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I’ve just been given a set of Hive Bluetooth speakers by MobileZap (see this link for all their Bluetooth speakers) [1].
The speakers charge by a micro-USB cable so I started charging them in my car immediately after collecting them. To connect them to a phone or other Bluetooth device you just press the Bluetooth button on top and get the phone to be visible and scanning for devices, they identify themselves as “Hive”, after that they just work. My first test of using them was playing Ingress and the quality of the sound was impressive, I had thought that the Ingress recommendation to use headphones was due to the risk of annoying other people or alerting other players, but the quality of the sound was impressive and the internal speakers of a phone can’t do it justice.
After getting home I did some tests listening to music. For watching music videos it didn’t work so well as the sound was too far removed from the video, but the audio quality was very good. I listened to “Vow” by “Garbage” (a good benchmark for stereo sound) and even though the Hive speakers are only 16.5cm wide I could still notice the stereo effect when they were about 1.5m away from me. The audio quality didn’t compare well with my Bose QC-15 headphones, but for affordable and portable speakers it was quite good and an obvious improvement over the speakers that are built in to any phone I’ve used.
According to the Bluetooth Wikipedia page the range of a class 2 device is 10m and the range of a class 3 device is 1m. When my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is talking to it I get a reliable range of about 5 meters and a mostly working range of 6 or 7 meters (sound randomly drops out and gets choppy). It could be that other phones would support a longer range due to having a higher transmission power (either class 1 or being closer to the limits of class 2) and a more sensitive receiver. But it doesn’t seem likely that a 5m range is going to be a problem.
Volume and Quality
The speakers are rated at 5 Watt, when running at maximum volume (both through the phone volume setting and the volume control on the speakers) the sound is reasonably distortion free, as good as can be expected from playing an MP3 that’s not compressed with the highest quality. Sound Meter [2] reports the sound volume as almost 85dB on a Galaxy S3 and as almost 100dB on a Galaxy Note 2, that would be somewhere between the volume of a “busy street” or “alarm clock” and the volume of a “subway train” or “blow dryer” which seems like a reasonable description, I find it very unpleasant to be within a meter of the speakers at maximum volume. With the typical amount of background noise in my house I can play music on the Hive speakers at one end of my house and hear it clearly at the other end.
These speakers are more than capable of supplying the music for any party I’d want to host or attend. I’m not really into wild parties, but I think that anyone who has a one room party would be more than satisfied with the Hive speakers. Obviously the sound quality of portable speakers in a box that’s 16.5cm wide and 6cm high isn’t going to equal that of a full size set of speakers, but I think that hardly anyone who attends a party would expect better sound quality than the Hive speakers can provide. The aim of such speakers is to be portable, not really expensive, and to provide good sound quality within those constraints. I think that they meet such aims well.
Over the years there have been many occasions when I have used a Thinkpad to provide the music for a party and found it to be quite loud enough. My current Thinkpad is a T420 which can produce 75dB according to my Galaxy S3 or 85dB according to my Galaxy Note 2. So it seems that I only really need about 10dB less than the maximum volume of the Hive speakers.
Appearance
The designers obviously made an effort on the appearance of the device. They have gone with the Hive concept and used hexagons everywhere. It really looks nice.
Unfortunately when I took the photo there was some dust on it which didn’t look bad to the eye but caught the camera flash. But with a matte black device there’s always the problem of light colored dust. Even with a bit of dust it still looks great as a set of speakers, the dust just detracts from the appearance in photos.
Line In
One of the features I looked for was an audio line input so I could connect it directly to a non-Bluetooth device. I’m assuming that this feature works as it’s something that’s difficult to stuff up when designing such a product, but I haven’t got around to testing it. Once I started using the device I just found that I didn’t have a real need for that feature.
One thing that it might be useful for is PC desktop speakers that are powered by a USB port on the monitor. Currently I have a bearable (but not great) set of speakers for each PC and I don’t need to change anything. But having the option of another set of speakers is very handy in case I suddenly need to make hardware changes.
Other People’s Reviews
When I review a product I generally try and get opinions from random other people if possible. My mother and my mother-in-law were both impressed by the Hive speakers and expressed interest in owning a set. My mother-in-law was particularly interested as she uses her phone to listen to radio stations from outside Australia (I’m going to get her onto Aldi for cheap 3G data ASAP so she can listen to Internet radio when travelling).
Generally the impression that other people have of this device seems to be very positive. It seems that Bluetooth speakers aren’t just a Geek toy.
Conclusion
While I’m very impressed by this product, at this stage I’m not sure whether I would pay for this one or something cheaper if I was paying for it. MobileZap offers a range of other products that look appealing at lower price points. It really depends on how much I use it.
I’ve just got a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer working and I’ve found the Hive speakers very useful for the purpose of drowning out it’s noise. If I keep doing that sort of thing then I’ll get enough use out of the speakers to justify the price.
I have just bought a wireless phone charging system based on the Qi Inductive Power Standard. I bought a charging device which connects to a standard micro-USB cable and receivers for the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and Samsung Galaxy S3 phones I own. Both those phones have contacts in the back of their case that are designed for wireless charging so you can install a charging device inside them. The charging devices make the case fit a little tight, and the charging device is stuck to the phone battery with contact adhesive, this makes it impractical to change the battery on a phone with such a device and makes it a little more difficult to swap out a battery case. One nice feature of the Nexus 4 is that it has Qi charging built in, that saved me $19 and was also more convenient.
I believe that the main advantage of a wireless charger is to avoid the risk of damage to the phone if it’s dropped while connected to a USB charger. This allows the phone to be charged in situations where you might need to quickly or regularly unplug it to go somewhere. One example of how I might use it is when working at an office so I could charge my phone while at my desk and then quickly take it with me if I had to go to a meeting (sadly I have worked in many offices where they have so many meetings). Another example is for sysadmin work where I have to frequently visit devices to fix them.
The wireless charging mat that I bought from Kogan connects to a standard micro-USB plug, the good thing about this is that it’s easy to find cables and it can take power from any PC. The bad thing about this is that the resistance of the USB cable is a factor that limits the power that a phone can receive, when using wireless charging you have the limit of the cable resistance as well as some power loss from the wireless transmission. After any extended period of charging the charging mat feels warm to the touch and the phone that’s been resting on it feels warmer than usual. The warmth is an indication of energy loss which means longer charging times, a longer charging time isn’t necessarily a problem as the convenience of wireless charging can allow longer charging times, but if you want to charge your phone in a hurry before you go somewhere then wireless isn’t a good choice.
In the past I’ve discovered that the battery in a Samsung Galaxy S3 can’t be charged if the phone is at 46C [1]. 46C might seem extremely hot to people in some parts of the world (EG northern Europe and Canada) but the temperature in even southern parts of mainland Australia can get that hot and it can be hotter in central and northern parts, so phone temperature can be a real issue. Currently my house is at 21C according to a digital thermometer, the Galaxy S3 and the Note 2 are being charged from USB and report temperatures of 27C and 23C respectively. While the thermometer in my house and those in the phones probably aren’t really accurate it seems reasonable to assume that the battery of a relatively idle smart-phone that’s being charged will be a few degrees warmer than the ambient temperature. The Qi charger makes things a lot worse as it even feels warm to the touch. So maybe a phone on a Qi charger would be 8 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature or more. That implies that in Australian summer weather a Qi charger won’t be useful outside or in any building that lacks air-conditioning. So I think we can give up on the idea of using Qi devices to charge phones at a BBQ.
The final problem I have is that the Qi device is quite small, I took the above picture with my phone face-down because no part of the charger is visible in normal use. With that size I can’t just dump a phone like a Note 2 on top of the charging mat and expect it to work. I have to carefully place it so that it balances and so that the wireless receptor inside the phone matches the transmitter in the mat, if the phone isn’t placed correctly then the Qi mat won’t detect it and won’t supply full power to the transmitter.
Conclusion
I’m fairly disappointed in this device. The waste heat makes it unsuitable for Australian summer conditions and slows charging. The difficulty of correctly placing the phone reduces the convenience which is one of the major features.
The price was $19 for each charging card for the Note 2 and the S3 and $29 for the charging mat to give a total of $67. I think it’s worth the money for me to cover the risk of one of my phones having it’s USB port damaged. Using a Qi charger on occasion will decrease the probability of such damage and allow the phone to be used after receiving certain types of damage.
The prices of those phones nowadays are $389 for a Galaxy S3 (Kogan price), $250 for a Nexus 4 (when it was on sale in the Google store), and probably about $500 for a Galaxy Note 2 (last time Kogan offered them). So by paying $67 for Qi charging I believe that I’m getting some degree of damage insurance for just over $1100 worth of phones. It seems likely that the Nexus 5 will ship with Qi charging support and that the Galaxy Note 3 will also support an optional Qi charging card (which will probably also be $19 or some similar price) so the charging mat should be useful for a long time.
While I’m disappointed I don’t regret buying the device. But I would be hesitant to recommend it to other people and definitely wouldn’t recommend it to someone who doesn’t have a significant interest and investment in smart phones.
A client has recently asked for my advice on web editing software. There are lots of programs out there for editing web sites and according to a quick Google search there are free Windows programs to do most things that you would want to do.
The first thing I’m wondering about is whether the best option is to just get a Linux PC for web editing. PCs capable of running Linux are almost free nowadays (any system which is too slow for the last couple of Windows versions will do nicely). While some time will have to be spent in learning a new OS someone who uses Linux for such tasks will be able to use fully-featured programs such as the GIMP which are installed as part of the OS. While it is possible to configure a Windows system to run rsync to copy a development site to the production server and to have all the useful tools installed it’s much easier to run a few apt-get or yum commands to install the software and then copy some scripts to the user’s home directory.
The next issue is whether web editing is the best idea. Sites that are manually edited tend to be very simple, inconsistent, or both. Some sort of CMS seems to be the better option. WordPress is a CMS that I’m very familiar with so it’s easy for me to install it for a client, while I try and resist the temptation to force my favorite software on clients there is the issue that I can install WordPress quickly which therefore saves money for my client. WordPress is a CMS that supports installing different themes (and has a huge repository of free themes). The content that it manages consists of “pages” and “posts”, two arbitrary types of document. Supporting two types of document with a common look and feel and common important data in a side-bar seems to describe the core functionality used by most web sites for small businesses.
Does anyone have any other ideas for ways of solving this problem? Note that it should be reasonably easy to use for someone who hasn’t had much experience at doing such things, it shouldn’t take much sysadmin time to install or cost to run.
Portslave is a project that was started in the 90’s to listen to a serial port and launch a PPP or SLIP session after a user has been authenticated, I describe it as a “project” not a “program” because a large part of it’s operation is via a shared object that hooks into pppd, so if you connect to a Portslave terminal server and just start sending PPP data then the pppd will be launched and use the Portslave shared object for authentication. This dual mode of operation makes it a little tricky to develop and maintain, every significant update to pppd requires that Portslave be recompiled at the minimum, and sometimes code changes in Portslave have been required to match changes in pppd. CHAP authentication was broken in a pppd update in 2004 and I never fixed it, as an aside the last significant code change I made was to disable CHAP support, so I haven’t been actively working on it for 9 years.
I took over the Portslave project in 2000, at the time there were three separate forks of the project with different version numbering schemes. I used the release date as the only version number for my Portslave releases so that it would be easy for users to determine which version was the latest. Getting the latest version was very important given the ties to pppd.
When I started maintaining Portslave I had a couple of clients that maintained banks of modems for ISP service and for their staff to connect to the Internet. Also multi-port serial devices were quite common and modems where the standard way of connecting to the Internet.
Since that time all my clients have ceased running modems. Most people connect to the Internet via ADSL or Cable, and when people travel they use 3G net access via their phone which is usually cheaper, faster, and more convenient than using a modem. The last code changes I made to Portslave were in 2010, since then I’ve made one upload to Debian for the sole purpose of compiling against a new version of pppd.
I have no real interest in maintaining Portslave, it’s no longer a fun project for me, I don’t have enough spare time for such things, and no-one is paying me to work on it.
Currently Portslave has two Debian bugs, one is from a CMU project to scan programs for crashes that might indicate security flaws, it seems that Portslave crashes if standard input isn’t a terminal device [1]. That one shouldn’t be difficult to solve.
The other Debian bug is due to Portslave being compiled against an obsolete RADIUS client library [2]. It also shouldn’t be that difficult to fix, when I made it use libradius1 that wasn’t a difficult task and it should be even easier to convert from one RADIUS library to another.
But the question is whether it’s worth bothering. Is anyone using Portslave? Is anyone prepared to maintain it in Debian? Should I just file a bug report requesting that Portslave be removed from Debian?
Seven hours ago I was handing out how to vote cards for the Greens at the 2013 Australian Federal election. I was hoping that either we would have a Labor/Greens coalition or an outright majority for Labor. Unfortunately we got a Liberal majority in the lower house and it looks like some extreme right wing groups may get into the senate (replacements for “Family First” – the anti-Gay party).
For some reason the polling station where I was working only had volunteers from the three major parties (Greens, Labor, and Liberal) while other polling stations in the same electorate had volunteers from smaller parties such as the Sex Party and the Socialist Alliance.
The volunteers from the Liberal party ate McDonalds outside the polling station and afterwards McDonalds rubbish was left on the ground, the above picture isn’t particularly clear because I took it after 6PM when the polls closed. The Liberals didn’t care enough to put their rubbish in a bin, it’s an externality for them, if they get enough seats in the senate they will surely take the same approach to governing Australia. The Labor people didn’t take the effort to clean up the Liberal mess even though it wasn’t particularly difficult to do so, I think that’s the type of attitude that led to this election defeat. In the case of the McDonalds rubbish in question I put it in the bin so that when the primary school kids return on Monday their school won’t be too messy after the election. But in the case of the mess that is being made in Australian politics it will take many more Greens votes to allow us to clean it up.
Last night at the Annual General Meeting we had a motion to disincorporate The Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) [1]. The proposal was for LUV to cease being an incorporated society on condition that Linux Australia (LA) [2] accepts us as a sub-committee. As a sub-committee of LA we would elect our own committee to run things locally but have LA hold the finances, deal with all the paperwork that the government demands, and generally do as many of the non-core tasks associated with running a users’ group as possible.
When we discussed this at the LUV committee meetings it didn’t seem like a big deal. But as is often the case with political discussions it turned out to be difficult.
There was a lot of discussion about LUV supposedly ceasing to exist, people seem to think that LUV is defined by having an incorporated society. My impression was always that it was defined by a mailing list and having meetings – and I was involved in both before there was an incorporated society.
Lurkers and Ownership
During the discussion we had some input from members who were typically lurkers who seemed to feel that their property rights towards LUV were being infringed, this annoys me. I think that if someone chooses not to be involved in running an organisation then they should choose not to concern themselves with the details of how the organisation is to be run. People who attend the meetings should have a say in how the meetings are run and have reason to be concerned about anything that might affect them and the opinions of speakers also matter. People who are involved with mailing list discussions should have a say in how the lists are run. But people who have never volunteered for a position on the committee shouldn’t be greatly concerned about the internal issues of how things are run.
Finance
Some concern was expressed about the financial situation of LUV and whether we would still get enough donations to keep it running when combined with LA. There was even some FUD suggesting that LA would just take our money (they had assured us that all funds and donations would be ear-marked for us). The current LUV financial situation is that Red Hat pays for the venue for the monthly meetings and the rent for the venue comprises about 2/3 of all donations. The remaining 1/3 comes from one company. So in the current situation if Red Hat ceased donating then we would have 18 months to find another donor or cease holding meetings before our bank balance became unreasonably low. If the company which gives the other significant annual donation was to cease doing so then we could operate for a few years on savings but we would need to find some other source of funding.
It seems to me that joining LA would give us more financial security. Then if Red Hat ceased paying for the venue then LA could keep things running until we found another donor, I’m confident that LA wouldn’t allow LUV to just shut down because of a shortage of donations.
If people are really concerned about the financial situation of LUV then they should urgently seek further donations such that if any one donor decided to stop giving then we could still operate as normal. To achieve that goal I think we need at least another $1,000 per annum. This issue of redundancy in donations is something I raise every time that LUV finances are discussed.
My conclusion is that people aren’t really bothered about the financial security of LUV except when they are looking for reasons to avoid change.
Doing New Things
During the course of discussion about the future of LUV there were a number of requests for improvement. One significant request was for more support for regional Linux users. Some years ago we held a mini-conference in Ballarat which went well. I think it would be good to do such things again, the cost is not particularly great and I’m sure it would be accepted by LA for funding, but we need to organise it.
Organising such events is something that anyone can do. Any LUV member can plan an event, get costs for everything that is needed (food, accommodation, travel, etc) and then pitch it to the LUV committee in terms of which things should be paid by LUV and which by the members concerned. We could then work on getting additional funding from LA if necessary. But planning an event takes some effort and it’s often effort that can only be done by a local. Finding a suitable venue and getting some assurance that a large enough audience will attend is something that can’t be done remotely.
I think that the problem for LUV in regard to such things isn’t a lack of money or independence. I think that the problem is that the committee spends too much volunteer time on administrative tasks and not enough time directly doing things that benefit members and the community in general.
In the past I have declined nomination to the LUV committee because I felt that I could contribute more by giving lectures, finding other speakers, and doing other things to directly improve the group. I was on the committee last year and have now been elected to it again, but I’m starting to think that I made a mistake. Maybe I should have declined and let others work on the new model rules and other paperwork.
One committee member has claimed that the time taken on administrative tasks isn’t taking time away from other LUV related tasks, I invite any committee members who feel that way to address some of the services that members are requesting. Speaking for myself my lack of time directly impacts that I can do for the club.
I think that ownership of a club should be related to what people do for the club. If you have a feeling of ownership and lack ideas for how to contribute then you can ask the LUV mailing list, there are lots of people with suggestions for things to do.
Some years ago when I first got a LG U990 Viewty (which in some ways is the best phone I ever owned) I went swimming and left my phone in my bag. My phone happened to rest on my car keys and had vibration mode enabled, after a couple of missed calls I had a nasty scratched area on the phone screen. Since then I’ve been very wary about allowing metal objects to come in contact with a phone screen.
Now I have a Samsung Galaxy S with some sort of motherboard damage (it won’t even boot and I know it’s not a software issue because it was initially intermittent). A phone that old isn’t worth repairing (they sell on ebay for as little as $50) so it seemed worth testing how hard the screen is. The screen cover is Gorilla Glass which was the hardest glass available at the time the phone was new (apparently there are better versions of Gorilla Glass available now and my more recent phones should be tougher).
My first test was with one of my favorite Japanese kitchen knives, it didn’t scratch at all. Then I chose a knife sharpening stone as an obvious item that’s harder than a knife, it scratched the screen easily. A quartz pebble also scratched the screen when I used some force, so presumably concrete and brick would also scratch it. Tests with all current Australian coins and my car keys showed that the screen is too hard to be scratched by them. I also tested hitting the phone screen with my keys, I hit it much harder than would happen if I was to run while having my phone and my keys in the same pocket and there was no damage.
My conclusion is that any metal object you are likely to carry in your pocket is unlikely to cause any problem if knocked against the screen of a modern phone.
Kogan Mobile has just announced that Telstra succeeded in it’s attempt to break it’s contract with ISPone and thus end the Kogan Mobile business [1]. Over the last few years there has been a trend for all Australian telcos to increase mobile phone costs. There are some pre-paid companies that offer reasonable deals for people who don’t make many calls, but for people who make any significant amount of calls or use any significant amount of data transfer the prices have mostly been going up.
The big exceptions to the trend of increased prices were Kogan Mobile and Aldi who offered “unlimited” contracts at affordable rates. Kogan’s deal was initially $299 per annum (it was later increased a bit) for “unlimited” calls and SMS and 6G of data transfer per month (but not more than 1G in one day and not more than 3 days of more than 400M in a month). 6G per month is much more than most people could use in a month and 400M is enough data transfer that most people won’t be at risk of doing that 3 times in a month. While Kogan did impose some limits on calls and SMS they weren’t going to affect most people. So when I switched to Kogan I removed the apps that tracked bandwidth use and talked for as long as I wanted without bothering about cost. I don’t think I used much more data transfer or spoke for much longer, but it was good not to bother about such things.
Now it seems that Aldi Mobile [2] is the best remaining option for affordable mobile access in Australia for anyone who wants more than the basic use. Aldi’s option is $35 for 30 days of “unlimited” phone calls and SMS within Australia with 5G of data transfer, $420 for 360 days of “unlimited” calls and 5G of data per almost-month isn’t as good as $299 per 365/366 days and 6G of data per month. Only having 5G of data per almost-month isn’t a problem for me, but the significant increase in price is.
A big problem with Aldi is the limitations on “acceptable use” which aren’t as clear as for Kogan, Aldi gives “downloading gigabytes of data in a short period” as an example of unacceptable use, this isn’t nearly as good as Kogan’s daily limits of 3*400M or 1*1G in a month which can be tracked by software to avoid accidental breaches.
But I’ll use Aldi in spite of this risk. All the other telcos charge too much for plans which involve 2G of data per month. The 1.5G quota I had before Kogan was a real problem for me, I need a quota of at least 2G with no serious penalties for accidentally exceeding it or a quota that’s at least 3G.
Australia needs proper competition in the mobile phone market or significant government action. Forcing the current telcos to stop colluding would be one good option for the government but another option would be to create a government owned telco with a mandate to serve the public – much like Telstra was before John Howard sold it off.
Chromium is the free software build of the Google Chrome web browser. It’s essentially the same as the Google code but will often be an older version, particularly when you get Chromium from Debian/Stable (or any other Linux distribution that doesn’t track the latest versions all the time) and compare it to getting Chrome straight from Google.
My wife is using Chromium on an AMD Opteron 1212 for all the usual web browsing tasks. Recently I’ve noticed that it takes a lot of CPU time whenever she leaves a Google web site open, that can be Google+, Gmail, or Youtube.
Web standards are complex and it’s difficult to do everything the way that one might desire. Making a web browser that doesn’t take 100% CPU time when the user is away from their desk may be a difficult technical challenge. Designing a web site that doesn’t trigger such unwanted behavior in common web browsers might also be a challenge.
But when one company produces both a web browser and some web sites that get a lot of traffic it’s rather disappointing that they don’t get this right.
It could be that Google have fixed this in a more recent version of the Chrome source tree, and it could be that they fixed the browser code before rolling out a new version of Google+ etc which causes problems with the old version (which might explain why I’ve never seen this problem). But even if that is the case it’s still disappointing that they aren’t supporting older versions. There is a real need for computers that don’t need to be updated all the time, running a 3 month old Linux distribution such as Debian/Wheezy shouldn’t be a problem.
There’s also a possibility that part of the cause of the problem is that an Opteron 1212 is a relatively slow CPU by today’s standards and it’s the slowest system I’m currently supporting for serious desktop use. I don’t even think it was one of the fastest CPUs available when it was released 4 years ago. But I think we should be able to expect systems to remain usable for more than 4 years. The Opteron 1212 system is a Dell PowerEdge tower server that is used as a workstation and a file server, so while I get desktop systems with faster CPUs for free I want to keep using the old PowerEdge server to avoid data corruption. As an aside I’ve been storing important data on BTRFS for a year now and the only data loss I’ve suffered has been due to a faulty DIMM. The filesystem checksums built in to modern filesystems such as BTRFS and ZFS mean that RAM corruption covers a greater portion of the risk to data integrity and the greater complexity of the data structures in such filesystems gives the possibility of corruption that can’t be fixed without mkfs (as happened to me twice on the system with a bad DIMM).
The consequences of such wasted CPU use are reduced CPU time for other programs which might be doing something useful, extra electricity use, and more noise from CPU cooling fans (which is particularly annoying for me in this case).
Any suggesstions for reducing the CPU use of web browsers, particularly when idle?
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