Charles on… anything that comes along

As should become clear after reading my article for New Statesman on how vulnerable British broadband users are, there’s a certain irony in the fact that I got bitten by the port 25 bug while in Australia.

To be precise, I had wireless access, but couldn’t use my local Postfix (the free program on the Mac that sends mail directly, without you needing to connect to your home network) because Telstra blocks port 25 to stop spam (outgoing email - SMTP - is sent on port 25. Incoming email is port 110; web stuff happens on port 80.)

Telstra’s done this because it’s had so much trouble with virus-infected systems generating spam. But that’s caused problems for some people with perfectly legitimate reasons for sending directly over port 25 to servers that aren’t mail.bigpond.com. There are arguments both ways.

Happily Google’s Gmail and Apple’s Mac.com let you have POP3 access (ie you can use a mail program on your computer to read the webmail stuff) and send from that same program because you have to go through their servers, but can do that from anywhere, over port 587. But they also force you to use their suffix, which meant for the past week or so I couldn’t send any mail “from” charlesarthur.com. Oh well.

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• Dialup is a pain (5 July 2006; score: 50.21%)
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Ian Hobson has been discovering what’s so painful about travelling to the US: getting between your plane and the street.

My flight was relatively on-time. However, as I turned the corner into immigration, I couldn’t believe what I saw.There were at least 1000 people in front of me… It took me almost 2 hours to get through - not what I wanted at 4am in the morning UK time…instead of arranging your transport; you do absolutely NOTHING for 2 hours but stand and shuffle your bags a few metres at a time. When you do get out, the transport is a mess - complete gridlock because relatives have come to pick up people, and instead of just doing a pick up, the whole place is a parking lot… On returning to the UK, I disembarked (or de-planed as I’ve heard say) via a bus, went through customs, got a taxi home to SW London all in under 50 minutes. If I’d been an American, I doubt it would have taken any longer. While it was a longer line here than I’ve been used to, and slower moving, it was NOTHING like the US. Anyone considering a shopping trip to NY should seriously factor in that a 7 hour flight these days is more like a 13 hour home-to-hotel trip, and IMHO you’ve got to save a lot of money to justify losing 26 hours of your life on a return trip.

Personally, I’ve been putting off invites to the US for a couple of years now, for two reasons: you have to fight for a journalist visa down at the US Embassy, in person; and you then get treated like a suspect for having the temerity to show up and seek to get in. I’ve told Dell, Adobe and Messagelabs (certainly the first two, I think the latter) that my reason for turning down offers to meet their people in the US is because of the huge pain going there now involves.

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ElGato isn’t well-known enough, given the quality of the stuff they do. The pictures elsewhere on this blog of the wife on BBC Breakfast TV were grabbed using the excellent EyeTV Wonder, which is a USB2.0 box that plugs from your (analog) TV and gives you a fast USB output that you can use to capture live TV. I’m always amazed that they can make money making stuff only for the Mac, but then again nobody else is really in this market as they are. By contrast there’s lots of competition for video capture on Windows, and it’s a race to the bottom there - people undercut each other like mad, without the feature set being very solid.

Now Ian Hobson sings the praises of the EyeTV for DTT (DVB-T).: ”

I have just got the EyeTV for DTT system - EyeTV software for mac with a tiny (and I mean tiny) DVB-T receiver which plugs into a USB 2.0 port. The receiver is really not much bigger than a box of matches. It has an attachment for an antenna (included) or you can plug in your own coax. It actually matches the mac mini quite well in style (metal and shiny white, rounded edges). The EyeTV software makes it all work on a mac. Combined with a tvtv.co.uk subscription, it all seems to work neatly indeed.

He also found it worked a lot better than a dedicated Pace PVR:

The worst thing about [the Pace machine] is that despite countless software updates, the thing still crashes regularly. This crash is usually as it’s about to start recording a show - so you miss it, and any shows set up afterwards to be recorded. To reset it you must pull the plug from the socket - there is no other power button! Storage is limited to 10GB, though you can install a larger drive. Performance on the TV guide and Teletext is truly awful. Setting it to record a channel 5 program using the guide means waiting around 10 minutes for the info to come in.

The EyeTV/DTT is currently about £99 at the Apple Store inc shipping - so a little more than a standard Freeview decoder. But it is half the price of the Firewire EyeTV device, and also half what I paid for the Pace box.
I installed it with just one minor problem first time. I couldn’t get the sound output at first, but that was my fault to do with my use of an external usb sound device. Once I sorted out the system preferences, I am now getting digital sound out to the hifi. The quality of the picture on the plasma screen via DVI out on the mac mini is truly excellent. Apart from sharpness, the key difference is in overall brightness and saturation of the picture. Realtime full screen display seems perfect - even when other things are running. (Oh, and of course, it’s portable. So, I can also take it with me for a weekend!)

If you’ve got a dedicated computer for these things, then it does make a lot of sense to have a tuner like that. Assuming of course that you can get digital TV where you are. You recall how long it took me to get broadband? (Kangaroos in the Australian outback were on high-speed connections before me.) Well, same story with digital TV - can’t get the signal.

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