Author: james

Acer Aspire Revo

I finally purchased an Acer Aspire Revo 3600. The one with the Atom 230 single core hyper-thread CPU. Naturally I opted for the Linux based version for just £149 or so from Play.com.

Strangely when I look at Play.com now, they don’t have any of the Linux versions available; they had been putting the price up-and-down by £10, but now the option is gone completely. Hopefully they’re not doing what Asus did; use Linux to enter the market, and then ditch it just when the product starts to get traction.

The box arrived on time (before other vendors had stock in their supply chains). I un-boxed it and was pleased to see the included mini-keyboard and mouse, those would have been equally happy to save £10 for these off the price. Nice touch having a reference to the GPL on an included page in the packing material, along with the VESA mount.

Interestingly, this option should have had an 8 GB SSD drive, but was (as I had seen elsewhere) a 160 GB SATA disk drive. Not too bad.

The initial “Splashtop” was hideously limited in its abilities. It basically just had Skype, a basic browser, and a link to install “your operating system”, which only offered the option to install Microsoft Windows.

Luckily you can disable the splash screens, boto from USB, and get a real distribution installed. I am running Debian AMD64 port. True 64 bit computing on a bargain basement priced piece of kit that performs well.

And I am pleased that I did. I have installed the NVidia driver. The HDMI video and audio just work, but new for me was actually having to chose which audio output I want to use.

I’ve only had SD video files to far, and they play back on my 720p Samsung LCT TV with no problems at all. Likewise, using GLSlideshow for pictures is also smooth. In fact, I think this is the perfect set top box. I’ve experimented with MythTV, Video transcoding, etc, and it just seems happy with all these tasks.

I have now seen that in Germany there is an Atom 330 (dual core) version now available. Yay, even better.But I suppose I could always play with CUDA on this system to access the GPU and do some heavy processing!

My only improvements that I could suggest now would be:

  • Drop the keyboard and mouse; drop the price or spend that difference on embedded bluetooth!
  • Put a usable distribution no the disk of the Linux version – don’t leave it blank
  • Ask NVidia to truly open source their Linux driver! Again!
  • Ask Skype to produce a 64 bit Linux version of their client, or open source their client completely

Lastly, the must have accessories I am have or am contemplating:

  • USB DVB tuner (freeview TV)
  • USB Infrared reciever
  • USB Video webcam
  • USB RFID reader (I have the Phidgets, but it doesn’t read Oyster serial numbers – different frequencies)
  • USB Bluetooth adaptor
  • Blueray drive

The SD card reader can read the 16 GB memory cards that I use in my Sony HDD video camera, and the system is good enough to playback the 1080p AVCHD MPEG Transport Stream (MTS) video files it produces. Finally; the video camera was looking a little lame give that the olde-worlde HP NC6120 I had couldn’t read the 16 GB cards (no firmware updates to enable this??), and wasn’t fast enough to playback the video files from the smaller capacity SD cards.

All up, I am pleased with this unit. Cheaper than the Asus Eeeboxes I was looking at, and with HDMI built in! Perfect. Highly recommended, but some fiddling to get it going.

Authen::NTLM issues

So after a few weeks, I finnaly tracked down a random MSIE issue with my RT installation to the Authen::NTLM and its cousin Authen::NTLM::Cookie modules. These are several years old, and were causing me issues with POSTs to RT when updating tickets, etc, as well as various login issues when using IE randomly.

So, falling back to mod_ldap.

Phidgets RFID Reader

I’ve been looking for a simple way of reading an RFID tag from the Oyster card an its equivalents elsewhere. Prices seem to vary, as do the ways of interfacing. I think I am settling on USB across the whole board for my home security devices; its pretty ubiquitous, and devices are generally reasonably well priced.

Now I have seen the RFID reader I think I want: the Phidgets RFID Reader. Looking around to purchase one shows some major variation in price:

So, looking at today’s exchange rate of US$ to UK£ of 1.6518, the Active Robots price is US$113.33. That’s US$60.69 more than Robot Shop, or a mark-up of 115.29%. Over double!

Time to order via the US.

PS: Now I have the unit, I realised the difference between 135 kHz RFID tags (like the Phidget unit) and the 13 MHz ones (like the Mi-Fare Oyster)…. you can’t read an Oyster Card with a Phidget. *sigh*

Wii Browser

Well, looks like the only browser for the Wii I got yesterday is the Opera based “Internet channel”, sold via the Wii Shop. Only around £3.50 (US$6 – 500 Wii Shop points).
Looks like the user agent string for it is “Opera/9.30 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 2047-7; en)“. Doesn’t seem to render my main site with the margins nicely. Also a little jumpy on the scrolling around the page kind of thing. Shame Wii is only SD video output – you don’t fit a lot on the screen while remaining clear to read.
The Photo channel seems to be missing what I would call a killer app for the Wii – the ability to take a Flickr stream or other photo sharing site and do a nice Photo frame transition on it. Heck, how about:

  • Knows about night time, and can either “show black” at night, or just show the time at night in a user-choose-able colour (like, grey so the screen isn’t too light for a darkened room)
  • Can chose a stream from a location URL, perhaps with a query string one can define (eg, the WII console number, so from the server side you could serve up specific images to specific machines)
  • Pan and scan, cross-fade, dissolve, fade-through-black, fade-through-white
  • Chose a music track (MP3) by URL to fetch and play in parallel
  • User customisable text overlay on pictures
  • Optional time, date, weather forecast overlay on pictures

Acer Aspire Revo or Asus Eeebox B208?

Acer’s Aprice Revo takes no the Asus EEEbox range

The Settop market is heating up; Asus and Acer are both coming to market with Atom A330 dual-core (2 x 1.6 GHz) low voltage systems, with discrete graphics and HDMI output, amongst other interfaces.

I’ve been delaying buying one of these for some time, waiting for one to come along at the right price point. I want to run Linux on it; I don’t want to run Windows + Antivirus – that just kills performance. Asus seem to be doing all they can to now drop Linux from their range; Acer is still there, with their Aspire Revo single-core Atom 230 unit sitting around UK£149 — UK£159 (inc VAT, see Play.com).

The features are there; but if only it can break the psychological UK£100 barrier, it can then be an impulse purchase!

When the A330 dual-core units hits, it looks like that model of Aspire Revo will be up against the Asus B208 unit – but with the advantage that Acer is still selling a Linux based unit, so no Microsoft tax.