ajft

I guess being a Tritschler I tend to overlook the other half of my family tree, I know a little about mum's family, but not a lot of detail. Wonderful to read a little about Grandad Barker from Gina then:

...My father died in 1987, my mother in 1980. So long ago. They were 'older' parents and I am the youngest and I envy people who still have their parents - take care of them, one day you will miss them as much as I miss mine. My Father was a wonderful man, Reginald Barker was his name and he started his working life as an engineer in a factory but played in his own band at weekends. Eventually the music took over and through huge talent and a series of leaps, he ended up a professional musician playing at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for 25 years. I wish I'd asked him more about his early life, do it now everyone, before it's too late.

He was born and lived in Leytonstone, East London and his father was an entertainer too. It was in the blood. Daddy also had a great bass singing voice and could play most instruments he picked up. He originally played the trumpet in his own band but mostly played timpani and percussion. We had a whole room at our house filled with his instruments. Huge kettle drums, tubular bells, a xylophone and glockenspiel, cymbals, all sorts. He had a wonderful bird whistle that you filled with water. You had to blow down it and it made a marvellous sounds. I loved it.

His nickname for me was Whizzer. Sadly he developed Parkinson's Disease in his later life and it robbed him of a happy retirement and the medication made him miserable and depressed. So unfair for a man who had so much talent. I could write much more about him, maybe another time. I still miss his raucous laughter and his deep resonant speaking voice.

Being part of a household that watches approximately an hour of television a week, at most, I've mostly ignored all the shiny new Australian digital TV channels showing the same old crud with the same overbearing ads and deliberate schedule slippage to render any recordings unusable. In the words of the TV executive, “We're not in the business of letting people not watch ads.”

All of a sudden a deadline emerged, mid-July, the Tour de France, this year SBS will be broadcasting their coverage on SBS2 — their digital channel. Much head-scratching occurred, reviews were perused, some catalogues were read. What do we want? We've got a wide-screen TV, albeit CRT, but the venerable TEAC still does the job. A digital receiver, yes. A hard-disk recorder, yes. Access on the home network? Backup copies of our other data? Photo store?

The LaCie cinema looked attractive, certainly physically attractive, but very expensive and reviews tend to indicate that they've got noisy fans. Back to the studying of the literature….

DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A, what a mouthful of letters and numbers, but the specs looked OK, the reviews sound good, the price seemed reasonable. Thank you Mr Rudd, I'll be spending that stimulus of yours, yet more money flowing from Australia to Asia, Korea this time, http://www.tvix.co.kr/ to be exact. EYO technologies in Sydney helped lighten my wallet, no less than three progress emails to tell me the steps my order was taking along the way and then 24 hours later the box is at the door.

First impressions? as always; the good, the bad and the ugly.

Neither good, bad nor ugly, but to quote the immortal words — as the actress said to the bishop — “Its a lot smaller than I expected.” It looked physically bigger in the images and I lazily didn't measure out the dimensions that it said on the brochure.

Neither the hard disk nor the HD tuner was installed in the main unit, but installation is dead simple and they slot together without screws or any other fasteners. So far so good….

The HDTV receiver was trivially easy to setup, the display rock-solid and far better than our analogue TV reception — and the antenna cable it is plugged into simply vanishes into the wall and I've no idea what on the roof it is attached to, or where the antenna points.

Manuals? As with most consumer electronics now you don't get one, just a CD and you're on your own to go and print the 68 pages yourself.

Now for the ugly, the on-screen display is woeful on our TV screen. I almost gave myself a headache navigating through the menus and setting the system up. Not sure if it just simply isn't designed to work with an analogue TV — but if that's the case then don't sell it as something that is! The on-screen display of the TV itself is fine, as is the menus from the DVD/VCR and the old X-box, but with the 6500A you'd better have the manual in front of you to help guess what the words and numbers are.

The bad? Wifi support only with a third-party USB dongle plugged in the back — a dongle I haven't got yet — and I couldn't get the wired network to work. Connects easily enough as an external USB drive which let me transfer all this year's photos, all my old scanned APS photos, and a handful of DivX videos for testing. The JPEG software simply cannot handle two-thirds of my photos, I've no idea if they're too big, or if the EXIF and/or IPTC headers confuse it, but the majority of my photos simply display a black screen, timeout and move on to the next photo that simply displays a black screen. No problems viewing them on websites or under Windows, Mac OS or Linux, just on a media player that can't display media….

To finish, I suspect that the user interface to setting up scheduled daily recordings is going to be difficult. Appears to be more of a media player with TV and recorder functionality tacked on over the top, and I'm starting to have my doubts….

Revisited:

2009-Jul-05: Watching the first recording of the prologue of Le Tour, all is well until we get to the first ad break. Press the fast-forward, 2x — then again — 4x, 8x... wait for the ad to pass, press Pause/Play and it jumps back to before the ad-break we've just fast-forwarded through! What the? Try again, this time the pause button won't work until we're well into the next part of the coverage, but once again play sends us back to before the ad-break!

Trying other button combinations, the "Up" and "Down" arrows are meant to jump 15 seconds forwards and backwards, they show a graphic on the screen saying that this is what they're doing, but they both jump about 5 minutes backwards through the coverage!

The manual(s) are of absolutely no help, pathetic Engrish, and the only mention of the functions of the remote is "navigation buttons" with no indication of how to use them or what each button does.

Come on, this software isn't even beta-test software, it DOES NOT WORK, this is not a commercially viable product!

Summary: As a consumer product the DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A is unusable crap.

2009-Jul-06: Ok, I've updated the firmware to 1.3.137 and things are a little bit better — but only a little. Instead of being totally unusable it is now only mostly irritating. Fast-forward now seems to go 2x, 8x, 32x and exiting from fast-forward to play usually goes to where it should — although it still sometimes leaps backwards five, ten or fifteen minutes! The up and down arrows still show the jump forwards/jump backwards graphics and this time they sometimes do what they say, although most of the time the forward button does nothing and the backwards one goes back more than the ten or fifteen seconds it says.

Summary: As a consumer product the DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A is half-usable crap.

Oh dear, oh dear. Can't tell their h1n1 from their hini. Can someone please get them a clue, or maybe even fix their spell checker.

Update on HINI 09 influenza

Following a significant increase in the number of confirmed cases of HINI 09 in Victoria

:

It is important that staff and students act responsibly in the interests of their own and their colleague’s health. If you are unwell and think that you may have flu-like symptoms, it is important you consult your own local doctor immediately and do not come to University until your doctor advises it is appropriate to do so.

That last paragraph really bugs me. The vast majority of people simply do not have a "local doctor" and cannot see "their doctor". Due to the way the health system works they go to multi-doctor health clinics where you're lucky to see the same doctor twice in any two visits, forced to sit in a waiting room with up to twenty other sick people for an hour or so, and if you don't have something contagious when you walk in, you're pretty much guaranteed of it by the time you leave.

It then goes on with an injunction to wash our hands a billion times per day, and for me to wash it every time after touching my face — surely in order to not bring the virus into contact with me I need to wash my hands before touching my face — it would do wonders for the water bill and lead to a truly stupendous amount of virus transmission as everyone rushes to the taps and the door handles; over and over and over again.

Remind me again, just how many people in Australia have died of this? Oh, that's right, none. Meanwhile 20,000 people in this country die each year of ordinary household non-catchy-named flu.

Yes, no, maybe? All the little 10" netbooks are attractive, but it seems that the more I look into it the more my options diverge, rather than converge to a model that I'm happy with. US prices on assorted models seem to be:

Model	$US
Samsung NC10	$399
Dell Mini 10	$349
Asus 1000HE	$385
Acer Aspire one	$349
MSI Wind	$329

Australian prices range from $550 to $800 as far as I can tell, with a lot more variation.