Monitor Woes

I decided to finally replace the ageing CRT monitor of my desktop PC, after having repeatedly put it off over the last few years. This CRT monitor, a 17" Samsung Samtron 75E, had served me remarkably well for over 11 years. When its display started to blur and intermittently turn yellow (cured by a hard whack on its side), despite a couple of repairs that seemed to initially fix the issues, I knew it was time to say good-bye to it. Since it is nearly impossible to buy a CRT monitor these days, I set out to buy an LCD monitor. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an affordable LCD monitor good enough to replace my old CRT monitor and I had to ultimately settle for a less-than-perfect replacement LCD monitor.

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An Ideal Electronic Book Reader

As a bibliophile with a limited space to hoard dead-tree books and without an access to a well-stocked library, I would like to move on to reading electronic books on electronic book readers. However, I am holding off buying one of the many electronic book readers already available in the market since I feel that they still have some way to go. So what would I like to see in an ideal electronic book reader?

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The Kindle 2

As was widely anticipated, Amazon launched the Kindle 2 yesterday at an initial price of about $360. Though the new Kindle has many improvements over its predecessor (and some surprising regressions), it still falls short of what I wish for in an electronic book reader. Despite its shortcomings, the Kindle 2 provides a great overall package compared to other electronic book readers, but only if you live in the US.

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Electronic Book Readers

As I have lamented before, I do not have access to a well-stocked and conveniently-located library here in Bangalore that lends books at reasonable rates. The alternative of buying all the books that I want to read is not just an expensive proposition - I also do not have enough space in my home to stock all such books. For some time now, I have been eyeing electronic book readers as a solution to this problem. It looks like I will very soon (but not quite yet) be able to get such a device at an affordable price.

Besides saving lots of space and providing unprecedented portability, electronic books also have some additional advantages over ordinary books:

• There are lots of freely-available electronic books. For example, Project Gutenberg provides electronic versions of thousands of classic books.


• You can easily make backup copies of (non-DRM-crippled) electronic books. This is unlike ordinary books, which can get damaged, lost or stolen.


• It is much easier to search through an electronic book.


• It is easier to enlarge the font of an electronic book or have the text read out by a text-to-speech software to help the visually-impaired folks.


• You save trees from being cut to produce paper.


• Electronic books should be cheaper than ordinary books since the publisher can very easily produce as many copies of such books as it wants.


• The Internet makes it much faster to deliver an electronic book than an ordinary book, when you order them through an on-line retailer. You also save on the shipping costs.


• Since software is usually used to write and typeset books these days, electronic books can be produced with no additional effort.

Of course, electronic books will never quite have the "feel" of ordinary books. Some of us also love the different smells of different books. An electronic book reader is quite delicate and more expensive when compared to an ordinary book. Unless an electronic book is in an open format like plain-text, HTML or PDF, it is quite possible that future electronic book readers will not be able to read it. Some publishers intentionally cripple electronic books with DRM making it more difficult to do things that are otherwise quite simple to do with an ordinary book (for example, share it with a friend). Many of the electronic books are unreasonably priced compared to the corresponding paper versions in spite of the fact that it is far cheaper to produce and distribute an electronic version of a book.

All this aside, there has been a huge downside of electronic books till recently - reading electronic books has not been as comfortable as reading ordinary books for most people. It is quite straining on the eyes to read lots of text on a computer monitor or on the tiny LCD screens of smart-phones and PDAs. It is also difficult to read such text in bright light. Even the dedicated electronic book readers have suffered from this problem. You can print out an electronic book to ordinary paper, but this is either too expensive or not feasible for most people.

This has now changed due to the availability of "electronic paper" displays. These displays look just like ordinary paper and are therefore quite easy on the eyes. They only use power when the displayed image needs to be changed and thus can run on a battery charge for much longer periods than LCD displays. Though the technology has been around since the 1970s, it has only recently become commercially viable. There are now several electronic book readers based on this display technology and judging by the reviews of these devices, we might just have passed an inflection point in the history of electronic books.

Here are some of the electronic book reader devices based on electronic paper technology currently available in the market, along with their prices as advertised at the moment:

1. Kindle, by Amazon, $400 (Ars Technica review of the Kindle)


2. PRS-505, by Sony, $300 (Ars Technica review of the PRS-505)


3. Iliad, by iRex, $784 (Ars Technica review of the Iliad)


4. Cybook, by Bookeen, $480


5. Hanlin, by Jinke, $300


6. BEBOOK, by Endless Ideas, $400


7. SoriBOOK, by Diginaru, $400

Ars Technica usually provides in-depth and unbiased reviews and therefore I have also linked to a review of a device on Ars Technica wherever available. MobileRead has a comparison-matrix of electronic book reader devices. You can also find a lot of nice videos on YouTube that show most of these devices in action, giving you a feel for these devices that is very difficult to get by just reading the reviews.

For example, here is a little video review of the Amazon Kindle:

Of these devices, the Amazon Kindle seems to have the best overall package in terms of price, connectivity and availability of electronic books. I like its integration with Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia. I also like its ability to look up the definition of a word in the integrated dictionary. Unfortunately, it also looks like the ugliest of the lot with some rather weird design choices in my opinion. It also cannot natively display PDF files. Amazon should release a newer version of the Kindle that rectifies these mistakes. Some of these devices, including the Kindle, are also unnecessarily saddled with DRM. Many of them have features that are of doubtful utility in an electronic book reader (for example, an MP3 player or a web browser with severely limited features).

Electronic paper still has some way to go before it can become an acceptable replacement for ordinary paper. The resolution of electronic paper still doesn't seem to be anywhere as good as ordinary paper. It cannot display colours other than black and white (or shades of grey), which is all right for ordinary text and figures but not for colourful photographs. The most troublesome aspect seems to be the manner in which the display is redrawn - there is a slight pause, followed by the blackening of the display followed by the final image. Depending on the person, this can either be very irritating or barely noticeable while turning pages.

These devices seem to be almost, but not quite, there. I think I will wait for the next generation of such devices before I buy one for myself.

Wi-Fi

I bought a D-Link DI-524 wireless router the other day to set up a little Wi-Fi network at home so that Anusha and I can surf the Internet simultaneously using our broadband connection instead of one patiently waiting for (or cursing) the other - she on her laptop, me on my desktop PC.

What surprised me was how cheap the equipment was (Rs 2,600/- after 4% VAT) and how easy it was to set up. There was a slight complication due to the Huawei SmartAX MT880 ADSL modem-cum-router we were using for our BSNL DataOne broadband connection and the assumptions made by the wireless router, but that is easy to resolve if you know the basics of IP (Internet Protocol). It was also relatively easy to secure the access point.


Of course, this adds a few more cables to the jungle of cables behind my PC that had already made cleaning difficult and any expansion a chore.


By the way, I have been seeing the prices of networking equipment (modems, switches, wireless routers) dropping drastically over the last year here in Bangalore, possibly because broadband has become quite affordable and because more and more people have a laptop or two.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

What Was Your First Computer?

Seen on Slashdot: "What Was Your First Computer?"

The first computer I worked on was the SCL Unicorn which was a clone of the BBC Micro Model B. This was a microcomputer based on the 6502 microprocessor and came with the OS and an interpreter for BASIC on ROM and 32KB of RAM.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Back From Vacation

I am back from a wonderful vacation in Ooty and the Deepawali holidays. Before going on vacation, I discovered that my Creative 52x CD-ROM drive had gone completely bonkers, randomly opening and closing by itself under any operating system. Apparently, this is not uncommon for these drives from Creative. In any case, I have taken it out and have put in a hard disc that I had lying around in the IDE slot that was thus freed. This was a remarkable coincidence as GCC also moved to Subversion in the interim and I was looking for extra space to fit the bloated copies of the SVN repositories. However, I must first take a backup of the existing stuff on the hard disc onto CDs and that is a painful process I am not really looking forward to.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

JumpDrive: Reprise

Today I received a replacement for the dead JumpDrive USB drive from Lexar Media. I am happy with the wonderful customer support service from Lexar Media.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

R.I.P. JumpDrive Secure (16 Sep 2003 - 2 May 2005)

After over 1.5 years of continuous service, my JumpDrive Secure 256MB USB drive has gone dead after I dropped it on hard floor in a moment of unpardonable carelessness yesterday. It was a good buy and it was tremendously useful. On Lexar's site for the JumpDrive Secure, there are incredible testimonials of this drive having survived various ordeals, including being washed with a person's laundry, and emerging unscathed. Alas, no such luck for me!

I even tried to pry it open and see if there was an obviously loose component anywhere that I could set right, but it's literally a couple of chips soldered onto a small PCB connected to a USB plug. As with almost all purely electronic devices, I cannot do anything here. This is rather unlike mechanical or simple electrical devices where I usually can figure out the problem and sometimes rectify the problem.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Corrupt RAM Modules

Once again, I have been bitten by bad RAM modules, this time in the Dell Optiplex GX270 machine I use at work. Memtest-86 was able to diagnose the problem after I spent almost a month wondering why programs randomly crashed on me and trying out all sorts of software updates.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

NV40 a.k.a. NVIDIA GeForce6

Wow!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

APM and Graphics Card Again

Since APM was a nice feature to have, especially
given the ability to properly power-off the machine
with a "shutdown -h now" under APM, I
enabled it again in the kernel but turned off
the "Enable console blanking using APM"
option - this seems to work perfectly well.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

APM and Graphics Card

The graphics card upgrade caused me immense
trouble with Linux - the machine would
freeze whenever the X server exited or
when virtual console blanking kicked in.

After much troubleshooting and hunting over
the Net, I finally managed to solve the problem
by disabling APM in the kernel. Phew!

I was not terribly excited by the knowledge
that the card is made by "Robanton",
apparently a Taiwanese company whose
site
works no more.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

nVidia GeForce 3 Ti 200

After several months, I finally laid my hands
on the nVidia GeForce 3 Ti 200 that I had bought
off eBay. With this upgrade, my system now
scores 3968 on the 3DMark 2001 gaming benchmark - an increase of more
than six times over my original configuration!

I hope this is just about enough to play
Half-Life 2 and
Uru. :-/
I noticed that the LexarMedia
JumpDrive 256MB USB drive that I bought sometime back
was actually capable of storing only 245MB!
Sure enough, this was because they use 1000 bytes
per kilobyte
and 1000 kilobytes per megabyte to advertise
storage space provided by the device like hard disc
manufacturers do, instead of 1024 bytes/KB and 1024
KB/MB that is used by almost all operating systems.
Uggghhh!!
By the way, the replacement for the defective
Visoly Flash Advance Xtreme 128M Card arrived and
is working perfectly well. I am extremely pleased with
the great service from Success Compu
(HongKong).

My hacking on GCJ has been quite erratic and
inconsistent - I feel really bad about it. I hope to
get to speed on this shortly (don't we all?).

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Replacements

I bought a Visoly
Flash Advance Xtreme 128M Card for the GBA and it
turned out to be defective! Uggghhhhh... I have sent it
back to the store for repair or replacement.

I have also bought a Lexar
Media JumpDrive 256MB Secure USB Drive off eBay
and am waiting for its arrival. Let us hope this one
does not turn out to be a dud!


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

PC Upgrade

Yay!

I upgraded my home PC with some RAM (512MB that should have
been recognised as 784MB - see my previous diary entry)
and a 750MHz P3 bought off eBay and I can see the
dramatic improvement this upgrade has brought to my
system compared
to the 128MB RAM and a 450MHz P2 that I had on this PC.

My system now scores 1280 on 3DMark
2001 compared to 585 before the upgrade! More importantly,
GCC 3.4 now does a clean bootstrap in ~2 hours instead
~3.5 hours earlier!

I now eagerly await my GeForce 3 graphics card, also
bought off eBay, so that I can enjoy Half Life 2!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Unnecessarily Obsolete Hardware

The PC Hardware scene is crazy - my home PC is around 3.5
years old and it is already very difficult to find upgrades
for it, especially CPU and RAM. I thought I finally got a
great deal on two PC133 256MB RAM modules off eBay, but
to my utter dismay found out that my PC recognised only
half the capacity of each module!

After much research on the web, I found out that not
all PC133 256 MB RAM modules are the same as far
as the Intel 440BX chipset, that lies at the heart of
my ASUS P3B-F motherboard, is concerned.

The most irritating thing about this is that there is
no easy way of telling whether a particular PC133
256 MB RAM module is suitable for the 440BX or not, even
by looking at the normal module details given on the
site of the vendors.

When I had bought my ASUS P3B-F motherboard, it was
one of the best and most scalable motherboards I could
afford and it has already been obsoleted and has become
the primary bottleneck in my system. This is so sad.

My PC is still immensely useful to me and performs
most of the tasks that I throw at it quite well.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)