Filip Norrgård’s blog @ filips.net
Filip’s blog about mobile technology, tech itself and other stuff

Don’t Install The Vista Bluetooth Update!
12 July 2007 in Root | Comments (4)

This warning goes out to all of you Windows Vista users that use Bluetooth: don’t install the latest IVT Bluetooth Driver update that comes through Windows Update! If you do, then you’re in for a heap of trouble… like I was.

For reasons unkown, Microsoft has pushed out the update driver which only seems to break Bluetooth stacks and implementations. Thankfully, the solution is quite simple:

1. Open Device Manager (using e.g. Start Menu’s search or Control Panel)
2. Expand (if not expanded already) Bluetooth Radio
3. Right click “Wlink Bluetooth Controller“
4. Click Uninstall
5. Check the box for “Delete the driver software for this device“
6. Click OK
7. Now let Windows automatically find the drivers for your Bluetooth radio.

No HID Bluetooth Driver? Then Delete One File

I had problems with getting my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse working after trying to pair them with my computer, so if you are having the same problems, here is how to get it fixed. It seems the INFCACHE.1 file (much too) easily becomes corrupt. The solution is to delete it:

1. Go to %windir%\inf\
2. Find INFCACHE.1 and open Properties
3. In the Security tab, add your username and give yourself full control
4. Now, you should be able to delete INFCACHE.1 — if not, check that your permissions to the file
5. Now try to let Windows automatically find the drivers for your  Bluetooth drivers.

Bluetooth Mouse Driver Problems? No Problem!

If you get problems with the mouse, then you need to find and delete the driver for the CHIC mouse. The message I got was the following:

Windows found driver software for your device but encountered an error while attempting to install it.
USB Browser Mouse
An error occurred during the installation of the device.
The driver installation file for this device is missing a necessary entry.
This may be because the INF was written for Windows 95 or later. Contact your
hardware vendor. If you know the manufacturer of your device, you can visit its website and
check the support section for driver software.

Do the following:

1. Open Windows Update and click on View Update History on the left side.
2. Find “CHIC - Other Hardware - USB Browser Mouse” and make note of the date. (Mine was from the 16th of February, 2007 — your date will vary.)
3. Again, go to the INF folder: %windir%\inf\
4. Using the date from step 2, filter the files so that only the files from that date are visible and delete them all.
5. Allow Windows to find the proper mouse driver.

Thanks to these sources: [Peter Caplan via Microsoft newsgroups] ["USB Browser Mouse Error" by Kirb.com]

Vaasa, Where The Gasoline Prices Are 1337
11 July 2007 in Fun | Comments (0)

No, I don’t like 1337 sp33k (aka. “leet speek”) much, but seeing how the 95 octane gas price the other day was 1.337 €/liter at Shell Express in Vaasa/Vasa (and for a short while at Teboil Express) I couldn’t help but laugh at the relation. You can just barely see the price (and the last 7, but it is there) in the picture below since the lighting conditoins were all but ideal for my camera of choice.

After thinking about if the cold gasoline station had been compromised by some cracker, I realized that I had to get some gas and proof of the coincidental “phenomenon”. Sadly the picture is a bit blurry since I didn’t have anything else to take the photo with except my cameraphone…

AnySee Can’t See Encoded Television… Or Maybe It Can (After Praying)…
13 June 2007 in Rant | Comments (0)

Introduction

This is a short story of the problems I had when trying to install a pair of AnySee digital TV tuners on Windows XP. Since I started writing this, AnySee has come out with drivers that force 64-bit Windows Vista to run in “Test Mode” thus enabeling unsigned drivers to run under Vista. However, I can’t get both terrestial and cable tuners to co-exist under Vista, and the Anysee viewer software is damn slow at times in Vista which (more or less) forces me to reboot into Windows XP for watching TV or use my belowed Terratec Cinergy T² to watch those free-to-air channels.

The Kill (Not As Told By 30 Seconds From Mars)

I bought a pair of brand new AnySees digital TV tuners just recently for viewing pay-TV on my PC for a very reasonable price. One for the terrestrial and another for the cable DTV networks. What is “a reasonable price” you ask? In my book it is: cheaper than a set-top digibox with integrated recording capabilities and conax card reader for those old CRT TVs – which will be rendered outdated very soon.

I knew that the AnySees wouldn’t work in the 64-bit version of Windows Vista that I’m running, but I had a copy of Windows XP Pro running on another partition that should be capable get the drivers installed. Proceeding to installing the cable AnySee first went quite fine. No errors, just hilarious engrish message when everything was done: “You should reboot a computer”. Right… Let me run to my neighbor and restart their computer, that should right about do it, no?

You Want QAM With That?

Well, firing up the program without restarting worked just fine, as I suspected. Getting the program to find the channels was another dilemma. I don’t know what the reason is, but cheap set-top digiboxes are more than capable of finding the channels on cable TV. However, AnySee and Technotrend (which made some tuners for Hauppauge for a while) require you — the consumer — to find out:

• the bitrate
• the QAM
• and each mux frequency

to get those channels found and working on your digital TV cable tuner. Strangly, this has never been the case for the terrestial digital TV tuners as far as I have seen.

To me, this isn’t scary, but to the Joe Average Consumer this looks broken. My cable company VLP (in Finnish) or VLT (in Swedish) has a page listing all the gruesome details that you need for digital TV tuners on computers: here in Finnish and here in Swedish. Just don’t get too dizzy with all those large numbers, ok?

Fast-forward to the TV channels scanned and working: things looked good. The picture quality was reasonably good, but could get better if I were allowed to choose the MPEG 2 decoders (like FFmpeg’s or Intervideo’s software decoders) but no, that isn’t possible. I inserted the card that my cable company requires one to have for some free channels — that you still pay for in the form of a stupid card fee — and waited for Eurosport to become decoded… and waited … … waited … Nope, nothing happened. :S I triple checked that the card was read properly by the program, and it was, the card number and the subscription data.

I knew that the card was working since I had tried it out using a borrowed digibox for the old TV sets. “Oh well”, I thought, “let’s try the other AnySee then”. After installing and this time restarting the computer, the terrestrial AnySee was up and a-running. Alas, the PlusTV card for the terrestrial AnySee rendered no decoded picture. At this point, I did what most other Finns would do: condemned the tuners to the extremly warm depths of the inner earth out of pure frustration.

Keep On Trying!

Well, giving up is for the weak. I decided to uninstall everything: the viewer software and drivers for the Anysees. Restarted (just to be sure) and started reinstalling all at once this time: first the cable driver and then the terrestrial. After the gruesome long waiting period and waiting for the channels to get found, the damn cards worked on both Anysees!

Alas, I can’t have them both connected to the computer and view both terrestrial and cable television at the same time since the AnySee viewer program gets them confused. That could be easily (?) fixed by the coders who make the viewer program, but I don’t believe that they read my blog anyways.

The alternative

Another option was to buy FireDTV firewire based digital TV tuners (that supposedly support HDTV already) but since my Acer Ferrari 4000 has only a 4-pin firewire port, that meant that I would have had to bring along another charger for the digibox and furthermore buy a common interface card so that my pay-TV cards would work in the digibox. (Yes, I’m using the word “digibox” to describe digital television box, which they essentially are.)

So buying two FireDTV tuners would mean (in the worst case) that I’d have to have to use 2 additional chargers, get 2 conax CI card (roughly 50€ a card), and at least one 4-pin to 6-pin firewire card. Not as comfortable as just bringing a USB to USB mini cable, which I tend to usually have along for my Nokia N91 and digital TV.

Let It Rain!
13 June 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

Finally, after weeks of drought, today some rain came to water the town of Vaasa. We’ve had forest fire warning for probably a month already, and even the weed (no, not that one) started turning dry and yellow.

Amazingly the rain did fall within city borders this time around. It’s been quite usual for rain to start to pour just outside city borders, leaving the town/city to dry even more in summer sunshine.

As I’m typing this, the sun is already starting to make an appearance and the little rain that came may dry away almost too soon. And here I was hoping for a cozy rainy day indoors…

"Oh Canada" Should Really Be "Whoa Canada"
11 June 2007 in Formula 1 | Comments (0)

And by that I’m referring to yesterday’s Formula 1 Grand Prix in Montreal. I haven’t seen this much action for a long time:

• Polish Kubika had a nasty looking accident and, quite amazinly, has been given the all-clear
• the safety car had to come out numerous times, 
• some beaver groundhog of Notre Dame island did a hit-and-run (sorta) on a car
• two cars were disqualified for running a red light in the pit lane exit
• some guy looking like Tom Hanks from “Cast Away” was on the 2nd step of the podium and claimed that the track had loose pavement during the race
• in the end, roughly half of all cars finished the extreme Canadian F1 race

This was action with nothing like it and after my pulse had settled, I realized it was long time since F1 was that full of action. :) Last time was back last year when there were Michelin tyres that enabled cars to overtake, which is something that the current Bridgestone tyres seem actively disable in F1 cars.

Updated: Davidson most likely hit during the race the same groundhog that R. Schumacher almost hit during practice, as reported by Pitpass.

Über-Cool Lightning Radars
16 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

The thunderstorm season started tonight with some mediocre thunder going on. (No, I’m sure that none of my neighbors were playing AC/DC’s Thunder ) The whole storm that came over Vaasa/Vasa yesterday was surprisingly powerful, I at least thought. The water poured down heavily and the wind had gusts at storm strengths that I thought belonged in the autumn, not spring.

Well, it is time to keep an eye on those lighting radars that are plentiful on the net. The good with these radars are that they are ideal for predicting when/if a thunderstorm will get near you. The bad is that they have varying data and calibrations, but that needs to be expected since they are only amateurs maintaining them. The pros (FMI, Foreca, SMHI) do not sadly allow give free access to their lightning radars, which is a bit of a shame. FMI has had their lightning radars only available for farmers and aviation needs, but last year they (thankfully) made their service available on mobile phones as well… for a smaller fee. But, in the end, the information from the free radars are not the significantly less accurate than what the meteorological institutions have to offer.

A local storm chaser group have put together a link list of Swedish and Finnish lightning radars. My two favorites are Zalama in Muurame and Stormtracker Wasa in Vaasa/Vasa. It’s worth checking out if you have concerns that lighting might destroy your home electronics or computers, or just wanna go golfing.

YLE’s Website and Finnish Websites Under Attack
15 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

The homepage of YLE – the Finnish Broadcasting Company –, Finnish Eniro and Suomi24 — a Finnish portal — have been under a so called website flood attack or (in geek speak) denial of service attack that started yesterday. According to Helsingin Sanomat, the attack started yesterday and continued today with the attacker, or more presumably attackers, adapting to the defenses put up by YLE.

The same article by HS quotes the Finnish Ministry of Communication as claiming this to be the largest attack on a Finnish website to date. The last big attack was on F-Secure a few years back.

The interesting part here is that no-one either mentions the reason of the attack (if they know it) or genuinely do not know why someone is attacking them. Since the severity of the attack is quite extensive, it seems like someone is commandeering a zombie network of compromised computers to attack the websites in question. There is a possibility that the attackers have tried getting money from the websites as a protection payment, and when the websites didn’t cough up the dough, the attack started.

F-Secure recently said on their weblog that this method of blackmailing hasn’t been working well for the attackers so most of them have switched to other methods of illegally gaining money.

I can’t figure why someone would try to attack YLE for other than money… not that YLE has money to spare. I’m paying them 200+ € in TV-license fees already and all of that has gone to ensure digital TV in Finland (I personally suspect ). Ok, there are two highly unlikely possibilities to why someone might want to attack YLE:

1. the digital TV mess
2. disgruntled Eurovision Song Contest fans

But I think I can safely assume that no-one of the above options have enough resources to initiate a destructive DoS attack.

Joost Is Down?
9 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

Hmph, trying to launch Joost today just shows a polite message about a new version being available. But, the Joost.com website seems to be down with either a server internal error or some proxy error. Sigh, and I wanted to watch some classic clay animations…

Update 10th of May: Joost seems to up and running fine right now. I only now had to download the latest version: 0.10.2 The old 0.9.2 version is outdated apparently.

Man, The WiFi and Bluetooth Space Is Getting Crowded Around Here
9 May 2007 in Root & Security | Comments (0)

Looks like the 2.4 GHz spectrum is getting crowded around my apartment these days. Way back, ’bout 2 years ago, when I moved to my current apartment, I was the only one using WiFi in the building. Well, except for someone in a neighboring house who also had WiFi, but I only saw that access point near the windows.

Today, when I tried to use my Bluetooth Plantronics stereo headphones to listen to some music in the kitchen but it turned out to be more difficult than previously. All was well for a few seconds and then…. silence… I quickly checked that the headphone and transmitter were connected and the power on — and yes, they were on and the music was still playing.

The music came back for a second, silence, some music for a bit more than a second, silence… and some music now until the track changed and more eerie silence. Aaand finally the music came back on.

This is probably what it sounds like when the headphone and transmitter try to find a less congested channel to broadcast on. I had thought there were quite few WiFi access points that could interfere with my Bluetooth headphones, but boy was I wrong! Using my Pocket PC and a program called WiFi Graph I checked out the number of APs it could find in my vicinity. The sum: 7 (including my own). So, all of my neighbors seem to have now!

Funny and scary bit was that 4 of those APs used the same WiFi channel number 6, and two of them had their manufacturer’s name, Zyxel, as the SSID. I’m afraid that those who didn’t change their SSID didn’t fix the password from the factory default either. Even more worrying is that only I and another WiFi user have enabled some sort of WiFi encryption (WPA or WEP), the others don’t seem to have any encryption in effect (unless they are using IPSEC or VPN, which I doubt they are using).

It is somewhat unfortunate that Bluetooth has to share frequencies with WiFi on the 2.4 GHz band, but what can you do when there is nothing left really for them to use? Plus, me being a sort of “bitten by the Bluetooth”-fanatic it probably doesn’t help that I have a good number of Bluetooth devices in good daily use: my computer, phone, Pocket PC, keyboard and mouse. (Sure, I have a bit more Bluetooth devices here also, but they are not always on. )

I wonder how long before the 2.4 GHz band will be over-crowded in apartment buildings by all of the super-converged-devices. Five years, perhaps?

What’s Up, UMTS?
27 April 2007 in Phones & Root | Comments (0)

After reading about problems with Sonera’s 3G (=UMTS) network in the Helsinki area, I’ve started getting problems with Saunalahti’s (aka. Elisa) UMTS network in Vaasa as of recently.
 It is quite strange this time around, though. People can’t really call me - all right, they can try to call me but they get all kinds of strange error messages or I ”never answer” to their call.
Well, I can’t answer if the phone ain’t ringing, can I?

The problem seems to be in the network and not the phone. It is the only reasonable conclusion I can make for when I today went into a store, where they apparently have a GSM repeater, the phone made the switch to GSM as UMTS probably doesn’t have great reception without a repeater there.
Quite soon after the phone went GSM, a phone call came in. Apparently, the caller had tried calling me several times but without any success until now.

I’ve seen this behavior before, but the other way around, I couldn’t call nor send SMS to anyone when I was connected to the UMTS network. Switching to GSM made it all work again. That was the result of a malfunctioning UTMS antenna on the network operator’s behalf, or so they told me.

So, I think I’ll be running on the GSM network for the moment and leave the trials and misbehaviours of the UMTS network alone for a few weeks time… (Yes, I’ve sent a report to Saunalahti, but they can take some time to answer to their emails. Large organization and all that makes email answering take some time, I think.)