Category: Rants

The DreamScreen is unwell. It’s Snapfish application is dying. Repeatedly. And it’s not showing the Snapfish albums when it does run….

I thought it was a weak Wifi signal, but after re-positioning the router to within 2 metres of the DreamScreen, I think its safe to say it’s not.

When starting the Snapfish application (why can’t it automatically “sleep” to this app?) it tried to download the list of albums. It seems to know how many albums I have, but fails to get the thumbnails, and the album titles. Trying to browse an album seems to again know how many items there are, but again the thumbnails fail. Trying to show a high res crashes the app, and the main menu screen is shown again.

Tut tut, HP:

1. Your Snapfish app (HP’s stack on the dream screen hardware) doesn’t seem to be resilient enough to handle data returned to it and crashes. Bad.
2. HP runs Snapfish – if that’s returning new/different data, then that’s Snapfish’s fault for modifying a “stable” API. Which is HP.  Bad.
3. There is no diagnosis that I can access to see what the error is. Bad.
4. There is no way for me to write an app onto this platform, still. Bad.

There was talk of an open SDK at one stage, but I’ve not seen any sign of it. Hum….

If HP doesn’t resolve this issue, or free the platform to let people develop more useful apps, then it will circle the plughole and die! An opportunity for a great product missed.

I ordered O2 Broadband when we moved into our new flat. Promptly they sent us a Thompson TH585 v7 DSL router/modem. Within a few days the line was attached and the modem duly got connected. Yay.

Inital speed for the first few days was 0.5 Mbit/sec. Was a little disappointed when the 8 Mbit/sec line, which O2 estimated that at 0.3 of a mile from the exchange should have delivered 6 MBit/sec.

After a week, the speed did increase, nightly (between 8pm and midnight) gave me speeds of around 3 Mbit/sec. The other morning I tried testing at 7am, and got 6.2 Mbit/sec. Cool.

On the down side, the “O2 Wireless Box II”, that’s the Thompson TG575 v7, running firmware 7.4.20.5, seems to have a bad habit of spontaneously rebooting, around every 1 – 2 days! It is frequent enough to be annoying.

I spoke to the O2 support line (since the only “Ask Amy” KB was particularly useless), who advised me to re-flash the same firmware, which I’ll try in a  few days, but I don’t hold much hope. There’s a version 8.2.x release on the Thompson web site, but — as seems to b common with some DSL providers — the actual DSL login details are hidden, so changing to a non-branded firmware may prove difficult. Sky Broadband (a.k.a. EasyNet) did the same thing.

So, it’s now 2010 (almost). Two of the most heavily used non-Free programs on Linux would have to be Adobe Flash Player, and Skype VOIP client. While neither have open-sourced their offerings, both do offer Linux versions.

The down side is they only offer 32-bit versions.

After several years of AMD64 bit Linux (the Debian port to AMD 64 has a mailing list that started May 2003 – over 6.5 years ago). Skype have repackaged their 32 bit build in a package that has the correct dependencies to run on 64 bit Linux, but the executable is still 32-bit. So no clean 64 bit system! Boo hoo.

Come on Skype! Come on Adobe. Either keep up (6.5 years!) or set it Free!

Time for some more storage at home – the old 250 GB Freecom HDD was getting a little tight on space. So a quick stop on Christmas Eve at PC World (normally not a good experience) and I chanced upon a 1.5 TB Iomega drive at £80 or so. 6x the size – nice.
I was initially hesitant; the name Iomega normally is associated with the phrase “click of death”, a symptom of the old Iomega Zip disks of the 1990’s. However, the price point, and 10+ years of water under the bridge and them still being in business made me consider it a reasonable purchase.
The drive was instantly recognised by my Acer Aspire Revo (running Debian Linux). The disk auto-mounted with its VFAT file system no problem; however, instantly it started to… wait for it … click! Noooo!
I reformatted to make it a Physical Volume for LVM, and then made a new Logical Volume (LV) with an XFS file system. It seems the disk still does the clicking/ticking every once in a while, normally after some period of inactivity.
It’s about 4 – 7 clicks/ticks, about once every half a second, the entire episode lasting around 10 seconds.

So, it’s been a few weeks, and there still doesn’t seem to be any news about an HP supported SDK or even a hack to get into the HP DreamScreen. More interesting comments on this blog; I concurr with the timings for starting “apps” and navigating menus – way too slow to react.

I think the main point is nicely summed up – when “the community” gets inside this device there will be a possibility of realising the potential of an intelligent picture frame — the kind of self-populating, automatically updating, no-user-input required device that you would give to your parents and siblings to keep in touch. They shouldn’t have to navigate through my Snapfish albums manually – it should just happen!

Sigh.