(This follows on from a post yesterday)

Succinct review: It rocks!

Longer review: I have two monitors. One is a 21″ widescreen Dell and one is a 15″ Samsung which I pilfered after my parents’ accounts assistant retired. The former is a high-quality monitor by average-consumer standards, the latter is decidedly not. I was intrigued as to how they’d fare when calibrated properly, and once the spyder arrived I eagerly unpacked it, read through the instructions and installed the software. Immediately there was a problem: it jumped straight onto my secondary monitor, and wouldn’t move. The only way around this was to disable the monitor, which was probably sensible anyway. I plugged in the calibrator and the software prompted me to hang the unit over the screen:

The obvious first reaction is ‘OMGHEADCRAB‘. The second is ‘what’s it going to do, then?’. I started the calibration process, and it spent the next eight minutes displaying varying shades of red, green, blue and grey. It told me to remove the unit, then said ‘I’m done’ and showed a before/after switch. I flicked it.

It turns out my Dell is pretty good. The before/after warmed up the display a little - everything went slightly more orange than before - but nothing major. I didn’t care - the point was to get a calibration and put my mind at ease, and whether the adjustment was big or small was irrelevant. And now this was done - great! The software automatically told my Dell to use the spyder2express colour profile, and that was that. But the niggling voice at the back of my head said ‘how do you know? It’s a cheap calibrator - how can you be sure it’s done a good job?’. So I came up with a plan to test it.

The next step was calibrating the Samsung. This would generally be problematic as the spyder2express only supports one monitor - it will overwrite its previous profile if you re-run the calibration, and the files can’t be simply renamed in Windows Explorer¹. But I knew you could be sneaky and install the Microsoft Color Applet. This Control Panel extension gives you more sophisticated control over colour profiles, including the ability to rename them. So I renamed the Dell profile², then disabled my main monitor and ran the calibration on the Samsung.

This time: massive difference. The before/after button took me from cool blue to warm orange. 24h later I’m still noticing that the display is very different.

Now, two monitors provide a good test of the spyder’s abilities - since both monitors are calibrated, I should be able to put the same image up on both screens and see no difference. This was the moment of truth: if the colours are identical, the unit works as advertised. If they’re off, its quality is variable. And how much it’s off indicates how good a unit it really is. So I fired up the Lightroom 2.0 Beta, with its swish multi-monitor support, and opened a photo on both monitors simultaneously.

Result: to my eyes, identical. I could see contrast differences between the monitors, but there was no difference in the colour. Brilliant. I spent ages playing around in Lightroom, changing white balances and whatnot, and it remained consistent no matter what I threw at it.

Yesterday afternoon I took the spyder to my parents’ office. My Dad’s monitor is notoriously bad - the colours have always been washed out, and I have to keep its brightness low to prevent photos posterising. I was skeptical the spyder could do much with it, to be honest, but ran it anyway. The before/after showed a huge difference. Everything was again much warmer, but somehow less bright, too. I checked out his Picasa and photos looked much, much better, but I also found I could up the brightness much more without any posterising. I’m amazed at the difference. Mum’s monitor was better, and became a little warmer, but nothing too drastic. I brought up the same flickr page on both machines, stepped back, and they looked exactly the same. Excellent.

I was worried the spyder would be a disappointment. I was prepared to pay to get better colors than before, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be just mediocre. And it isn’t - I really couldn’t ask for anything more. I suppose the final test comes when I send some images off to the sRGB printers, but I’m confident - if it can produce perfectly matching colours on my monitors, there’s no reason to think it’s not matching the specifications. I spent most of today editing photos from my niece’s Naming Day last weekend, and it’s great to know that my parents will be seeing the same colours I am.

A bit more geeky stuff follows.

Continue reading ’spyder2express review’

1. possibly - I’ve seen conflicting reports about this [↩]
2. I kept getting in-use errors, so I actually ended up copying the profile in Windows Explorer, then renaming this copy in the Applet [↩]

Colours are annoying, particularly when you’re messing around with digital photos. If I email a photo to ten people at ten different computers, they’re all going to see slightly different colours. This is because every monitor has unique quirks in its colours. It’s a trade-off of non-professional consumer hardware, and is perfectly reasonable - most people don’t need to worry about how exactly their photos will appear on other machines. Unfortunately, I am no longer one of those people.

For example, I want to make a Blurb book of my Year 25 photos, and I’d obviously like the colours I see on-screen to be very close to the final result. Now, Blurb print their colours according to the sRGB standard. sRGB is a widely-used database of colour values: any two printers, if calibrated to this database, should print the exact same colour if I say ‘dudes, print me some green’. And computer monitors can be calibrated too - if I can ensure the green on my monitor matches the green in the sRGB specification, problem solved! But my monitor isn’t calibrated - I have no idea how well the colours on my screen match the sRGB colours. If my monitor is rubbish at green and displays them darker than it should, I’m going to get a Blurb book in which all the greens are too light.

So the question becomes, how do I ensure that I’m seeing the right colours? How can I calibrate my monitor? It’s possible to alter the colour balance in Windows, but that doesn’t help - Windows only knows it’s telling the monitor to display green, it can’t tell what colour my monitor is actually showing.

Thankfully, there’s an easy solution: I need to buy a hardware calibrator. This is a device that physically looks at the monitor while the computer displays a pre-determined series of colours. The accompanying software analyses the calibrator’s data and determines the difference between the theory and the reality. Then comes the clever bit - it adds a layer between the image and the monitor, called a colour profile. So your photo says ‘I am green’, then the colour profile says ‘right, I know that this particular green will come out too dark, so I’m going to tell the monitor to display a lighter green - one that will show a truly representative colour’. The photo isn’t changed at all, but the colour profile ensures you’re seeing the correct colours¹.

Unfortunately, a decent hardware calibrator costs £130. I can’t justify that for something I’m going to use once. But I’ve had various paying photo jobs recently(!), and I’ve become increasingly paranoid that colour-matching will bite me in the ass at some point. What if my not-too-shabby-but-getting-on-a-bit Dell 2004fpw is way out? I’ve had pictures printed before and they’ve been close enough, but what if the lab optimised them to fix the problems?

Then I discovered the Spyder2express hardware calibrator.

It’s a cheaper version of the £130 recommended-everywhere Spyder2. It only supports one monitor. There’s little in the way of configuration. But the reviews say it does a good job and actually uses the same hardware as its more expensive siblings - it’s the software that’s crippled, and the results aren’t necessarily as good as the fancier models. It also has the major advantage of ‘only’ costing £62 inc. delivery.

My paranoia got the better of me. I didn’t want the worry, and I figured pretty-close-but-not-perfect was much better than hope-things-turn-out-ok. I bought one. It arrived this morning.

Now, I knew this wasn’t going to be the most exciting purchase ever, and I was preparing myself for the anticlimax. I figured I’d use it once, then sit there looking at my £65 and wonder whether I’d made a mistake. Review tomorrow.

1. this always reminds me of the Hubble space telescope, which had a problem with its mirror after it was first launched, meaning it produced fuzzy images. They couldn’t replace the mirror in situ, so they designed a filter that exactly reversed the mirror’s flaw, and stuck it between the mirror and the CCDs. It worked. [↩]

Yesterday’s post brought me two toys:

The ‘brella is mine. The laptop I’m setting up for a friend. But this is no ordinary laptop, this is an eee pc. Alice of the wonderful Wonderland got one a while back, and her initial possible-typo thought has been ringing around my head for 48hrs, because it sums the thing up perfectly: IT TITCHY! Here’s a better picture, actual size¹:

See? It titchy! I’m in love. It’s 23 x 17cm and in its case weighs 976g, which isn’t much more than a large book, or my camera. It has wifi, 512mb RAM, three USB slots, a 3hr battery, a VGA port, an SD-card slot, two speakers and a webcam. It runs linux, boots in 15 seconds, shuts down in 5 and comes with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Skype. Best of all, it only cost a shade over £220 - brand new.

Clearly there’s a compromise somewhere, and it’s mainly in power and disk space. It’s not at all fast - 630Mhz - and the hard drive is only 4gb². Plus, the screen resolution is only 800×480, being as how it’s only 7″ on the diagonal. But if all you want to do is surf, type and chat, you don’t need any more than that. Couple this thing with an apparently-compatible Huawei PAYG Mobile Broadband stick and you’ve got 1mbps internet access you can throw into your bag just in case. Is brilliant.

The keyboard is obviously tiny tiny tiny, and takes some getting used to. But it’s at least a standard layout, and I adapted pretty quickly. The mouse ‘buttons’, it has to be said, are godawful, but thankfully the trackpad supports tapping. The machine recognised my USB drive straight away and I was able to transfer files from my XP machine without issue³. The screen is just large enough that text is readable without straining, but it’s close.

The menu system is fairly unexceptional, and buries the good stuff in with a load of less-than-useful programs, but does the job. It’s not officially editable, but activate the ‘advanced mode’ and you’ve got the full configurability⁴ of linux. About which I know nothing, but I had a crack anyway. The machine is popular enough that the eee wiki has many, many guides on unlocking advanced features without screwing everything up, and I went through a few step-by-step. The instructions suffer from the usual crowd-sourced documentation problems in that they can veer from incredibly useful to ‘oh, and before you do the next step you’ll need to rebuild the kernel - once you’ve done that…’, but are on the whole good. It has a problem out-of-the-box that prevents it from connecting to wireless networks that have WPA keys containing spaces; I was able to fix this by overwriting a couple of system files. I also tidied up the default layout, upgraded to OpenOffice.org 2.3, and enabled the option to boot into KDE. You can do much more - and for £40 you can upgrade it to a touchscreen(!) - but as it’s not mine I stopped there.

I’d be saving up for one, but it’s no use at all for anything photographic. Sure I could probably shove the GIMP on there, or even try XP and Photoshop if I thought I could handle the speed, but the 4gb drive is just too small. My camera’s memory card is twice that, so it’d be no use for backing up ‘in the field’, and I can’t imagine that editing a 3888×2592 file on that screen would be much fun. The eee has inspired a whole host of other micro-laptops, but they all seem to be coming in far more expensive, sadly.

My friend spends 4hrs on a wifi-enabled bus every day, but gets fed up of lugging a full-size laptop around. This should be a perfect solution, and I have to hand it over tomorrow. I am sad. I’ve named it and everything. Still, at least I have a ‘brella.

1. not true [↩]
2. although it’s a blindingly-quick solid-state drive [↩]
3. although god only knows how you find the drive in the xandros open/save menus if you don’t click ‘open in file manager’ immediately [↩]
4. is this a word? [↩]

I’ve been exhausted today, after a heavy weekend. A friend invited me to help install and configure a startup’s network, and both nights neither of us got to sleep until 0300.

The company had quite the setup: 24″ monitors, VoIP phones, a beautifully-sunlit open-plan office, Aeron chairs, the lot. Their building had network wiring already, and it was our job to get everything connected and talking to each other (or not, if you’re a VoIP phone and a PC). I’ve never configured anything quite so high-end before. We had Sawyer the 24-port gigabit ethernet switch (brawn, didn’t need to do anything fancy), Jack the 24-port fast-ethernet switch (less powerful, but needed to do clever routings) and Hurley the wireless router (wireless = the cool bit) all connecting to Kate the ultra-configurable mega-secure Cisco router (ultimately in charge, and physically under both the switches). Everyone needed internet access, and it all had to work via DHCP - all settings being supplied automatically once connected to the wall / wireless. Each component threw up problems at times, and it was quite the challenge.

As ever, the toughest problems were sometimes the fastest - denying intra-subnet communication took five minutes, despite being a major worry - while the insignificant things ate up time - the network printer Just Didn’t Respond, and took two hours to fix. At times we delved into Cisco’s formidable command-line-interface, and discovered various deficiencies in their generally ultra-swish GUI. We also ate a lot of muffins. And bon-bons.

By 0130 on Monday morning everything was wired up and talking to each other. It was quite the relief! Today we heard nothing until this evening, when a call said everything had run fine. This is pretty rare - there’s always something broken - and we’re concerned they’re using next door’s wireless.

There was a hell of a learning curve and the pressure got to us both at times, but it was great fun nevertheless. I’ve also grown quite fond of Cisco routers. You might need a degree in jargon to configure the things, but they’re seriously powerful toys.

In the corner of my parents’ office is a small computer acting as a file and email server. It’s a little workhorse that’s been going for ages, but late last year it started turning itself off. Mum and Dad would arrive in the morning and find it inexplicably lightless, despite no power cuts.

I tracked it down to the weekly full HD-clone backup, and could at least reproduce the problem: the machine just conked out, with no blue-screen or anything in the windows event log. This suggested it was hardware-related, and there were a few possibilities, the most likely being one of the hard drives. I tried running full sector scans, but it conked out halfway through. I took them away, but found no errors. The next most likely cause (I thought) was the power supply. So I replaced that and the next backup promptly reported sector errors on one of the hard drives. So I replaced that too, and the backup completed - yay!

A week later: same problem.

So I swapped out the RAM. No difference. At this point I was starting to think it must be Random Motherboard Crap. Sometimes you get a problem you can’t trace, so you replacing the motherboard+cpu, and everything’s ok but for the lingering feeling that maybe you missed something. In this case, I would indeed have missed something if I’d replaced the lot.

Last week I sent an email around to various friends, asking if they had any other thoughts. My friend Ben got back to me the same evening with a list of things to try, one of which was a stress test - did it fall over under high cpu load? I tried Prime95 last night and the machine fell over in minutes - far less time than the backup typically took to take down the system. It was pretty late by this point, so I stopped for the night and while driving home suddenly realised the incredibly obvious possiblity.

This evening I ran the old-school Motherboard Monitor, and watched as the stress test took the CPU temperature up to 105 degrees celcius. 105 degrees! That is a ridiculously high temperature for a non-ancient CPU. So I took a look inside, really really hoping I hadn’t somehow missed the CPU fan having fallen off, or something. No - the fan was in place and still going, but there was a bit of dust clogging the heatsink. I vacuumed it up and re-ran the stress test.

It peaked at 66. A not-crazy amount of dust had increased the temperature by 40 degrees! It survived the stress test without issue, and is currently running a full backup for the first time in months¹.

I’m a little annoyed I didn’t think of this. Overheating used to be the go-to problem for random shutdowns, but modern computers run so cool that it’s now pretty uncommon. But it shouldn’t have taken me four months to figure it out. Oh well, at least they’ve got a shiny new power supply.

How come the backup completed that once? Could be chance, but I bet I left the side of the case off, having just installed the new drive. Still didn’t twig, though.

I think Ben was thinking ‘overheating’, but didn’t want to say it so bluntly so I wouldn’t feel bad. He’s subtle that way. Thanks, Ben!

1. not quite so bad as it sounds - the important files were being backed up online, but this is far from optimal. Golden rule of backups is always have two systems, because one of them will always be broken at the critical moment [↩]

My computer had never worked properly since I put in together in late 2005. I got random static bursts, and most USB devices would crash the system if left plugged in. I replaced the motherboard in desperation six months later, but it didn’t help much - the same problems came back. Research suggested the CPU and motherboard (both of them!) conflicted in some bizarre way, but no solutions were forthcoming, and I eventually gave up removing this or that piece of hardware every few weeks to see whether it made a difference. I didn’t have the money to replace both, so I lived with it. This happens sometimes with technology - it just never works right, and you end up having to buy something new. I got used to working around the problems for a couple of years, but a confluence of problems last month finally did me in. Before February it would have been a luxury, but it crossed into the sensible-decision bracket, so I didn’t have to feel guilty. I was going to need more RAM and a new hard drive anyway, so I finally gave in and ordered a totally new system, this time based around Intel rather than AMD.

I’d decided early on that my priority would be processing and editing photos. I’m not bothered about playing games - I’d like to be, but nothing other than guitar hero has grabbed my attention for ages now - so I concentrated on RAM and CPU power at the expense of graphics. My friend Ben helped me choose the most appropriate equipment, and we ended up with a Q6600 quad-core processor with 4gb of RAM, plus a larger HD. It all arrived yesterday morning and I put it together in the afternoon.

The hardware setup took a few hours, after which it worked first time, which is a rarity! I then spent as long trying to talk the XP install into understanding the SATA drivers, and my twitter followers will know how frustrating that became - sorry! After that, though, everything was smooth as Captain Jack. XP is now all installed and I’m nearly done getting it all configured.

Lightroom and Photoshop are mind-bogglingly faster. Adobe products are one of the few that can take full advantage of four processors, and the extra RAM¹ means much less hard-drive thrashing. I can switch between the two programs without having to shut down everything else, and this morning I was happily editing in both programs with Firefox and iTunes running in the background. This is exactly what I wanted - editing photos should be much less frustrating now, and for the next few years of my uni course.

A couple of weird little problems have solved themselves, too. I was having issues with a) my mouse double-clicking when it should be single-clicking, and b) my router dropping packets so random bits of websites would fail. Both have Just Gone Away.

I’ve also seen a significant speed boost in Google Docs, of all things - I guess it relies heavily on local javascript processing.

I tried not to get too wound up over the old problems - there are worse things in life than the odd crash, or having to remember to unplug a card reader - but *tempts fate* it’s really very nice to have a stable system. Totally worth it.

1. only 3.5gb is accessible as I couldn’t stretch to a 64-bit OS [↩]

After replacing a laptop hard drive yesterday I discovered the keyboard had a broken key. I couldn’t fix it, and the client preferred to work around it than buy a not-cheap replacement, so I looked for a program to remap the keyboard. Turns out there’s a tool in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. I installed it and grabbed remapkey.exe from the directory - it seems to work independently. The GUI is a bit odd, but I was able to swap the broken key for something less common (does anyone use ` ?). remapkey alters the registry, so there’s no need for startup programs. Not useful very often, but invaluable when needed.

I ordered a replacement laptop hard drive last week, but accidentally clicked an SATA version rather than IDE. I only discovered this after opening the packaging, and as I needed the drive that day I was forced to visit the local computer shop. They had an IDE drive in stock:

Ebuyer price: £39.02
Local shop: £116.33

I appreciate they have more overheads, but that’s just stupid. Didn’t have any choice at the time, unfortunately, and it’s obviously unfair to pass my muppetry on to the client. Won’t make that mistake again.

On Dell’s online system configurator, in the midst of questions like ‘do you want Office?’, ‘do you want a 20″ widescreen monitor?’ etc., is this:

This is just a bios option that takes half a second to change, but I don’t really object to Dell charging as it’s not something many people know about. However, I’m pretty sure any computer will boot to the hard drive by default - what does the first £3 actually buy you?

I thought I understood why more than 3gb of RAM has little value in modern machines, but it turns out I was wrong. Dan explains nicely:

Large areas of the memory between three and four gigabytes are cordoned off for system devices in exactly the same way that chunks of the Upper Memory Area were purloined in the old days.

*shudder*. I remember struggling with memory areas as a kid, and never really understood what was happening. It wasn’t until my A+ exam a few years ago that I finally got to grips with it. I think I’ll recommend memory-hungry clients top out at 3gb for the meantime - there doesn’t seem to be an easy way around it without going 64-bit, which brings many other difficulties.

Despite being up until ungodly¹ hours last night, today was rather productive.

I had a callout to a petrol station this morning. A power spike had fried the forecourt computer and broken all communication with the pumps. The computer was old. You know how when Arthur Miller died you thought ‘he was still going? Wasn’t he married to Marilyn Monroe back in the 60s?’. Old like that. My hopes of recovery faded when I saw the AT power supply, but the motherboard turned out to have an ATX connector. Replacing an AT PSU with an ATX is always entertaining, mainly because AT PSUs connect(ed) directly to the power switch, and if the case isn’t set up for ATX it’s nigh on impossible to turn the thing on and off short of pulling out the main cable². There was no other quick solution, however, and after a lot of cable routing and swearing at symmetrical IDE connectors the thing finally powered up. Half an hour’s troubleshooting later and it started communicating with the pumps and we brought in the ‘no petrol’ signs. It wasn’t a difficult job, but was particularly satisfying when customers immediately started pulling in.

I’ve also finally completed my application for the Westminster University Photography degree. Getting references, finding all my GCSE/A-Level certificates and writing a personal statement took longer than expected, but it’s now sitting in an envelope in front of me. I don’t know the official deadline date - nobody seemed to want to tell me - but my application will be sent special delivery in the morning. I’m very concerned it’s too late, but it’s worth a try.

1. I suspect one might spontaneously pop into existence just to back me up on this [↩]
2. also, messing around with an AT PSU is the one time I’ve ever been zapped by mains voltage. I found myself on the other side of the room, completely confused and wondering whether it was possible a secretary had hit me [↩]

I used to use two monitors. Being able to quickly maximize windows side-by-side is extremely useful, especially when photo/website editing, but my flat hasn’t the space for two large CRTs so I traded them for one widescreen LCD when I moved in. I’m very happy with it as a monitor, but it’s not the same. I recently got hold of a spare 15″ LCD, and hooked it up this morning. The resolutions don’t match and the two are at very different height - moving the mouse from one to another is a weird experience - but it works well nevertheless. I’ve a bunch of Google Gadgets taking up much of the screen currently: Gmails, Google Talk, a scratch pad, a disk/bandwidth monitor and BBC News. The background nature of the Gadgets means they’ll happily sit behind anything I drag over there. It’s helpful being able to shove chat windows out of my main work area.

From the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego:

Webb … demoed a little plastic robot that falls over when your friends go off IM and stands up when they come back online.

I want one! I’d like different poses for different people. Some would have happy raised arms, others a snap salute, ‘talk to the hand’ or a gorilla stance, and I know one person who definitely deserves Saturday Night Fever pointings.

On my desk I have a small magnetic chair that keeps hold of paper clips / screws / pins etc., and a few days ago I knocked it off the edge while playing with iDog cleaning. It landed on top of the printer, sending assorted tiny bits of metal down the paper feeder. The printer is now rather broken. Bugger. Epsons aren’t really designed to be taken apart (it’s not responding to the turn-it-upside-down-and-shake-it technique, sadly), but it’s either that or buy a new one. Bad Rowdy.

Plus, Windows just let me know that it restarted itself due to a ‘hard drive read error’. Urgh. Oh well, my computer’s been circling the drain of b0rk for a while now, what with being scared of USB devices and all, so this is probably a good early warning that it needs scrapping. Extra hard work for a while, I think.

I finally managed to fix my parents’ network this evening. A few days ago I’d replaced their original router, which was starting to play up after 15 months of heavy use, at which point everything went crazy and putting the original router in place didn’t solve the problem. If there is a time in an accountant’s year that you don’t want this to happen, it’s the end of January when all the tax returns are due in. I shored up their six computer network so that it mostly worked, albeit very slowly, and they had to jump through a few hoops to read and send emails for a couple of days. I couldn’t find any kind of software explanation, so resolved to start replacing hardware until it started working again. It turned out that the replacement router was broken on arrival. This was always a possibility, but had seemed unlikely enough that I checked everything else first. A shiny new Netgear is now sitting in its place, and everything (as of this evening, anyway) is going swimmingly. Phew.

Just back from dancing, where the teachers were working on my posture. Good grief. I had to start taking notes in the end, there was so much to remember. I must not lead with my arm. I must keep my ribcage up. I must move forward with the body rather than the feet. I must rise and fall less in the foxtrot. I can make outside steps easier using ‘contrary body movement’, where the left shoulder comes forward with the right foot and vice versa. And this is all walking in a straight line! I’m glad they’re getting more picky with me, but it’s difficult to concentrate on all of it at once. It feels great when I get it right, but that didn’t happen often this evening. Hopefully I’ll get there with practice.

Speaking of dancing¹ here is a Cockatoo named Macky doing the Makarena:

and speaking of things…that…are…er…something to do with the sky²…I like this picture of Comet McNaught too:

Time for bed, I think.

1. bow to my segue awesomeness [↩]
2. lost it [↩]