The MacAlba

I’m a recent iPhone owner and, needing to install software to give me an internet gateway for my laptop when travelling, I jailbroke it. This meant that I could also install other non-Apple-approved software like Cycorder to make movies using the inbuilt camera.

So, having travelled to Sydney, I took advantage of a wait for a train to give Cycorder a workout in a less well lit location; the place being Museum Station on Sydney’s underground rail network. From memory, I think the iPhone/Cycorder combination can record 12 to 15 frames per second.

The result is a 90 second clip hosted at Vimeo.

It’s now been a month since moving from 2-way satellite “broadband” service to a wireless broadband network connection.

Since then an external UHF antenna has been installed to get a better signal from the 3G base station. The signal strength has increased from “low” to “low to medium”. It’s not the magnitude of signal gain that I was looking for, but, given the amount of gum tree foliage that the signal has to bore through, it’s better than nothing.

The antenna was installed by professional riggers sub-contracted to the broadband carrier; it sits extremely solidly on the roof. Given that the Telstra 3G wireless broadband terminates on the same or nearby tower to where our telephone-over-microwave service sits, I got the compass out and took a bearing. The microwave antenna is sited about 150 metres south of the house and has a clear line-of-sight to its base station. The UHF wireless broadband antenna was about 20 degrees too far to the south; I swung it around but, surprisingly, it made little difference – the quantity of foliage is being blamed for this.

The peak download speed to date has now been 2800 kbit/s with a peak upload speed of 1100 kbit/s. Compared to the 512k/128k satellite service, I’ve got nothing to complain about (so far).

I live in a rural location. I have no copper telecommunications cable to the house; in fact I’d have to install a kilometre of cable to get to my property boundary, and then Telstra, the local carrier, would have to lay about 7 km of cable to connect me to the local telephone exchange. But then, the local exchange doesn’t have ADSL or ISDN!

My telephone service is delivered by a voice-over-microwave radio link.

For the past couple of years my internet connectivity has been delivered by 2-way satellite. While I can’t complain (OK, I can think of lots to complain about), it was better than a dialup modem – just. While I could live with a maximum 512 kbit/s downlink speed, the latency injected due to the huge distance the packets had to travel was a major pain in the neck.

Just recently, Telstra, the same local carrier, finally dropped the tariffs on its 3G wireless broadband service. For $129 (which, while expensive, is cheaper than the 2-way satellite), I have managed to get a peak downlink speed of 2600 kbit/s (2.6 Mbit/s) and a latency to my place of work that’s now 100 ms instead of 1700 ms.

I can now access the internet just like most of the rest of the people I know.

Oh yes, and while my monthly quota has now “jumped” from 5 GBytes to 10 Gbytes, I still feel like a poor cousin to those using Comcast in the USA who now have to live within a monthly 250 Gbyte quota. The poor cherubs.

My blog reading tool of choice for a long time used to be NetNewsWire. It’s a great piece of software and a great tool – I had purchased it after trialing it for a short time. But, being on a 2-way satellite link with a finite download quota, I began to resent the amount of bandwidth being consumed by NetNewsWire as it went about its business of checking for new blog articles every 2 hours. To be factually correct, much of the problem was due to bloggers not being aware of, or not being able to utilise, their ability to turn on data compression when their RSS feed was being checked.

My solution to this issue was to turn to Google Reader (again). I had tried Google Reader some time previously but, at the time, I didn’t like its user interface. And some time before that I had used Bloglines as an online reader before likewise becoming frustrated by its user interface.

In the intervening time Google had released a new version of their Reader. And I liked it. Google looked after the periodic checking for new blog articles – my own bandwidth use was reduced. Google Reader used Ajax to feed me only a couple of handfuls of blog articles at a time, thus trickling the data to me rather than spiking my bandwidth use.

And them came feed overload. Each time I came across an interesting blog article from a person whose blog I wasn’t subscribed to, I would immediately subscribe in the hope of continuing to find similarly interesting articles.

After I had reached some 535 feed subscriptions I came to the realisation that the signal to noise ration wasn’t especially good. I was having to wade through far too many articles that I wasn’t interested in before coming across something that was of interest.

So began the Great Cull.

Over a period of weeks I unsubscribed from over 200 blog feeds – I’m currently subscribed to about 320. That’s manageable. It now takes me less time to reading a larger number of interesting articles. I win.

I previously wrote about my first attempt at a Google Earth (GE) “mashup” where I’d overlaid a Bureau of Meteorology rain radar image over a panel from Google Earth.

I’ve now modified the mashup to overlay two rain radar images side-by-side. I’ve taken the Grafton and Moree images and overlaid them over their respective ground areas. Writing the KML code was trivial; most of the time required to do this was in manually registering (aligning) the radar image over the ground area. while it’s not perfect, it’s adequate for my purposes.

To view and manipulate my mashup, download the KML file, save it to disk, then double-click it (or “open� it directly from GE).

Here’s what it should look like:

It might take a while to actually see some rain on this image – we don’t get all that much at this time of year.

I’ve only recently begun exploring Google Earth (GE). The Google Gods haven’t yet blessed the pane in which we live, it’s still in low-res, but the panes around us are in magnificent hi-res detail. I can even see a few graves in the neighbouring Hillgrove Cemetery now.

I’ve also been reading about people creating “mashupsâ€? – the combining of information, maps in this case, from more than one source.

My first attempt at creating a mashup involved mixing the Bureau of Meteorology‘s (BoM) rain radar image for this area with Google Earth’s view of New England and surrounding area. My mashup updates the radar image every 10 minutes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t rain around here that much at this time of year so it might take a while to view the results at their glorious best.

One benefit of overlaying the rain radar image on GE is that the viewer can take advantage of the 3D and pan, tilt, and zoom features to look at the rain from every conceivable angle

To view and manipulate my mashup, download the KML file, save it to disk, then double-click it (or “open� it directly from GE).

This is what you can expect, rain permitting:

I bought a cheap standard-definition digital TV set-top box (STB) about six months ago when it was “on specialâ€? at the post-christmas sales. I wanted to find out a bit more about such a thing. Once home I tried it out only to discover that the TV antenna masthead pre-amplifier kept overdriving to such an extent that the digital TV channels (only one channel removed from the analogue TV channels) were useless. I couldn’t get a strong enough signal on the digital channels because the analogue signals interfered with them.

Now, some months on, I switched the STB inline again. To my surprise it now works perfectly. I’m working on the theory that the problem is temperature related and that now, because it’s winter, there’s no cause for the pre-amp to act badly.

So, with a working STB, I began to work examine what digital TV is all about. We only currently get two TV stations transmitting digital signals in this area – ABC and SBS. The ABC is transmitting its analogue service plus its relatively new, digital only, ABC2 channel. SBS transmits its normal analogue service plus a foreign TV-news service. In addition, SBS also transmits a high-definition version of its analogue program – I can’t view this though as my STB only handles standard-definition services.

Both the ABC and SBS also transmit two radio stations. SBS relays its two analogue radio services; the ABC transmits its digital-only “Dig� and “Dig Jazz� services.

According to the STB I’m receiving the signals at about 40% of full strength – nevertheless neither the audio nor the video show signs of loss of data. We’re just under 40 km from the TV transmitter which explains the low signal strength. That and the hundreds of gum trees above the height of the TV antenna.

I suspect, however, that unless I replace the masthead pre-ampifier, I’ll experience problems again once the temperature starts to rise in 4 or 5 months time. I’ll need to research higher-quality masthead pre-amps rather than the common but cheap amplifier that was installed when the house was built a few years ago.

References:
ABC
Dig radio
Dig Jazz
SBS
Digital Broadcasting Australia

I think I need to create a new blog category specifically for my experiences with BorderNET. Now, I’m under no delusion that BorderNET’s customer support is any better or worse than other ISP service desk, but…

Last week, after experiencing several overnight outages I called their support desk phone number. After hanging on for a while it timed out and a recorded message asked me to email my query instead. So I duly sent in my email. Today, being some days later, I received an email which didn’t respond to my query but said that they had a heavy load of emails to reply to, and could I phone their support desk if my original query was urgent.

Does anybody else see the problem with their circular logic?