It won’t be sold here, and it won’t work on Telstra’s Next G HSDPA network. See this article in The Australian for more details.

For our brethren abroad, here’s a nifty comparison chart courtesy of Tech Talk Radio’s US correspondent, Mark Diggins:

Apple's iPhone 3GS vs Google's Nexus 1

Andrew’s arrived home after a productive trip to the United States, and Tech Talk Radio’s executive producer is back at the wheel.

According to our historical archives, Andrew has only missed 5 episodes, out of a total 282.  What an appalling track record.

Actually, I wish mine was that good.

The last two episodes can be downloaded here (Ep 15/2010 – with special guest Anthony Caruana) and here (Ep 16/2010 – with special guest Matthew Robinson).

Matthew Robinson, Tech Talk Radio's European correspondent

I’ve listened back to these episodes, and The Panel certainly has a different “feel”. Not sure if it’s for better or worse, but very different.

We’re all looking forward to hearing Andrew’s war stories tomorrow night, though.

More soon.  Over & out.

This would enable me, in theory, to stream audio and video from my network to the television and sound system in my living room; and to stream audio and video from my network to the television in the master bedroom.

Why not just use wireless?

I’ve been using WiFi to the lounge room Media Centre for some time (well, years) now. It works adequately. But wireless technology is designed for portable devices, and in the case where I’ve got a Media Centre PC which never moves, the better option from a technical standpoint is to connect to the network using a wired network port. A fixed network connection is faster than wireless, more reliable, and my Media Centre won’t be competing with other wireless devices for bandwidth, using the same hotspot ‘legitimately’ (e.g. net books, smart phones etc.).

Conspiracy theorists that obsess about security will also agree that a wired network connection is a better option than wireless. I, however, do not obsess about such things. Honestly.

Yesterday I got out the fashionable white overalls, retrieved my toolbox from a bygone era and proceeded to cable new network points to the lounge room and the master bedroom. This involved much swearing, grunting, bashing-of-head-against-low-floorboards and grazed elbows, but I got there eventually.

In Australia, make sure any infrastructure cabling, at work or at home, is undertaken by a licensed cabler.  Like me.

Lounge Room – wired for internets!

I plugged the Media Centre into its new network port, and was pleased to see a noticeable improvement in network speed. I’ll keep using the PC as a Media Centre in the lounge room. It makes a lot of sense to me to have a networked PC connected to your television and sound system.

The Bedroom Solution

- or -

“How to browse internets and network file shares in your bedroom without a computer”

A PC in the bedroom, however, is a bit excessive (IMHO). So what’s the best way to access content on the network and stream it to the television?

I had my eye on a fashionable media streamer from Western Digital which Andrew spoke about on Tech Talk Radio in November. After seeing a demonstration, viewing a Blu-Ray rip over Andrew’s network in his lounge room, I was sold. The quality was great.

There are three versions of these little boxes, and I bought the most expensive one, the WD TV Live, which supports networking. This set me back $198 from JB Hi Fi.

Western Digital's WD TV Live

The WD TV Live is a small unassuming box which provides an interface between your television and your computer network, with a nifty little remote control (yes, batteries are included!). All the WD TV Live needs is power and a nearby network connection, which I now have, thanks to yesterday’s wrangling.

The WD TV Live outputs to composite or component video (cables supplied) or HDMI (cable not supplied), in full HD 1080P video. When it powers-up, the WD TV Live finds shares on your computer network and lets you watch video and listen to music. It also has 2 x USB ports so you can connect external drives, memory sticks and the like.

Rear of the WD TV Live - from L to R: power, USB, HDMI, optical, LAN, composite out & component out

To get it going, all I needed to do was connect HDMI to my television, connect the blue network cable and plug-in the power. The WD TV Live did everything else, and the default settings are very usable. It found my network’s DHCP server, assigned itself an IP address, found my network shares and just started working.

Format Support

According to the documentation, supported video formats include AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG 1, 2 & 4, WMV9 & VC-1), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (H.264, X.264, AVC, MPEG 1, 2 & 4, WMV9 & VC-1), TS / TP / M2T (MPEG 1, 2 & 4, AVC & VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4 & H.264), M2TS & WMV9.

Supported image formats include JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP & PNG.

Supported audio formats include MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital & DTS.

The WD TV Live also supports common playlist and subtitle formats, and it’s got the DLNA stamp of approval.

Andrew says he’s had huge success with MKV video formats, in terms of quality.

User Interface

Nice.  Fast and smooth.

WD TV Live - User Interface

There’s also a nice interface which streams content directly from Google’s video-sharing website YouTube, popular photo-sharing site Flickr and Live 365 internet radio. You can login to YouTube if you have an existing account.

WD TV Live - browsing YouTube with the built-in UI

My only gripe is the on-screen keyboard, which is clunky and frustrating. You’re driving it with the up/down/left/right arrows on the remote control, so I’m not really sure how Western Digital could improve on this. You only need to use the on-screen keyboard if you’re entering custom network settings, or user names and passwords for network shares and such things. Fortunately the WD TV Live remembers these settings, so you rarely need to use the on-screen keyboard.

Problems with HomeGroup Networking

Tech Talk’s Graeme Callaghan also purchased one of these little boxes some weeks ago. He told me that the only difficulties he has experienced have been with Windows 7 “HomeGroup” networking, which apparently does strange things, e.g. causing network shares to disappear, reappear then disappear again. Graeme said that after he disabled HomeGroup networking, in favour of traditional Windows workgroups, everything worked consistently and well. I’m sharing content off a Windows 7 Professional machine in traditional ‘workgroups’ mode and everything with the WD TV Live has been smooth-sailing.

The Verdict

Good.

Easy to set up; reliable; intuitive user interface; excellent playback quality. High WAF*. This is a media streamer which fills a fundamental hole in the digital lounge room.

Or, in this case, Dr Ron’s Digital Bedroom.

* Wife Acceptability Factor

About 10 months ago I purchased a “3 PC” licence pack for a couple of computers at home.  This provided me with an activation code that could be used on 3 PCs, for home use.  I installed Kaspersky Anti-Virus on two PCs and put the remaining  licence away for a rainy day.

Well, it started raining a few days ago and I thought I’d use the remaining licence on a new PC.

When I typed in the activation code, Kaspersky (the software, not the man himself) congratulated me on installing the software, and smugly informed me that I had a good 62 days left, at least, on this licence for this computer.

Huh?!?!?  I paid for a licence for a year for this PC!

It seems that Kaspersky starts the clock ticking for its activation codes from the time the first one is used – or possibly from the time the activation code is purchased, I don’t know.  I can’t find it in their fine print.

Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, but I feel decidedly jibbed by Kaspersky on this occasion.

Who or what is a Kaspersky? Kaspersky Lab is an organisation which produces robust, easy-to-use anti-virus, anti-spyware and internet security software for the PC and Mac.  It seems to detect viruses, threats and malware where other products fall short.  The name “Kaspersky” is highly regarded in the IT industry.

We always rave about it on-air because it works well.  It costs a few bucks, but when it comes to internet security software, you get what you pay for.  (AVG users take note!!)

The founder of the organisation, Eugene Kaspersky, spoke to Andrew in 2007 about the life and times of his internet security organisation.

But it’s software, with a licensing regime like any other commercial software.  Caveat Emptor.  Read the fine print.

There are 1001 blog-worthy things to blog in my blog about.

Sadly, time (lusty and blithe) is at his apogee.

In brief, I have:

• Had a shave, since the last blog post;
• Upgraded The Surgery WordPress blog from 2.8.3 to 2.9;
• Moved WordPress blog from Fedora 9 machine with crappy dynamic IP address (it was killing me) to shiny Fedora 11 machine with static IP address;
• Marveled at my ability to upgrade WordPress, SQL databases and move them across Linux machines, AND make grown-up changes to DNS zone files – am surely a guru of such things now and legend in my own lunchbox;
• Undertaken 2 of 8 Tech Talk Radio Summer Series productions, time-consuming but rewarding;
• Upgraded the HTC Dream / Google phone to the next Android operating system, very successful;
• Teetered on the brink of e-mail bankruptcy;
• Ordered a new PC for Christmas;
• Ventured inside an Apple Store for the very first time, and escaped by making only a minor purchase (a new iPod Touch); and
• Just today, assisted Mrs Dr Ron in restoring her iTunes library, after she deleted all the music files from her PC’s hard disk  - successfully achieved restoration by using a third-party app called iRip which we’ve spoken about on Tech Talk in the past (thanks JD, saviour of Dr Ron’s marriage).

I have also Tweeted mercilessly about our well-intentioned (yet incompetent, foolish and mis-informed) Senator for Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy.  In case you hadn’t caught up with the news (which the good Senator saved until after the last live episode of Tech Talk for 2009), Australia will be ranked highly with the United Arab Emirates, Iran and China in its foolish deployment of an ISP-based Net Filter.

Adam Turner has had a lot to say about this, and made a clever analogy with a different type of infrastructure.  His blog posts here and here in The Age last week should be mandatory reading.

I’ll blog in more detail about these and other things soon.

I hope you have a great Chrissy and a safe and prosperous New Year.

On Tech Talk Radio we discussed the Interim Report with respect to identified technology issues, and technological recommendations which the Royal Commission might make for the 2009–10 bushfire season.

• The Interim Report is publicly available and can be viewed here (link to external site).
• The Panel’s discussion about the Interim Report can be downloaded here (MP3 audio file – 13 minute discussion – file size 12 MB).

Susan now works in the corporate arena and provides advice and assistance to organisations like schools, sporting bodies, psychologists, child protection agencies and medical practitioners.

Susan on Tech Talk Radio, 23/03/2009

You can download today’s audio segment here.
(Right-click / Save As… to save the file to your computer.  Approx 8MB file size.)

Source: Commonwealth Bank

Normally I wouldn”t give these schemes the time of day, but the size of this current campaign bombarding our mail servers is enormous.

The ‘real’ Commonwealth Bank site says:

“The Commonwealth Bank does not send emails requesting you to confirm, update or disclose your confidential banking information.”

Well that sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?

The problem is that unscrupulous spammers are riding the wave of the Commonwealth’s success, registering similar or deceptive domain names and sending hundreds of thousands of spam messages, in an effort to elicit a response from unwary Commonwealth customers.

Messages purporting to be from the following domains have all tried relaying through my mail server in the last 24 hours:

commbiz.commbank.com.au
commonwealths.com
commbank.au.com
bankofthecommonwealth.com
thecommonwealth.org
commbnk.com
commbank.net.au

…and the list goes on.

Fortunately SpamAssassin seems to be knocking them all on the head, by my server at least.

But not all mail servers run real-time anti-spam software, and lots of servers are delivering these messages.

Technology journalist Angus Kidman, writing for APC Magazine, says that the sheer variety of messages means that many anti-spam services are finding it impossible to identify all the problem emails, even if their text sounds familiar and seems easy to detect; also that according to email security vendor MessageLabs (a division of Symantec), in the first week of the campaign more than 22 different core messages were being sent out en masse, with more than 11 variants.

Read the APC article here.

So what can you do to combat the problem?

• Make sure you’re running anti-spam software, and a good email software (like Mozilla Thunderbird, NOT like Microsoft Outlook Express) that detects and quarantines spam;
• DON’T CLICK ON or RESPOND TO spam emails – doing so just verifies to the spammer that your email address is legitimate and active, and invites a thousand-fold increase in spam to your email address;
• Never disclose personal information or credit card details online, unless you’re 100% confident about the security of the website you’re visiting.  Always double-check SSL certificates and the website address in your web browser’s title bar.

If in doubt, don’t click!

It’s only taken us six months.

Have a look.

Photo: Robert Broomhead (Monday night's guest)

The WIA is the organisation which represents amateur radio operators to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and purports to be the world’s oldest national radio society, having been founded in 1910!

The WIA AGM “Weekend Of Activities” included conference speakers, informative radio-related technical presentations and off-site activities, like a tour of the Powerworks Energy Technology and Visitors’ Centre.

Yours truly did a short presentation on Social Media and Social Networking on Saturday night.  We had a great evening, the meal was delish and fun was had by all.

Photo: Robert Broomhead

Many thanks to Robert Broomhead for inviting me to attend, and for the terrific audio-visual system which “just worked” with my Asus netbook.

(Audio here: Dr Ron’s diatribe on Social Media and Social Networking at the 2009 WIA AGM.)