/bin/tim

So, I’ve got my FreeSat HD receiver, now where’s the content ?  I thought the bare minimum after the ITV HD launch would be F1 HD feeds, but no, not even for the British GP.  A lost opportunity.

In general the HD deployment in the UK is a complete mess.  On FreeSat, you get BBC HD and ITV HD (if available) but not Channel 4 HD.  If you have Sky HD, you get BBC and Channel 4 HD but not ITV HD.  Unfortunately its seems FreeSat has failed to deliver on its promise even though its already 2 years late.

Today is another really good example of why 25% of my time is (and has always been) wasted fixing IT problems that I shouldn’t have to.  I just got an HP C7280 All In One Printer (£199 from PCWorld) which is a wireless printer/scanner/copier/Fax.

So first I unpacked it, and uncharacteristically, read the Start Here guide.  Except when I got to point 3 it diverged from reality.  Supposedly I could choose my language from the menu on the built-in display.  What the display actually said was 12345.  So what do i do now, I pressed 1,2,3,4,5 but to no avail.  I turned the printer on and off a few times.  Stubbornly the message never changed.  I checked the documents for any mention of this problem but no luck.

Finally, after some searching through the HP support site I found this solution;

1. Pull the power cable out whilst the printer is on
2. Next, with the cable disconnected, hold the power button down for 10 seconds
3. Next, hold down # and 6 keys together and keep them held down whilst powering on and don’t release until it eventually gets to the menu talked about in the guide to select your language.

Basically that little proceedure resets the printer back to defualt setting. But, I shouldn’t have to do that!  Its brand new, it should work out of the box.  A non-IT literate person would have returned the printer as faulty.

At least its working now….

Although I outsource our email to a hosted Exchange server I needed to set up a server to manage web server email confirmations.  I hadn’t;t used this particular server software before but it was pretty simple and was sending email pretty soon, but none was returning and just producing delayed sending messages.

At first I thought it was the DNS, but that looked all ok.  To double check I used the DNS name with a Telnet session so I had manual control over the process and could see any error messages directly from the SMTP server in real time.  I used the excellent Putty as my terminal (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.htmlsoftware) as Telnet is n longer included by default in Vista and Windows Server 2008.

If you ever need to do a similar check on an SMTP server then here’s the sequence:

1. Start Putty
2. Enter DNS name (or IP Address)
3. Select Port 25 (or other if non standard)
4. Ensure you have selected the Telnet protocol (not SSH)
5. The terminal sessions should then open in a window
6. hit return
7. Type HELO
8. The server should respond with a 250 message (text may vary)
9. Type MAIL FROM: yourname@yourdomain.com (this address does not matter too much, but you should use a valid external email address)
10. The server should respond with a 250 message (text may vary)
11. Type RCPT TO: emailaddress@smtpserver.com  (replace email address with valid account on SMTP server)
12. The server should respond with a 250 message (text may vary)
13. Type DATA (hit return)
14. Type SUBJECT: Test Message (replace test Message with whatever you want)
15. Hit Return key twice
16. Type some email body text until finished
17. Type . (period - this tells server you are done) and hit Return
18. The server should respond with a 250 message (text may vary)
19. You’re done now you could repeat the process or type QUIT to leave.

Now that message should appear in the inbox of the target email address you specified in the RCPT TO: line.

However for me the message appeared then disappeared … into an unknown black hole… so the investigation continues.

There’s a lot of fuss about travellers fingerprints being taken at the new Terminal 5, which worried me a bit as well, until I discovered the reason for it.  The proposed system would take a fingerprint at check-in and compare it to one at boarding to make sure the same person was getting on the flight, like an electronic boarding card.

Somehow it got mixed up with keeping peoples fingerprints on file somewhere, when in fact they promised to destroy the data after 24 hours (assuming they can be believed).  However this confusion could have been avoided if they just used the fingerprint as a numeric hash and checked that.  That way no fingerprint data would ever be stored but there would be a unique hash that would ensure the passenger hadn’t changed before boarding.

On the face of it,  using the Internet to choose and book a hospital consultant appointment seems a fantastic idea.  But as with most government projects,  defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory. 

It seemed so simple,  I need to see an ophthalmic consultant to check my eyes are ok after laser surgery.  So I received a letter through the post with a reference and password to use the optimistically named ‘Choose and Book’ service run by the NHS.  Sounded too good to be true, so I went to the web page where I had to enter my reference, birth year and password.  Bingo! it quickly pulled back the details of the appointment and asked me to click to go on to book a time.  I excitedly clicked the link, expecting to see a calendar of available dates and hoping to do one or at most two more clicks to choose and confirm.

How wrong I was,  I was actually then taken to the complicated home page of the hospital concerned, and after a couple of moments hunting round finding what to do next I saw the ‘Choose and Book’ link. OK so it was a bit manual and not integrated and added an extra step, but I was still optimistic.  Slowly, so slowly the link stuttered into life and low and behold I was back at the original login page …. strange … oh well a bit more manual work,  I suppose they are being thorough, so I entered the details again, but was greeted with an error … ‘unable to log you in at this time’.  The site suggested I go back to the original link and start again.

Annoyed, I did so, and went through the whole process again, to get the same error. Finally I gave in and called the phone booking system.  They checked and the error wasn’t that I couldn’t log in, rather there were no available appointments, but it reports the login failure instead.  So I ended up wasting time on a system that is poorly designed and implemented.

Not only that, but they can’t take user feedback unless its from a GP surgery, who surprisingly don’t use the same system ….

Whilst purchasing a MyBook at PC World today I noticed they were selling the excellent Devolo Powerline AV200 Starter Pack (2 adapters) for £99, abot £20-30 cheaper than online.  For the uninitiated, the PowerLine standard allows devices which look like normalhouse plugs but with an Rj45 Ethernet connector to join your various devices using your home electrical wiring as network cable.  This means that you can dynamically run networks in your house without network cabling.  It also gets by any limitations of wireless signal loss through walls.

Although its slower than Cat-6 cabling your house for gigabit bandwidth, its very much easier to implement because you just plug the connectors in to a normal plug socket.  Up to 255 Powerline plugs can be supported on one electrical main.  You can plug any Ethernet device into a Powerline plug, even a switch or hub, or as I do, my ADSL connection.  even if you share your power supply cabling (shared house/flat) it still works as you can encrypt the data between your plugs.  One interesting option is the wireless LAN  extender which allows you to add a wirless access point at a distant point in your house using the mains cabling, and it works very well.

Hint: if you are starting out you need at least two plugs, so get a starter kit

I was just looking at a friend’s Asus EEEPC which are all the rage right now.  Its very cute, and I was sorely tempted to buy one,  its £229 for the 4GB SSD model.  However,  its just not quite convincing enough for me, yet.  The 7″ display is too small,  I like the SSD but again its too small and needs supplementing with a USB stick, the keyboard is small but I could get used to it.  Its cheap …. did I mention that?  but hey,  I can buy a full laptop for another £70.

What does attract me is the almost fixed function of the device.  ie its designed to do a few things, but do them well, or well enough, specifically low impact tasks like email, web browsing etc.  I thought about its possibility as an eBook, but really I need 1024×768 to get A4 page fidelity enough to read (fit to page view).

So, whilst I like the EEEPC, I think I would actually spend a bit more on a real laptop and then downgrade that to the capability of the EEEPC.  this would be mega performance in comparison although I guess the battery life would be less.

Maybe I could rip the hard disk out and configure a bootable USB stick to start from to save battery.  Windows couldnt save much this way as its too chatty with the registry and is always doing something even when you aren’t.

So, I think I’ll try that first, I have the measure of the EEEPC so thats my target for a ‘utility’ laptop.

I’ve been waiting years for the eBook I need.  I’ve seen and tried the Rocket, the Sony PRS, the iRex illiad, the starEbook and the Kindle. and they all fail miserably for me.  Each one has something good(ish); worthy of note is the illiad has the much needed 1024×768 display; the Kindle has great connectivity. The downside is they all cost huge and offer low bang for the buck.

Tantilisingly, what I need is far simpler than what these guys try to produce.  I don’t need something that works for 40 hours without charge, I dont even need something that weighs less than a feather.  In fact I think my requirement is similar to many pro’s who want eBook capabilities for work purposes.

Actually what I need is more or less a standard cheap notebook and i’ll sacrifice a real keyboard for a tablet style display.  I rarely need more than 3 hours running away from mains charging, and I can accept some weight. I can cope with a shared memory graphics adapter but I do want colour, a 1.4GHz core duo and 1GB RAM. Probably running some lightweight Linux preferably on an SSD disk to save power. At a minimum I want it to render PDF and preferably also DOC and PPT. I’d love it to be able to playback video and audio as well as view images.  I definitely want an RSS client and a web browser.

Tesco can seel me a Fujitsu laptop for £299 with 1.8GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 120GB Disk, DVD Rewriter, 128MB Graphics, 802.11g, Modem, and Vista!  so why can’t I have that in my eBook format? Please!

SPF, Sender Policy Framework thats what.  Its a TXT record you can apply to your DNS zone to allow receiving mail servers to determine whether your email domain is being impersonated to send spam (UCE).  Why is this important?  Well if you have more than 1 SMTP sending server then your IP address ranges may be different.  This means that some of your email may be rejected as spam at servers like Hotmail and never reach the recipients mailbox (even the junk mail folder).  Once added, mail servers can check the SPF record to confirm your email is valid and hopefully your email won’t be rejected.

So what does an SPF record look like ?  Well here’s an example;

 v=spf1 ip4:62.21.98.128/24 a mx include:spf.myispmail.net ?all 

But working it out is a chore, so go to an easy to use online configurator here http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

This is a great idea!  The original Star Trek has been remastered for HD-DVD and they have replaced the special effects with new modern effects, very cool!  Check out the new graphics here http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/TOS/article/28095.html

… and look at this cool phaser remote control!

On Saturday I had a call from someone because the email they sent me had bounced back to them as undeliverable.  I immediately thought this must be a problem with this persons email skills, wrong name, domain etc. but I thought I’d check.  I opened Outlook and saw the last email to me at this domain had arrived Thursday morning, and suspiciously, there was no junk mail since then … so alarms bells started ringing in the distance,  but I wasn’t to worried as this was surely simple and quick to check and fix…how wrong I was!

My first inclination was to check the DNS settings at my ISP, especially the MX records.  These were all fine and my MX was pointing as expected to Hotmail,  as I use the Live Custom Domains option. So, nothing wrong there.  Next stop the Live Admin for custom domains.  Bingo! warning messages all over this console;

But Hang on! it says my DNS is not configured ‘Pending DNS Configuration’ and a careful check between this and my ISP DNS settings shows no differences … what gives? So after a struggle I find an email address to which Live support queries can be sent and ask them what the pending change is as there is no direct reference as to exactly what setting is wrong.  After 30 mins I hadn’t got a reply (even automated) and I realised that I had used the failing email address so I resubmitted a new ticket.  Shockingly, the new ticket was over 9000 higher than my last one half an hour previously!  I guess a lot of people worldwide have issues with Live.  Apart from the automated reply I have not received a reponse.  So no immediate help there…

So, I needed to be more proactive and sent a few test emails which all disappeared without being received.  So I decided to get low level and see if I could track what was actually happening so my first step was to see where the email sever was being told to send email in case my ISP DNS had failed.

I used the trusty NSLookup utility to see what was going on with DNS.

NSLookup -sil -qMX timcarmichael.com

Server: 209.68.2.46
Address: 209.68.2.46#53

Non-authoritative answer:
timcarmichael.com canonical name = blog.timcarmichael.com.
blog.timcarmichael.com canonical name = timcarmichael.wordpress.com.
timcarmichael.wordpress.com canonical name = lb.wordpress.com.

Authoritative answers can be found from:
wordpress.com
origin = ns1.wordpress.com
mail addr = mmmmmm.gmail.com
serial = 2005071858
refresh = 14400
retry = 7200
expire = 604800
minimum = 60

EEEK!  wordpress.com have become my home nameserver!  they obviously have no knowledge of my real settings and list the MX as GMail.  No wonder I stopped receiving email.  But there is no way to contact their support as they are on holiday… so I contact my ISP to see whats happening and how on earth my real settings got orphaned and wordpress took over.  I didn’t even know that wordpress had nameservers.

Now I knew what the problem was I could fix it.  I unlocked my domain at my ISP and reset the nameservers back to my ISP.  Nothing more I could do now as DNS updates can take up to 48 hours to propagate.

That still leaves me with the question, still unanswered, how did wordpress.com become my nameserver? my domain was definitely locked at my ISP which means no-one but me should be able to make changes.  So how did they?

I’ll update when I know … but I’m not holding my breath as to when I get a response.  What this proves though is that when faced with a problem like this you are really on your own to resolve it, if you can, no matter how urgent and important it is.

The worst thing was I lost all my existing email in the hotmail account!  Fortunately I have a backup, but this would definitely catch the unwary.  When live domains eventually re-found the DNS was correct again it seemed to associate me to a brand new (and empty) hotmail account.  So beware! 

What a nightmare, and no-one to help! These free services are only good if you can sort any problems out yourself,  assuming you can discover and understand the problem.  So I hope this helps someone else, or me again in the future.

I was pretty shocked to discover (thanks to BBC news) that energy saving light-bulbs contain mercury and are classified as hazardous waste.  There are two effects of this; firstly, when they die you cannot just throw them away with domestic rubbish, they must be specially disposed of as hazardous waste; Secondly, and more worryingly, if you broke a light in your house/office, the official cleanup procedure issued by the DoE is to call in the local council hazardous waste team!  and if not, you should open all the windows, wear a mask and rubbers gloves and thoroughly clean the area to remove toxic hazards.  But from my schoolboy chemistry, I seem to remember that mercury must be caught and cannot be washed or scrubbed away.

This is pretty scary, especially for kids or people unaware of the dangers of mercury poisoning. Be warned!

PCWorld are selling 750GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 external drives for £99, thats cheaper than I can buy a bare 750GB drive for!