This isn't really so much for y'all, but for me. Its an easy place to go to glance at movies & TV shows on disk that I have. The full list is here, on Blist, and its viewable by the public (if you have a Blist account), but its nice they offer an embed.
From the ones that are listed "Blu-Ray", those are the ones I haven't watched yet, because of the continued inoperation of the Stone Soup Blue Ray Player. Stay tuned for more on that story, as I move from Vista to Windows 7 Beta. Woot!
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Soup Blu-Ray Player: Chapter Two - Vista x64
It was last year that I started the saga of The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player. I'll not recap, but give a catch-up: the Media-PC is about to, I'm afraid, be the recipient of its third Vista OS install. In trying once again to fix the Logitech MX Bluetooth keyboard's driver, the SoundMax HDMI-accessible driver was blown away. The machine doesn't see that the device exists. The Windows "native" drivers for the "HD Sound" won't install. So the SSBRP is, once again, rendered rather useless. Because there really aren't all that many silent movies released in Blu-Ray and though I can and do enjoy foriegn films with subtitles, I miss the music, sound-effects--and after-all, what's a sub-woofer without any woof?
How did I get to this state? Did the SSBRP ever work at all? Oh, yes. It worked. Gloriously. Beautifully. Not-quite-perfect-but-quite-serviceably-thank-you. Just the other night my son Chad, and his fiancee, Heather, were visiting from Las Vegas and Chad had brought along his Blu-Ray copy of The Incredible Hulk. We all watched it, and the "making of" special feature and I was quite happy. Prior to that I'd watched "Dark Knight", "Wanted" and "IJatTotCS", all in Blu-Ray. This going back to November when I'd finally straightened out the driver mess that I've come to understand is, inevitably, unfailingly, but quite regularly fallibly, Vista.
Could my life have been easier had I decided to go with Vista-32, the more direct decendant of XP? Surely. But I had a terabyte drive, the idea of multi-gigabyte video files and more addressable RAM than you could throw a pointer at. And I had four cores of 64-bit capable processor! Why would I leave all that on the table in the name of compatability and stability!!? Bah! Take me straightaway to the Bleeding Edge, Jenkins, and don't spare the cycles! Or sectors. Whatever. The point being that this was going to be a New Computer. I'd tried Ubuntu and though it was nice, we agreed to remain friends and talk occasionally, but well, it just wasn't mature enough for a lasting, committed relationship based on movie viewing (Hardy Heron, we'll always have DivX). So it had to be Vista, and what is it they say? In for a penny? Yeah. I went for eight bucks worth. Sixty four bits, to be punny about it.
One would like to think that an operating system produced by the Worlds Largest Vendor of said-same, and Richest Company, etc., and one that was mature by at least eighteen months, would be pretty well shaken-out, right? I mean, by the time Windows Millennium came around, Windows 98 had been around that long, right? And it was good enough so that "ME" was really a mistake to leave tried-and-true '98 for. The ME was the "wait for XP" edition. So I guess what has happened is that Vista, despite being eons in development is really the "ME" of the 21st century. Folk are clinging to their XP until, what's it called, "Seven"? Comes out. Seven. That's got cachet up the yin-yang, baby! Riiiight. But I digress.
An Endless Vista
Vista 64 should, by all rights, have vendor support and community support and lots of high-version drivers and software and devices and...and...and.... Well. It does have a lot of community support. It has to. One wonders if a course in being a Linux geek and having to figure all that out with the help of the fine Ubuntu User's Forum is a prerequisite for installing Vista x64 onto one's system. Let me tell you, friend. It couldn't hurt.
At the first attempt at living with Vista (now, in 2009, aka, "C:\Windows.old") I installed into a clean system. With no nVidia nor Asus nor LG (Blu-Ray) drivers. I was smart enough not to install the AirLink300 Wi-Fi card. Its XP drivers were nothing to sing home about (some of the worst Chinglish documentation and software strings I've seen since Epson manuals of the mid-80s), and so I wasn't pinning any hopes on finding Vx64 drivers. But I didn't need it, because the Comcast modem, with its loverly 8Mbps was just an RJ45 cable and a WRT54G 10/100 port away.
The initial install was fine. I tip that to the 'geers at nVidia and Asus, and to the fact that its pretty hard to get a reference VGA driver wrong. But props also to the fact that the onboard HDMI output worked from the get-go. But there wasn't any sound. 'Salright, I'm just warming up. More stones for the soup were to come. Registration occurred, nagging diminished, and I even managed to find my way through the very first layers of the onion that is Vista Security. I was able to turn off the nagware that is Vista's User Authorization Control (UAC). This is an absolute necessity when you're a safe and knowledgeable user installing vendor-provided software (i.e., you're not practicing unsafe warez). Otherwise, at each CD, at each setup.exe, you'll be asked, "Do you really, REALLLY want to do that, huh? Do ya? Do ya? Huh?" Or dialogs to that effect.
That the default for video and Human Interface Devices (HID--that's keyboard and mouse to you and me) worked out of the Vista DVD install was great. Because the Asus and nVidia softwares need an operating system to go against. So you can switch out of "800x600" mode and up to glorious 1080p (1920 x 1080 x 32bit) mode on that deliciously big screen. And so you can use the northbridge and southbridge chips for sound, and for the exotic bits that came with this motherboard, the "Hybrid SLI" mode--HDMI out through the motherboard connector from both the PCI-e MSI 9800GTX+ and ALSO the digital sound out from the LG Blu-Ray player.
Oh, yeah. I could taste it.
But what does any geek worth his salt do when he first puts together a new system? Install the CDs that came in the box? HEEELL, no! You go on the net and download the latest! And true to form, even though the motherboard was a scant four months old, there were updates to be had, and nVidia can be counted upon to have a Detonator set that's at least a rev newer than anything that has to make it all the way through a manufacturing chain--and that isn't even the Beta stuff!
So I started in with v178.xx (an old v151.xx was on the disk) and flashed the MB Bios and grabbed the latest MB drivers and... hmm. Some of the stuff wasn't quite right. Should I reinstall this one? Re-do the order? Maybe the Beta software.....hold on there, cowboy! This ain't your first rodeo. Put your professional hat on and start approaching this like an engineer and not a kid who's read too much Extreeeme PC. So I got out a fresh page of quadrille and started Keeping Records of All Changes.
To make a long (very looong) story short, the magic moment came when I applied sufficient discipline to change only one thing at a time and started with the software that came in the box. The magic pieces of which were the Connextant drivers which enabled the glorious HD sound out through the HDMI connector.
All Was Right With the World (or, Mmmm, Good Soup!)
The LG Blu-Ray disk came with a software bundle, and in it was a DVD player that supported Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The only thing was...it didn't respond to mouse inputs. The Play and Stop buttons worked okay, but the in-menu controls didn't (like, "scene selection" and "special features". You know, trivial stuff). But the controls responded to the keyboard. Would an upgrade from the (perhaps crippled?) version work? I don't know, because they wanted $90 for the upgrade ("special pricing for LG Blu-Ray owners!" Uh. yeah. thanks.) At $120 for the player and $90 for the software, I could have easily bought a standalone Blu-Ray player. It was starting to look like that was going to be the best solution, and the SSBRP was going to be relegated to a gaming platform only.
But it did work to play HD disks. And using the keyboard wasn't horribly inconvenient. And besides, when one day I got a universal remote for the PC, maybe that stone would somehow make the soup the complete and satisfying meal it should be with the full adult minimum daily requirements of Niacin and Iron.
And so, we watched the Iron Man Blu-Ray in HD in all its glory! It was wonderful. And wanting is not always more satisfying than having. Although, in retrospect, having once had makes wanting once again an even more covetous state. But at that time, I had seen the future, and it was good in 1080p.
And then I got cocky.
To really get the best effect of Windows Media Center (WMC), you need to have a tuner, right in the computer. Someday soon all content will be by TCP/IP or some other IP variant [insert Net Neutrality plug here] but there's still a lot of broadcast and cablecast content that needs to be deplexed into channels. So I got myself another stone for the soup pot. A Pinnacle PCTV HD card was (I thought) a good buy. Maybe it was a good buy because it was about to be a discontinued item: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16815144018
But it was HD, and Pinnacle was a good name. There were Beta Vx64 drivers available. I told you I was cocky.
Unfortunately, when the software installed, it put a virtual shim into the sound driver stack. Makes sense, you have to output the sound the card receives to the computer output. But it totally busted the state-of-the-art HDMI and Hybrid-SLI driver stack. Undo, uninstall, reinstall, nothing worked. I tried registry edits with some clever GUID searches, but...Vista ain't exactly XP. The end-result was a non-functioning sound system. The system didn't recognize that there was any sound hardware installed for the drivers to work against--indeed even for the drivers to select the right hardware profile.
I might have continued fighting with this, but for one other problem. The Logitech Bluetooth MX keyboard and mouse combo. I installed their approved Setpoint ver 4.60 drivers for Vx64, but on launching the interface, there were only "help" and "update" tabs. The functional tabs that allow you to change mouse and keyboard settings simply weren't there. Shortly after my trials, Logitech tech support put up a note on how to maybe fix this problem--but it wasn't available then, and to discuss it now would be getting way ahead of my tale.
So I had no sound and a keyboard that was working but had some glitches. Like none of the multimedia keys worked. Okay, that's not entirely true; the volume wheel did work--but you wouldn't know, because of the motherboard sound problem. And more irritatingly, the spacebar launched WinMail. Really. The space bar. I don't know how that ever came to be a default keyboard macro, but imagine. Imagine typing in a path. Like, oh, "Program Files". Or a tech support question on the Logitech forum. I had to resort to using the mouse to select a space, then copy it to the clipboard, then use Ctrl-V instead of the space bar as I was composing. One slip and bang! WinMail in the foreground. I got good at "space Alt-F4 Alt-Tab Ctrl-V" key combos to correct my well-trained fingers. But you know, that's not really a skill that you want to get into muscle memory.
So after a few days, and with the release of Indiana Jones staring at me on the calendar, I capitulated. I did a reinstall.
Take Two: The Right Order
The second install was fairly straightforward. The only thing was that I didn't want to do a destructive install because I had all this downloaded driver content and installed programs (I had managed to get Halo going for a short campaign before audio meltdown). I had a hundred-odd megabytes of stuff on there. Now the sane thing to do would be to run a backup out to the NAS. After all, I have this old Buffalo system that has a couple hunnert Gigs. And it has another hunnert or so gigs attached to it via USB. All accessible through WINS. But wait! That would just be too darned easy for this project. The WINS it seems is the oldest implementation, going back to NT 3.x. Which is incompatible with more recent NTs and apparently Vista is "right out". Even following their techsupport suggestion of setting some flag for compatability from "2" down to "1" then to "0" still wouldn't allow my Vista to see the drive by browsing. I could get to the FTP server just fine, but no mounts. Credentials didn't match. I remember something from work about passing cleartext credentials in WinNT 3.x, but ye gods that was a long time ago and besides, I couldn't find it in my email archives. Anyway, it looked like I could manually xmit
and restore via FTP, or nuke it, or....just leave it where it was!
No reason to re-download it all again. I mean, I had a TERABYTE, bro! Wide open spaces. The plains as seen from the western banks of the Mississippi. So I did a non-destructive reinstall, and Vista handled that quite gracefully. "C:\" became "C:\windows.old". Think about that for a moment, and you'll see its a nice trick. The root partition stays the same, but everything is moved to within a subdir on that disk. In reality, its a couple of MBR pointers and away you go!
So score one for Vista. Minus a hundred for me having to reinstall in the first place. Or, rather, second place.
After the second installation, it was pretty straightforward to get all the drivers installed in the right order, following a plan I developed from re-reading my notebook on the first pass. So then I had a working baseline. The Pinnacle card was out. That will have to be revisited later. Maybe never, now that I see it is discontinued. Sigh. But the hybrid SLI and the HDMI sound were working again and channeling the Blu-Ray player properly. Plus I got the Logitech Momo Force Feedback Steering Wheel with Paddle Shifters working. So that was a big plus!
What do do when you have a stable system? Make a backup! I already knew the NAS was out of the question--put it on the list of future Stones to acquire, a NAS with more emphasis on the "A"-able. Making a backup to the same drive wasn't allowed. I wasn't about to try my years-old copy of Partition Magic in order to make a "D:\" drive on part of the unused "C:\" (besides potentially throwing the LG Blu-Ray into uncharted "E:\" territory). So the alternative was to make a full backup using DVDs. I'd even pop for the dual-layer.
But wait, it couldn't be that simple, could it? Of course not. Because the first time you make a "complete" backup on Vista, it wants to make a complete disk image. And in my case that meant an image of the couple-hundred gigabytes of "C:\Windows.old". Nevermind that I only wanted a small part of that, "C:\Windows.old\Users\Chris\Downloads". It wanted all or nothing. It told me to get 24 DVDs ready. Oh, no. Not me, brother. I'd already on more than one occasion had a "backup set" on 5.25" floppy disk (and later on 2.88Mb 3.5" disks) from "Fastback". Remember the cheetah on the box? Nothing speedy about it when you're trying to do a recovery and the entire index is on the last disk.
Please insert disk 48 of 50... Press Any Key.
Disk Unreadable. Abort, Retry, Continue?
So once again I decided to swing without a net, fly without a parachute, bathe without a raincoat...ahem. You get the picture. No backup, damn the torpedoes! Besides. I had a very workable system now, why would I want to do anything at the system level that would upset the applecart?
Indeed the system worked well for IJatKotCS, despite still not being able to use the mouse to navigate. And so I started in on buying Blu-Rays and setting them to be my preferred medium on Netflix. Nice. I wasn't quite ready to retire the Toshiba HD-DVD/DVD player, but the Ol' Vista box did have the ability to handle the whole shootin' match. Plus gaming. Yeah, baby. The Stone Soup was tastin' mighty good.
So it was with no surprise that after this holiday break, after watching Chad's copy of The Incredible Hulk on the SSBRP, after setting up print drivers to the family's new Epson Artisan 800 multifunction printer, and after moving the whole setup off the RJ45 tether to a nice Linksys/Cisco Wireless-N interface and into the family room (to make room for the Christmas tree, but we're going to leave it where it is), that I decided to tackle that keyboard problem again. Because, you know, that an FPS game uses to jump almost all the time, and though I could remap, the fingers already know that is jump. Launching WinMail in the middle of a tight Half Life Episode I session when you need to avoid some headcrab just isn't any fun.
Besides, Logitech now had ver 4.70 up on the website; I had reported the problem with the tabs, they had a technote on how to get past the issue and it had to come my way, didn't it?
Didn't it just have to work out for me eventually?
Stay tuned for the Entree course on the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player dining experience.
How did I get to this state? Did the SSBRP ever work at all? Oh, yes. It worked. Gloriously. Beautifully. Not-quite-perfect-but-quite-serviceably-thank-you. Just the other night my son Chad, and his fiancee, Heather, were visiting from Las Vegas and Chad had brought along his Blu-Ray copy of The Incredible Hulk. We all watched it, and the "making of" special feature and I was quite happy. Prior to that I'd watched "Dark Knight", "Wanted" and "IJatTotCS", all in Blu-Ray. This going back to November when I'd finally straightened out the driver mess that I've come to understand is, inevitably, unfailingly, but quite regularly fallibly, Vista.
Could my life have been easier had I decided to go with Vista-32, the more direct decendant of XP? Surely. But I had a terabyte drive, the idea of multi-gigabyte video files and more addressable RAM than you could throw a pointer at. And I had four cores of 64-bit capable processor! Why would I leave all that on the table in the name of compatability and stability!!? Bah! Take me straightaway to the Bleeding Edge, Jenkins, and don't spare the cycles! Or sectors. Whatever. The point being that this was going to be a New Computer. I'd tried Ubuntu and though it was nice, we agreed to remain friends and talk occasionally, but well, it just wasn't mature enough for a lasting, committed relationship based on movie viewing (Hardy Heron, we'll always have DivX). So it had to be Vista, and what is it they say? In for a penny? Yeah. I went for eight bucks worth. Sixty four bits, to be punny about it.
One would like to think that an operating system produced by the Worlds Largest Vendor of said-same, and Richest Company, etc., and one that was mature by at least eighteen months, would be pretty well shaken-out, right? I mean, by the time Windows Millennium came around, Windows 98 had been around that long, right? And it was good enough so that "ME" was really a mistake to leave tried-and-true '98 for. The ME was the "wait for XP" edition. So I guess what has happened is that Vista, despite being eons in development is really the "ME" of the 21st century. Folk are clinging to their XP until, what's it called, "Seven"? Comes out. Seven. That's got cachet up the yin-yang, baby! Riiiight. But I digress.
An Endless Vista
Vista 64 should, by all rights, have vendor support and community support and lots of high-version drivers and software and devices and...and...and.... Well. It does have a lot of community support. It has to. One wonders if a course in being a Linux geek and having to figure all that out with the help of the fine Ubuntu User's Forum is a prerequisite for installing Vista x64 onto one's system. Let me tell you, friend. It couldn't hurt.
At the first attempt at living with Vista (now, in 2009, aka, "C:\Windows.old") I installed into a clean system. With no nVidia nor Asus nor LG (Blu-Ray) drivers. I was smart enough not to install the AirLink300 Wi-Fi card. Its XP drivers were nothing to sing home about (some of the worst Chinglish documentation and software strings I've seen since Epson manuals of the mid-80s), and so I wasn't pinning any hopes on finding Vx64 drivers. But I didn't need it, because the Comcast modem, with its loverly 8Mbps was just an RJ45 cable and a WRT54G 10/100 port away.
The initial install was fine. I tip that to the 'geers at nVidia and Asus, and to the fact that its pretty hard to get a reference VGA driver wrong. But props also to the fact that the onboard HDMI output worked from the get-go. But there wasn't any sound. 'Salright, I'm just warming up. More stones for the soup were to come. Registration occurred, nagging diminished, and I even managed to find my way through the very first layers of the onion that is Vista Security. I was able to turn off the nagware that is Vista's User Authorization Control (UAC). This is an absolute necessity when you're a safe and knowledgeable user installing vendor-provided software (i.e., you're not practicing unsafe warez). Otherwise, at each CD, at each setup.exe, you'll be asked, "Do you really, REALLLY want to do that, huh? Do ya? Do ya? Huh?" Or dialogs to that effect.
That the default for video and Human Interface Devices (HID--that's keyboard and mouse to you and me) worked out of the Vista DVD install was great. Because the Asus and nVidia softwares need an operating system to go against. So you can switch out of "800x600" mode and up to glorious 1080p (1920 x 1080 x 32bit) mode on that deliciously big screen. And so you can use the northbridge and southbridge chips for sound, and for the exotic bits that came with this motherboard, the "Hybrid SLI" mode--HDMI out through the motherboard connector from both the PCI-e MSI 9800GTX+ and ALSO the digital sound out from the LG Blu-Ray player.
Oh, yeah. I could taste it.
But what does any geek worth his salt do when he first puts together a new system? Install the CDs that came in the box? HEEELL, no! You go on the net and download the latest! And true to form, even though the motherboard was a scant four months old, there were updates to be had, and nVidia can be counted upon to have a Detonator set that's at least a rev newer than anything that has to make it all the way through a manufacturing chain--and that isn't even the Beta stuff!
So I started in with v178.xx (an old v151.xx was on the disk) and flashed the MB Bios and grabbed the latest MB drivers and... hmm. Some of the stuff wasn't quite right. Should I reinstall this one? Re-do the order? Maybe the Beta software.....hold on there, cowboy! This ain't your first rodeo. Put your professional hat on and start approaching this like an engineer and not a kid who's read too much Extreeeme PC. So I got out a fresh page of quadrille and started Keeping Records of All Changes.
To make a long (very looong) story short, the magic moment came when I applied sufficient discipline to change only one thing at a time and started with the software that came in the box. The magic pieces of which were the Connextant drivers which enabled the glorious HD sound out through the HDMI connector.
All Was Right With the World (or, Mmmm, Good Soup!)
The LG Blu-Ray disk came with a software bundle, and in it was a DVD player that supported Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The only thing was...it didn't respond to mouse inputs. The Play and Stop buttons worked okay, but the in-menu controls didn't (like, "scene selection" and "special features". You know, trivial stuff). But the controls responded to the keyboard. Would an upgrade from the (perhaps crippled?) version work? I don't know, because they wanted $90 for the upgrade ("special pricing for LG Blu-Ray owners!" Uh. yeah. thanks.) At $120 for the player and $90 for the software, I could have easily bought a standalone Blu-Ray player. It was starting to look like that was going to be the best solution, and the SSBRP was going to be relegated to a gaming platform only.
But it did work to play HD disks. And using the keyboard wasn't horribly inconvenient. And besides, when one day I got a universal remote for the PC, maybe that stone would somehow make the soup the complete and satisfying meal it should be with the full adult minimum daily requirements of Niacin and Iron.
And so, we watched the Iron Man Blu-Ray in HD in all its glory! It was wonderful. And wanting is not always more satisfying than having. Although, in retrospect, having once had makes wanting once again an even more covetous state. But at that time, I had seen the future, and it was good in 1080p.
And then I got cocky.
To really get the best effect of Windows Media Center (WMC), you need to have a tuner, right in the computer. Someday soon all content will be by TCP/IP or some other IP variant [insert Net Neutrality plug here] but there's still a lot of broadcast and cablecast content that needs to be deplexed into channels. So I got myself another stone for the soup pot. A Pinnacle PCTV HD card was (I thought) a good buy. Maybe it was a good buy because it was about to be a discontinued item: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16815144018
But it was HD, and Pinnacle was a good name. There were Beta Vx64 drivers available. I told you I was cocky.
Unfortunately, when the software installed, it put a virtual shim into the sound driver stack. Makes sense, you have to output the sound the card receives to the computer output. But it totally busted the state-of-the-art HDMI and Hybrid-SLI driver stack. Undo, uninstall, reinstall, nothing worked. I tried registry edits with some clever GUID searches, but...Vista ain't exactly XP. The end-result was a non-functioning sound system. The system didn't recognize that there was any sound hardware installed for the drivers to work against--indeed even for the drivers to select the right hardware profile.
I might have continued fighting with this, but for one other problem. The Logitech Bluetooth MX keyboard and mouse combo. I installed their approved Setpoint ver 4.60 drivers for Vx64, but on launching the interface, there were only "help" and "update" tabs. The functional tabs that allow you to change mouse and keyboard settings simply weren't there. Shortly after my trials, Logitech tech support put up a note on how to maybe fix this problem--but it wasn't available then, and to discuss it now would be getting way ahead of my tale.
So I had no sound and a keyboard that was working but had some glitches. Like none of the multimedia keys worked. Okay, that's not entirely true; the volume wheel did work--but you wouldn't know, because of the motherboard sound problem. And more irritatingly, the spacebar launched WinMail. Really. The space bar. I don't know how that ever came to be a default keyboard macro, but imagine. Imagine typing in a path. Like, oh, "Program Files". Or a tech support question on the Logitech forum. I had to resort to using the mouse to select a space, then copy it to the clipboard, then use Ctrl-V instead of the space bar as I was composing. One slip and bang! WinMail in the foreground. I got good at "space Alt-F4 Alt-Tab Ctrl-V" key combos to correct my well-trained fingers. But you know, that's not really a skill that you want to get into muscle memory.
So after a few days, and with the release of Indiana Jones staring at me on the calendar, I capitulated. I did a reinstall.
Take Two: The Right Order
The second install was fairly straightforward. The only thing was that I didn't want to do a destructive install because I had all this downloaded driver content and installed programs (I had managed to get Halo going for a short campaign before audio meltdown). I had a hundred-odd megabytes of stuff on there. Now the sane thing to do would be to run a backup out to the NAS. After all, I have this old Buffalo system that has a couple hunnert Gigs. And it has another hunnert or so gigs attached to it via USB. All accessible through WINS. But wait! That would just be too darned easy for this project. The WINS it seems is the oldest implementation, going back to NT 3.x. Which is incompatible with more recent NTs and apparently Vista is "right out". Even following their techsupport suggestion of setting some flag for compatability from "2" down to "1" then to "0" still wouldn't allow my Vista to see the drive by browsing. I could get to the FTP server just fine, but no mounts. Credentials didn't match. I remember something from work about passing cleartext credentials in WinNT 3.x, but ye gods that was a long time ago and besides, I couldn't find it in my email archives. Anyway, it looked like I could manually xmit
and restore via FTP, or nuke it, or....just leave it where it was!
No reason to re-download it all again. I mean, I had a TERABYTE, bro! Wide open spaces. The plains as seen from the western banks of the Mississippi. So I did a non-destructive reinstall, and Vista handled that quite gracefully. "C:\" became "C:\windows.old". Think about that for a moment, and you'll see its a nice trick. The root partition stays the same, but everything is moved to within a subdir on that disk. In reality, its a couple of MBR pointers and away you go!
So score one for Vista. Minus a hundred for me having to reinstall in the first place. Or, rather, second place.
After the second installation, it was pretty straightforward to get all the drivers installed in the right order, following a plan I developed from re-reading my notebook on the first pass. So then I had a working baseline. The Pinnacle card was out. That will have to be revisited later. Maybe never, now that I see it is discontinued. Sigh. But the hybrid SLI and the HDMI sound were working again and channeling the Blu-Ray player properly. Plus I got the Logitech Momo Force Feedback Steering Wheel with Paddle Shifters working. So that was a big plus!
What do do when you have a stable system? Make a backup! I already knew the NAS was out of the question--put it on the list of future Stones to acquire, a NAS with more emphasis on the "A"-able. Making a backup to the same drive wasn't allowed. I wasn't about to try my years-old copy of Partition Magic in order to make a "D:\" drive on part of the unused "C:\" (besides potentially throwing the LG Blu-Ray into uncharted "E:\" territory). So the alternative was to make a full backup using DVDs. I'd even pop for the dual-layer.
But wait, it couldn't be that simple, could it? Of course not. Because the first time you make a "complete" backup on Vista, it wants to make a complete disk image. And in my case that meant an image of the couple-hundred gigabytes of "C:\Windows.old". Nevermind that I only wanted a small part of that, "C:\Windows.old\Users\Chris\Downloads". It wanted all or nothing. It told me to get 24 DVDs ready. Oh, no. Not me, brother. I'd already on more than one occasion had a "backup set" on 5.25" floppy disk (and later on 2.88Mb 3.5" disks) from "Fastback". Remember the cheetah on the box? Nothing speedy about it when you're trying to do a recovery and the entire index is on the last disk.
Please insert disk 48 of 50... Press Any Key.
Disk Unreadable. Abort, Retry, Continue?
So once again I decided to swing without a net, fly without a parachute, bathe without a raincoat...ahem. You get the picture. No backup, damn the torpedoes! Besides. I had a very workable system now, why would I want to do anything at the system level that would upset the applecart?
Indeed the system worked well for IJatKotCS, despite still not being able to use the mouse to navigate. And so I started in on buying Blu-Rays and setting them to be my preferred medium on Netflix. Nice. I wasn't quite ready to retire the Toshiba HD-DVD/DVD player, but the Ol' Vista box did have the ability to handle the whole shootin' match. Plus gaming. Yeah, baby. The Stone Soup was tastin' mighty good.
So it was with no surprise that after this holiday break, after watching Chad's copy of The Incredible Hulk on the SSBRP, after setting up print drivers to the family's new Epson Artisan 800 multifunction printer, and after moving the whole setup off the RJ45 tether to a nice Linksys/Cisco Wireless-N interface and into the family room (to make room for the Christmas tree, but we're going to leave it where it is), that I decided to tackle that keyboard problem again. Because, you know, that an FPS game uses
Besides, Logitech now had ver 4.70 up on the website; I had reported the problem with the tabs, they had a technote on how to get past the issue and it had to come my way, didn't it?
Didn't it just have to work out for me eventually?
Stay tuned for the Entree course on the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player dining experience.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Lesson from the 80s: backup, backup, backup
You know what I'm talking about. The topic which makes everyone who owns a computer nervous. They look at the floor, the wall, a meek grin creeps up their face, they favor you with a non-commital shrug. It is the data equivalent of flossing. It is preventative, proscribed and yet frequently inconvenient or more time-consuming than you want to commit when you're in a hurry. I'm talking about data backups.
Why is it that most people don't have a rigorous method to be able to recover anything they've ever written, shot, videoed, installed or downloaded? We all put a pretty high price on our financial records, our family photos--nearly all our intellectual effort these days. We all know we should have backups, and most of us have suffered the pain of losing something. I'm not talking about the last bit of typing before the last Ctrl-S, but a Real Loss of a Significant Amount of Irreplaceable Data. So why do most people just not have a plan? Is it like earthquake insurance in CA? Too expensive and complicated if you ever have to rebuild? Is it like a structured weight-loss program? Necessary for good health and peace of mind, but, in practice takes too much discipline? Something you'll start after the holidays? "I'll start backing up everything when I get a new computer and have to move all my data anyway."
I count myself amongst the "most". I have a vague collection of external disks, thumb drives, optical media backups, online accounts. None of which are used in a cohesive plan which allows for recovery. I have, for example, some in-car video of a track day at Laguna Seca in 2006, my first time driving my Porsche on a race track. Tens of gigabytes of raw and edited files, as I recall. Maybe 30GB. I have it somewhere. At least, I hope I do. I don't really know where. DVD-R? External USB? Bare IDE drive in that stack over there? On one of the kids' computers? A little-used "E:\" partition somewhere? Not being able to recover from a backup is as bad as not having one at all. Its funny that I can reach onto a shelf and pick out one of more than 300 DVDs or one of more than a thousand books in my home, but finding any/all of my own electronic data--which should by all accounts be easier, not harder, is just not that easy at all. The most eggregious is really the perhaps 200 (don't even know exactly, really) collection of self-burnt CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs in a number of racks and shelves in the family room. The best I can say is that I know which rack to grab and throw out the window first in the event of a fire, but I can't really say that everything I most want is on those particular disks. I have a paper label pack, an ink-jet printer, a program that does labels. I even have LightScribe and a stack of blank (and expensive) LightScribe DVDs. Yet most of the disks are labeled with a marker. Too brief and too cryptic. "Downstairs computer, misc docs, pics, Disney trip, MP3s, 11-04". Um, okay.
It is amazing to me that here we are in the 21st century--nearly a decade in-- moreover we're 40 years into the Personal Computer information revolution, and "backups" aren't a thing of the past. Of course I don't mean not having backups, but I mean not having to jump through hoops to create, manage and use backups. That's what I mean by "backup". The "Fastback" or "Ghost" or other kind of managed backup process plus software. And I mean for the home, not the Small-to-Medium Business. Dell, IBM, all the big names are falling over themselves to service that market.
There have been some really interesting and relevant products in this arena, but it really should just "happen". I guess the closest thing to this ideal is Apple's Time Machine. But when you start thinking about real disaster recovery--I'm talking about your laptop going missing from your car or your home (God forbid) be flattened by some effect of man or nature--you need something more than just a hidden cache of files on the same disk.
Like flossing (if you don't do it already, regularly, by habit or discipline) you only hear about data backups or recovery from your professional care representative--like when you're suffering other effects of not doing it. As when you talk to the Apple Genius Bar about recovering from a hard disk crash. We recently got the soft admonition, after the hard disk was replaced under warranty, to perhaps talk to a data recovery specialist. We might get a quote on scraping any remaining data from the otherwise useless hunk of metal now residing in the antistat bag in our hands. Or learn to live with the lost data. Kinda like hearing you need to go see the periodontist for a root planing. Ugh.
But that event, no matter that it happened recently to not just one laptop but two in the space of one day (it was a very sad day at the Markham home), is in the past and I took it as a slap in the face to look toward the future. Fool me once, etc.
Some day (its always "some day", isn't it, with technology. Man's vision exceeds his grasp), we will have all our stuff in some variation of The Cloud. It may not look at all like The Cloud that is out there now, but I mean, pedantically, "off-site, anywhere-accessible, store". There's certainly a lot of work in this area, which maybe I'll ponder in a later post. But there are plenty of others pontificating about using Google Mail as a hard drive or any of the other umpty-dozen startups with whom you can trust your data in small-gigabyte chunks. Hopefully they'll still be around after their round two funding dries up. Hopefully your data will still be around. But I digress.
It is time to revisit the home NAS. What we currently have is an ancient Buffalo 160GB system, with FTP and WINS sharing, but rather poor implementations of both. It supports an external USB drive or a very short list of printers on its one port. One disk, no RAID. The web management interface is poor. It has been a sometimes network backup tool but mostly it is off. I can't say for sure, but I believe that a folder delete through the web interface led to a large data loss. User error, sure, but due to an oblique interface. To be fair to Buffalo, it was their first offering, and it appears (from the language of the user manual) that it was an OEM'ed import. So kudos to Buffalo for getting out ahead on the home/SOHO NAS, but bad on me for being on the bleeding edge.
That was at least five years ago. With the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP) cum media-PC running the living room, I've decided to revisit the backup and warm-store issue. We need a place for all the computers in the house to be automatically backed-up as well as for file sharing (beyond the 1TB the SSBRP offers for music, pictures & video.
Buying a NAS means buying hard disks. Some day in the future, when we're all wearing spandex jackets and driving flying cars, we'll either have everything digital we own or use in The Cloud or on a Solid State Disk. Until that shining day (2012, maybe) we'll be using the tried-and-true (but still fragile) spinning platter magnetic store Winchester Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
Markham's two rules for purchasing HDD space are simple:
But these two Rules work against each other. That's because the bigger the drive, the cheaper the per-GB cost, up to a point. Size increases with technology, so the biggest drives are the newest drives which aren't the cheapest drives. So there's a saddle point in effect at all times, which moves up in drive space over time as the saddle moves down on the price axis. For example, NewEgg currently has a 1TB drive for $0.10/GB--right at the Rule 1 Price Point--and a 3TB drive (!!) for ~$0.08/GB.
And of course, with the bigger size drive, even at cheaper $/GB at the saddle point, there is a bigger total outlay. Which is where Rule 1 kicks in: Don't buy the bigger disk until you can use it. So you may end up paying a penny or more per GB for a smaller disk, but it more likely you'll actually spend that penny on storing your data rather than just heating up your enclosure.
I may have to ammend Rule 1. Do I need 2TB (1TB in RAID/5 format) of disk? No. Do I want a terabyte of striped NAS always-on backup!? You bet I do!
This may be my new NAS RAID 2TB RAID0/1 for $220 This is ~$0.11/GB, well under the External Drive Price Point and very close to the Bare Internal Drive Price Point!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091
Or there's this from Buy.com:
http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-hard-drive-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata-raid-external-hard/q/loc/101/206461304.html
I saw a similar at the Apple store last night for $500 and this is $100 off MacMall pricing and $30 off Buy.com
It is eSata, which the StoneSoup BluRay Play (SSBRP) supports. That does mean leaving the SSBRP on all the time, but it has some good pwr mgmt capabilities. I just have to make sure that it doesn't go completely to sleep overnight. Or test waking up the SSBRP over the network via one of the laptops with an external shared drive access (e.g., a nightly automatic backup).
All this is being driven by two (count-em! two!) catastrophic laptop HDD failures on the same day at our house Monday.
First Cheryl's laptop started issuing the "click of death" for no reason other than she uses it 18h a day. It required a disk replacement at the Apple Store (under warranty) and ~5mos of her work was lost.
Then, hours later, Karey knocked my laptop that she was using off the arm of a recliner. The case was chipped but ThinkPads of that era have an HDD shock detector. Apparently it isn't fast enough or they don't do their accelerometer tests from higher than 24". Because she asked me that evening, "It says, 'A fatal hard disk error has occured. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.' I did but it keeps saying that. What should I do?" This wasn't even the BSoD, it was the Black Screen
ROM alert that You're Screwed. I spent several hours running the Windows Recovery Console off the XP install disk, and CHKDSK (wow...1982 flashback) showed, "irrecoverable errors". Swell.
So the question for me, currently, is one of interface. Choose the eSata disk, leave the SSBRP on 24x7 but have all the Windows networking stack and file sharing at my fingertips, or Choose the true NAS, gigabyte interface and a lower power footprint than the eSata host--but with an unknown quantity in the form of the web browser user interface and access control? I may have to try both and return the loser.
The important thing is to get a backup system in place, and this is the first step. After that: software.
Why is it that most people don't have a rigorous method to be able to recover anything they've ever written, shot, videoed, installed or downloaded? We all put a pretty high price on our financial records, our family photos--nearly all our intellectual effort these days. We all know we should have backups, and most of us have suffered the pain of losing something. I'm not talking about the last bit of typing before the last Ctrl-S, but a Real Loss of a Significant Amount of Irreplaceable Data. So why do most people just not have a plan? Is it like earthquake insurance in CA? Too expensive and complicated if you ever have to rebuild? Is it like a structured weight-loss program? Necessary for good health and peace of mind, but, in practice takes too much discipline? Something you'll start after the holidays? "I'll start backing up everything when I get a new computer and have to move all my data anyway."
I count myself amongst the "most". I have a vague collection of external disks, thumb drives, optical media backups, online accounts. None of which are used in a cohesive plan which allows for recovery. I have, for example, some in-car video of a track day at Laguna Seca in 2006, my first time driving my Porsche on a race track. Tens of gigabytes of raw and edited files, as I recall. Maybe 30GB. I have it somewhere. At least, I hope I do. I don't really know where. DVD-R? External USB? Bare IDE drive in that stack over there? On one of the kids' computers? A little-used "E:\" partition somewhere? Not being able to recover from a backup is as bad as not having one at all. Its funny that I can reach onto a shelf and pick out one of more than 300 DVDs or one of more than a thousand books in my home, but finding any/all of my own electronic data--which should by all accounts be easier, not harder, is just not that easy at all. The most eggregious is really the perhaps 200 (don't even know exactly, really) collection of self-burnt CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs in a number of racks and shelves in the family room. The best I can say is that I know which rack to grab and throw out the window first in the event of a fire, but I can't really say that everything I most want is on those particular disks. I have a paper label pack, an ink-jet printer, a program that does labels. I even have LightScribe and a stack of blank (and expensive) LightScribe DVDs. Yet most of the disks are labeled with a marker. Too brief and too cryptic. "Downstairs computer, misc docs, pics, Disney trip, MP3s, 11-04". Um, okay.
It is amazing to me that here we are in the 21st century--nearly a decade in-- moreover we're 40 years into the Personal Computer information revolution, and "backups" aren't a thing of the past. Of course I don't mean not having backups, but I mean not having to jump through hoops to create, manage and use backups. That's what I mean by "backup". The "Fastback" or "Ghost" or other kind of managed backup process plus software. And I mean for the home, not the Small-to-Medium Business. Dell, IBM, all the big names are falling over themselves to service that market.
There have been some really interesting and relevant products in this arena, but it really should just "happen". I guess the closest thing to this ideal is Apple's Time Machine. But when you start thinking about real disaster recovery--I'm talking about your laptop going missing from your car or your home (God forbid) be flattened by some effect of man or nature--you need something more than just a hidden cache of files on the same disk.
Like flossing (if you don't do it already, regularly, by habit or discipline) you only hear about data backups or recovery from your professional care representative--like when you're suffering other effects of not doing it. As when you talk to the Apple Genius Bar about recovering from a hard disk crash. We recently got the soft admonition, after the hard disk was replaced under warranty, to perhaps talk to a data recovery specialist. We might get a quote on scraping any remaining data from the otherwise useless hunk of metal now residing in the antistat bag in our hands. Or learn to live with the lost data. Kinda like hearing you need to go see the periodontist for a root planing. Ugh.
But that event, no matter that it happened recently to not just one laptop but two in the space of one day (it was a very sad day at the Markham home), is in the past and I took it as a slap in the face to look toward the future. Fool me once, etc.
Some day (its always "some day", isn't it, with technology. Man's vision exceeds his grasp), we will have all our stuff in some variation of The Cloud. It may not look at all like The Cloud that is out there now, but I mean, pedantically, "off-site, anywhere-accessible, store". There's certainly a lot of work in this area, which maybe I'll ponder in a later post. But there are plenty of others pontificating about using Google Mail as a hard drive or any of the other umpty-dozen startups with whom you can trust your data in small-gigabyte chunks. Hopefully they'll still be around after their round two funding dries up. Hopefully your data will still be around. But I digress.
It is time to revisit the home NAS. What we currently have is an ancient Buffalo 160GB system, with FTP and WINS sharing, but rather poor implementations of both. It supports an external USB drive or a very short list of printers on its one port. One disk, no RAID. The web management interface is poor. It has been a sometimes network backup tool but mostly it is off. I can't say for sure, but I believe that a folder delete through the web interface led to a large data loss. User error, sure, but due to an oblique interface. To be fair to Buffalo, it was their first offering, and it appears (from the language of the user manual) that it was an OEM'ed import. So kudos to Buffalo for getting out ahead on the home/SOHO NAS, but bad on me for being on the bleeding edge.
That was at least five years ago. With the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP) cum media-PC running the living room, I've decided to revisit the backup and warm-store issue. We need a place for all the computers in the house to be automatically backed-up as well as for file sharing (beyond the 1TB the SSBRP offers for music, pictures & video.
Buying a NAS means buying hard disks. Some day in the future, when we're all wearing spandex jackets and driving flying cars, we'll either have everything digital we own or use in The Cloud or on a Solid State Disk. Until that shining day (2012, maybe) we'll be using the tried-and-true (but still fragile) spinning platter magnetic store Winchester Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
Markham's two rules for purchasing HDD space are simple:
- Rule 1: Never buy disk until you can use it, because empty disk is flushing money. Disks always get cheaper and bigger.
- Rule 2: There are two price points to keep in your pocket when shopping for Disk: $0.10/GB for internal (bare) drives, and $0.15/GB for external drives. By these metrics, a "good deal" (at this writing--the price points slip by a penny or two regularly) is $100/TB for a bare drive.
But these two Rules work against each other. That's because the bigger the drive, the cheaper the per-GB cost, up to a point. Size increases with technology, so the biggest drives are the newest drives which aren't the cheapest drives. So there's a saddle point in effect at all times, which moves up in drive space over time as the saddle moves down on the price axis. For example, NewEgg currently has a 1TB drive for $0.10/GB--right at the Rule 1 Price Point--and a 3TB drive (!!) for ~$0.08/GB.
And of course, with the bigger size drive, even at cheaper $/GB at the saddle point, there is a bigger total outlay. Which is where Rule 1 kicks in: Don't buy the bigger disk until you can use it. So you may end up paying a penny or more per GB for a smaller disk, but it more likely you'll actually spend that penny on storing your data rather than just heating up your enclosure.
I may have to ammend Rule 1. Do I need 2TB (1TB in RAID/5 format) of disk? No. Do I want a terabyte of striped NAS always-on backup!? You bet I do!
This may be my new NAS RAID 2TB RAID0/1 for $220 This is ~$0.11/GB, well under the External Drive Price Point and very close to the Bare Internal Drive Price Point!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091
Or there's this from Buy.com:
http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-hard-drive-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata-raid-external-hard/q/loc/101/206461304.html
I saw a similar at the Apple store last night for $500 and this is $100 off MacMall pricing and $30 off Buy.com
It is eSata, which the StoneSoup BluRay Play (SSBRP) supports. That does mean leaving the SSBRP on all the time, but it has some good pwr mgmt capabilities. I just have to make sure that it doesn't go completely to sleep overnight. Or test waking up the SSBRP over the network via one of the laptops with an external shared drive access (e.g., a nightly automatic backup).
All this is being driven by two (count-em! two!) catastrophic laptop HDD failures on the same day at our house Monday.
First Cheryl's laptop started issuing the "click of death" for no reason other than she uses it 18h a day. It required a disk replacement at the Apple Store (under warranty) and ~5mos of her work was lost.
Then, hours later, Karey knocked my laptop that she was using off the arm of a recliner. The case was chipped but ThinkPads of that era have an HDD shock detector. Apparently it isn't fast enough or they don't do their accelerometer tests from higher than 24". Because she asked me that evening, "It says, 'A fatal hard disk error has occured. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.' I did but it keeps saying that. What should I do?" This wasn't even the BSoD, it was the Black Screen
ROM alert that You're Screwed. I spent several hours running the Windows Recovery Console off the XP install disk, and CHKDSK (wow...1982 flashback) showed, "irrecoverable errors". Swell.
So the question for me, currently, is one of interface. Choose the eSata disk, leave the SSBRP on 24x7 but have all the Windows networking stack and file sharing at my fingertips, or Choose the true NAS, gigabyte interface and a lower power footprint than the eSata host--but with an unknown quantity in the form of the web browser user interface and access control? I may have to try both and return the loser.
The important thing is to get a backup system in place, and this is the first step. After that: software.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Other spaces, other uses
Kaisa introduced me to Deviant Art a few years ago. Lots of great art there. I've had a poem in my drafts folder here since October, but this space isn't really right for it. So I made my first submission to Deviant Art today. I used my nom de guerre, "cesium356". Okay, that's actually my gamer name, but it seems like no one in the ultra-hip deviantart world uses their real name. Artists, gotta love 'em.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Stone Soup Blu-Ray -- Part 3: Windows 7 rescues us from Vista
The second installation of Vista was attempted with a bit more clarity, aforethought of planning. The entire desired software stack was present and the end-goal of the system was understood.
It is important to know where you're going before you start out. Sure, you can just go for the journey, but some trips are better with a destination in mind. To wit, The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP), after much mission creep, was determined to have to meet this RFP:
The point about Comcast being that because most of the computing happens in the living room and adjacent bedrooms, I decided to leave the wireless router upstairs (erm, our house is on a hill, therefore topsy-turvy with the upstairs being the entry and living area and the downstairs is a family room and bedroom). This also leaves the antennas well-placed for wireless connection to the now-famous "Lamb Cam" (subject of a future post). But the SSBRP loses its hardwire 8-megabit/sec connection to the world. Theoretically, switching to a 802.11g network shouldn't slow it down any, but there's these walls and floors and air in-between now.
So the one update to the hardware of the system from Part 2 was the addition of an 802.11x card. I chose Linksys/Cisco because 1.) Their drivers are good 2.) The AirLink 300N I had didn't work with Vista64 in another computer and 3.) I was tired of saving a couple bucks on a 2nd tier brand only to burn that savings in hours and hours of configuration nightmares. True to form, the Linksys worked out of the box. QED.
So once again, armed this time with a Windows 7 Beta DVD, I moved the existing C:\Windows.old directory to C:\Windows.oldest to allow Windows 7 to do its non-destructive trick. Someday I may reclaim the couple hundred Gigs I have as a double-archive of a useless Vista x64 install, but for now, it's forward and damn the disk space!
I'm not going to recount how pleasantly uneventful the Win 7 install was. This is broadly known, now 5 weeks into the Microsoft Beta for the new Operating System. What you may not know is that this Beta has a Nexus-6 feature. It times out. In August of this year 2009, my fresh installation which I will undoubtedly become reliant if not completely dependent upon (despite warnings about "not using it for production purposes") will on promise from Microsoft, become inoperable. Aauugh! The sweet promise and the real sweetness ripped out of my hands in the heat of summer? Ah, but perhaps not. Here's something that I'm betting almost all of you don't know: according to a friend-of-a-friend who works for Microsoft, you will be able to purchase a copy of Windows 7 before this beta expires. So none of that "in 2010" stuff. That's just the MS PR machine trying to avoid a Vista version 2.0 catastrophe. You know, like how they promised us Vista in 2004 or something and it was a long time coming after that. This time they're playing their cards close to their chest. But I have to tell you that the way Windows 7 Beta is being installed all over the place, displacing Vista in almost all occasions, Microsoft could release this Beta as-is for money and it would be an improvement.
So proceeding carefully from my clean, clean install of Windows 7, I first installed the Asus motherboard drivers from their "all-in-one" CD that came in the Box. This includes the nVidia v15.11 southbridge driver and the v168.something Detonator. Several revs back from most recent. But tested with this board! So caution, caution this time around. I got the Hybrid SLI working and the HDMI Sound. The Linksys drivers went in as expected, slick. Updates were now possible from Microsoft and from the other vendors (though I already had everything in C:\windows.old\install). The LG Blu-Ray firmware was still the latest and the default cdrom.sys picked it out and the Cyberlink DVD 7 bundle hooked up.
The SSBRP was back in business! I went back to my Netflix queue and switched my default media back to Blu-Ray. I popped in my copy of The Fifth Element and enjoyed.
But there were still a couple of wrinkles. The Logitech MX keyboard was still, infuriatingly, sending an "open mail" shortcut every time the spacebar was pressed. Win 7 doesn't have bundled email though (thanks, EU!) and so it merely gripes about trying to launch a DLL. A modal dialog that requires dismissal and which will open multiple times and swallow follow-on spacebars, but marginally better. But it only feels good because the hurting is less than with Vista, not because it is gone.
I enabled the audio device (new in Win 7) and could send the audio out to both the HDMI and the S/PDIF optical out concurrently. Which you can't really do because there's about a 1/4 sec delay difference between the two channels and it sounds like you've enabled "hall echo". But you can turn one or the other device's output down and it sounds just fine. Optical for the Blu-Ray and HDMI for the video games. Sooo niiice.
So back to that Logitech keyboard. I got fed up, so I decided to install my Gear Head 2.4Ghz wireless keyboard. Purchased for another computer (the predecessor and antecedent of the SSBRP) I hadn't tried it before because the driver stack looked a little sketchy. Indeed I never tried it for Vista x64. But what the hell!! All the caution, caution went out the window (pun intended) with the hubris that came from a good soaking of audio/video streams by the Blu-Ray player. Dammit, I wanted to have it all and that meant a good keyboard, too!
Now I've shopped a lot of other keyboards, and they all come up short. Either they're Bluetooth and have good range but they're fru-fru or they're IR and have crummy range. Neither are cheap. But by "fru-fru" I mean with matte aluminum and other HTPC upscale presentation features and upwards of $100. For a friggen keyboard! I wanted the WebTV keyboard. Laptop compact but with Bluetooth for the range. And no more that $60. Less than $40 would be ideal. Guess what? Doesn't exist. Hear that Logitech? You can't win in the living room unless you have a plain wireless keyboard that doesn't belong in the MoMA but has the range to reach from the couch to the screen.
But I already had the GearHead keyboard, and I had the hubris working for (against) me, so I gave it a try. Worked fine. But, um, the Blu-Ray stopped working.
I mean, not at all. The device disappeared. Trying to load the cdrom.sys interactively, I could only get the "no appropriate hardware detected" message. Which was bull because it was just working with that driver!! Auugh! What had I done!!?
Lots of uninstalls and reinstalls and trying the Vista x64 version and trying to reinstall the LG software that came on the disk.....nothing.
One of the culprits here is the lack of an uninstall for default drivers. The guids come from MS and once they're in your registry, there's no way to back them out w/o going to manual methods. You can disable them in the device manager, but that doesn't remove their registry entries. So when you reinstall....you basically have the same thing over again. I understand why it is done this way--it has a high likelihood of success and is hard to break. But when the defaults don't work for you...well, you're kinda screwed.
Unless, that is, you happen to trip onto a solution via Google. I got onto a Win 7 board, and someone there posted a Vista solution link and that person remembered something he had done back in 2003 with there being "upper filters" and "lower filters" to the CD-ROM driver guid. Remove those, specifically, manually, and all will be right with the world. And I did, and it was and I really couldn't believe it for a while. Real shock that a one-liner edit in a number of profiles in the Registry really could revive the Blu-Ray.
So for now I'm back to the original Logitech. I tried another IR Logitech wireless on loan, but it didn't work any better. So I took my lumps, but I have my SSBRP back and as long as I don't try to use the keyboard for, I dunno...writing? I'm fine. I just have to remap the "Jump" key in a bunch of games to something different. Like "R", which is next to "E" for "Use". Run-Jump is still possible, if not easy, but the Reload has to be mapped to CTRL or something. I'll get it, eventually. Half-Life 2, Episode One was a fun do-over and even better w/everything turned up to 11.
The Logitech Momo wheel drivers installed w/o error and the force feedback on the wheel works fine. Over the holiday break I was able to turn four laps at the Nürburgring in GT/R and it was pretty damned cool doing it on the big screen with a proper wheel and pedals.
The Hulu and Adobe Media Player content work famously. The 3-cable 802.11n antenna that came with the Linksys adapter is excellent and there are no dropouts due to streaming faults.
The goals for the system are largely all met. With the exception of the keyboard (not a trivial problem but also without a trivial solution, but with a 90% workaround) every RFP item was met and mostly spectacularly.
The SSBRP is alive, I've watched a number of movies with Cyberlink 7, I've had no problems other than the aforementioned mouse-menu button interface and I was even able to do a fairly good (if I do say so myself) compare between the DVD version and the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca. So it really is in use. Confident? I picked up Boondock Saints director's cut and The "20th Anniversary Edition" (oof) Adventures of Baron Munchausen (sale: Fry's $12.99) DVD replacement. I've watched Wall-E and Wanted and the gluttony of HD movies from the Stone Soup Blu Ray Player can continue unabated.
Now if it only had some help booting faster and accessing programs faster. Like maybe a Phenom 2 chip and a SAS-RAID-10 system built on 15k rpm drives? But that would mean (for "reasonably" priced HDs) moving the installed software to the "warm store" SATA disk mapped to the "D:" drive. Naaaah! I'll keep it as it is for now. Maybe I'll add a Harmony Remote, but that's a different story altogether.
It is important to know where you're going before you start out. Sure, you can just go for the journey, but some trips are better with a destination in mind. To wit, The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP), after much mission creep, was determined to have to meet this RFP:
- Vista Media Center
- Netflix add-in
- Blu-Ray Player
- Being able to play Blu-Ray and HD disks with the sound through the HDMI connection
- Being able to connect the PCM-optical output of the motherboard to the home theater system and have the Blu-Ray play through it.
- 1080p, full-screen, w/o skipping, artifacts
- 1080p Gaming (Steam Support)
- Having a network connection that can sustain GB downloads of game content
- Support for the Logitech Momo steering wheel setup (incl. drivers!)
- Being able to play reasonably recent driving games: GTR, Race '07 at full-resolution and with the knobs turned up to 11 (e.g. 4xAA, 8XAF, water details, long-distance rendering, etc.)
- Hulu, Adobe Media Player, et al.
- Having a network connection that can stream HD w/o skipping or pausing.
- Audio and Video capable of said-same.
- Did I mention that the network connection was now wireless?
- Something you wouldn't think you would have to mention is that this sometimes web-browsing involves typing. So the keyboard has to work.
Modest goals, no? Well...it's Vista. So we'll see.
The point about Comcast being that because most of the computing happens in the living room and adjacent bedrooms, I decided to leave the wireless router upstairs (erm, our house is on a hill, therefore topsy-turvy with the upstairs being the entry and living area and the downstairs is a family room and bedroom). This also leaves the antennas well-placed for wireless connection to the now-famous "Lamb Cam" (subject of a future post). But the SSBRP loses its hardwire 8-megabit/sec connection to the world. Theoretically, switching to a 802.11g network shouldn't slow it down any, but there's these walls and floors and air in-between now.
So the one update to the hardware of the system from Part 2 was the addition of an 802.11x card. I chose Linksys/Cisco because 1.) Their drivers are good 2.) The AirLink 300N I had didn't work with Vista64 in another computer and 3.) I was tired of saving a couple bucks on a 2nd tier brand only to burn that savings in hours and hours of configuration nightmares. True to form, the Linksys worked out of the box. QED.
So once again, armed this time with a Windows 7 Beta DVD, I moved the existing C:\Windows.old directory to C:\Windows.oldest to allow Windows 7 to do its non-destructive trick. Someday I may reclaim the couple hundred Gigs I have as a double-archive of a useless Vista x64 install, but for now, it's forward and damn the disk space!
I'm not going to recount how pleasantly uneventful the Win 7 install was. This is broadly known, now 5 weeks into the Microsoft Beta for the new Operating System. What you may not know is that this Beta has a Nexus-6 feature. It times out. In August of this year 2009, my fresh installation which I will undoubtedly become reliant if not completely dependent upon (despite warnings about "not using it for production purposes") will on promise from Microsoft, become inoperable. Aauugh! The sweet promise and the real sweetness ripped out of my hands in the heat of summer? Ah, but perhaps not. Here's something that I'm betting almost all of you don't know: according to a friend-of-a-friend who works for Microsoft, you will be able to purchase a copy of Windows 7 before this beta expires. So none of that "in 2010" stuff. That's just the MS PR machine trying to avoid a Vista version 2.0 catastrophe. You know, like how they promised us Vista in 2004 or something and it was a long time coming after that. This time they're playing their cards close to their chest. But I have to tell you that the way Windows 7 Beta is being installed all over the place, displacing Vista in almost all occasions, Microsoft could release this Beta as-is for money and it would be an improvement.
So proceeding carefully from my clean, clean install of Windows 7, I first installed the Asus motherboard drivers from their "all-in-one" CD that came in the Box. This includes the nVidia v15.11 southbridge driver and the v168.something Detonator. Several revs back from most recent. But tested with this board! So caution, caution this time around. I got the Hybrid SLI working and the HDMI Sound. The Linksys drivers went in as expected, slick. Updates were now possible from Microsoft and from the other vendors (though I already had everything in C:\windows.old\install). The LG Blu-Ray firmware was still the latest and the default cdrom.sys picked it out and the Cyberlink DVD 7 bundle hooked up.
The SSBRP was back in business! I went back to my Netflix queue and switched my default media back to Blu-Ray. I popped in my copy of The Fifth Element and enjoyed.
But there were still a couple of wrinkles. The Logitech MX keyboard was still, infuriatingly, sending an "open mail" shortcut every time the spacebar was pressed. Win 7 doesn't have bundled email though (thanks, EU!) and so it merely gripes about trying to launch a DLL. A modal dialog that requires dismissal and which will open multiple times and swallow follow-on spacebars, but marginally better. But it only feels good because the hurting is less than with Vista, not because it is gone.
I enabled the audio device (new in Win 7) and could send the audio out to both the HDMI and the S/PDIF optical out concurrently. Which you can't really do because there's about a 1/4 sec delay difference between the two channels and it sounds like you've enabled "hall echo". But you can turn one or the other device's output down and it sounds just fine. Optical for the Blu-Ray and HDMI for the video games. Sooo niiice.
So back to that Logitech keyboard. I got fed up, so I decided to install my Gear Head 2.4Ghz wireless keyboard. Purchased for another computer (the predecessor and antecedent of the SSBRP) I hadn't tried it before because the driver stack looked a little sketchy. Indeed I never tried it for Vista x64. But what the hell!! All the caution, caution went out the window (pun intended) with the hubris that came from a good soaking of audio/video streams by the Blu-Ray player. Dammit, I wanted to have it all and that meant a good keyboard, too!
Now I've shopped a lot of other keyboards, and they all come up short. Either they're Bluetooth and have good range but they're fru-fru or they're IR and have crummy range. Neither are cheap. But by "fru-fru" I mean with matte aluminum and other HTPC upscale presentation features and upwards of $100. For a friggen keyboard! I wanted the WebTV keyboard. Laptop compact but with Bluetooth for the range. And no more that $60. Less than $40 would be ideal. Guess what? Doesn't exist. Hear that Logitech? You can't win in the living room unless you have a plain wireless keyboard that doesn't belong in the MoMA but has the range to reach from the couch to the screen.
But I already had the GearHead keyboard, and I had the hubris working for (against) me, so I gave it a try. Worked fine. But, um, the Blu-Ray stopped working.
I mean, not at all. The device disappeared. Trying to load the cdrom.sys interactively, I could only get the "no appropriate hardware detected" message. Which was bull because it was just working with that driver!! Auugh! What had I done!!?
Lots of uninstalls and reinstalls and trying the Vista x64 version and trying to reinstall the LG software that came on the disk.....nothing.
One of the culprits here is the lack of an uninstall for default drivers. The guids come from MS and once they're in your registry, there's no way to back them out w/o going to manual methods. You can disable them in the device manager, but that doesn't remove their registry entries. So when you reinstall....you basically have the same thing over again. I understand why it is done this way--it has a high likelihood of success and is hard to break. But when the defaults don't work for you...well, you're kinda screwed.
Unless, that is, you happen to trip onto a solution via Google. I got onto a Win 7 board, and someone there posted a Vista solution link and that person remembered something he had done back in 2003 with there being "upper filters" and "lower filters" to the CD-ROM driver guid. Remove those, specifically, manually, and all will be right with the world. And I did, and it was and I really couldn't believe it for a while. Real shock that a one-liner edit in a number of profiles in the Registry really could revive the Blu-Ray.
So for now I'm back to the original Logitech. I tried another IR Logitech wireless on loan, but it didn't work any better. So I took my lumps, but I have my SSBRP back and as long as I don't try to use the keyboard for, I dunno...writing? I'm fine. I just have to remap the "Jump" key in a bunch of games to something different. Like "R", which is next to "E" for "Use". Run-Jump is still possible, if not easy, but the Reload has to be mapped to CTRL or something. I'll get it, eventually. Half-Life 2, Episode One was a fun do-over and even better w/everything turned up to 11.
The Logitech Momo wheel drivers installed w/o error and the force feedback on the wheel works fine. Over the holiday break I was able to turn four laps at the Nürburgring in GT/R and it was pretty damned cool doing it on the big screen with a proper wheel and pedals.
The Hulu and Adobe Media Player content work famously. The 3-cable 802.11n antenna that came with the Linksys adapter is excellent and there are no dropouts due to streaming faults.
The goals for the system are largely all met. With the exception of the keyboard (not a trivial problem but also without a trivial solution, but with a 90% workaround) every RFP item was met and mostly spectacularly.
The SSBRP is alive, I've watched a number of movies with Cyberlink 7, I've had no problems other than the aforementioned mouse-menu button interface and I was even able to do a fairly good (if I do say so myself) compare between the DVD version and the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca. So it really is in use. Confident? I picked up Boondock Saints director's cut and The "20th Anniversary Edition" (oof) Adventures of Baron Munchausen (sale: Fry's $12.99) DVD replacement. I've watched Wall-E and Wanted and the gluttony of HD movies from the Stone Soup Blu Ray Player can continue unabated.
Now if it only had some help booting faster and accessing programs faster. Like maybe a Phenom 2 chip and a SAS-RAID-10 system built on 15k rpm drives? But that would mean (for "reasonably" priced HDs) moving the installed software to the "warm store" SATA disk mapped to the "D:" drive. Naaaah! I'll keep it as it is for now. Maybe I'll add a Harmony Remote, but that's a different story altogether.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player
[Credit to the title and concept goes to my good friend Michael. Thanks for that and again for listening to the original tale of creep, recounted here.]
It always begins with The Wanting
Ever since I made the wrong choice in the HD video disc format wars of the first part of the 21st century, I realized that some time in the future I'd have to find a means to switch horses, to get a Blu-Ray player and hence a method to continue to get HD disc content, at least until such time as the Internets pipes are big enough to handle on-demand HD to all comers. Since I'd already bought an HD-DVD player, and wasn't about to toss my couple-dozen HD-DVD disks, I wasn't really inclined to just up and buy a Blu-Ray player. I had an alternative plan brewing in the back of my mind all summer. All the plan needed was a catalyst.
Last month, as we tooled around Costco during a lunch break, my buddy Michael picked up the new Iron Man movie, on Blu-Ray. He'd been waiting for it to come out and to be able to watch it in the high-definition format. Of course, he also needed a Blu-Ray player to go with. With some (very little) urging by me, he picked up a Sony which at Costco comes with an HDMI cable. It was quite a deal at $279 before tax. Michael hadn't made the wrong turn down the HD disc aisle that I had made months ago, so it was a substantial but not painful choice for him.
And then there's my son Chad & his fiancee Heather in Las Vegas. Chad's always been a gamer, so for him the Blu-Ray was just a feature of a gaming system he was going to have anyway. The system was around $400. And that's with a full PS3 gaming rig attached.
I mention the prices of the options that Michael and Chad chose; it is important for this story. I was sure that I could come up with a Blu-Ray drive for less by upgrading the Media PC I already had. I knew, from previous shopping, that one could get a Blu-Ray player add-in for a computer for well less than $200.
I was also intent to upgrade the Media PC (aka a Home Theater PC, HTPC) to be able to see high-definition streamed video off the internet. That requirement came from the family. We had tried to watch episodes of House which were on Hulu, but which stuttered and sound-delayed on our current HTPC. So I had an inkling that this would be more than just an optical drive swap, but I didn't know how much more.
And continues with The Having
The first component to be upgraded was the optical disk. It was a DVD-R/+RW which lacked only Blu-Ray to keep its place in the New Scheme. My first (of what would turn out to be many) trips to Fry's had me leaving with a combo LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. The sticker was $199, but the shelf price was $169 and at the register it rung up at $139. Big score! This was going to be the cheapest Blu-Ray player, ever. It would leave me with many tens of dollars with which to re-purchase much of my existing DVD collection. After all, how many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey is too many?
Now, I didn't actually need the HD-DVD capacity, as I have a fine Toshiba A35 player which should serve until, well, who knows but it isn't completely antiquated yet; I just received a new software update in the mail the other day. I do, however, think the LG combo player is a coup, because it will allow me to someday retire one box from the media presentation stack in the living room. But not right away. The thing about the Toshiba? It works.
I had my Blu-Ray player to read Blu-Ray discs (which I didn't have yet), but I also knew that what would really make the Blu-Ray player "taste better" (you're catching the Stone Soup bit now) would be to upgrade the graphics card. The existing card was an nVidia 7600GS. Which was fine at the time--the time being when my son Chad put the computer together. That would have been about 2006, after he entered UCSC, and then traded it for a much more convenient and dorm-friendly laptop. Chad gifted it to me some time after that and by mid-2008, the seven-thousand nVidia card series based on the "G73" chip was getting a bit long in the tooth. What I saw this computer really had going for it was that it was PCIe-capable. The 7600 could have been an AGP bus card, but this one wasn't, it was PCIe which meant the motherboard was up to an upgrade to the most modern of GPUs.
So after not a small amount of shopping around to find that price-performance sweet spot, I settled on a 9800GTX+ from my favorite on-line vendor, NewEgg. The MSI version was a great deal and the card's specs were awesome. All I needed to do was to drop that puppy into the HTPC with the LG Blu-Ray player and I'd be watching Iron Man in Blu-Ray format. Not only that, but the 9800GTX+, with its "G92" chipset--while not quite up to the latest-and-greatest two hundred series from nVidia--is completely capable of playing all the latest games: Crysis, Far Cry 2, BioShock, etc. My old standards Half-Life 2 (and Portal--I love Portal) could be turned up to Eleven. And then there were the driving games. The latest SimBin driving games, Race'07 and GTR Evolution couldn't really be driven at full 1080p by the 7600 with its GS shaders and small memory footprint. But it would sing with the 512MB of memory on the 9800GTX+. $149 after a rebate. But look at all the "flavor" it will add to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray and HTPC..and Gaming computer.
Then I started looking at the processor, a 2.0GHz Sempron. Single core. Ugh. Not hardly enough to smoothly run all that 1080p 24hz DTS-HD audio goodness. The current HTPC wasn't even socket AM2, so we were at a dead-end. But Fry's to the rescue! As it turned out, while I was there for an HD-DVD sale (totally different story), I was tipped to one of Fry's typically very good motherboard/CPU combos. In this case, I got an Asus M3N-HT HDMI/Deluxe motherboard, with a quad core AMD Phenom 9550. That's a 2.2GHz chip, not a big bump from the Sempron, but with four cores, obviously. A big, big jump up from the Sempron.
The Phenom CPU is great, but the motherboard is superb. It runs the brand-new 780a chipset, which has a new nVidia feature, "Hybrid SLI". This allows an on-board graphics processor, (in the case of this mobo an 8-thousand-ish spec GPU) sharing system RAM to SLI with a short list of PCIe graphics cards. And guess what's on the list? That's right! My newly acquired 9800GTX+! Woo-hoo, the soup was really heating up. I was getting a real SLI rig for gaming! W00t! And at the price of only one GPU card! Plus, the other salient feature of the Hybrid SLI which is really perfect for systems like mine--part HTPC and part gaming rig--is that when you use softare to switch to using the on-board GPU only, the PCIe slot is turned off. As in completely off, draws no power, runs no fan. And everyone knows those tiny GPU fans are noisy.
And as if that weren't enough, if you couldn't tell by the name of the mobo, it has native HDMI out. Perfect for the HTPC-out to our living room 46" LCD 1080p Samsung, and it uses the RealTek onboard 7.1 Audio without any SPDIF jumpers to get HD audio out of the HDMI. A very nice board.
Now CPU prices fall notoriously fast, especially lately as we're into another drop into the 45mm die processes. So an early-October smokin' deal may not sound as good in early November, but its a merry-go-round. You grab ahold of something as it goes by and get on. Besides, the opportunity return in having it now, rather than waiting for the price to go down is..well, in the case of a new Blu-Ray player, worth it. Or so I thought. The two hundred dollars bundled price meant the CPU was practically free. I hedged my bet with a store warranty, giving me a little bit of overclocking insurance and obsolescence insurance for another $30.
The Stone Soup Blu-Ray player was really starting to take shape now. But, um, of course the new Mobo takes DDR2 dual-channel memory. Wow, I hadn't bought DIMM memory in a long time. It is tuned now for gamers, the mobo BIOS settings allow all kinds of soft tuning for timings and they even have their own heat sinks. My wallet hardly felt the $70 (after rebate) for the four Gigabytes of Dual Channel Corsair XMS memory in two matched 2GB sticks. The motherboard can take 8GB, and I'd read how if you have a huuuuge amount of RAM you can set your swap partition to zero size and your computer will really scream. But this socket AM2+ motherboard can't set more than two memory sticks into dual channel mode. If you put in more, it will slow the d/c memory down to the slower single channel mode. So more is faster disk-wise, but slower speed wise.
Which sent me down the path of thinking about the disk. A 10k RPM Raptor was out of the question. This was going to be an HTPC and so it had to be quiet. Indeed, one of the things I didn't like about the current HTPC was that the disk was loud. Or maybe it was a case fan in front of the disk. Whatever. It was of 160GB capacity, which just doesn't seem like very much these days. Especially since I figured I could use this upgrade, when the TV set wasn't on, as our home NAS. The new motherboard was RAID-capable, after all. So a bit more mission creep was added to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player. But I wasn't going to introduce that right away. One of Markham's Maxims of Personal Computing (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) is "Never buy disk capacity that you can't use right away, because it will always be cheaper by the time your disk fills up." So I bought a little insurance, on the high side of the "sweet spot", which was, at that time, the 750GB disk. Instead I got a Seagate 1TB disk, at a very nice $150. That's $0.15/GB, which is well under my $.20/GB classification of a "good deal". Later I'll get another TB disk and setup the RAID mirror. Then it will be ready for the family photos, Music and home movies.
I was ready to add all these "extras" to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player and get about the business of actually using my new upgrades in the HTPC, but I ran into my first sticking point. The Asus mobo is ATX. I didn't check beforehand to find out that my current HTPC is micro-ATX. She won't fit! So that led to another few shopping trips and a dalliance with a Zalman HTPC case and other esoterica. These HTPC cases are expensive. Like an empty metal box will set you back more Benjamins than an entire Home Theater in a Box rig--and I'm pretty sure they're made up of the same metals. So that bit of kit was a bit too spicy for this Stone Soup. Instead I settled on a Antec Sonta III upright mid-tower case. It has a nice piano finish that matches the Samsung LCD screen quite well and has sound insulation and other HTPC-ish features. Plus it came with a great Antec P/S. Price was $103--less than I would have paid for an add-in power supply.
So let's recap what's in the Blu-Ray HTPC "upgrade":
$103 new case w/new power supply
$200 new motherboard
and new CPU
$ 70 new memory
$139 new optical drive (the Blu-Ray, remember?)
$150 new winchester drive
$150 new graphics card
$ 16 an HDMI cable
------
$828 That's a lot of stones in that soup pot!
And the OS. Vista? I had an extra license laying around. Its legit, it just didn't cost me anything.
What's missing? Oh. Networking. This turns out to be the next "long pole" in our current HTPC setup. It uses an Airlink 300 wireless card. Its "N" protocol, but though slogging through an Ubuntu driver setup was not completely painful, I knew that it would be nothing compared to getting that card to work with Vista Ultimate. So I decided it was time to get a speed upgrade and hard-wire the WAN ethernet into the motherboard port. No wireless for the HTPC.
So that introduced two new ingredients into the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player: Comcast cable to replace the ATT&T DSL and the aforementioned Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. Why the Vista "UE"? Because it comes with Windows Media Player for Vista. Which is where I want this PC to spend most of its waking time. I had dallied with the MythPC interface in Ubuntu, but never really got it so that it was more (or, rather "less") than a nerd's delight. To be candid, it wasn't ready for prime-time, which was when my family would be using it to watch TV!
The six-fold bump in speed from the cable networking over the DSL was as-advertised and I'll never go back. The setup wasn't completely smooth--but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the ingredients were there and ready to go together.
Assembly day was round about October 11th, as I recall. The hardware assembly was mostly straightforward, with a few Memory settings that needed some tuning. After shuffling the parts in and then out, I realized that the old HTPC was completely intact and so still is. I'll find a use for it or donate it, paying it forward as Chad did for me a year or so ago. And the base Vista OS went in along with the Asus drivers on the included CD, so picture (Hybrid SLI mode) and sound (through the HDMI with an nVidia driver) were available forthwith.
But I didn't have a Blu-Ray disk to try it out with! I couldn't wait when Michael bought his, so Iron Man was going to be the last DVD that I'd ever have to upsample. But that didn't solve my Blu-Ray test problem. So instead I used my Matrix HD-DVD disk to try out the new HTPC. It played well--after I allowed the LG player to update itself and allowed the bundled HD-DVD software player to update itself as well. Which required the networking to work, and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing.
So is this a happily-ever-after story? Of course not. This is the end of but the first chapter of my tale. What is to come, you might ask. Imagine if, in the original Stone Soup story, the soldiers got the villagers to throw all the goodies into the pot, but they didn't have a ladle or the bowls leaked, or the fire under the pot wouldn't stay lit? Pretty frustrating and everyone is still hungry, eh?
My Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player's story will contine in the next entry.
It always begins with The Wanting
Ever since I made the wrong choice in the HD video disc format wars of the first part of the 21st century, I realized that some time in the future I'd have to find a means to switch horses, to get a Blu-Ray player and hence a method to continue to get HD disc content, at least until such time as the Internets pipes are big enough to handle on-demand HD to all comers. Since I'd already bought an HD-DVD player, and wasn't about to toss my couple-dozen HD-DVD disks, I wasn't really inclined to just up and buy a Blu-Ray player. I had an alternative plan brewing in the back of my mind all summer. All the plan needed was a catalyst.
Last month, as we tooled around Costco during a lunch break, my buddy Michael picked up the new Iron Man movie, on Blu-Ray. He'd been waiting for it to come out and to be able to watch it in the high-definition format. Of course, he also needed a Blu-Ray player to go with. With some (very little) urging by me, he picked up a Sony which at Costco comes with an HDMI cable. It was quite a deal at $279 before tax. Michael hadn't made the wrong turn down the HD disc aisle that I had made months ago, so it was a substantial but not painful choice for him.
And then there's my son Chad & his fiancee Heather in Las Vegas. Chad's always been a gamer, so for him the Blu-Ray was just a feature of a gaming system he was going to have anyway. The system was around $400. And that's with a full PS3 gaming rig attached.
I mention the prices of the options that Michael and Chad chose; it is important for this story. I was sure that I could come up with a Blu-Ray drive for less by upgrading the Media PC I already had. I knew, from previous shopping, that one could get a Blu-Ray player add-in for a computer for well less than $200.
I was also intent to upgrade the Media PC (aka a Home Theater PC, HTPC) to be able to see high-definition streamed video off the internet. That requirement came from the family. We had tried to watch episodes of House which were on Hulu, but which stuttered and sound-delayed on our current HTPC. So I had an inkling that this would be more than just an optical drive swap, but I didn't know how much more.
And continues with The Having
The first component to be upgraded was the optical disk. It was a DVD-R/+RW which lacked only Blu-Ray to keep its place in the New Scheme. My first (of what would turn out to be many) trips to Fry's had me leaving with a combo LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. The sticker was $199, but the shelf price was $169 and at the register it rung up at $139. Big score! This was going to be the cheapest Blu-Ray player, ever. It would leave me with many tens of dollars with which to re-purchase much of my existing DVD collection. After all, how many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey is too many?
Now, I didn't actually need the HD-DVD capacity, as I have a fine Toshiba A35 player which should serve until, well, who knows but it isn't completely antiquated yet; I just received a new software update in the mail the other day. I do, however, think the LG combo player is a coup, because it will allow me to someday retire one box from the media presentation stack in the living room. But not right away. The thing about the Toshiba? It works.
I had my Blu-Ray player to read Blu-Ray discs (which I didn't have yet), but I also knew that what would really make the Blu-Ray player "taste better" (you're catching the Stone Soup bit now) would be to upgrade the graphics card. The existing card was an nVidia 7600GS. Which was fine at the time--the time being when my son Chad put the computer together. That would have been about 2006, after he entered UCSC, and then traded it for a much more convenient and dorm-friendly laptop. Chad gifted it to me some time after that and by mid-2008, the seven-thousand nVidia card series based on the "G73" chip was getting a bit long in the tooth. What I saw this computer really had going for it was that it was PCIe-capable. The 7600 could have been an AGP bus card, but this one wasn't, it was PCIe which meant the motherboard was up to an upgrade to the most modern of GPUs.
So after not a small amount of shopping around to find that price-performance sweet spot, I settled on a 9800GTX+ from my favorite on-line vendor, NewEgg. The MSI version was a great deal and the card's specs were awesome. All I needed to do was to drop that puppy into the HTPC with the LG Blu-Ray player and I'd be watching Iron Man in Blu-Ray format. Not only that, but the 9800GTX+, with its "G92" chipset--while not quite up to the latest-and-greatest two hundred series from nVidia--is completely capable of playing all the latest games: Crysis, Far Cry 2, BioShock, etc. My old standards Half-Life 2 (and Portal--I love Portal) could be turned up to Eleven. And then there were the driving games. The latest SimBin driving games, Race'07 and GTR Evolution couldn't really be driven at full 1080p by the 7600 with its GS shaders and small memory footprint. But it would sing with the 512MB of memory on the 9800GTX+. $149 after a rebate. But look at all the "flavor" it will add to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray and HTPC..and Gaming computer.
Then I started looking at the processor, a 2.0GHz Sempron. Single core. Ugh. Not hardly enough to smoothly run all that 1080p 24hz DTS-HD audio goodness. The current HTPC wasn't even socket AM2, so we were at a dead-end. But Fry's to the rescue! As it turned out, while I was there for an HD-DVD sale (totally different story), I was tipped to one of Fry's typically very good motherboard/CPU combos. In this case, I got an Asus M3N-HT HDMI/Deluxe motherboard, with a quad core AMD Phenom 9550. That's a 2.2GHz chip, not a big bump from the Sempron, but with four cores, obviously. A big, big jump up from the Sempron.
The Phenom CPU is great, but the motherboard is superb. It runs the brand-new 780a chipset, which has a new nVidia feature, "Hybrid SLI". This allows an on-board graphics processor, (in the case of this mobo an 8-thousand-ish spec GPU) sharing system RAM to SLI with a short list of PCIe graphics cards. And guess what's on the list? That's right! My newly acquired 9800GTX+! Woo-hoo, the soup was really heating up. I was getting a real SLI rig for gaming! W00t! And at the price of only one GPU card! Plus, the other salient feature of the Hybrid SLI which is really perfect for systems like mine--part HTPC and part gaming rig--is that when you use softare to switch to using the on-board GPU only, the PCIe slot is turned off. As in completely off, draws no power, runs no fan. And everyone knows those tiny GPU fans are noisy.
And as if that weren't enough, if you couldn't tell by the name of the mobo, it has native HDMI out. Perfect for the HTPC-out to our living room 46" LCD 1080p Samsung, and it uses the RealTek onboard 7.1 Audio without any SPDIF jumpers to get HD audio out of the HDMI. A very nice board.
Now CPU prices fall notoriously fast, especially lately as we're into another drop into the 45mm die processes. So an early-October smokin' deal may not sound as good in early November, but its a merry-go-round. You grab ahold of something as it goes by and get on. Besides, the opportunity return in having it now, rather than waiting for the price to go down is..well, in the case of a new Blu-Ray player, worth it. Or so I thought. The two hundred dollars bundled price meant the CPU was practically free. I hedged my bet with a store warranty, giving me a little bit of overclocking insurance and obsolescence insurance for another $30.
The Stone Soup Blu-Ray player was really starting to take shape now. But, um, of course the new Mobo takes DDR2 dual-channel memory. Wow, I hadn't bought DIMM memory in a long time. It is tuned now for gamers, the mobo BIOS settings allow all kinds of soft tuning for timings and they even have their own heat sinks. My wallet hardly felt the $70 (after rebate) for the four Gigabytes of Dual Channel Corsair XMS memory in two matched 2GB sticks. The motherboard can take 8GB, and I'd read how if you have a huuuuge amount of RAM you can set your swap partition to zero size and your computer will really scream. But this socket AM2+ motherboard can't set more than two memory sticks into dual channel mode. If you put in more, it will slow the d/c memory down to the slower single channel mode. So more is faster disk-wise, but slower speed wise.
Which sent me down the path of thinking about the disk. A 10k RPM Raptor was out of the question. This was going to be an HTPC and so it had to be quiet. Indeed, one of the things I didn't like about the current HTPC was that the disk was loud. Or maybe it was a case fan in front of the disk. Whatever. It was of 160GB capacity, which just doesn't seem like very much these days. Especially since I figured I could use this upgrade, when the TV set wasn't on, as our home NAS. The new motherboard was RAID-capable, after all. So a bit more mission creep was added to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player. But I wasn't going to introduce that right away. One of Markham's Maxims of Personal Computing (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) is "Never buy disk capacity that you can't use right away, because it will always be cheaper by the time your disk fills up." So I bought a little insurance, on the high side of the "sweet spot", which was, at that time, the 750GB disk. Instead I got a Seagate 1TB disk, at a very nice $150. That's $0.15/GB, which is well under my $.20/GB classification of a "good deal". Later I'll get another TB disk and setup the RAID mirror. Then it will be ready for the family photos, Music and home movies.
I was ready to add all these "extras" to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player and get about the business of actually using my new upgrades in the HTPC, but I ran into my first sticking point. The Asus mobo is ATX. I didn't check beforehand to find out that my current HTPC is micro-ATX. She won't fit! So that led to another few shopping trips and a dalliance with a Zalman HTPC case and other esoterica. These HTPC cases are expensive. Like an empty metal box will set you back more Benjamins than an entire Home Theater in a Box rig--and I'm pretty sure they're made up of the same metals. So that bit of kit was a bit too spicy for this Stone Soup. Instead I settled on a Antec Sonta III upright mid-tower case. It has a nice piano finish that matches the Samsung LCD screen quite well and has sound insulation and other HTPC-ish features. Plus it came with a great Antec P/S. Price was $103--less than I would have paid for an add-in power supply.
So let's recap what's in the Blu-Ray HTPC "upgrade":
$103 new case w/new power supply
$200 new motherboard
and new CPU
$ 70 new memory
$139 new optical drive (the Blu-Ray, remember?)
$150 new winchester drive
$150 new graphics card
$ 16 an HDMI cable
------
$828 That's a lot of stones in that soup pot!
And the OS. Vista? I had an extra license laying around. Its legit, it just didn't cost me anything.
What's missing? Oh. Networking. This turns out to be the next "long pole" in our current HTPC setup. It uses an Airlink 300 wireless card. Its "N" protocol, but though slogging through an Ubuntu driver setup was not completely painful, I knew that it would be nothing compared to getting that card to work with Vista Ultimate. So I decided it was time to get a speed upgrade and hard-wire the WAN ethernet into the motherboard port. No wireless for the HTPC.
So that introduced two new ingredients into the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player: Comcast cable to replace the ATT&T DSL and the aforementioned Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. Why the Vista "UE"? Because it comes with Windows Media Player for Vista. Which is where I want this PC to spend most of its waking time. I had dallied with the MythPC interface in Ubuntu, but never really got it so that it was more (or, rather "less") than a nerd's delight. To be candid, it wasn't ready for prime-time, which was when my family would be using it to watch TV!
The six-fold bump in speed from the cable networking over the DSL was as-advertised and I'll never go back. The setup wasn't completely smooth--but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the ingredients were there and ready to go together.
Assembly day was round about October 11th, as I recall. The hardware assembly was mostly straightforward, with a few Memory settings that needed some tuning. After shuffling the parts in and then out, I realized that the old HTPC was completely intact and so still is. I'll find a use for it or donate it, paying it forward as Chad did for me a year or so ago. And the base Vista OS went in along with the Asus drivers on the included CD, so picture (Hybrid SLI mode) and sound (through the HDMI with an nVidia driver) were available forthwith.
But I didn't have a Blu-Ray disk to try it out with! I couldn't wait when Michael bought his, so Iron Man was going to be the last DVD that I'd ever have to upsample. But that didn't solve my Blu-Ray test problem. So instead I used my Matrix HD-DVD disk to try out the new HTPC. It played well--after I allowed the LG player to update itself and allowed the bundled HD-DVD software player to update itself as well. Which required the networking to work, and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing.
So is this a happily-ever-after story? Of course not. This is the end of but the first chapter of my tale. What is to come, you might ask. Imagine if, in the original Stone Soup story, the soldiers got the villagers to throw all the goodies into the pot, but they didn't have a ladle or the bowls leaked, or the fire under the pot wouldn't stay lit? Pretty frustrating and everyone is still hungry, eh?
My Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player's story will contine in the next entry.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter or C.R.A.P.?
It is unbelievable to me how the unscrupulous will take advantage of people and lie to try to sell something. It is only slightly less unbelievable to me that enough people are duped by their schemes that new schemes are cooked-up by these sociopaths.
Of late, it is the new ways to improve gas mileage. The Vornado, the XXX and now, the leader in the category of "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with Bull$#!t! A recent addition to the art form of the latter has come upon the internet scene. I'm talking about the "PICC" or "Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter.
Here's their website. Check it out. Put your critical-observer visor on and turn your skeptic shield up to "full"! Open it in a new browser tab or window so you can go back and forth between it and my re-information (as opposed to their disinformation!) critique.
This is Absolutely too good to be true.
I hardly know where to start to refute all these claims, but I'll start at the top.
They say,
Well, there are lots of ways of doing that. A turbocharger. A supercharger. They use the kinetic energy in those gases imparted by the engine's "pumping action". A catalytic converter does
take large gas molecules and "turn them into smaller particles" (which is what happens when you burn something). They're burned in the catalytic converter, not the tailpipe. And the result is fewer "large gas molecules" and particulates are released. Somewhat "less exhaust", because some of it is converted in burning to more heat. But there is very little unburned gasoline molecules (distinct from gas, i.e., molecules in a gaseous state) in your exhaust to begin with. Dump a bunch of gasoline molecules into a catalytic converter and you quickly ruin it. They're made to deal with trace amounts, making them even more...trace. The point being, you're creating some more heat outside the engine--where it can do work--but not much. And not much compared to the heat that pours out of the exhaust manifold or is circulated out through the water and/or oil cooling system through fans and radiators. If the PICC was claiming to be able to use the excess heat that your car produces---then they'd have something! But that's not what they're claiming.
How about that in-car gasoline "cracker"? You could, I suppose "crack" formulated gasoline. If you were to try something like this--and it would have to be by some other mechanism than what is described on the PICC site, perhaps involving a catalytic reactor (that isn't driven by waste heat as your exhaust catalytic converter is--maybe Citgo has one they're not using--you might (or maybe not, my long-chain butyl chem is a bit rusty) create some energy. But the backyard mechanic really shouldn't attempt to "crack" formulated gasoline. Really, the best gasoline cracker you have is your car's engine. It does a really good job of "cracking" all the BTUs, or heat-energy out of that gas.
Chevron and Shell have done their very best to make gasoline clean burning and high octane for the price. There's admittedly little bit of competition in the market place, but there is enough so that one company just cannot afford to leave NINE TIMES the efficiency on the table. "I'll buy ABC Gas, theirs is so much worse than XYZ gas!" And if you think all the gas companies are doing it, to what end? Participate in some conspiracy to make you consume more gas? Pass up the 100MPG carburetor from the GM "vault" please!
What's next on PICC's list of BS? Well, converting a liquid to a "plasma" could only effectively be done with the magnetic resources and heat resources of, oh, THE SUN! Or, if the "liquid" in question was, maybe, LIQUID HELIUM!! Then you might be able to get transitory plasma signatures in this very weird super-state of matter. But room temperature liquids? Good luck, Einstein (or should I say..Bose-Einstein? Heh. Physics joke.)
Nearly all industrial plasmas (TV sets, fluorescent tubes, those cool "lightning globes") are created by introducing electrons into a gas, not a liquid, where it is MUUCH easier to dislodge other electrons to create the plasma at low energy levels. Output of this electron interaction with the plasma is...photons!
You're not going to be able to turn your gas-burner into Star Trek's Plasma Drive with a little box.
Then there's the final claim in the second main paragraph, "...the gasoline you pay for goes further and the exhaust is so negligible that it hardly registers." Okay, bunky. Pull out your last smog check certificate (for those of you unlucky enough not to drive a classic car that is exempt). Look at the numbers. We're talking "parts" (meaning measurable particles--usually in the micron range) per MILLION. Sometimes, on the most modern and "SULEV" or "P-ZERO" rated cars, many of the numbers are already practically zero. One part in a hundred million. I think that goes to "hardly registers" without the intervention of a PICC. Your nose is a sensitive machine, and you can sometimes smell exhaust--more when the engine is old, or cold, or needs a tune-up. But most of what you feel is carbon dioxide (C02)that is really hot. Guess what? Aside from the heat, it is really, really hard to "crack" energy out of CO2. The sun does it. Plants do it, but it takes them a long time...oh, and the sun, too. C02 is your major greenhouse gas, and there are a whole bunch of smart people trying to figure out what to do with it. Burying it in the ground is a more feasible option than burning it in your car. Really.
What about their claims for increases in efficiency? On the face of it, look at the counterfactual to those claims. There just isn't 9X the energy available in the gasoline over what our cars burn now to "crack" out of it! Think of how inefficient your engine would have to be to only be able to extract 1/9 of the energy available in the gasoline-- and that it would some how be available to be merely "broken down" or "cracked from" the fuel to be used. Here are some fuels and their BTU stores. You'd be better off burning a pound of coal than a gallon of gasoline (10% of 125K BTUs) in your car if gasoline internal combustion engines were as inefficient as these guys claim.
Looks like, if anything, they should be starting with diesels as there's more energy in #2 fuel oil than in gasoline. But there aren't as many truckers as there are desperate people with 80's cars and '08 gas bills.
As to their test of a V8 318ci engine running at 50% load for an hour at 3,000rpm. That is equivalent to a "van...traveling up a 30 degree incline for one hour"? This is Wonder Woman's Invisible Van? How much does this "van" weigh? Where does that fit into the calculations? An engine floating up a hill on its own doesn't have to pull much weight. Even so, 200mpg, or their claim of 2 pounds of gasoline per hour is absurd.
Okay, I've been throwing a lot of arrows. Here's my concrete calculation using their meager data posing as engineering, if not science.
1. Three thousand RPM in a V8 engine, is 24,000 ignition cycles per minute. Or one million, four hundred forty thousand ignition cycles per hour.
2. In that hour, they claim 2 pounds of gasoline used. That's 907 grams.
3. Dividing those 1.44 million sparks into those 907 grams of gasoline, that's 0.00063g of gasoline per spark. Wow. That's a really small number. Sixty three hundred thousandths of a gram.
4. Hmm.. Or about 2 parts in a MILLION per GRAM! You know, that's less than the amount left over in the exhaust? Wow. These guys are good. They're not just getting all the energy out of the exhaust, they're getting more energy than is in the exhaust! Maybe its nuclear. wow.
1. Okay, that last was a bit snarky and unscientific. Back on the beam, we check our table of energy in gasoline, and have to do some more math to convert teir BTUs from 125k/gal to something per gram. That's a volumetric gallon, and our fuel gram is a weight. So it depends on the density of gasoline. Assuming 60 degrees F., these folk in England tell us that's 737.22 kg/cu.m or 0.073722 grams per ml.
2. (Getting there, bear with me.) A gallon is 3,785.41178 ml. So a ml of gas has 0.0302832942
BTUs of energy.
Multiply that by #2 results and you get, out of each spark in that super-dooper
(de-dooper-de-booper!) engine, 0.00223254502 BTUs of energy. Let's round, okay? I'll be REALLY generous and round to twenty-three ten-thousandths.
My friends, you're going to have to take my word for it (but I'm happy to continue down this rabbit hole) that 23/10,000 of a BTU is about 1.2 ft/lbs of energy. To frame it another way, a horsepower is approximately 2,544 BTUs an hour (they did this for an hour). A horsepower is thirty three thousand ft-lbs/min. Or 500 (more or less--we can start really rounding now) ft-lbs/hour. A Chrysler 318 engine has nominally 180hp, but can make much more. We're interested in economy, so that's a good starting point. So that's 9,000 ft-lbs/hr.
What did we calculate? 1.2ft/lbs? But a 318 cubic inch engine should be making FOUR THOUSAND TIMES that amount of energy. Basically, the light wouldn't stay on in the engine. It couldn't get out of its own way, even tethered to an invisible van! It can't be done. There isn't enough raw energy in 2 lbs of gasoline to run a V8 motor at 3,000rpm for an hour. You'd need something that would get you a 4,500% improvement on efficiency. Can't be done. QED.
Then they ask a real relevent question:
Here's what it means: this website and their claims are snake-oil. They're trying to hide it in pseudo science meaningless graphs and "testimonials" and mumbo-jumbo. BTW, I love how none of their mechanics quotes actually have names attached to them. I wonder if an ASE-certified mechanic could lose their license if they really put up something like this? More likely, the quotes were just made-up. I hate to think certified mechanics would be trying to pawn this crap off on their customers.
Here's a good one.
actually have no facts nor evidence to back up your idea, so your claim can only be a "belief".
And on that "covalizer". Wow, they should just trademark that name. Someone is going to want to buy that from them when we are all driving electric cars. I mean, "engergizer" is taken, so you've got to have something that sounds scientific.
The videos on this site are really just too absurd to take on point-by-point. Just suffice to say when they say things like, "mechanically, it is just like your car engine", they're not lying--COMPLETELY. What they're using is a Sterling engine. Which has some mechanical similarity with your car engine--and about the same mechanically as a 1900 train engine. A sterling engine will make mechanical energy out of anything that will burn and has enough water to make steam. That's why they're in use in the third world. Low-grade fuel sources and you can still make power and it won't ruin the engine. It'll be hell to clean up afterwards, but it can be done.
We won't even go into why they put this absurd video on this PICC site. I didn't see a demo of any of the products (okay, I could only stand it until 5:30) wearing a tie or being in a garage doesn't make you an expert nor a mechanical nor fuel engineer. More evidence of snake oil.
Oh, and water injection into engines for cooling has been done for a long time. No magic, but that doesn't mean you'll get the same power as if you were running 100% gas, rather than 60% gas and 40% water. I'm guessing you'll get something like 62-63% of the energy.
Perhaps the only "real" thing on their website is the "HAFC Optimizer". Sure. I could probably make one of these--or at least buy it somewhere else on the internet. It could very well be a module that remaps your ignition and injection. Most people who get these use them to get more power (and attendant LESS gas mileage) out of their performance cars or work trucks. It's not hard to do, as the manufacturers have to balance between fuel mileage targets and the market place of horsepower and speed claims. But the "UCSA" (Mitchell Enterprises of Clovis, CA) will probably set it up to put the car's computer into super-lean-almost-knocking mode all the time. Better gas mileage, sure, for a while. Because a super-lean firing will destroy your car's power and destroy your engine in no time.
But I concede you might see some percentage (maybe even double-digits, if your car is out of tune) increase enough to be sold on their snake oil and to spread the word for them. They'll be long gone by the time your engine goes, "KA-BLAMMO!"
What about that evil catalytic converter that the auto industry was forced to put (thoughtlessly) downstream of your engine's combustion, rather than upstream where the smart people of PICC would put it?
Maybe the converter used to do a great deal to combat smog, but its role has been reduced, though not eliminated. It is still an important step, the last one, to destroy all the smog left in the exhaust gas as possible. The catalytic converter of 1971, around when they were widely introduced, was grossly inefficient compared to today. Today there is so little non-combusted material due to hyper-efficient combustion chambers (VVT, hemispheric chambers, multiple valves, multiple spark) that catalytic converters can be the last link in an emissions control chain to put out "SULEV" emissions. Which is practically zero. As low as 0.1g per mile. Less than
1/2 oz. of NOx per 100 miles!!! See this EPA chart on outputs from different "classes" of vehicles.
There is some great wastes on Internal Combustion Engines. Some inefficiencies that someone (not likely the UCSA) will figure out how to exploit. For instance, figure out how you can retrieve the up to 50% of engine energy wasted as heat, and turn that into kinetic energy. Then you've really got something! Maybe a stirling engine run off steam created by the excess heat generated by the gas motor? Just an idea. That many have had.
Other charlatains, other pitches.
These aren't the only guys that are trying to separate people from their money faster than their right foot which is attached to the gas tank which is attached to their wallet.
There was this article in the paper the other day about some guy in Pleasanton who was putting some wires in a PVC pipe, along with a cathode and an anode and some attachment plumbing. About $30 in materials. Then you hook one end to your car's alternator, the other to the air inlet and fill it with water.
"The first time I use Pelligrino. After that, you can use your Aquafina bottled water." Actual quote. Sheesh.
The purpose of this contraption was to create (or should I say, "crack"!) hydrogen and oxygen out of the water in the pipe and feed it to your car's engine as "mixing gases". Too bad the second law of thermodynamics says that the energy needed to produce the electricity at the alternator to convert the water to gas will greatly exceed the energy you could get out of that same engine by feeding the gas back into it.
They are charging $1,000 each for these things and claimed they had sold 2,000 units.
P.T. Barnum was right. Don't be another one.
However, to be fair, I should point out that if the engine is inefficient, as in a DOT test on "older diesel engines", you might get some increased burn efficiencies out of oxygen injection. Four to seven percent in their tests. Good, but not hardly enough to spend $1000.00 on. If you were spending $20,000 on gas, maybe.
I think I'll wait for a real fuel cell. It uses gas, but zero emissions as it uses the _energy_ created in the fuel cell, not the gases directly to run an electric motor. There's a lot of interest in cars and technology using this idea.
It is very much worth investigating the real thing. Real science. Real applications. Not pseudo-science, wild claims and "see how you can become a dealer" marketing schemes.
To quote a wise friend of mine, "Check your tire pressures and add a pound or two. You'll save more gas than any of these stupid gadgets!"
Of late, it is the new ways to improve gas mileage. The Vornado, the XXX and now, the leader in the category of "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with Bull$#!t! A recent addition to the art form of the latter has come upon the internet scene. I'm talking about the "PICC" or "Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter.
Here's their website. Check it out. Put your critical-observer visor on and turn your skeptic shield up to "full"! Open it in a new browser tab or window so you can go back and forth between it and my re-information (as opposed to their disinformation!) critique.
This is Absolutely too good to be true.
I hardly know where to start to refute all these claims, but I'll start at the top.
They say,
"What if we could turn the gases you are throwing away via
your exhaust into added mileage and power for your vehicle?"
your exhaust into added mileage and power for your vehicle?"
Well, there are lots of ways of doing that. A turbocharger. A supercharger. They use the kinetic energy in those gases imparted by the engine's "pumping action". A catalytic converter does
take large gas molecules and "turn them into smaller particles" (which is what happens when you burn something). They're burned in the catalytic converter, not the tailpipe. And the result is fewer "large gas molecules" and particulates are released. Somewhat "less exhaust", because some of it is converted in burning to more heat. But there is very little unburned gasoline molecules (distinct from gas, i.e., molecules in a gaseous state) in your exhaust to begin with. Dump a bunch of gasoline molecules into a catalytic converter and you quickly ruin it. They're made to deal with trace amounts, making them even more...trace. The point being, you're creating some more heat outside the engine--where it can do work--but not much. And not much compared to the heat that pours out of the exhaust manifold or is circulated out through the water and/or oil cooling system through fans and radiators. If the PICC was claiming to be able to use the excess heat that your car produces---then they'd have something! But that's not what they're claiming.
How about that in-car gasoline "cracker"? You could, I suppose "crack" formulated gasoline. If you were to try something like this--and it would have to be by some other mechanism than what is described on the PICC site, perhaps involving a catalytic reactor (that isn't driven by waste heat as your exhaust catalytic converter is--maybe Citgo has one they're not using--you might (or maybe not, my long-chain butyl chem is a bit rusty) create some energy. But the backyard mechanic really shouldn't attempt to "crack" formulated gasoline. Really, the best gasoline cracker you have is your car's engine. It does a really good job of "cracking" all the BTUs, or heat-energy out of that gas.
Chevron and Shell have done their very best to make gasoline clean burning and high octane for the price. There's admittedly little bit of competition in the market place, but there is enough so that one company just cannot afford to leave NINE TIMES the efficiency on the table. "I'll buy ABC Gas, theirs is so much worse than XYZ gas!" And if you think all the gas companies are doing it, to what end? Participate in some conspiracy to make you consume more gas? Pass up the 100MPG carburetor from the GM "vault" please!
What's next on PICC's list of BS? Well, converting a liquid to a "plasma" could only effectively be done with the magnetic resources and heat resources of, oh, THE SUN! Or, if the "liquid" in question was, maybe, LIQUID HELIUM!! Then you might be able to get transitory plasma signatures in this very weird super-state of matter. But room temperature liquids? Good luck, Einstein (or should I say..Bose-Einstein? Heh. Physics joke.)
Nearly all industrial plasmas (TV sets, fluorescent tubes, those cool "lightning globes") are created by introducing electrons into a gas, not a liquid, where it is MUUCH easier to dislodge other electrons to create the plasma at low energy levels. Output of this electron interaction with the plasma is...photons!
You're not going to be able to turn your gas-burner into Star Trek's Plasma Drive with a little box.
Then there's the final claim in the second main paragraph, "...the gasoline you pay for goes further and the exhaust is so negligible that it hardly registers." Okay, bunky. Pull out your last smog check certificate (for those of you unlucky enough not to drive a classic car that is exempt). Look at the numbers. We're talking "parts" (meaning measurable particles--usually in the micron range) per MILLION. Sometimes, on the most modern and "SULEV" or "P-ZERO" rated cars, many of the numbers are already practically zero. One part in a hundred million. I think that goes to "hardly registers" without the intervention of a PICC. Your nose is a sensitive machine, and you can sometimes smell exhaust--more when the engine is old, or cold, or needs a tune-up. But most of what you feel is carbon dioxide (C02)that is really hot. Guess what? Aside from the heat, it is really, really hard to "crack" energy out of CO2. The sun does it. Plants do it, but it takes them a long time...oh, and the sun, too. C02 is your major greenhouse gas, and there are a whole bunch of smart people trying to figure out what to do with it. Burying it in the ground is a more feasible option than burning it in your car. Really.
What about their claims for increases in efficiency? On the face of it, look at the counterfactual to those claims. There just isn't 9X the energy available in the gasoline over what our cars burn now to "crack" out of it! Think of how inefficient your engine would have to be to only be able to extract 1/9 of the energy available in the gasoline-- and that it would some how be available to be merely "broken down" or "cracked from" the fuel to be used. Here are some fuels and their BTU stores. You'd be better off burning a pound of coal than a gallon of gasoline (10% of 125K BTUs) in your car if gasoline internal combustion engines were as inefficient as these guys claim.
Looks like, if anything, they should be starting with diesels as there's more energy in #2 fuel oil than in gasoline. But there aren't as many truckers as there are desperate people with 80's cars and '08 gas bills.
As to their test of a V8 318ci engine running at 50% load for an hour at 3,000rpm. That is equivalent to a "van...traveling up a 30 degree incline for one hour"? This is Wonder Woman's Invisible Van? How much does this "van" weigh? Where does that fit into the calculations? An engine floating up a hill on its own doesn't have to pull much weight. Even so, 200mpg, or their claim of 2 pounds of gasoline per hour is absurd.
Okay, I've been throwing a lot of arrows. Here's my concrete calculation using their meager data posing as engineering, if not science.
1. Three thousand RPM in a V8 engine, is 24,000 ignition cycles per minute. Or one million, four hundred forty thousand ignition cycles per hour.
2. In that hour, they claim 2 pounds of gasoline used. That's 907 grams.
3. Dividing those 1.44 million sparks into those 907 grams of gasoline, that's 0.00063g of gasoline per spark. Wow. That's a really small number. Sixty three hundred thousandths of a gram.
4. Hmm.. Or about 2 parts in a MILLION per GRAM! You know, that's less than the amount left over in the exhaust? Wow. These guys are good. They're not just getting all the energy out of the exhaust, they're getting more energy than is in the exhaust! Maybe its nuclear. wow.
1. Okay, that last was a bit snarky and unscientific. Back on the beam, we check our table of energy in gasoline, and have to do some more math to convert teir BTUs from 125k/gal to something per gram. That's a volumetric gallon, and our fuel gram is a weight. So it depends on the density of gasoline. Assuming 60 degrees F., these folk in England tell us that's 737.22 kg/cu.m or 0.073722 grams per ml.
2. (Getting there, bear with me.) A gallon is 3,785.41178 ml. So a ml of gas has 0.0302832942
BTUs of energy.
Multiply that by #2 results and you get, out of each spark in that super-dooper
(de-dooper-de-booper!) engine, 0.00223254502 BTUs of energy. Let's round, okay? I'll be REALLY generous and round to twenty-three ten-thousandths.
My friends, you're going to have to take my word for it (but I'm happy to continue down this rabbit hole) that 23/10,000 of a BTU is about 1.2 ft/lbs of energy. To frame it another way, a horsepower is approximately 2,544 BTUs an hour (they did this for an hour). A horsepower is thirty three thousand ft-lbs/min. Or 500 (more or less--we can start really rounding now) ft-lbs/hour. A Chrysler 318 engine has nominally 180hp, but can make much more. We're interested in economy, so that's a good starting point. So that's 9,000 ft-lbs/hr.
What did we calculate? 1.2ft/lbs? But a 318 cubic inch engine should be making FOUR THOUSAND TIMES that amount of energy. Basically, the light wouldn't stay on in the engine. It couldn't get out of its own way, even tethered to an invisible van! It can't be done. There isn't enough raw energy in 2 lbs of gasoline to run a V8 motor at 3,000rpm for an hour. You'd need something that would get you a 4,500% improvement on efficiency. Can't be done. QED.
Then they ask a real relevent question:
"What does this Mean To You?"
Here's what it means: this website and their claims are snake-oil. They're trying to hide it in pseudo science meaningless graphs and "testimonials" and mumbo-jumbo. BTW, I love how none of their mechanics quotes actually have names attached to them. I wonder if an ASE-certified mechanic could lose their license if they really put up something like this? More likely, the quotes were just made-up. I hate to think certified mechanics would be trying to pawn this crap off on their customers.
Here's a good one.
"we believe...you will be evaporating fuel out of
your tank faster than you are using it for your travel."
Uh. Meaning...you "believe" that you're going to eat a hole in the bottom of my gas tank with your crappy "covalizer" agent? Or, in a more mundane interpretation of "believe", that youyour tank faster than you are using it for your travel."
actually have no facts nor evidence to back up your idea, so your claim can only be a "belief".
And on that "covalizer". Wow, they should just trademark that name. Someone is going to want to buy that from them when we are all driving electric cars. I mean, "engergizer" is taken, so you've got to have something that sounds scientific.
The videos on this site are really just too absurd to take on point-by-point. Just suffice to say when they say things like, "mechanically, it is just like your car engine", they're not lying--COMPLETELY. What they're using is a Sterling engine. Which has some mechanical similarity with your car engine--and about the same mechanically as a 1900 train engine. A sterling engine will make mechanical energy out of anything that will burn and has enough water to make steam. That's why they're in use in the third world. Low-grade fuel sources and you can still make power and it won't ruin the engine. It'll be hell to clean up afterwards, but it can be done.
We won't even go into why they put this absurd video on this PICC site. I didn't see a demo of any of the products (okay, I could only stand it until 5:30) wearing a tie or being in a garage doesn't make you an expert nor a mechanical nor fuel engineer. More evidence of snake oil.
Oh, and water injection into engines for cooling has been done for a long time. No magic, but that doesn't mean you'll get the same power as if you were running 100% gas, rather than 60% gas and 40% water. I'm guessing you'll get something like 62-63% of the energy.
Perhaps the only "real" thing on their website is the "HAFC Optimizer". Sure. I could probably make one of these--or at least buy it somewhere else on the internet. It could very well be a module that remaps your ignition and injection. Most people who get these use them to get more power (and attendant LESS gas mileage) out of their performance cars or work trucks. It's not hard to do, as the manufacturers have to balance between fuel mileage targets and the market place of horsepower and speed claims. But the "UCSA" (Mitchell Enterprises of Clovis, CA) will probably set it up to put the car's computer into super-lean-almost-knocking mode all the time. Better gas mileage, sure, for a while. Because a super-lean firing will destroy your car's power and destroy your engine in no time.
But I concede you might see some percentage (maybe even double-digits, if your car is out of tune) increase enough to be sold on their snake oil and to spread the word for them. They'll be long gone by the time your engine goes, "KA-BLAMMO!"
What about that evil catalytic converter that the auto industry was forced to put (thoughtlessly) downstream of your engine's combustion, rather than upstream where the smart people of PICC would put it?
Maybe the converter used to do a great deal to combat smog, but its role has been reduced, though not eliminated. It is still an important step, the last one, to destroy all the smog left in the exhaust gas as possible. The catalytic converter of 1971, around when they were widely introduced, was grossly inefficient compared to today. Today there is so little non-combusted material due to hyper-efficient combustion chambers (VVT, hemispheric chambers, multiple valves, multiple spark) that catalytic converters can be the last link in an emissions control chain to put out "SULEV" emissions. Which is practically zero. As low as 0.1g per mile. Less than
1/2 oz. of NOx per 100 miles!!! See this EPA chart on outputs from different "classes" of vehicles.
There is some great wastes on Internal Combustion Engines. Some inefficiencies that someone (not likely the UCSA) will figure out how to exploit. For instance, figure out how you can retrieve the up to 50% of engine energy wasted as heat, and turn that into kinetic energy. Then you've really got something! Maybe a stirling engine run off steam created by the excess heat generated by the gas motor? Just an idea. That many have had.
Other charlatains, other pitches.
These aren't the only guys that are trying to separate people from their money faster than their right foot which is attached to the gas tank which is attached to their wallet.
There was this article in the paper the other day about some guy in Pleasanton who was putting some wires in a PVC pipe, along with a cathode and an anode and some attachment plumbing. About $30 in materials. Then you hook one end to your car's alternator, the other to the air inlet and fill it with water.
"The first time I use Pelligrino. After that, you can use your Aquafina bottled water." Actual quote. Sheesh.
The purpose of this contraption was to create (or should I say, "crack"!) hydrogen and oxygen out of the water in the pipe and feed it to your car's engine as "mixing gases". Too bad the second law of thermodynamics says that the energy needed to produce the electricity at the alternator to convert the water to gas will greatly exceed the energy you could get out of that same engine by feeding the gas back into it.
They are charging $1,000 each for these things and claimed they had sold 2,000 units.
P.T. Barnum was right. Don't be another one.
However, to be fair, I should point out that if the engine is inefficient, as in a DOT test on "older diesel engines", you might get some increased burn efficiencies out of oxygen injection. Four to seven percent in their tests. Good, but not hardly enough to spend $1000.00 on. If you were spending $20,000 on gas, maybe.
I think I'll wait for a real fuel cell. It uses gas, but zero emissions as it uses the _energy_ created in the fuel cell, not the gases directly to run an electric motor. There's a lot of interest in cars and technology using this idea.
It is very much worth investigating the real thing. Real science. Real applications. Not pseudo-science, wild claims and "see how you can become a dealer" marketing schemes.
To quote a wise friend of mine, "Check your tire pressures and add a pound or two. You'll save more gas than any of these stupid gadgets!"
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