The Search for a Silent Clock

December 24th, 2011 No Comments »

It was at about 3am when my 5-year-old daughter started calling for me. After being on the wall of her bedroom for about 6 months, she’d finally decided at that moment in time that she no longer wanted her pink wall clock in her room any more because the ticking was keeping her awake. Fair enough, it would have annoyed me too… I’d mounted rubber feet on it, removed the echoing plastic face cover and the second hand itself, and taped up the mechanism all in an attempt to soften the ticking. It was only cheap anyway so it’s not a problem. But what was a problem was the screw left in the wall where the clock used to be. I can’t leave a screw unused, or an empty screw hole… so I started to look for a new clock.

My first stop was the TFA 60.3504 Radio Controlled Wall Clock. This looked perfect, and can also be classed as a gadget! The radio-controlled feature of the clock means that once the battery has been inserted, within 5 minutes the hands had automatically spun around to display the correct time (in the UK…). The unit itself looked really nice, but there was a problem. The Amazon description advises that this clock has a sweep-second hand. For those not in the know, a sweep-second hand is a seconds hand which moves in a smooth sweeping motion, as opposed to an abrupt stepped ticking motion. Clocks fitted with a sweep-second hand are usually considerably quieter than a ticking clock. Sadly though, the TFA 60.3504 (a nice simple name to remember?) ticks. It’s not a loud tick, but it’s certainly not bedroom friendly. I’m afraid it had to go back.


That’s when I discovered clock #3: Acctim Yoko Quiet Silent Sweep Second Hand Quartz Wall Clock. Wow, such a long name. This clock doesn’t have any fancy radio controlled auto setting sadly… If it did it would have been perfect. Importantly for its intended use however it is very very very quiet and has the all important sweep-second hand! When you insert the battery, it does make a very quiet grumbling sound as the mechanism strives to provide a smooth motion, but this is well below audible levels from a few metres away in bed. Physically, this clock is on the large side though, measuring 32cm in diameter. For my daughter though that is probably an advantage – she’s learning to tell the time and the large face and numbers make it very clear to read.

To conclude, if you want a quiet night, go for the Acctim. If you want subtly cool gadgetness, go for the TFA 60.3504. They’re both superb wall clocks.


Buffalo LinkStation Duo

December 17th, 2011 2 Comments »

Sadly this isn’t my new toy: it belongs to the Father-in-law whose aging Freecom NAS was no longer up to the job. The brief was reasonably simple on the surface of things, to be able to store a large music collection and enabling that collection to be streamed to a wireless music player, whilst also being accessible from a laptop both online and offline. Well, seeing the LinkStation Duo 2TB available for a comparatively low price on Amazon I suggested he go for it. Why the Pro Duo version and not the standard Live? Mainly because the 2TB Duo NAS consists of two 1TB drives and lets you run them mirrored (RAID1) for resiliency. If one drive were to fail, your data is safe and sound on the other one – all you need to do is buy a new 1TB drive and swap it over with the faulty one. The NAS should then rebuild the array and resiliency is once again restored. It’s a simple but effective concept which I have relied on for many years and protects you against the failure of a single hard drive at any one time. It doesn’t of course replace the need for regular backups off-site somewhere which will be the subject of a future blog I’m sure.

Buffalo_LS_Duo_350After plugging the NAS in, ignoring the supplied CD, I went straight to the web interface. Setting the hostname and giving it a static IP address was simple enough, but a word of advice to anyone deciding to run the automatic firmware update process: don’t. The upgrade was about 250MB, with no progress bar whilst the download or install took place. I’d suggest you browse to the Buffalo Tech web site and download the firmware manually that way first, then apply it to the NAS afterwards. Once I had updated it, I proceeded to the RAID configuration. This could be simpler in my opinion, but I figured out how to remove the default RAID0 (striped) partition, and then create a new mirrored one afterwards.

Linkstation Pro Duo - Web Sys InfoCreating folders is the easiest task of all to complete and I won’t discuss that here, and creating new user accounts to protect those folders is also pretty simple. Keep in mind that by default a user is given read-only access to each folder and you’ll have to make sure you select read-write in the appropriate drop-down list if that is what’s needed. Another general tip for NAS users is to make sure you create user accounts exactly in-line with the user accounts you log on to Windows with. If you click on an icon labelled ‘Bob’ and then type in a password to get in to Windows, make sure you create a user account called ‘Bob’ (note the capital) with the same password to enable seamless access.

The NAS supports Windows offline folders, which is handy for laptop users, and also boasts DLNA capabilities (works okay if a little un-customisable) and acts as an iTunes server (I didn’t test this one). More interestingly though is the bittorrent server built in to the firmware – this is becoming a standard feature of many NASs lately and allows you to download, from a legitimate source of course, peer-to-peer hosted files without leaving a computer on. Just think of all those Linkstation Pro Duo - No CoverUbuntu source disks you can easily acquire in that manner. An even more useful feature, which I’d often thought was daft not to include on all NASs, is a web server and database server! Your NAS is running a web server anyway, so why not allow you to upload your own custom files in a virtual folder on that web server? I couldn’t suggest using the NAS as a production web server, but for test and development it should be ideal.

Physically, the NAS is not one of the smallest around, but then again it does pack in two standard 3.5" drives and a hefty processor by comparison. It’s a sleek black unit with three bright LEDs on the front and in operation it is remarkably quiet. I’ve been advised that it can make quite a noise on occasions which I have tracked down to being drive re-synchronisation – basically, don’t power the NAS off unless you’ve done a graceful shutdown by sliding the off switch at the rear of the unit and waited for the lights to go out. If you need to replace a hard drive, you just pop the front cover off and slide one out – simples.

Netgear DGN1000 ADSL Router

December 10th, 2011 No Comments »

When your broadband connection goes down you feel completely helpless don’t you? Or is that just me? Well, my ADSL router died a few weeks ago and I needed to get it back up and running as soon as possible. I found an old Siemens router in the garage from when I used Tiscali so I reconfigured this, plugged it in and all was well. For a week or two. Then that router died too with an almost identical fault – power light would come on, but it would never boot. Grrr, I had a few choices – order a new one online (er, how?) or go to an actual shop thing and buy one. My local PC World / Currys / Comet / Tesco turned out to be less than useful unless I had over £70 to burn and keeping in mind that BT Infinity will be rearing its head within the next couple of months I was reluctant to spend much given that I’ll need new hardware anyway when I sign up to that. Thankfully Argos rescued me, and the Netgear DGN1000 was purchased.

The router is shiny and black with wall mountable screw holes on the back which is always a nice touch… if it was going to be a permanent installation I’d have used these but in the interest of keeping my walls clean I have propped it precariously in the corner of my lounge instead so as my 2-year-old son can ‘test’ it fully. Installation of the router was very straight forward – I’ve used a lot of Netgear ADSL routers over the years, mainly the DG834G varieties and the interface in the DGN1000 is more or less the same. The router automatically detected the line parameters and prompted me for my credentials which were duly supplied… and there we are, all connected! Of course I had to make a number of changes to default configuration to align it with my existing network infrastructure: the LAN addressing had to be changed to 192.168.1.0/24 from 192.168.0.0/24 and of course this means re-addressing the router to 192.168.1.1 – a very easy task; the DHCP scope needed to be adjusted in a similar manner, and limited to fewer addresses which prevents overlap with the statics on my LAN; and a few inbound traffic rules needed to be added forwarding to my server for remote access. All this was easy to do and quite intuitive, but the most important thing was the Wi-Fi configuration. Now, I don’t make use of Wi-Fi on my router because I have a dedicated access point elsewhere in the house, so I usually disable it straight away. This time I decided to test it out specifically for this review. Netgear, quite stupidly in my opinion, enable Wi-Fi on their routers out of the box. Not only do they enable them, but they give them a standard SSID of NETGEAR and turn off all encryption leaving the router completely open. The DGN1000 includes Wireless-N support across a single radio meaning it can theoretically support up to 150Mbps. More expensive models sport double antennae meaning they can go up to 300Mbps if you need that kind of bandwidth. After locking down the configuration to WPA2-AES I gave the wireless connection a good hammering. Compared to my existing 802.11g network which normally connected at around 40Mbps, the 802.11n access point gave me connection speeds of 64Mbps. Of course in real life this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but transfer speeds to my server generally felt a little nippier by comparison although I didn’t bother with anything scientific. If I ever get hold of a 300Mbps access point then I’ll do some proper playing for you.

Netgear DGN1000I do have a couple of beefs with the router. Firstly, connection speeds are a little lower than my late Huawai router, syncing at around 3.8Mbps instead of the previous 4.5Mbps but I’m not noticing the difference really – I’m getting enough to stream BBC iPlayer in high quality. My second beef concerns the manner in which it deals with internal requests to services which are hosted internally to the LAN, but using an Internet facing DNS name / IP address. Not following me? Well, my Windows Home Server sits on my LAN, and if I wish to connect to the server when I’m out and about on someone else’s Internet connection, I simply open a web browser, type in the special secret URL associated with my server, and the web browser goes away and hits my router at home, which port forwards me through on TCP 80 to my server inside my LAN. All fine and dandy, but what if I’m sitting at home on my LAN and I do the same thing – you’d think that the router should be able to understand that it is actually supposed to port forward you to a specific host on your LAN, but what it actually does is ignore its ruleset and connect you straight to the internal web interface of the router. I haven’t had this issue since I first made use of a Netgear DG834G v1 many years ago and even then the problem was resolved after a few months via a firmware update. Why Netgear have allowed this problem to creep back in I’m not sure but I’ll update this review if it gets fixed.

The Cheapest Android Smartphone?

December 3rd, 2011 No Comments »

Samsung Galaxy Europa, also known as the Samsung I5500. And why have I purchased an Android mobile when I have a perfectly good Windows Phone 7 mobile? Well, it’s for development. If I’m to create decent mobile apps, I need to be able to test them on an actual piece of hardware. I’ve chosen the Europa because it’s one of the cheapest around – I paid under £40 for this bad boy, plus of course the obligatory £15 top-up they make you buy too from mobiles.co.uk (aka Carphone Warehouse – see the advert at the top). It’s running Android 2.2, also known as Froyo, which is just one version above what I consider to be the minimum Android software release you should run – v2.1 is the baseline version I develop my apps on but more on the software in a bit. It has a 2.8 inch capacitive touchscreen which is very responsive, only let down on occasions by the sluggish 600Mhz processor which struggles to keep up at times. Build quality is average, it feels solid but very plasticky especially the faux metal silver edging and the extremely rounded corners. My biggest complaint about the device though is in relation to the hardware buttons. The buttons for menu, home, back and search are easy to use, but very difficult to read. The problem is they don’t light up so in low light you can’t see the logos on them at all. After a few days you will get used to it, you’ll easily remember where back and menu are because you use them all the time but that isn’t the point. The screen resolution is also very low at 240×320 pixels. Putting aside the quality of images it displays because of this low resolution, which I don’t consider to be a problem, the low resolution causes the display to become cramped when performing tasks such as surfing the web or viewing information within apps. If you can afford extra for a phone with a higher resolution then go for it. The low resolution does have its advantages – games such as Angry Birds run very smoothly despite the slow processor. What can I say about the camera? Well, it has one – a rear facing one. There’s no flash, but it doesn’t need flash because all that would do is further illuminate the awful image quality it produces. It’ll be good for AR, barcode / QR scanning etc, but for actual precious memories you can forget it.

And now to the software: Android. I’m still undecided about this mobile operating system despite having used it in anger now. It’s very piecemeal and requires apps for almost every aspect of functionality. Each app has a different approach to the user interface which leads to a level of inconsistency throughout. However once again you just have to get used to them, oh, and use Gmail or Hotmail instead of the built-in email client which sucks big time. Apps such as Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter integrate neatly in to the ecosystem synchronising with the calendar, contacts list and providing push alerts to the status bar at the top of the screen. There are tons of free apps, even more so than the iTunes App Store from what I see (Angry Birds is free on Android, costs money on iTunes)… but for me at least, apps crash at random sometimes and there’s weird slowdowns too. Then again seeing Google Streeview in action on a mobile phone is awesome.

Overall, for £40 it’s amazing. For that price, it’s locked to the Three network (I believe you can unlock it for about £15 by calling their customer services). This phone will do anything so long as you are prepared to search for the facility or an appropriate app. From an app development point of view it has certainly been very useful to see the operating system in action, helping me produce a more consistent approach to navigation.

Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 Web Cam

November 26th, 2011 No Comments »

I did have a web cam, it was another Microsoft one, the VX-1000 which I purchased when working in Barcelona a few years ago. It was very good and useful for calling home and speaking to the family. Sadly, it has also died. I’m having to write a lot of articles lately reviewing replacements for gadgets which have died but at least it’s keeping me busy.

This time, the old web cam’s built in microphone decided to make a loud buzzing sound in use meaning the remote end couldn’t hear a thing. Now, this is of course a bit rubbish and with The Wife starting a new Open University course learning Welsh I decided to buy a new one. What’s a new web cam got to do with learning Welsh? I’m not too sure really, but she says she needs a headset to speak to her tutor and I figure the microphone on the web cam combined with the speakers should be okay.

Microsoft Lifecam HD-3000Right, on to the new web cam. It’s capable of capturing 720p widescreen HD footage at up to 30fps and in dim light conditions too. It’s no comparison to a proper video camera at all, but as budget web cams go things have certainly moved on. The size of the camera is compact, with a built-in microphone and a fixed-focus lens.

Installation on Windows 7 was very easy. You just plug the USB cable in and let it install. It automatically went online, downloaded the drivers and started a wizard to install the accompanying software. If you’ve got the Windows Live software suite already installed then the button on the top of the camera will launch Live Messenger video chat… although this is a bit of a long winded pointless way of doing that.

Microsoft Lifecam HD-3000 - 2I decided to test the camera on the first available victims, which happened to be my parents. Of course I couldn’t see the quality of the video, or hear the quality of the audio, but they tell me it was excellent. The software allows you to digitally zoom in, and pan around that zoomed image, as well as apply various “hilarious and comic” effects such as cat ears, cowboy hats and fat nose (no, it didn’t make a difference to my nose).

Microsoft Lifecam HD-3000 - 3My final observation is regarding the camera’s clip which allows it to attach to various display types. There are a number of reports on the Internet complaining that it is cheap and nasty. I’m not of that thinking, because I reckon it’s quite ingenious. The clip is a bendable soft-plastic coated thingy that you bend the optimum angle to clip the camera to the screen. Once in place, it is quite secure, and the camera can be separately angled left/right to point to you. One criticism I do have is that it overhangs the display a little more than I’d like, but this is something I’m happy to live with given the cost of the camera and its overall quality.

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