Cantanko

The next step in the home cinema build is getting a decent Freeview antenna. I already have Freesat gear, but the kitchen really needs a freeview set, plus there’s still content on Freeview that has yet to make it onto DVB-S.

In looking around for a decent antenna, I found a rather good site run by someone who obviously knows their stuff and confirmed my suspicions that there’s no such thing as a digital aerial. I’m well within the Sutton Coldfield transmitter footprint and as such a decent Log40 antenna should do me fine. From the roof, I even have line-of-sight to the transmitter, which is somewhat of a bonus

I’ve also chucked £15 at a dedicated DAB dipole. If my experiments with in-car DAB were anything to go by, a decent antenna will pay dividends. I’m a complete DAB laggard, however if I’m going to be on the roof I may as well stick an antenna up there for it.

ATV seem to sell all the right bits at the requisite quality for an install that isn’t going to fail within a couple of years, so it’s probably worth checking them out.

It irks me somewhat that various NAS vendors are currently scrambling to support Mac OS X Lion’s implementation of Time Machine. Long story short, it requires that the device providing a network resource to act as a Time Machine volume supports DHX2 authentication.

So far, it would appear that LaCie, Western Digital, Iomega, Synology et al have completely failed to produce a DHX2-authenticated NAS even though the various Lion developer previews have been around for ages now.

What’s more, this hasn’t stopped the very excellent Netatalk project from supporting DHX2. Admittedly it’s still in beta, but at least it’s there and it does work. As my local file server / satellite recorder / general dogsbody machine is running Gentoo Linux, compiling and installing the latest beta is trivial and fixes all of the problems, allowing my iMac to continue to use it as a Time Machine volume.

For those interested, a very comprehensive howto for installing the Netatalk beta is available here.

I decided to stuff the BBC 3G survey on to an Android phone. The phone was fully charged and left for approximately 1 day on a desk with no one using it.

This is what the battery usage graph said after a day:

How much power usage?!

A bit thirsty aren’t we?

Also, the thing appears to not discriminate between user-selected 2G and auto-discovered 3G. As I live in the back of beyond but somehow manage to get very marginal 3G coverage, I usually keep my phone pegged to 2G to stop it meandering all over the place. Presumably this would skew the results somewhat…

Just found out how to get a little more sonic entertainment from the iMac that’s hooked up to the amp via a digital interconnect. In thumbing through the manual it turns out the DSP-AX620 can handle a PCM stereo source up to 32-bits per sample at 96KHz, which is nice, but initially I couldn’t find out how on earth to furnish it with such a signal. Despite playing some 96KHz, 24-bit FLAC files I have, the iMac was still churning out a rather ordinary 16-bit, 48KHz bitstream.

It turns out there’s a not-often-publicised little app squirrelled away in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

Open this up and a veritable smörgåsbord of audio options are presented. Why this isn’t in the usual “Sound” control panel section, or at least why there’s not a link to it from there, is beyond me.

Either way, you can use this gadget to set the optical audio output to be a 24-bit, 96KHz bitstream. It actually normalises the resolution and rate of anything Core Audio is asked to play to what’s set here, hence the reason the FLAC files were popping out at 16/48. A quick modification:

…and the Amp happily picks up the new bitstream:

And you know what? I’m not sure my ears are good enough to perceive the difference… I have Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms” in both formats and perhaps I can hear a more accurate rendition of the very top end, but to be honest my ears’ frequency response rolls off quite steeply after 18KHz nowadays Such is life: by the time you can afford a system capable of reproducing high definition audio, your body no longer has the bandwidth to acquire it accurately.

Still, I have a new set of words on the front of the amp and that makes me happy

I am rather chuffed – my misbehaving Yamaha DSP-AX620 that I bought for a pittance from eBay has had it’s digital side resurrected! continue reading…

A couple of years back, I bought a semi-knackered Yamaha DSP-AX620 from eBay for a tenner: all of the analogue stages were working correctly, however the DSP board was misbehaving. As I was using a discrete decoder and the ’620 had a 6-channel analogue in, this was fine and dandy, but as I now have a new shiny iMac with an optical audio out I need to get the DSP board working again or buy another amp. continue reading…

I’ve been deliberating long and hard over what computer to buy. For the last decade or so I’ve run Linux on my desktop, mainly because the things that I do with my machine are all, with the notable exception of video editing, covered admirably by both free software and not exactly cutting-edge hardware.

Having said that, I’ve recently bought a new DSLR camera and found that the video it churns out to be astonishingly good. Yes, it’s a pain to handle and yes, it has a CMOS sensor so it has a rolling shutter, but again for the kind of stuff I’ve found myself shooting (mainly outdoors) it’s done a marvellous job.

This leaves me with the problem that my existing Core-2 laptop wasn’t exactly man enough to properly wrangle the photos and video this thing churns out, be it either multiple exposures for HDR image processing or high-def footage. The first thought was to build a top-spec PC, but to be frank I’m starting to get bored with build-it-yourself hardware, especially if it’s not doing anything particularly specialist. continue reading…

Probably of absolutely no interest to the vast majority of visitors to this site, but we’re now IPv6 enabled! continue reading…

After much gnashing of teeth, I have a working OpenRD box! continue reading…

I took delivery of a new toy today: it’s an ARM-5 powered development platform known as OpenRD that gives you a 1.2GHz ARM-5 CPU, 512MB RAM, 512MB flash, a MicroSD card slot, internal SATA drive mounting point, eSATA, dual gigabit ethernet, 7 USB ports etc… continue reading…