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Triple play: Freebox Revolution v6

January 11, 2011 By

Triple play has arrived in our home. Here’s the description of my day yesterday. First, Internet access was cut off. Normal, since I changed ISP, but what was abnormal is that I got it back at nearly 3 times faster download speed very shortly after, when I connected our new Freebox v6. I was expecting more of a hole in the connection and had a 3G+ key ready just in case.

Unboxing

Nothing to see here! Three boxes, each with a diagram of hookup on the inside lid:

  1. Freebox modem, router, server.
  2. Freebox player (set top box)
  3. Power supplies for the above which also connect the two via Ethernet at 200Mbps

I opened up the boxes, plugged in the server and powered it up. It has a LED readout that enumerated the steps it was going through in powerup, connect, syncro. I went upstairs and hooked up the player to our TV, using the included HDMI cable.  That alone sets the box apart from most of the gear I’ve bought. There was a second Peritel cable in case you have an older TV with no HDMI. I love HDMI for its combining of audio with the video.

Setup

As soon as the modem was plugged in, it went though its paces and I played with the Macs connected to it via Ethernet cable. It happend that the box router comes set with the same unroutable local address I use, 192.168.1 but the gateway was set to 254. I use fixed IP addresses on most of my equipment, so I had to first use DHCP on one to find the gateway. Once I did this, I could switch the computers back to manual fixed IP and set up two other important devices, our SIP phones.

Phones

Full telephony is part of the triple play, so I plugged the Siemens Gigaset S675IP in to the phone connector on the router as if it was a “normal” phone. It’s not: the Gigaset is a DECT/SIP hybrid, it connects to a phone line and has 6 SIP accounts. Our are set to providers in the USA and conference servers like ZipDX. I needed to reconfigure both the Gigaset DECT and the Polycom IP650 desk phone to talk to the new router IP. Both phones were now working.

WiFi

Setting up WiFi was a matter of generating a key, and might be the only daunting thing to a non-techie. However, I got through it and copied the very long string to USB. One thing I never found was a way to copy that key to the iPods,. It had to be typed in manuually; This was probably the longest operation of the day.

Media Server / Set Top Box (above)

Firing this up went through some configuration. First the screen resolution and trim, which is automatic. Then the detection of terrestrial digital TV channels. Finally I was ready with the full menu (see image below). I briefly tried terrestrial, which worked, but sucks because we don’t have an outside antenna. The digital TV over the Internet is perfect. Further, I was able to download a file at something like 15MB/s while watching TV. But then I moved to the media part.

Network Attached Storage

At first I was confused by how to connect to the server part, since there is a 250 gigabyte drive in it. Older versions used ftp, which I was ready for, but couldn’t find. It took my hours to realize that this box works as Network Attached Storage (NAS). Here’s the amazing part: it just appears as a drive automagically on Macs and even the Windows 7 laptop. I immediately copied some AVI over to it and lo and behold, it plays these better than my Macbook connected to the TV did on VLC.

Blueray / DVD

I’m not a Blueray fan, we don’t even have a full HD TV, so I didn’t try it and don’t care. However, inserting my American DVD in the unit gave me the “wrong region, fool!” error. I’ll have to look into the possibility of a hack, but I fear the region is in the firmware. Not about to mess with that. I put in a DVD I made here, which works in normal players, but it had no audio. I guess for now, we’ll have to keep the deregionalized DVD player we have.

DECT Phones

The unit has a built in DECT base. I haven’t tried this yet, I’ll be back to edit when I do. If you already have a bunch of DECT handsets, this might be a good way to go.

Remote control

It’s rubbery and a bit too much Philippe Starck (tarte à la crême du moment) for my taste, but it works.

The Internet access speeds are about 20Mb/s which is great, although I’d have liked an upload speed increase, too. It’s only a hair faster than the 768Kb/s we had before.

Filed Under: News, Technicity Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Musicians’ Online Visibility

January 2, 2011 By

Internet visibility.

Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.

Your tunes.

Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.

Soundcloud

After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.

Posterous


One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.

Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.

There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.

Summing up

If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.

Filed Under: Internetz, Music, Technicity Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

30 Million+ Wine Labels in Circulation Use AVIN code

December 14, 2010 By

To find out more about the AVIN please visit http://AVIN.cc

The AVIN code is a unique technology that solves an enormous challenge facing the wine industry, clean data. Andre Ribeirinho, of the website Adegga.com, has been working for 3 years to create an open standard for wine information and has recently achieved the milestone of having 30 million wine bottles labeled with the AVIN.

Like an ISBN for books, each vintage of every wine is assigned a unique number that consists of 13 digits preceded by the letters AVIN (ex: AVIN6452997073019), which includes various data points including wine name, region and varietals. This unique code is currently free for wineries to register and is guaranteed for life. The key benefit to using the AVIN is that there is no longer need to dispute the wine’s origin, spelling of the winery name or various other key factors.

“The AVIN is poised to change the wine world as the ISBN did the publishing world. Ask any book publisher whether they can survive without the ISBN. I highly doubt that you’ll find many people believing they could” says founder Andre Ribeirinho.

By becoming a central repository for information, AVIN helps to address internal wine trade issues as well as having customer marketing benefits. Over 25,000 different wines from around 7,500 wineries have already had an AVIN registered.

Wine retailers, importers, writers and also competition organizers can resolve numerous inventory queries by confirming wine details against the single information source.

The AVIN also has consumer marketing benefits. Wineries can print matrix barcode on the labels to create a dynamic and interactive wine buying experience. For example QRCodes permit smart phones to scan and extract information from the wine label itself, displaying this information on the customer’s phone but also with the possibility to link to awards, articles and stockists.

“Wine buying has always been a confusing process for the consumer. Today with the AVIN and QRCode technologies consumers can access information about the wine they are thinking about buying without having to guess” explains Andre.

The AVIN is currently setting up a Board of Directors to both manage the project and ensure the data remains free and accessible to all users into the future. Currently, any winery can head to http://www.avin.cc/ to create an AVIN code for their wine within minutes. For developers and individuals interested in using the AVIN in their wine related businesses, go here: http://www.avin.cc/api-documentation/ for more information.

“We believed that the AVIN would prove to be a good tool to make it easier for our customers and consumers to search/ to find online information about our wines, in this age of information.” Carrie Jorgenson – Cortes de Cima Winery

Filed Under: Internetz, News, Technicity

Social Media, SEO and the Vegematic

November 20, 2010 By

What do social media and the Vegematic have in common?

Ron Popeil would say, “How much would you expect to pay for lessons in social media? $500? $800? More?” More, apparently. I see one about to happen, offered for close to $1,000. So, what do you get for $1,000?, Well, you’ll listen to talks, the content of which is largely available free. You’ll hear pitches for companies presented as “talks” or “tutorials”. You’ll get to hang out with a few people who know what it’s all about, but most of the people there will be the marks, the punters, people who have paid $1,000 to hang out with you.

 

 

Filed Under: Technicity

China and the Visibility Problem

November 11, 2010 By

(Copy of my own post on Wine Brands Blog to check CDN performance on this test site)

According to the luxury lifestyle blog Luxuo, “China is expected to be the world’s seventh largest wine consumer by 2013 as the nation’s thirst for vintages continues to grow amid an economic boom.”

A new challenge has presented itself in the past few months. After over 15 years experience on the web, I though I’d solved a lot of problems, but we have never had a reason to attempt to serve content into China until recently. After a Chinese-language site opened, we were getting reports of loading times so slow the sites were completely unusable. We visited Shanghai in May 2010, and it’s true that almost everything you look at it is abysmally slow from the average DSL connection. A site that uses Flash and video is not likely to load enough to be seen.

Recently, I did some tests in this area and found more complexity than I expected. The Internet in China, I’m told by one Chinese company, is not interconnected in the same way (peering) that most other countries employ. This means that even if you have hosting in Hong Kong (which you know is considered to be outside the mainland Internet) or in a single city like Shanghai, it still does not ensure decent delivery into other Chinese provinces.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exist for this reason, so we did more tests with 4 different CDN and found they all worked very well indeed – except in China! We tested Amazon Cloudfront CDN in Singapore and found it was no better than their US-based servers in delivery to China. There are specialized CDN for Mainland China (Akamai, ChinaCache, but these can be very costly. Most of our smaller producers whose wines are distributed in China will not be able to afford a five-digit monthly invoice to be present there. Even the less modest ones gasp when apprised of the costs involved.

We’re currently working on assembling specialized resources as a solution to this very real problem: Getting a wine web site to be not only visible, but usable. Even non-Flash, non-video heavy sites have a serious speed problem in Shanghai and other provinces, even if they show decent performance in, say, Hong Kong. Other complexities include licensing from the Chinese government, Chinese domain names (.cn,.com.cn), Chinese DNS and a presence of some kind at an address in China. We expect prices to drop significantly in the next two years, but until then, getting your web content into China will be tough going.

Filed Under: Internetz, Technicity

Cloudfare.com Protects Your SIte

September 21, 2010 By

skiddy

Cloudflare.com, from the people who bring you Project Honeypot, is worth taking a look at. If it’s still in beta when you read this, contact me for an invite. From their text on the site:

“CloudFlare wants to give tools to every web master to make their websites faster, safer and smarter. The best way to show you what that means is to share our 2010 Product Roadmap. This is the vision for what CloudFlare will do for its users by the end of 2010. Today, CloudFlare does a few cool things, which are highlighted below. There are lots of new features being rolled out over the coming months. As an early user, we want your feedback! Let us know which functionality you really want and if its not on the list, tell us. We’re making being a web master a little bit easier.”

Filed Under: Security, Technicity

This is Orange

August 28, 2010 By

Orange France is the company whose non toll-free number I called twice a week for six weeks to get the phone line whose bill we were receiving every month connected to the Internet.

Orange France is the company who, week after week, told me “We guarantee you that we will fix this or call you or send an SMS with the staus of your issue within 72 hours.”

This is the company who has a specific support email which auto-responds with a surtaxed phone number to call for support.

This is the company whose support people (at multiple levels) told me “I don’t understand, I’m looking at your record and I see it isn’t connected. Yes, it should have been done. I am submitting an escalation request.”

Orange France is the company whose support person told me after 6 weeks, “You have to go to an Orange store to get the order cancelled and the equipment turned in.”

This is the company whose store, pictured above made me wait an hour while prospective suckers tried iPhones.

This is the company whose employee in the store pictured above told me “We can’t cancel the order.”

This is the company whose employee, when told “Orange support line told me to come here specifically to get you to cancel my order.”  in the store pictured above told me

“Yes, I know they say that on the phone, but it isn’t true. We can’t do it.”

This is the company whose employee showed a Powerpoint at HDComm with smiling children and marketing “We care” language that is 100% false and hypocritical.

Orange France is a company I have no love for at all. Now you have an idea why.

I see I am not alone. A collection of Twitter comments shows they have 100% negative appreciation.

Filed Under: Technicity

StatusNet Desktop

August 22, 2010 By

I did a brief download and evaluation of this tool, StatusNet Desktop a client for Laconica instances like http://identi.ca and got as far as adding my two identities on the main identi.ca site. Something was wrong with the times it was showing, such as “ten minutes ago” for stuff posted in March. It’s my fault for not reading the docs at all but apparently even the army.Twit.tv instance can’t be added because it isn’t secure.

Ok, after some reading I decided to install a server instance, so I did. Now things are a bit more clear, this is the new “Laconica”? Much more fleshed out. Not limited to 140 characters, either. Looks good. Now to figure out what the “secure” part needs.

Filed Under: Technicity

Earth to Winery, hello?

August 22, 2010 By

I was at the wonderful Clos Pepe yearly event this August. I am thankful to our gracious hosts, Steve and Cathy for the invite. Ironic then, that the following experience took place at Clos Pepe, whom I’ve already mentioned as doing a great job communicating on the net in their own way, notably via @clospepe and @weshagen on Twitter. I was happy to chat with Wes again and we left with a couple of bottle of his wine.

Communications skills are a must for wineries. I recall the Lavinia manager in Paris saying they had over 12,000 wines in stock. Pushing the name out there starts with communication. A man came up to me at one of the tasting tables and asked if I was French because he saw the Palmer t-shirt I was wearing. Yes, this shirt is the perfect conversation starter. We got to talking and it turned out it he is a French winemaker who moved to California some years ago. It sounded like a classic “immigrant” success story with the added interest in that it was about wine. He was right to come and talk. He told me his wines were made in the old world, not the California style. I asked him for a card, and when he handed it to me I noticed there was no email address on it, so I asked him to write that on the card. (There was a web site URL, so perhaps he was wary of being put on a mailing list?)

Well, as our vacation progressed we were thinking this fellow might make an interesting subject for a column or an interview. I emailed him on August 9th, 2010, asking if he’d be interested in telling his story to the world. No reply to date.

I mentioned the winery name to a friend who was coming to our mid-August wine gathering, he was kind enough to bring a bottle of the wine. I liked it, it was 100% California, fruit forward (which is not always a bad thing IMO) 15%+ alcohol (which isn’t always bad…). I can like it, I can drink it, but I can’t call it “European style”.

Bottom line, the wine was 100% new world, the online presence 100% old.

Filed Under: Technicity Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Unlocked iPhone 3G tests on iOS4

August 21, 2010 By

Having owned an iPod Touch for  over a year, I was interested in getting an older unlocked iPhone for use with T-Mobile in my visit to the USA and with Orange Mobicarte (prepaid) in France. I bought a used iPhone 3G which was jaibroken to iOS4, which would not have been my choice because it’s very slow. Once you get used to the slow speed, the phone works fine as do the apps. I found and bought the phone onCraigslist.

My T-Mobile prepaid account allows no data at all, so wifi was the only connection to the Internet. The good news is, no unexpected data charges. In fact, once I loaded Google Maps on the phone with wifi, they were cached there and using the GPS worked very well all over town and even out several miles away. The accuracy was excellent, within a few yards at worst. I was surprised by this. It’s like getting a GPS free with the phone. (Remember, no data and no paying for data).
Before returning to France, I put the Orange SIM in and since roaming is enabled on that account, I got a text message with instructions on how to buy credit to call and use data in the USA. I did not need these so I didn’t try them. Of course this is expensive because it’s both roaming and prepaid.
Back in France, I was surprised to find that both Edge and 3G seemed to be available, although they weren’t working at first. After fooling around for hours, I found that somehow I’d been connected and that I had used over $50 in credit without actually doing anything. Probably just the GPS and mail checking, etc. I immediately turned off celular data and 3G.
Today, I reset the data counters, enabled Edge and checked my Gmail account. The cost of data on the Mobicarte prepaid SIM is currently 0.15 euros per 10KB. I’ll keep checking the cost of these services, but I can see there’s no question they are expensive. My use of such things would be sporadic, but I think they will be handy occasionally.
Filed Under: Technicity Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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