Mike Dent's Blog

iPhone 4 "Antennagate", I don't get it?

2010-07-23T21:55:00.000+01:00

I've briefly tested an iPhone 4 and yes I was able to watch the signal drop from 4 bars to 1 bar in about 10 or 15 seconds. I held it in my left hand as I normally do to browse, check email etc. I'm right handed by the way.
I did not make a call but I usually hold the phone in a similar grip, in my left hand, I would guess if I was in a marginal signal area that I'd have lost a call.

Now at the press conference that Apple held recently, Uncle Steve showed us how several other modern smartphones fell foul of the same problem as the iPhone 4 does.
Apple showed how holding the phones in a particular way caused the signal level to drop on these devices.
Since then they have released a web page showing these cases of signal drop. (shame the pages require Quicktime to view the videos?!)
The web pages showed the following models suffering from attenuation caused by the human hand.

Blackberry Bold 9700
HTC Droid Eris
Nokia N97 mini
Samsung Omnia II
iPhone 3GS

During the press conference Apple declared they would be issuing free bumper cases to all those who have suffered the so called "death grip".

Now in my opinion if the iPhone 4's signal problem is caused by attenuation from the hand, then the bumper case will move the hand a whole 0.5mm or so away from the metal, I don't believe this is far enough to counter this attenuation problem.

My opinion is that the metal band around the iPhone 4, which makes up the antenna, is actually becoming de-tuned by the conductivity of the hand/skin. This is perhaps why some people are not seeing the problem as much as others, ie there skin is less conductive perhaps? Or my other opinion is that they have become brainwashed and refuse to believe anything could be wrong with an Apple product.

Apple have cleverly designed the "bumper case" which is just a silicone/plastic band which covers the antenna strip around the case, to stop the skin making contact with the antenna and effectively stopping the antenna being de-tuned.
If they had designed the phone from the outset with some kind of plastic or glass edging covering the antenna, instead of trying to make it some kind of feature, they would have stopped any of this problem all together. Of course the phone may not have looked as appealing but it would have remained a damn site more functional than it does do at present.

I still can't believe how Apple can release a flawed product like this and I struggle to understand how people are putting up with either using a case to cover up part of the appealing feature they have paid for or are adjusting how they would normally hold a phone just so it does not drop calls?

Yes it may have been blown out of proportion slightly but when Apple are as huge as they are they have just got to get things like this absolutely spot on. Every man and his dog are out there waiting for the slightest slip-up from them.

Disclaimer.
We currently have several Apple products in our household, including an iMac, Mac Mini and recently I sold my iBook 12". I believe Apple make some great hardware and that OS X is an excellent operating system.
I'm just not being persuaded by what I believe to be a cover-up story by Apple to hide the fact they have made a glaring design error with the iPhone 4.

I'm now Certified!

2010-07-16T21:27:00.000+01:00

Apple Certified of course.
Yesterday I took two Apple exams:-

Mac OS X 10.6 Troubleshooting Exam. 9L0-0062
Macintosh Service Certification Exam. 9L0-008

Thankfully I passed both with flying colours! So I'm now an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician.
As well as other benefits I can now display the logo below on my email, website, business card etc.

Ubertechs now Meraki Reseller!

2010-06-01T22:31:00.000+01:00

My company, Ubertechs Ltd, recently became Silver level partners with Meraki of California. Ubertechs are able to offer support services and UK sales of Meraki's unique wireless mesh networking equipment.
Please see the Ubertechs website for more details.

HTC Desire has arrived!

2010-05-15T17:10:00.000+01:00

Well since my last post I've been using an old Motorola V80 phone, pictured on the right. Things have been tough, i.e. no access to calendar, no access to email and no access to my contacts!

Anyway, the wait is over, after Amazon screwed up on my order by ignoring my wish for Express delivery, the HTC Desire is finally here!

To the left you can see the V80 next to the Desire, I'm just setting up the mobile carrier in this photo.
I've been using the phone for about 1 day so far and all I can say is WOW!

Compared to the G1 it is so quick, I mean really quick! The screen is so vivid and bright, Android 2.1 has some nice touches over the 1.6 version I had on my G1 and the HTC Sense UI is great. HTC have added calendar search in their Android version so this is a big bonus to me!

Ooops! Butter fingers!

2010-05-08T13:17:00.000+01:00

As you can see from the photo my G1 phone has had a nasty fall! I was walking down some rather long stone steps at the University last week when somehow I lost grip on my beloved Android phone and it flew from my hand!

It probably went at least 10 feet outwards and then fell towards the steps below! The screen is smashed and it managed to break the hinge on the back too!

Luckily we were insured so the case is now in the hands of our insurers. I feel totally lost without it though! I keep reaching to where the case used to be on my belt.

I'm currently using a rather old and very basic Motorola V80. Thankfully as I use Google Apps it was a simple job to set up my calendar reminders so that they are sent as a text/sms message!

The Youtube 1,000 views challenge!

2010-05-03T13:47:00.000+01:00

Thanks for reading this.
My youngest son, 10, is a big stop motion fan, he has recently been making a few short stop motion videos. I've given him my webcam to make these with which unfortunately has a rather
nasty fault on it, which is a red line from top to bottom of the image!
I said to him that if he gets a thousand views on his first stop motion video he uploads, then I will consider getting him a new camera :)

He does not know about this blog post and will be totally amazed if he manages to get 1,000 views of his video!

He thinks the task will be impossible and that he will be stuck with the faulty camera for ever!
Here is the video below, please click on it, have a watch, its very short, and pass the link on to your friends!
With your help I'm sure we can get his 1,000 views!
Thanks!

Beware the dust!

2010-04-18T17:15:00.000+01:00

I'd forgotten I took this photo a while ago. It's the rear of a computer power supply showing the air holes completely blocked by dust!
As a result the power supply had over heated and failed!
This is one reason why you should certainly have your PC checked once
in a while!

Bird-box Web Cam.

2010-04-02T15:16:00.000+01:00

Last week my company fitted a bird/nesting box at a local primary school. The birdbox has a colour camera fitted inside it which connects back to a PC running Linux. The camera can then be viewed from any PC or Mac in the school! At night the image is illuminated by infra red LED's. Below is an image I captured just now.

Any movement that happens inside the nest box is also recorded and archived, this can also be played back from any computer on the school network.
We may have been a bit late getting it installed though! Still there's always next year if we don't manage to get any nesting birds this spring.

(Shameless plug; If you want one of these birdbox webcams installing at your school please get in touch.)

Gone Google?

2010-03-31T22:27:00.000+01:00

My "Gone Google" sticker recently dropped through the letter box. Decided to stick it on my tiny Acer netbook!

Out with the old, in with the new! (Windows Server that is!)

2010-02-20T19:13:00.000Z

Over the past few days my company Ubertechs Ltd has been working on a clients Windows 2000 server migration. Our customer has had the same Dell server since the year 2000! It has served them well and has certainly earned it's keep. At the time it was over £4500 and about 5 years ago we installed a second raid 5 array and some additional memory.
However the time came to replace the whole unit with a much faster and more efficient server.

The new Dell box is based on Windows Server 2008, it operates as file and print server also hosting the usual DNS, DHCP and Windows Active Directory.
We successfully migrated all server roles from the old Windows 2000 server to the new server, including about 50 group policy objects (which needed some modification), 40+ user account and about 80 workstations.

It's been an interesting few days and now thankfully things are once again running as normal, albeit much faster!

Ubertechs Special Offers!

2010-02-13T11:43:00.000Z

About 4 years ago I had a smaller batch of door to door cards printed, these worked well, so I thought it about time I did a slight re-design on them and had some more printed!
As usual I used the Lancaster branch of Printing.com, who have always produced great results for me!
Here is a pile of some of the cards ready for delivery. I have a few people standing by to deliver them in different areas!
So if you need your PC or Mac computer or laptop repairing, look no further than Ubertechs Ltd.
Serving Lancaster and surrounding areas.
I've also started a customer referral discount scheme, details of this are here. And finally in my shameless plug! You can follow Ubertechs on twitter at http://twitter.com/ubertechs .

Some missing Android features.

2010-02-12T17:33:00.000Z

Android is Google's operating system for mobile devices, initially smartphones but perhaps others. There are several very big over sights in my opinion.:-

Firstly is the inability to search your calendar. Surely not! I hear you gasp. Oh yes, it's true, unless you have a HTC Hero, with HTC's modified android applications, you are unable to search your calendar.

So, here is the link to the google code bug I filed about it. When I filed this bug , Android was at version 1.1 so perhaps it was fine for it not to be included. Now we are at version 2.1 on some devices! If Android want to compete with the Blackberry or iPhones of this world then they must include this basic feature very quickly.
Please check it out, comment and be sure to 'star' the issue so it gets the attention it deserves from the android developers.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2518&can=5&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars
By the way, the search facility is implemented in iPhone version 3.0 and above software.
(23 stars @ 12/2/2010)
(49 stars @ 01/04/2010)
(56 stars @ 13/04/2010)

Next up, not as serious but still very inconvenient is the lack of 'click-to-dial' in email messages.
One of the reasons I switched from iPhone to Android was because I use the calendar application a lot and found it was not possible on the iPhone to click on a phone number in the description or body of a calendar entry and have the phone dial for you. This feature was already there in the early version of Android 1.1 and so this was one of the factors that made me move.
Now further down the line, I realise that a phone number sent to you in an email, is not 'click able' in Android!
This was possible on the early version of the iPhone, pre version 3.0 software. Now the iPhone wins, you are able to click-to-dial on numbers both in email and calendar.
Yes you guessed it, I have an android bug filed.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2383&can=5&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars
Please visit that link, comment or at least 'star' it, thanks.
[Update. Just checked this on a HTC Hero and it seems to work! It does not work on my G1 though.)
(5 stars @ 12/2/2010)

Garstang Booths.

2010-02-06T16:21:00.001Z

Having a coffee in the Booths cafe after doing some shopping. Free WiFi with your drink and 50p off each drink for every £10 you spend. Not too shabby.

[Uploaded from mobile]

Dent Family History.

2010-02-05T11:35:00.000Z

My Gradnfather Alan E (left) with his brother William H.

Over the past few months I've been working on finding out as much as possible about my family history. I've been mainly concentrating on my fathers side. I've had a good start with it as my aunt had done a lot of work on this many years ago.
Most of my work revolved around using the Ancestry.com website. This has proved very useful and has allowed me to fill in many gaps and even find relatives that my father did not know about in the USA.
Last night I received two unconnected emails from Dent relatives in the USA. I'd not made contact with these people before and I was very surprised when I found out that neither of them knew the other had written to me!

Things I've discovered so far include:-

My family originates from Burnley in Lancashire where they were stonemasons and later brick-makers.
My great grandfather moved to Lancaster area to manage a brickworks near to Caton.
My grandfather was a carpenter for Waring & Gillows, he was in the Royal Engineers and I have been able to find all his military papers.
My grandfather worked for just over a year in Buenos Aires, South America on the woodwork in the prestigious Plaza Hotel. This was 1913 to 1914.
My grandfather came back from Buenos Aires and within 6 months he was in the Royal Engineers until the end of the war when he returned to Waring & Gillow.
Lots more...

I'm currently waiting for the will of my great, great, great grandfather to arrive, he died in 1835.

Router/Firewall upgrade - or - Xbox peace at last!

2010-02-05T10:42:00.000Z

Last night I switched my Soekeris net4801 router from m0n0wall to pfSense. I'd been running m0n0wall for several years and it had served me well. However recently I upgraded it to 1.3 and noticed that I had trouble getting NAT to work correctly for my 2 Son's XBOX 360. As the days past this had been causing more and more 'fun' with the eldest.

Before I upgraded their nat type would display as moderate and this would work fine for most things. After I upgraded to 1.3 the nat setting on their xbox dropped to strict. I tried several nat rules and short of putting their xbox's in the DMZ, and re-wiring their rooms, I was stumped.

I read up on alternatives that I could load on to my embedded Soekris box and it seemed pfSense, a fork from m0n0wall, looked a good candidate. It supported UPnP, which would allow the correct opening and closing of ports to forward traffic to their xboxes.

I downloaded the latest non-beta version and wrote it to the compact flash card in the router, not before having taken a backup of the latest m0n0wall config! I had to dig out my null modem cable and connect in to the router via serial interface to do the first configuration but after that it can all be looked after by a web interface or ssh.

All went well, I was even able to import my last m0n0wall config, after making some changes, to have it setup pretty much as I previously had. Only now I had the option to turn on UPnP and even configure it so that it would only affect certain hosts.
Ahhhh peace at last....

[5th Feb 2010 Here is a link to the network bunny site that has some more details on the xbox nat issue]
[9th Feb 2010 Had a reply on the m0n0wall mailing list. Here is a link to the authors page with details on how he got open nat working with m0n0wall]

Sun.

2010-01-31T15:28:00.001Z

went to the field near our house with Morgan and Cameron today.
A very nice and sunny day it was too. Almost February 2010.

Dads MythTV box.

2010-01-13T21:23:00.000Z

About a year ago I built my dad a MythTV system out of an old PC. This is a dual tuner system, combined frontend/backend with a 200gb disk in I think. It's running MythTV 0.21 and he has been using it without much problem for the past 12 months or so.

Recently our TV system in the UK begun switchover from analogue UHF signal to digital UHF. This required several re-tunes of our TV's and of course I needed to visit to re-tune his mythtv box. I think the whole switch over process required 3 retunes before everything was straight.
Somewhere along the line it seems that one of the tuners was not tuned or tuning in right. The result is that he is now missing recordings and does not have the ability to record more than one program at a time. This causes him to miss recordings of Emmerdale and Coronation Street, shock, horror!

Not long after I set the system up for him I configured his router for remote VNC access and ssh access to his mythtv pc, so I could connect remotely for maintenance and updates. He is 82 and so I can't really expect him to find his way around the bash shell at his age can I?

All was fine until his router decided to go belly up. He called Plusnet and another one was sent, only this time it was a crappy single port Thompson 516 or something similar. I attempted to configure the firewall and port forwarding but I don't think I ever got it working. Tonight I managed to talk him through enabling remote access to the router so I could connect in and try and set the forwarding up.

Talk about watching paint dry! Each time I tried to navigate to another page took over 30 seconds! I did as much as I could and then I was kicked out! I think there is a 20 min idle timer in place on the remote access but I've no idea why it threw me out. Anyway I didn't have the patience to talk him back through enabling the remote access so I will pay him a visit and do what I should have done in the first place.

Missing audio on H264 videos & Mythtv.

2010-01-11T11:57:00.000Z

Recently I did a reinstall of my Mythtv frontend. Everything seemed ok apart from the lack of audio on
H.264 video clips which are taken with our Creative Vado HD camera.
This was working before the install so I'm not sure what I changed.
Anyway I posted a query on the mythtv-users list and a kind person called David Linville replied they had a similar problem which was fixed my changing the audio output device from ALSA:hdmi to something else.

After I had enabled all the ALSA devices in 'alsamixer', see first screenshot, I managed to get the audio working again! I took a quick photo of the settings for future reference and just in case it helps anybody else.
I'm using an Acer Revo 3610 for the frontend with Mythbuntu 9.10.

Rather annoying Google calendar bug.

2009-12-08T14:47:00.000Z

Recently I noticed that the location field, or the 'Where' field as Google call it in their calendar was
not being synchronised back to my G1 Android device. This had worked flawlessly for many months.

I thought it was perhaps a bug in my android operating system on my phone but the same thing was happening on my wifes HTC Hero.
I did some searching on this and could not find anyone else with the same problem. I'd came to the conclusion it was not an Android bug I decided to post about my problem on the Google Calender support forums.

If you are having the same problem I would urge you to report it at the above forums. Until google acknowledge the problem it is unlikely to get fixed.

[Update January 2010. Rather oddly this problem seems to have fixed itself. Several people have also commented that it has begun working for them. Obviously Google did some magic to fix this. Would have been nice if they had followed up with a quick note to say it was working]

2009-12-01T22:49:00.001Z

Today I went to a customer with a rather old PC, this is the BIOS screen as it booted. It used to have 128mb of ram in but about 18 months ago I upgraded it to 512mb. It's slightly faster than it was! Check out the Pentium 3 processor running at 500Mhz. Suffice to say each reboot cycle of XP took about 10 mins!
Anyway I managed to fit a ethernet card in it and connect it to their BT Homehub and get it back on the intenet.

MythTV 0.22 Tuning?

2009-11-29T20:27:00.000Z

I'm currently having some fun trying to tune my DVB-T cards in correctly with MythTV 0.22. The process seems slightly different to that of 0.21 and I'm struggling a little. Mainly posting this in the hope somebody on the MythTV mailing list is able to see what I am doing wrong! :)

Above is what I am left with after removing all channels and transports and doing a full scan. I have to then go through each channel and add it. Once I do this I end up with numerous duplicates and lots of channels which do not seem to work?

Above is a photo of the transports that I see after the full scan. I am beaming towards Winter Hill transmitter in the north of england.
If you have any ideas where I might be going wrong I'd be more than happy to hear from you!
Thanks.

MythTV status....

2009-11-29T16:13:00.000Z

Well I've managed to backup my existing mythtv database from the 0.21 version of Myth and reinstall my main MythTV box with Mythbuntu 9.10. I've also managed to restore the database and recordings.

Here are some statistics:-

Oldest recording is the film 'Cypher' recorded on Apr 22, 2007.
I have a total of 610 programmes.
Which are using 630 GB.
There is a total of 1.3TB of storage space.

I've also managed to configure the new frontend which is an Acer Revo (see post below) this is setup using the VDPAU profile and I can report that video playback is very smooth and looks great so far.

I need to do some more setup to configure mythmusic, photos and video etc.

Sky+ Problems.

2009-11-25T09:11:00.000Z

We had Sky+ fitted about 8 months ago, in that time we have had the following problems.

Some programs as part of a series link did not record.
Attempting to record a program which is in progress fails silently.
Signal level drops over time.
Using FFW to skip adverts. When pressing PLAY, the program then plays from the start?
Probably the worst programme guide in history.

Most of these problems seem to fix themselves if we switch the unit off and on again. The box has been replaced and still bugs remain.

The whole interface is cumbersome and out of date. In many places you cannot go back to the program guide where you left off from, you are forced back to the top level.

Try choosing a program by its title to search and record. You are forced to wade through literally hundreds of programs before you reach yours, am I missing something here? Lets say I want to record Poirot, I go to 'P' then I am forced to scroll or page down, until I get to Poirot?

I'll update this list as I find more bugs.

Moving Backend in to the Garage....

2009-11-24T23:27:00.000Z

In my previous post I mentioned a MythTV upgrade, well it's about to happen.
I've ordered a 1TB disk to add to the current 750GB of storage in the present combined backend/frontend. I have also ordered an additional USB dual tuner, digital tv adaptor. This will take the minimum possible concurrent recordings up to 4, with the option to record several more per tuner, as long as the channels are on the same multiplex. I may well limit it to 4 recordings anyway, as I am not sure how well the current AMD 3000 processor will cope.

My plan is to move this to the 19" rack in the garage and install a new, quiet and low power front end under the TV in the lounge.

With this in mind, I have ordered a Acer Revo 3610 (above), Atom 330 Dual Core, 1gb ram 160gb, hdd. This is a small 'nettop' box for about £150 running Linux. To control this I have ordered a MCE infra red remote control from Maplin.
I will be installing MythTV 0.22 on both of these. Not sure yet if I will attempt to upgrade the 0.21 install on the current box or just start again.

MythTV Upgrade time.

2009-11-22T18:29:00.000Z

With the recent release of MythTV version 0.22 I am considering upgrading my home PVR/MythTV/DVR system. After our Sky box became faulty several months ago we upgraded to Sky+, this upgrade was also partly due to the demise of analogue TV and thus our beloved Tivo system becoming redundant.

Sky+ does not live up to the hype though. The day to day use of the system does not compare to the Tivo’s.

The Sky+ TV guide is next to useless. Several obvious actions are missing and navigating your way round it is frustrating.
Try to search for a program beginning with a specific letter and you can say goodbye to several minutes of your life.
Pauses, lockups and missed recordings seem common place, this is after we had the box replaced recently.

Sadly many of the geeky TV channels like Discovery are missing from Freeview, we don’t subscribe to the movies or sport so it’s only those which tie us in to Sky really.

Anyway, I digress. MythTV 0.22 brings about many new features, a complete rewrite of the interface and the incorporation of VDPAU. Basically speaking this off loads much of the video decoding process to the graphics chip. This is only supported by Nvidia hardware and only then on 8400 series and above (with the exception of some 8800’s).

My current MythTV box, a combined frontend/backend has an older 5200 AGP card in it, sadly an upgrade of the card is not an option!

One possible way round this is to move the current MythTV box in to the rack in the garage, upgrade it to 0.22 version and run a small/silent frontend only in the lounge.

There is currently a lot of talk of the Acer Revo ‘nettop’ boxes in the Myth community. They are small, practically silent, low power consumption (Atom processor) and best of all have the Nvidia ION video chipset, which doessupport VDPAU.

So, watch this space, I’ll write more soon, maybe!