Jan
29
MS Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
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Thought it would be a neat idea to install the Media Center Edition OEM on the PC I put together myself for multimedia purposes. So I bought the OEM and had a go at installing it. Turned out not to be such a great idea, so be warned.
OEM means for original equipment manufacturers, so it’s assumed that you know what to do with the software, which includes the following:
How to install it, which isn’t as simple as you might think (now that I’ve warned you, you can Google for details). Get it wrong, and you’ll find that the Media Center interface doesn’t install, and Internet Explorer and Media Player are hidden.
It comes on two CDs, or on one DVD – the DVD may throw up a request during installation for the 2nd CD if you haven’t followed the instructions!
It’s rather fussy about hardware; for instance if you thought it would work with a ATI Radeon 7000 video card you’ll soon find out your mistake. The drivers can still be installed but WMC will have nothing to do with the “Catalyst” utility. (though I did find a free download that went in the toolbar and did a much better job of controlling the TV-out.)
It is incompatible with the BBC’s iplayer download (the 2008 regular version). Heck knows why; the similar 4OD works just fine.
My advice is, unless you have some good reason for using WMC and know how to make up a complete hardware/software package that will work, give it a miss and use Windows XP Pro instead. You should be able to get XP Pro to do what you want. If a certain Ebay retailer is to believed, you can even get a freeware Media Center-like interface.
FYI one of the MS Vista editions incorporates Media Center functions, or so I’m told.
Jan
22
Winter anime 2008/9
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I’ve been enjoying Toradora!, Nodame Cantabile Paris Chapter, Eve no Jikan, and Kannagi. Sampled some others which I didn’t pursue.
Kannagi is another boy-meets-magical-girl anime. That said, it’s a delightful series. The hero carves a figure of a girl out of an old tree-trunk which came from the site of a shrine. He is shocked when the carving disintegrates and in its place appears an attactive girl, Nagi, who seems to be a manifestation of the shrine-goddess Kannagi. In time-honoured fashion, Nagi comes to live with him. The resulting complications are well handled, and are much to do with finding out who exactly Nagi is, a subject about which she herself seems vague. And she’s an appealing character, whih long hair, long legs and a white swishy miniskirt which probably absorbed much of the animation budget… There’s quite a lot of mild fanservice here.
Jan
22
Orange Livebox
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Just had the disagreeable experience of setting up an Orange “Livebox” wireless modem/firewall/router.
The box does work, but the experience is much more trying than it might be if some extra information was provided.
Prompts for firewall to be turned off: Turn off firewall, and also uninstall Adobe Flash 9, Flash 10, and anything else you think might be causing it.
Network Settings for computer connected with wired cable: in case of setup troubles, set them to the final setting of “Obtain IP address automatically” & “Obtain DNS server address automatically”
You should be able to get to the setup via a new Orange icon on the desktop. In case of bother, note that the Livebox setup address is 192.168.1.1
In case you are wondering, the setup username and password are admin/admin. You could I presume change them to something less obvious.
If you have a network switch, you could plug it into the Yellow network port (or the Red, if you have removed the setup cable) on the Livebox. Any computers connected to the switch can then use the Livebox broadband connection. They can also browse shared files on the computer used for the set-up. Whether all the other computers can see each other seems to be another story. 
Addendum: I’ve been using the Livebox as a wired router/firewall for several days and find it works well. It seems that one is expected to leave it on all the time & connected to the Internet while the computers are in use. As soon as the computers are turned on and allowed to boot up, they have a live Internet connection. (just like the computers at work). It works with Linux clients too.
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Jan
18
ICS:Internet Connection Sharing
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I had a reason for setting up ICS (wanted to connect a modem-less Linux PC to the Internet) so had a go at setting it up.
There’s no shortage of advice on the Internet, starting with microsoft.com and continuing around sundry forums and websites. It’s not so easy to find out exactly what to do for one’s particular hardware, and rather a lot of the advice is biased towards one particular solution, rather than explaining what range of solutions should work.
First, ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) is a scheme whereby one computer, equipped with a modem or suchlike device, provides a connection to the Internet and shares it with other computers via a local network.
Here’s what I found worked:
Used a computer running Windows XP Pro SP2 as the host. This computer had in effect two network ports; one connected to the Internet via USB2 ADSL modem, and the other, RJ45 port, connected to a wired 100MB network via a 5-port switch.
Ran the ICS setup wizard on the host. This sets up the host on a workgroup MSHOME with IP address 192.168.0.1
Made the wizard’s floppy disk and used it to set up a Win98 client computer and a WinXP client computer as follows: workgroup MSHOME, LAN addresses acquired automatically (DHCP), Internet addresses acquired automatically (DHCP)
Manually configured two Linux clients with LAN addresses acquired automatically (DHCP), Internet addresses acquired automatically (DHCP)
Turned off the ZoneAlarm software firewall on the host. Turned on the Windows XP firewall and added an exception for Port 80 on the local network. (This allows HTTP traffic from the clients).
The Linux clients show a Windows network, with workgroup MSHOME, in their file browsers.
Notes: Nowadays most home installations use a physically separate router box rather than using ICS.
Hardly any of the recent advice mentions using wired networks rather than wireless or powerline networking. This is strange – perhaps it is thought that wiring up a wired network with RJ45 terminated cables is too much bother for the home user! In fact, wired networks are no trouble at all once the wires are plugged in, which is more than can be said for wireless. Wireless has well-documented security problems. And sometimes it won’t work at all. The IT person installed wireless networking in our lab where I work, but after a week or so it all had to be stripped out and replaced with a wired network. The wireless network was useless in an electrically noisy environment.
You might be put off by the idea of drilling cable holes in your home. However there is little in the interior of the average home to resist the determined driller. A power drill will soon put a 3/4″ hole through plasterboard, floorboard, lightweight partitioning or building block (but check where the pipes, joists and power cables go first). And when you move out, a dab of filler and a lick of paint should make good the holes.
You can change the LAN DNS address from 192.168.0.1 if you want – some say this would improve security. The LAN could use fixed addressing (i.e. 192.168.0.2 etc) instead of DHCP if you want, though I didn’t test this. One source said that you had to use fixed LAN addressing with Linux clients, but this is clearly untrue.
It is assumed that all the computers on the network have the relevant drivers for TCP/IP networking installed on them…
The free version of Zonealarm is incompatible with ICS – it seems you have to upgrade to the paid-for Pro version. The Windows XP firewall was OK but only after I set port 80 as an exception for the local network (LAN), naming the exception HTTP80. Port 80 is used for HTTP and the exception allows web browsers on the client to work.
If you poke around in the control panels you can turn on an icon which shows on the XP client toolbar when the host is connected to the internet.
You may notice that time display on the clients is now synchronised to the host.
When it doesn’t work: Check your setup is correct. Use file-share browsing to check that you can browse from and to all the computers on the network. If you can’t, you have a problem. If some computers can’t see others or be seen by them, try disabling the local network (in the Windows control panel) and then enabling it. This worked for me in clearing a hangup.
If none of the clients can browse the Internet even though you see indications that it’s connected, try turning off the software firewall (or firewalls!) on the host. If that cures the problem, fix the firewall! Running with no firewall in place is a very bad practice.
It is important that the host computer should have two network ports (e.g. one USB modem and one RJ45 port) otherwise your ISP will get very annoyed about the lack of separation between local and Internet addressing, and may disconnect you.
Jan
18
Viewing downloaded anime files with Linux.
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I have been trialling a Linux distribution called “Mint” (Linux Mint 6 “Felicia”). The plus point about this distribution is that, unlike most Linux distributions, it plays all the filetypes of interest to downloaders of anime, straight out of the box. For instance it plays .mkv and .mp4 files.
One can play these files with other Linux distributions, but only after a severe encounter with Linux jargon in the course of finding the required codecs (libxine1) and figuring out how to install them.
As for how well Mint works: it can be used as a “live CD” or properly installed to the hard disc. The live CD operation is extremely slow. Once installed, I found it was still a bit slow and grindy, (however I installed it on a very old and small hard drive so it was not a definitive test.) It did play all the filetypes I tried. However I found an annoying bug in that the network browsing didn’t work. It seems I’m not the only one to find this, and following advice found online, I installed “fusesmb” and “smb4k”. Before I fired either of these up, however, I found that the network browsing had sprung into life, which left me wondering if the real issue is that one has to double-click on the network icon to open it, rather than the single-click which works elsewhere in Linux file browsers. Another annoying thing about Mint is that there are no helpfiles worth mentioning either in the installation or online! (But it is based on Ubuntu, which has reams of help).
I tried benchmarking just how well my hardware handled anime video files. The details won’t be of great interest to you, unless you are using older PCs, however:
Turns out that SuSE Linux 10.0 uses slightly less processor power for this task than Windows XP, on identical hardware. (a measure of codec efficiency). Mint (on which even the system monitor program consumed a noticeable amount of power) was less efficient than SuSE in my test.
Also these PCs didn’t like larger (i.e. HD) .mkv files, which caused the processor demand to ramp up towards 100% even on the better machine of the two. Demand on SD .mkv files was a quarter that on HD.
Addendum: The SuSE Linux 10.0 hopefully can be upgraded online and then configured to use the BBC’s beta version iplayer downloader for Linux. Hopefully this will allow programs to be downloaded for later viewing. The Mint Linux, meanwhile, refuses to load either from the hard-disk or the live CD.