I bought the iPod when it first came out. One of those 1st gen 5 GB ones with the mechanical wheels that came out six whole freakin’ years ago. Now I own a 4th gen 40 GB monochrome iPod that I use almost every work day, and one of those clippy 1 GB Shuffle things that I occasionally use when I walk the dog in the hood. I’ve had the battery and hard drive replaced on the bigger iPod, so it’s still alive and kicking, but I’ve been waiting to upgrade for the last while. I think I’m still waiting. Today’s announcements just don’t cut it for me: the iPod touch looks awesome - many of my coworkers have iPhones, so I know exactly how compelling the wide display and touch interface is. But 16 GB just doesn’t cut it, since I carry around at least 30 gigs of music; and the point of the large display is to watch movies, which isn’t exactly easy on the storage. And the Wi-Fi ability isn’t that interesting either: wherever I’m near wireless Internet, I’m pretty much near a computer anyways - I’d rather just get an iPhone for the better cellular connectivity. As for the iPod classic, it’s definitely got the space all right - I’d have a hard time filling 80 or 160 gigs - but I’d be thinking wistfully about that iPhone touch screen as my poor finger goes round.. and round.. and round that darn wheel. Guess I’m going to hold out longer and wait for the next iteration. By then hopefully it’ll be 32 GB of flash memory with the touch interface, which makes somewhat more sense. (Or maybe I’ll still complain about the lack of storage.)

Our DSL modem died last Sunday, breathing its last wheezing gasp under an onslaught of BitTorrent traffic. It took over an interminable week for the replacement to arrive, including a visit from an AT&T technician who came out and verified that yes, it was a modem issue. We could have told him that. Susan rallied bravely under undue e-mail deprivation, while I fretted about lost webserver hits. Modem arrived last night; it took us two hours last night with the aid of three extremely patient DSLExtreme technical support people to get the replacement going again.

Note to future self: when technical support people tell you at the beginning of a conversation to check that you used the correct power supply, you double and triple check that. Just because the blinky lights are lit doesn’t mean it’s got the right juice.

So no longer do we have to drive back to work on a Friday afternoon just to print out a forgotten camping reservation confirmation; or wonder about Catherine Deneuve’s age in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (she was no more than twenty); or try to rip a CD in iTunes and realise typing in track names is a pain in the ass. Huzzah!

I’m in the middle of seven days off work that I took after shipping beta. Not like I didn’t have enough to do around the house (carpentry and the like), but nonetheless in anticipation of some free time, a few weeks ago I ordered a FPGA board to play around with.

Now my exposure to digital circuit design spans one semester of CPSC 218 - “CMPTER ORGNZTION” on my transcript (I notice UBC doesn’t offer this course any more). I remember for the last project, my lab partner and I breadboarded some ICs to power a 7 segment LED counter and botched a connection somewhere, because the damn thing never lit up properly. I’ve had no need to program Verilog or VHDL before this. In other words, I’m an abject newbie. But lately at work, I’ve been programming closer to the metal - assembly and multithreading horrors - and some of the cool kids are doing robotics, so I figured learning how to program an FPGA might be an interesting new hobby. It’s certainly a better way to spend time than experience grinding in Final Fantasy.

So I ordered a Xylo board from KNJN and it showed up the next day. As you might surmise, I know nothing about FPGA hobbyist kits, but this thing looks pretty nice. An Altera 100-pin Cyclone FPGA is packaged on it. 5V power comes in on USB connection, the FPGA can also gets its programming that way. It’s set up for VGA output, LCD text output, Ethernet, and some other interfaces I know nothing about (JTAG and I2C). Of the maybe 65 available for I/O on the FPGA, there are 43 exposed I/O pins on the board: 35 on three headers, 5 wired for VGA output, 2 to a secondary connector, and one for a user clock. Some useful prewired pins as well: two pins connected to the on-board LEDs, 1 pin connected to an on-board push button, 2 pins connected to the I2C bus.

The programming environment is Altera’s Quartus II Software. The “Web Edition” is currently free (alas not so for Linux). I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of the software, but so far I’ve been able to type in some Verilog, make the appropriate pin assignments, compile to a RBF (”raw binary file”), upload that to the FPGA and make LEDs blink. Pretty painless even for a newbie.

Being a graphics geek, I care more about the potential VGA capabilities. The five pins to the VGA header aren’t completely obvious; for example, you have to look at a VGA pinout diagram to figure out that VGA pin 13 is the horizontal sync pin and is connected to pin 99 of the FPGA. Also, the RGB pins look like they’re supplied at 3.3V - not sure if the supplied VGA interface is supposed to take care of the downvolt to 0.7V. And with only 1 pin each to RGB, that’s 3-bit color: only 8 possible colors with the default interface, I’d have to add some DACs (or build my own resistor ladders) to get more colors. Anyways, some other potential projects to toy with include controlling some RC servo motors, since that looks like it’s easily done with a FPGA. Think armatures and stop motion animation. Pretty cool stuff to play with. I’ll post some more about it when I get past the Verilog learning curve.

My laptop hard drive was obviously on its death bed this weekend, so I had to order a replacement which showed up today - that’s the foil pouch on the top. The weekend before that I finally got fed up with the increasingly loud whining coming from my desktop PC and replaced its hard drive as well. As an incredibly absurd result of this, there are currently eleven hard drives in my house right now in varying degrees of health. Three of them are in computers I use regularly, one is in a Tivo, two are in iPods (one used 4th gen, one unused 1st gen with barely useable battery), one is from Dorritta’s old PC and still has some of her data on it (left drive above), two are old Western Digital hard drives that got old and intolerably whiny but still work (one of them being the drive in the middle), one is in a enclosure and used for backups (the black box), the last is the dying laptop drive I need to replace. Combined the sum total capacity of these eleven drives is nearly 700 gigs. This doesn’t include the busted hard drive I sent to Dell for recycling this week (another Western Digital. Why did I persist in buying WD drives? I don’t know, but I’ve switched to Seagate Barracudas for their warranties), the couple of iffy drives I gave to Manh a couple of months ago (I think both were in the Tivo at some point), and various other hard drives that might still be mouldering in a closet in Vancouver somewhere. I think I’ve owned something like twenty hard drives over my life, quite possibly adding up to a terabyte of storage. Surely this must be enough to store some sizable portion of the Library of Congress. There is no way I’ve created more than a few gigabytes of anything meaningful in my entire lifetime, and no this does not count my ripped CD collection. Something is quite wrong with this picture. Shouldn’t affordable holographic perpendicular indestructible instant and other buzzword compliant storage have been invented by now? We’re still at the mercy of spinning plates with bits of metal floating a couple of hundred molecules above, which just sounds so.. primitive.

Speaking of Dorritta’s PC: Rosalind and I replaced it with a Mac mini for her birthday after I got fed up having to deal with Windows crap - the last straw being two trips to Vancouver two weeks apart where on the first trip I fixed her computer, then on the second trip Mom’s computer, and then immediately after I returned the second time I got a phone call saying Dorritta’s computer had just died after she accidentally booted off some wrong floppy. Sister’s initial impression? “Ooo, it’s like a cute bento box!”, then she tried to pry off the lid in the thoughts it was a laptop of some sort. *shakes head* literature students. My initial impression? As I suspected earlier, they’re fantastic machines for relatives - quiet, powerful enough (heck, it’s beefier than my current Mac laptop), comes with a fairly decent software package (although I did end up giving her my little used copy of Office X), and she hasn’t broken it yet in two weeks. Quite promising. Just keep in mind they have no keyboard and mouse port and only have two USB ports. And Apple keyboards (with USB port replicators) are seemingly impossible to find in brick and mortar stores. Which means if you’re plugging in an old keyboard and mouse, you’re probably going to have to get a USB hub to plug in a printer.

Not much blogworthy, but apparently blog I must.

I haven’t really done much lately - my have a life quotient is pretty near zero at the moment. Other than the rare movie (Kill Bill) or concert (Emanuel Ax) it’s been home, work, home again to vegetate, the odd video game, and on the weekends, deal with the latest house issue. Haven’t been inclined to climb, play music, or move ahead with getting a driver’s license (my latest newest priority). Partly it’s November blues, partly it’s work stressing me out. I seem to exist in a robotic state lately - caught myself losing track of what day of the week on occassion. At least life goes on around me. Mom just turned sixty five and is going to Taiwan and Vietnam for over a month in just over a week. David (the brother-in-law) just turned forty, and is enjoying a semi-permanent teaching post. Wayne and Karen just had a daughter - I guess it’s a good thing they didn’t go with “Chewbecca” (one of my more inspired moments). And Susan dressed up as a blue 2×2 Lego brick for Hallowe’en. Which is, as Greg says, a pretty good indicator.

I put together a new web server/router box. While trying to replace the extremely loud hard drive on the previous model it got into a state where it would only boot with its innards lying on the floor.

So I bought a cute little box made by Shuttle which now happily (and almost inaudibly) sits on my desk routing packets and serving up web pages such as this one. I guess it’s no surprise that when The Geek Test memed its way through Pixar, I scored 35.89544% - Major Geek.

This is my new toy. Warning: geeky description to follow.

A couple of weekends ago, I was going through the place recycling all my obsolete computer junk when I found my old STB WinTV card among other sadly unused relics. A quick Google search discovered that someone had written open source drivers for this and other Brooktree-based boards. So I stuck the card in my Windows XP box, installed the drivers without much hassle, and then installed DScaler, and was soon happily watching TV on my screen - albeit without working sound (something to do with the sound chips on that make of card).

I then looked around at the rest of my sorry computer equipment: one homebrew 700 MHZ XP machine, plastic front taken clean off (after the last vacation it refused to start until I yanked the front and jiggled random cables, snapping the plastic front off my DVD-ROM drive at the same time); one homebrew Linux gateway machine, with a half-dead video card (drew half the screen in psychedelic colors). I thought about: my growing MP3 collection (legit - I convert all my audio CDs immediately); deinterlacing hardware I had recently considering purchasing; how slow Warcraft 3 played on the XP box; and future plans for buying a projector and upgrading to a better stereo system.

Then I found the article “Building A Home Theater PC” over on ExtremeTech, and my fate was sealed. Based in large part upon the recommendations in that article, I bought components from Newegg (whom I heartily recommend - cheap and fast processing), and built myself a new PC, destroying the XP machine for spare parts and rebuilding the Linux box at the same time.

I stuck with the recommended Cooler Master ATC 600 case, which is a nice case for that high-end stereo component look. To keep things quiet, I went for a Zalman CNPS6500B CPU fan and an Enermax power supply; these fans are absolutely silent when cooling a 2 GHZ Pentium IV chip (which is what I bought). The noisiest thing in the case right now are the 3 smaller case fans (I could probably disable those) and the hard drive itself (which I transferred from the old machine). The DVD-ROM drive is an old Pioneer I’ve had for a while, while for the video board I threw in an ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder,

After two weeks I’m quite happy with the result. It’s now sitting on the floor of my living room (no stereo rack), halfway between my TV and the rest of the computer equipment. The TIVO, cable, and PS2 are routed through the composite input (no component inputs on ATI boards, unfortunately), while video outputs are going to the TV and the computer monitor. The ATI card and its associated software is responsible for switching among and deinterlacing video inputs, playing DVDs, and sending output to the monitor and TV, and it’s controllable via the remote control that came with the graphics card. That part works reasonably well now, although it was a bit of a pain to set up - ATI’s software is not that tolerant if you do things out of order; it also could use a bit of work in the robustness department particularly if you start closing the multimedia applications and trying to reopen them. When everything is actually running though the results are good.

Meanwhile I’ve moved all MP3 collection over to the new machine, and have finally started to rip all of my classical CDs as well. Audio is currently just using the mainboard’s builtin, and going out my crappy mini-stereo, controlled by MusicMatch (and only because their interface to tagging is pretty good; I still use LAME on Linux to convert CDs). Still it sounds as good as it did before, and it’s a hell of a lot more convenient.

For future work I plan to get a clean sound card for digital out (the M-Audio Delta cards look nice), a receiver to decode, some more speakers for a 5.1 setup, and a projector hooked up to the VGA output. And by then I better have some more living space to put them in..