Tag Archives: Wireless

Buying from the Bad

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A while ago, the customer service of ebuyer infuriated me to the extent that we went about creating a new category here (bad shops) and I genuinely intended to never buy from them again. Sadly, market forces have worked against me and I find myself about to make another purchase from the customer service vortex that is ebuyer.

Recently I have discovered that I need to get a DVD-Recorder. This is OK, because they are reasonably cheap now – Tesco’s sells Liteon models for under GB£70. As I was looking through the shops, considering which model to get (I want one which has built in DivX for example), I found Sainsburys sells a DVD-recorder which is DivX and has an 80gb HDD for £130. How can you turn that down? I went home and checked online to see if there were any other deals and, blast,Evil ebuyer do a Liteon DVD-recorder with a 160gb HDD for £124. Blast and double blast. It is hard to mentally justify spending the same amount of money for a machine with half the capacity, so another order with ebuyer was put together. I hate myself for it.

Comically, ebuyer seem to have done everything in their power to stop people purchasing products there. The DVD Recorder I want to get is the Liteon HDA740GX which I have seen in Currys for £182 and on Froogle should cost over £156. It is, from what I have read, a good model. Most shops (eg, PC World) sell the 80GB version for the price eBuyer is asking for the 160GB monster. Ebuyer, being cheaper than anyone else I can find by a fair amount, get the order. Blast, double blast and triple blast.

eBuyer Screen Shot - taken 14 Jun 07Now, the strange thing about ebuyer is when you try to navigate back to the product page you come across this conflicting bit of information. If you look at the second and third entries there you can see what I mean! (screen capped in case they ever fix it… 🙂 )

For some reason, the e-commerce site returns two identical products with different prices. One version, with a manufacturers part number of H DA740GX is going for the reasonable price of £124.5, but should you be foolish enough to buy the HD A740GX you will have to fork out £202.93. As far as I can see (with admittedly only a basic search for the manufacturers details), these are identical products.

Hopefully ebuyer will manage to deliver this to me by Wednesday as they have promised (and I had to pay for, as they don’t deliver for free to the remote places in the UK) otherwise I will have to resort to my somewhat impotent ranting against them and boycott them again (until I need a new tech order…)

On the e-commerce front, it isn’t just ebuyer which is insane. I was in PC World today (in the real world shop) and I saw a Belkin WiFi Phone which looked interesting, but there were no prices on it in the shop. Basically, this is a phone that connects to your Skype account via a wireless connection to your router. So, no need to have your PC on to use Skype which overcomes the main hurdle I have to using this wonderful service. Now, to prove this product exists you can look at it on the Dell site (which seems the cheapest) or on Froogle. It is real. It is what I wanted and it was in the shop I visited – they had dozens and it looked like they had been there for ages.

On the PCWorld website, however, can you find one? No. I tried searches for “Belkin Wifi” “Belkin Wireless” and even “Belkin.” At best I got a list of cables and network cards. No signs at all of the phone. Crazy.

Still, Dell sell it, so anyone reading this and looking for a present to buy me – consider it!

[tags]Bad Shops, Ebuyer, PCworld, Dell, E-commerce, Technology, Customer Service, Shops, Society, Froogle, Skype, Belkin, WiFi, Wireless, Telephony, Phone, LiteOn, DivX, Tescos, VoIP, Sainsburys, Currys[/tags]

Science fair

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Wireless energy promise powers up, says a BBC article that claims that wireless energy transfer is close to practicable. Which would be impressive if it were true (although it might give the anti-wifi campaigners a few more warranted causes for concern than your standard Belkin device currently justifies.)

I probably am too cynical for my own good but I’d have to say this story has less of the ring of truth than the kidney transplant reality show that suckered me last week.

US researchers have successfully tested an experimental system to deliver power to devices without the need for wires.
The setup, reported in the journal Science, made a 60W light bulb glow from a distance of 2m (7ft).

For a start, I am not too impressed by making a lightbulb glow. Don’t some science museums have a display where you can light up a bulb at a distance by using some innate physical property of the gas in the light bulb? (Apologies for the vagueness. Yes, sometimes social science really isn’t a “science” and sometimes you really can’t ask me cos I’m just a girl.) This makes the whole public unveiling seem like a school science fair. (No, we don’t have them in the UK – or didn’t when I was at school – but we do get the Simpsons.)

But then again, maybe it is another example of a physical property that was considered only a toy that turns out to be really useful… I’m thinking of the gyroscope, but maybe the toy came after the engineering thing. OK, table blow-hockey and hovercraft then? Surely they had those tables before the hovercraft?

The BBC site says the news is from an experiment reported in Science. Ever diligent, I looked through a good few days’ news items in Science without finding it. Which is not to say it isn’t there, just that I couldn’t spot it. I looked at the MIT site and it had the “stem cells in mice” article that Science did, but no mention of any amazing new wireless energy transfer experiments.

Maybe this is actually old news and just appears on the BBC today because it’s a slow science day.

(Aside. It bloody must be. They have a totally spurious article saying that cannabis-caused mental health hospital admissions have gone up by 85% since Labour took power. Don’t make me go into the utter nonsense of this one. It merits an entire newspaper full of mocking deconstruction.)

So, with no easy science references to check out the light bulb, I was reduced to going back through the BBC’s own site. And, blow me down with a feather, etc, here’s a reference from November 2006 about the same chap, Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic, announcing that physics is about to solve the resonance issue, as soon as they build a model….

The article has basically the same content as today’s, even down to the same bizarre illustrations, minus the science fair-style lightbulb display..

  • Prof Soljacic, in front of an LCD monitor with a garish abstract screen saver – messaging how cutting edge he is;
  • a GCSE science-style diagram of two antennaed headsets, with an explanation – this is the bit I understood. However, I saw too many Tomorrow’s World’s to be totally convinced. Please note: I AM STILL WAITING FOR THE JETPACK;
  • a lot of wires in a multi-socketplug – so we can find out what plugs in a multisocket look like, in case we’ve never seen one.
  • Plus a garishly coloured plug with trailing wire that looks like an artist’s impression of a future wirefree energy provdiing device, until you realise it’s supposed to be a standard plug, lit by someone with only a 1960s lightshow as their illumination.

Linux Gamble

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Well, it is the weekend. Previously, I said I was going to get some Cat5 (or Cat6) cable and hard wire myself into the router to see if I could get 64 bit openSUSE or Ubuntu working. I have discovered that 5m of Cat5 costs £24.99 from PCWorld and that is a lot more than I intend to pay on the off chance it allows me to get Linux up and running, on the grounds the Belkin works fine in Windows.

However, there is some remaining perseverance.  Tonight I have started the incantations, I have sacrificed a square pane of glass to the LinuxGod (a window… get it? Oh I give up) and unwrapped two penguin (bars) to inspect their entrails. Hopefully this will enable me to get a working Linux system over the course of the weekend.

I suspect, if I am honest and borderline serious, I am going to resort to installing 32bit openSUSE or Ubuntu, as they have worked with this device in the past. If this still fails, I will travel to Antarctica and kill every single black and white, flightless bird I come across. In a bizarre fit of over confidence, I also have a 40gb partition put aside for Solaris. I may be online again before 2008…

Technological Breakdown

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Well, it seems I have been thouroughly defeated by both Ubuntu and openSUSE (64bit versions). I pretty much spent all day Friday trying to get an openSUSE install connected via a Belkin WiFi USB dongle – which, incidentally worked instantly with the 10.1 32 bit. This failed to the extent the XServer died and I had to do a complete re-install. It appears openSUSE is not as tolerant for “hot swapping” USB devices as you would hope 🙂

On Saturday I cracked and tried an Ubuntu 6.10 install. I dislike Ubuntu because I feel the hand holding is over the top and personally find it next to impossible to get anything done on it. In the past, however, Unbuntu has been better than SuSE at finding devices and getting them working.

Not this time.

Ubuntu, in the case, was even worse than SuSE because of how difficult it is to get administrative commands working. After four hours, although I hadn’t destroyed the install, I gave up and reinstalled openSUSE.

Today, I have spent another five hours trying to get the WiFi dongle working – all to no avail. SUSE claims it is trying to connect to the router, but there is no activity shown on the dongle (it has an LED which blinks when it is working), so I suspect SUSE is lying. I spent two hours trying various methods of building the drivers – namely:

./Configure

make all

as suggested at LinuxQuestions.org. I tried the versions that come with the RT73 file. I tried the method shown by GIDForums and even followed the steps at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RT73_Wireless. All were good and seemed to make sense…. but none worked. At all. Each time I ran “make” it failed with millions and millions of errors.

Screen shot of old set up In the past, when I have tried to configure WiFi cards in SUSE I have been presented with a screen like this one (on the left – hopefully), but for some reason this is all changed in the 10.2 (at least the 64 bit version). This change is not helping matters. The old layout, while it could be confusing, at least allowed you edit the bits which needed editing. The new version is some what different.

Now, the screens I get look like this:

New WIFI manager - Screen 1New WIFI manager - Screen 1New WIFI manager - Screen 1New WIFI manager - Screen 2 New WIFI manager - Screen 3

Now they appear “better” but they are pretty much useless when it comes to trying to “problem solve” the WiFi issues.

So far, nothing I have tried in three days has worked. When I look at the modules loaded, I have rt2500usb and rt73usb running in openSUSE. I tried to kill either of them with

modprobe -r name

But this did nothing either – openSUSE claimed modprobe didn’t exist (although it would show me the man page for it).

Eventually (i.e. now), I have given up for a while. Most of the solutions I can find require me to be connected to the internet to enable a fix – seems to defeat the purpose but…. Next weekend I plan to go to PCWorld and buy a Cat5 cable long enough to reach from the router to the linux box, hopefully this will allow an internet connection and enable the fixes. Until then, I am staying Windozed. Sadly.

Now, I love linux. I really do. However, until it is possible for people to use it out of the box with common store bought components it really is going to remain a niche product. This is a shame because for basically free you can get a fully functioned PC which runs a powerfull, easy to use and capable office package, web servers, graphics manipulators and much more. To run a similar system using the MS products everyone is so used to would cost thousands. With the advent of crap vista, and the change to “look and feel” you would think this is an excellent time for people to migrate to Linux. Sadly, at least in the case of SuSE and Ubuntu, Linux is not ready for this task. Can you imagine going to a shop and buying a television which required three days of recompiling before it would show a picture?

[tags]Linux, SUSE, Ubuntu, Wifi, Wireless, LAN, Networking, Technology, Computers, Society, Rants, YAST, openSUSE, Belkin[/tags]

Linux Annoyances

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Not much online time today, sorry. I am fighting a (losing) battle with my technology.

I have spent most of today trying to set up my main PC as a dual boot Linux/windows box using openSUSE 10.2 (64 bit) and Windows XPSP2.

Sadly, I have been far from successful.

The problems began with Partition Magic. The PC I have came with WinXP installed on its 180gb HDD. As I had around 100gb free space, I thought putting 20 gig aside for Linux would be next to no problems. I ran diskeeper and checkdisk to make sure everything was fine (it was) then I rank Partition Magic to resize the disk – I planned to make a 1gig swap file and about 14 gig for the linux install.

Sadly, each and every time Partition Magic rebooted (claiming it was going to resize the partitions) it came up with “Error 1513 Bad Attribute Position in File Record” and suggested I looked at the help files. I honestly spent over an hour doing this (reboot, choose partition sizes, restart, get error message, check help files, find nothing, reboot, choose partition sizes…. etc). Nothing I could find in the help files was any use.

Eventually I cracked and went to a web search engine (why didn’t I do this the first time!) and found out my Partition Magic 8 needed an upgrade to 8.01 and then a patch applied. Isn’t software great?

This done, everything went fine. The install interface for openSUSE is easy to use and easy to understand. I did spend about an hour choosing which packages I wanted but that was just because I’d become a kid in a sweet shop at that point. In the end I settled for Gnome and about 4gb of software. Linux is fantastic.

The install went smoothly…right up to the point at which it needed to connect to the Internet. It found my Belkin USB WLAN adaptor and identified it perfectly. It even found the SSID of the network. When trying to connect it (as it should) asked for the WEP key, so I entered it. After what felt like a week, it came up asking for the key again, so I entered it again. This happened five times before the computer gave up and I had to restart the network connection.

After two hours of trying different things (converting the key from HEX to ASCII etc), I had pretty much exhausted everything I could think off. I have been back to windows to check the settings (they are fine) and I have tried the USB device on other linux machines (although it was an Ubuntu machine) and it works fine. Nothing I seem to be able to do will make my openSUSE installation connect to the wireless router. I have hit a complete brick wall now and I am fed up of entering 26 hex characters every ten minutes so I have given up and come back to windows (yes, sad, I know).

I will try a brief google search to see if I can find the answer, but to be honest I dont know if I can be bothered any more. There is more to life than spending almost an entire working day trying to make software do what I want it to do. The idea is that computers (etc) make our lives easier and less stressfull. If people are writing such bad code that I have to give up all my spare time to get their software to work, I am not really interested. The same applies to Symantec and their fundamentally broken Partition Magic.

I love linux. I have two linux machines running fine here (one openSUSE 10.1 [32bit] and one Ubuntu). I used to love openSUSE and hate Ubuntu. Times may be changing.

If any one has had similar problems, or knows and answer, please let me know!

[tags]Technology, Linux, Windows, Software, Operating System, Wireless, Networking, Rants, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Belkin, Netgear, Partition Magic, Error Messages, Symantec[/tags]