Mobility and media

As a birthday present to my self I recently bought an Archos PMA400. I have to say that this device is very nice and while not my idea of the perfect mobile device, which in my opinion should basically have the full computing power of a server, wireless, digital telephony connections, and long battery life, its not far from it. Aside from being a standard PDA which runs Linux, it has a number of other features including being able to plug into a TV and record any channel and play it back either on the TV or its own screen. While that type of functionality is not unique, especially as the recent trend towards PVRs continues, what is unique is how user friendly and convenient Archos has made it. My pma comes with a cradle that you plug it in and then plug the cables (scart for the euros) into the relevant parts of the TV. Now when you plug it into the cradle it enables an infrared receiver on the cradle and the included full, normal remote control now controls your pma. Even better then that the PMA learns the signals that activate your TV / stereo etc and now you can control ALL the devices via the PMA which sits there and relays stuff back to the relevant device via IR. Battery life, while not as good as I would ideally want it, is enough to play music for 9 hours and videos for 4.5 hours. All in all its fairly amazing and because it runs linux I can support ANY codec I want, including DRM'd if I was so inclined (I'm not) through to the more windows centric and of course all the open source ones. If any of you reading this have any familiarity with OpenPMA then let me know because I think that is the firmware I will try running on it next. So I've got my media player now what?

For a long time I've been uncertain about what to do with the digitalization of media. As a technologist I think its great, I mean its so much easier to list, select and play digital songs / movies then having to swap physical media around. The problem I have is that I'm very particular about the quality of both movies and music as I have spent a small fortune on a good home cinema and I can hear the difference between a 128kb mp3 encoded song and a 192kb one. The obvious solution is to just store everything in a lossless format (that is in its pure unaltered form from the cd / dvd), however, the concern about that is the amount of space that would require. Here the nice thing is, that having procrastinated so long, the amount of storage required, while once infeasible, is now very very affordable. So I decided that I would store all my media in a lossless format and then transcode on the fly any time I wanted to put it onto a more mobile device, like my Archos PMA. I set out to do some research on codecs and media.

The first thing that I discovered was that WAV format, which I had mistakenly thought was a raw music format is actually in fact more of a general container and not specifically for music. As a result of this there are a lot of extra things in a .wav file then you would need for encoding pure music for example. Looking into it further I discovered that FLAC was generally regarded as the best lossless format, the reasons being that it compresses up to 2/3 more then original WAV format, it can be streamed, tagged is completely open source and widely supported for a lossless format. After my investigations I have decided that I will store all my music in FLAC and then transcode them into AAC format for listening on portable devices or where space is an issue, AAC having been chosen after I conducted a number of double blind listening tests to see what my ears prefer. Now it was on to movies.

Storing movies is a lot more problematic then storing music. For starters there is two aspects to any movie, the picture and the sound, and while playing back picture is relatively straightforward, playing back sound can be very complex. The main problem with the sound for my requirements is that often the mechanism that is playing the pictures wants to also process the sound, in my case a computer. The issue with that is that no computer, regardless of how good a sound card, can run my speakers at the necessary requirements as well as my amplifier. This was causing me a lot of problems initially until I realised that I could keep the sound and just allow the mechanism that is playing the pictures to "pass through" the sound to another external decoder, in my case my aplifier. The question then was what was a satisfactory quality?

The question of quality I decided was moot in the end because I will do a similar thing with my movies as I have done with my music, that is I will just keep the full dvd image and when I want to watch the movie on another device I will just transcode it to something else. Now the question is what is the best something else? After doing some research it seems that Divx5 is generally regarded as the best picture codec, however, xvid4 is not far behind. Xvid (divx backwards) is an opensource codec that started off a fair way behind the current codecs at the time but up until the recent release of divx5 was leading the way. Even now, while many think that divx5 is better then the current incarnation of xvid, there are some areas which it would appear to be better, and as a believer in open source I strongly suspect that xvid will shortly regain its crown as the leading codec. Because I support open source and xvid is very widely supported, I will encode all my movies to xvid for use on mobile devices.

So there you have it. My advice to people considering moving their collection of music and movies to pure digital formats is to go out and buy a cheapish SATA raid card and 4 x 300gig hd's. This means that you will about 1 TB of storage which will be more then enough for most peoples entire cd and dvd collection. Store the cd's in FLAC format and the dvd's in a raw image and transcode them into AAC or xvid if you need to play them on more mobile devices.

Playing catchup

Well it's been a while since I last posted and like in other things I'm currently playing catchup with my blogs. First cab off the rank is philosophy.

I recently turned 30, which is an age that I never thought of myself as being. By that I mean that all my life I've never really planned or thought ahead at all, I'm just interested in the here and now. The biggest surprise of my life in that regard was finishing university. I had, like most of my peers, "mapped" my life from school to uni and then ... well in my case nothing, I had thought that I'd be an acedemic. Of course once I actually got to the end of my honours year I was thoroughly sick of what I had been studying and hacking for 16 hours a day instead. While it was obvious that IT was what I should be doing it was a big wake up call in the sense that for the first time I had to think about something after university, a first. Turning 30 was a similar experience. The age itself doesn't worry me, afterall I've been steadily working towards various things, using my time learning and exploring concepts and ideas and all in all I feel stronger, faster, smarter and more knowledgeable then when I was, say 21. That said 30 was simply an age that I had never thought of in connection with myself. So I decided to take stock of what I was doing with my life and where I wanted to go, so instead of my usual birthday, which for those of you that don't know me is spent wandering around old haunts reminiscing, I went to hampstead heath and thought about the future. For the record I can highly recommend going to Hampstead heath for a walk and a think, it has a great view (something that I think is important for thinking) and it is one of the few places that you can get a bit of space in London. In fact I liked it so much I'm now seriously thinking about moving there shortly.

I spent about 5 hours just walking around thinking, after a particularly good thought I'd sit down for half an hour and write it all down. I approached it from the perspective of what I liked about my life and what I didn't like and what steps I'd need to do to fix the things I didn't like. A lot of what I came up with is a little too personal to put down in a public blog like this but I promised various people I would write up some kind of synthesis so here are the relevant points:

• In order to do accomplish anything then I must be passionate about it. I should focus on doing things that I enjoy while avoiding things that I hate, common sense but easy to get distracted from. The following serves as those lists, though not exhaustive:

ENJOY

- learning - mastering something - tinkering with computers
- rigorous examination
- perfecting something
- competition
- adventure
- neophilia
- space ( both personal and mental)
- concrete objectives
- nice objects

HATE

- slow thinkers
- repetition
- conformity
- bad physical shape
- lack of accomplishment
- time where nothing is learnt

Finding motivation will come not from just one thing that I enjoy, but should rather come from a combination of things that I enjoy. Long term motivation means more discipline then I am currently enforcing on myself, while doing something that you love is easy, you don't always love it and shying away from something the moment I come across a part of it that I don't love is very counter productive. I should structure my life so that I can achieve goals (see accomplishments). I should also regularly think about what I'm doing and where I'm going and spend time considering possibilities.
Some thoughts on what matches some of the above are things like learning to code well which matches many of the intellectual side of things and doing regular physical activities matches the others. This suggests that it would be very beneficial for me to learn to code and schedule some regular "adventure" type physical activities. Mountaineering, canyoning, skiing and walking all seem appropriate.

• Accomplishments can sometimes be smaller things that require little amount of work or perhaps just a moment of inspiration, but more commonly they require serious amounts of work and dedication. I'm not very good at the later and so
  I should get in the habit of formulating lists and actively ensure that I am working towards the goals on the list. As part of this there needs to be some form of measurement, a regular litmus test to ensure that I have forward progress, this also helps the feeling of underachievement that often comes after working on something for a long period of time but without finishing it,
  even when in many cases you are making big progress (ie learning a language isa very good example of this). I need to accept myself as an accomplishment andnot require any external validation of that. I need to appreciate that without
  motivation it is highly unlikely that I will have any accomplishments.

So there you have it, motivation and accomplishments were the key for that train of thought. What that all equates to a list of things that I've given myself to work on and regularly check that I'm actually achieving. Again the list is personal but includes things like ensuring that I'm actually going out and socialising as well as getting back in shape.

Actually I'll end it there and make new blog entries for the different topics ;)

Time and M$

Not going to write much, but thought I'd share some interesting links with you all. First up is this blog entry, an interesting insight into some of the things going on over at Microsoft. I try to keep my eye on MS and it was with some interest a few months back that I read an article about big changes going on there, it looks like they are not working.

On a different note ben sent me an interesting link to help with time management. Reading it just read like common sense to me, that said its useful to have it crystalized somewhere so I thought I'd link it in case anyone else was interested in such things.

Sleepless sickness

Well it's been a while since I blogged for which I largely blame the combination of an obsessive gaming period and illness. I have been sick probably only twice in the past 10 years and both of those were some time ago, so it was quite a shock to have spent most of last week in bed with some kind of "cold". I say cold because everyone seems to get very upset when I use the word "flu" as they seem to think it implies some near death experience, I'm not convinced as you can tell from my tone, but nonetheless I'll refer to it as a cold. What was really annoying though, was that it co-incided with a bout of insomnia. I sometimes find myself so fired up over something, normally when I'm learning something, that I can barely sleep. This is normally not a problem as it actually helps me learn, but in this case, coupled with the cold it just meant that I couldn't get any sleep to give myself a chance of getting over it so I was pretty unwell for a while. Thankfully though it seems to be over now and I'm back to work and productive things. One annoying thing though is that I seem to have really screwed up my neck over the last few months, I'm not sure what it is by massages and careful placement of my head while I sleep hasn't seemed to help. I guess I'm going to have to go to some specialist but for some reason I have an instinctive aversion to trusting Brittish medical facilities.

Come fly with me we'll fly, lets fly away

Here I am blogging again while 11km up in the sky over the "java sea" (the irony isn't lost on me) doing just under mach 1. I have come to the realisation that the problem with long distance flying is not now lack of options, it's that you don't want to do anything. They still have the antiquated system in place where you need to turn up 3 hours before an international flight, which means that even if your flight was at a reasonable hour, you still had to get up at some horrible time because you had to get to the airport (invariably located a long way away from where you are staying) 3 hours before the flight started. This time round I actually timed how long it took me from when I turned up at the check in desk with no ticket to when I was waiting at the passenger lounge having gone through customs and 2 security checks, total time - 11 minutes. Then I just had to sit down and enjoy Sydneys International airport (Kingford Smith) hospitality, which unsurprising to those of you who use it regularly, sucks badly. To top it off my plane was about 1 hour late leaving Sydney, though I actually prefer that as now I have one hour less to spend in Singapore occupying myself waiting for the London leg of the flight.
Now I'm sitting on the plane wondering if my next flight will have wireless net coverage or if I should use up my remaining time on this one, I think I'll assume that it does and just use up MOST of my time :) I might even try a skype voip conversation shortly and see if the prohibitive rates they charge for making phone calls is a thing of the past once and for all or if the telephone companies are in cahoots with the isp. Fortunately my headphones are still taking me to a world of sonic bliss where I am able to ignore all the crap going on around me. On which note it has to be said travelling with Australians is a good thing, on the whole all Aussies are used to travelling LONG distances and consequently spending long durations travelling, the result is that they are actually a fairly pleasant bunch to travel with, far less annoying then other cultures / socities I often find myself in the company of while travelling.
So here I am, I can do anything on my laptop (well for another 10 hours or so), including things like programming or watching various shows I have downloaded, or I could watch some in flight on demand videos or I could read. In fact I want to do none of the above as I am too tired to really concentrate well and I'd rather just catch up on some sleep, which is also fairly problematic due to the fact that there is drone of jet engines in the background and more annoying, the habit of planes to randomly drop a few feet every 10 minutes or so which sets of your body's sense of equiblium which in turn startles you out of sleep with a vague sense of impending doom. Fun. Perhaps I'll go back to baiting the nearby baby with scary faces (enhanced by my recent shaved head I've found) and generally making myself popular with people who arn't as audibly protected as myself.

Australia

Well I'm back in Australia. It hasn't even been a year since I was last here and I'm back again, the reason, Best man at my friend Adam Skovron's wedding. I have decided that I won't be coming back for a couple of years so I took off 3 weeks and have made a real trip of it this time, even to the extent of not spending a few days in Japan like I wanted to, so that I can catch up with everyone that I wanted to see (i'm not quite there yet, but I'm close!). I find it really interesting seeing Australia now, it doesn't feel like home, London doesn't either for that matter, and whatever ties I once had here are now only in the form of memories. There are some key differences that I've noticed this time around though.
The sun. You just can't explain it to someone who hasn't spent time in the Australian sun. People from other sunny parts of the world think they know, but they still don't, the sun in Australia is harsh, really harsh. Sydney still sits underneath the hole in the ozone and you can actually discern a clear difference standing out in it. Yesterday I decided to walk into the city over the harbour bridge. I looked out the window from my mothers apartment (in Milsons Point) and saw an overcast day and so left my sun glasses at home and didn't bother with sun screen. I left the apartment and start walking, I had just started to cross the harbour bridge when the sun said "theres ben! rare spot! kill him" and the clouds parted and the sun light washed over me. I guess that I was walking for about 13-18 minutes in the sun all up by the time I arrived at my destination. I was absolutely soaked with perspiration and, predictably, thoroughly sun burnt. For those of you that don't know I have recently decided to act on an age old promise to myself, where I always stated that when I got to the point with my hair that I had a bald patch on top and I personally thought it looked stupid I would just shave it all off, which is precisely what I did. Personally I don't think that it looks too bad, but what little protection I had gained before from my strategically placed hair has now vanished and as a consequence I currently look like a beetroot. I look around and see everyone, even the "geeks", are brown. You just can't help it over here, if you move around in the sun at all, then you will be brown. Interestingly though, it doesn't look healthy to me, it looks in fact, like they are being slowly spit roasted by the Australian sun. It's no wonder that Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
Something else that I found interesting was the cost of things. You'd think that living in London that I could rightly expect that everything was cheaper, pretty much regardless of what it was, or at the very least food. Food is something that Australia unquestionably has it better then London. There is an abudance of top quality fresh produce that London can just never match and so even when the chef isn't that good, the fact that all the produce is so good makes up for it and you are still left with a decent meal, but if you can get a good chef, then its heaven. So you could say that food was something that I was really looking forward to, and it hasn't let me down, but what was interesting was checking out the prices. It's still accurate to say that the cheapest meals in Sydney are less then half the price of something comparable in London, that is that it is still possible to eat well for AUD $10. That is not really possible in London. It is also fair to say that if you want to go and drop 200 pounds per person on a meal that you actually can't spend that much (short of alcohol) in Australia, but what has changed is the middle of the road meal. In London I regularly dine out, so I can comfortably say that a nice meal will normally cost you around 10-18 pounds, depending on whether you are having entres or not. I can now say after eating out pretty much exclusively since I arrived at all kinds of places that the cost is very similar now in Sydney, and, in some cases its even more expensive. It really took me as a surprise, I don't object to paying a little more but it really shattered the image of Australia being cheap in my mind.
Body culture. It's the largest difference between the Australian population and that of any in Europe, especially England. When I walk around in England you notice that many people while not overweight, are definitely well padded. On the whole it means that the guys look fairly big and the women quite curvy (i'm not complaining mind you!). When you walk around Australia though, you notice that neither the guys nor the women have ANY excess body fat. The result is that the guys all look muscle bound, simply because you can actually see their muscles, which in most cases are actually quite small, but I was so used to not seeing any muscles (ie I can't think of one person at work who strikes me as being "muscley") so I had this feeling that I was walking around surrounded by people that live in the gym. The women are noticibly hotter on average then their european counterparts, but again you can almost see the obsession with their appearence and the effort it takes to keep themselves looking like they do. It's a testamount to the difference that weather plays in profile of an average citizen. The final thing of note is about perspective.
Most city people, regardless of which city it is in the world (at least in my experience) are happy to tell you about how different they are from their "country" brethren, normally heavilly laced with quips and derogatory observations about how the country folk are slow, dumb or even inbred. In many cases it is true, not that there is necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with country people, or living in the country for that matter, but simply that there is a measurable difference in the average opinion on many topics and a slightly slower pace of life. What I found interesting this time around is that I now see such a difference between people that I know that have lived in many large cities and those that havn't left, for example, Sydney. Living in London (but the concept is applicable to any other large city) is very different from living in Sydney. The easiest explanation is of course culture and population and that is very true, but there are also different psychologies at work and different approaches of the government and businesses as well. The result of all of this in my opinion is that if you live in a few different large cities you generate a kind of "meta-city" person, someone that has adapted to live in ANY city, which means a very open mind, that has been forced to see things from a number of perspectives. This time around i've noticed that a number of the people that I've chatted with seem to be really stuck in the "Sydney' frame of mind, where their only reference and the only meaningful perspective for them is that of a Sydneysider. While living in the country or just one city is not a bad thing, it does seem to mean that you have to work harder to not get stuck in a given frame of mind, especially where in a country like Australia, all the media is controlled by one or two people. It almost raises the question to what extent are we already generating populaces in the image that the governments want via popular media.

Technology penetration

Well its finally happened, I'm writing this blog from 10km up in the sky currently over the Black Sea at little under mach 1, and as you can plainly tell, I'm on the net! I must admit I was pretty sceptical when, bleary eyed, waiting to get on the damn plane this morning I was greeted by two attactive lasses who tried to give me some cards, and were muttering what I took to be something for sale. My normal scepticism almost cost me the best freebie I've had in a while, one free hour of wireless net access on my flight. Of course, as a geek I normally find it hard to engage women and ask for favours, but with the right incentive I've found that its quite easy... needless to say I now have enough net access to make my flight bearable :) Its not blisteringly fast, but its actually far far better then I thought it would be, perhaps at about ISDN speed, maybe even slightly faster just with an unusually high latency of around 2 seconds or so, which I assume is the time taken for it to bounce of various satellites.
On a different note I recently bought a pair of new ear phones, or more accurately, in canal ear phones. The concept of the in ear phones is simple, put the sound as close as possible to the ear drum directly by making you insert the head phones into your canal, it sounds a little odd, but after a few attempts you get used to it (for those of you, who like my father, panic about the idea of putting anything into your ears and the consequences of loud bursts of noise from your audio source, you needn't be worried as it comes with a sound filter that will block out any loud spikes in the audio feed). The benefits of doing this are that you need less power to drive the speakers and the speakers can be smaller, there is much more clarity as there is no interference due to sound traveling through the air. What this also means is that you effectively make a seal by inserting the ear phones, which means, you guessed it a MASSIVE reduction in back ground noise. This is the key thing on a flight, I'm sitting here surrounded by people talking, babies screaming and some lovely big Royles Royce engines and I can only hear Beethovens 9th symphony. Bliss, no really, its fucking bliss I have my own private world of sound. There are other benefits as well, most ear "buds" are actually detrimental to your ears, primarily because they don't block out ambient background noise and result in the user turning up the volume to drown it out and thus causing long term hearing damage. Due to the fact that the speakers are so close to my ear drums and the seal I lose about ~30db of background noise, meaning that I have to turn down the ear phones in order for it to be comfortable, from my reading it would appear that the in canal ear phones are actually the best of ALL the different personal speakers you can get for your long term hearing.
So you'd think with my ear phones, and wireless net connection I'd be able to amuse myself, and you'd be right. What's even more amazing though is that I am still spoilt for choice, I have on demand movies, not the normal timered, 4 or 5 heavily edited movies, but a solid 150 all of which I can play when and how I want. I just watched the "Edukators" are really good german art film which I meant to catch when it was at the cinemas a few months back but that caught my eye when flicking through the on demand movies.
Now if the plane doesn't drop out of the sky I might JUST be able to have a pleasant flight :)