Silicon Valley Redneck

Good against remotes is one thing...

Stephen Fry rants about universal remote controls.

Those things have always struck me as being a bit like Esperanto, really: universally pointless.  The concept seems good enough, but when it comes to implementing it, well....

You'd think a multi-function remote with soft controls implemented using a touchscreen ought to be useful, though expensive.  (Isn't there a Palm app for this?)  Apparently, though, they're not.  Useful, that is.  Expensive, they are.

But, then: a lot of the non-universal remotes provided with appliances are hard to use... because they try to be more than one thing.

I have (pops off to living room for a moment) five remotes, plus the cordless keyboard/trackball.  They are:

• Projector: 22 buttons, of which I routinely use ON/OFF; the three input-select buttons see occasional use, and the rest are for setup and maintenance.  This one is pretty well designed, just for the projector.
• Receiver: 51 buttons, of which I routinely use four.  Three others get occasional use.  Six of the buttons select which device it's controlling... which might be handy if I had a bunch of gadgets all made by Onkyo, which I don't (just this receiver and my old one from college, which has no remote-control capability whatsoever).  Were I to venture beyond the few buttons I actually use, this remote would become horribly confusing.
• VCR: 24 buttons, reasonably well set up for controlling a VCR... though it also has modes for controlling a TV set, a cable box, and something or other else.  As a control for those other things, I expect it would be a horrible mismatch.
• DVD player: 33 buttons, 17 of which have more or less obvious uses.  Only controls the DVD player.
• Computer: this is one of the ATI RF remotes, and I've set Xine up to understand it reasonably well.  52 buttons, not well suited to any particular real-world usage, but I've mapped about 20 of them to useful functions.

It would kinda-sorta make sense to have a single remote to handle the "usual" functions for the projector, receiver, and computer.  (Actually, if I added an IRDA transceiver to the computer, this could be a use for an old Palmoid device... I think there's a Grand Vizier still in working order around here.  If I learned to write little Palm apps, it could be a nice refinement to the home theater.  Also, it could, when talking to the computer, receive context menus over the IRDA... assuming I wrote context menu software for Linux.  Which I'm not likely to do.  So much for that idea.)

Anyway, what I was about to write, before I started counting remotes and buttons, is this: the remotes which come with appliances are often confusing in their own right.  I sometimes find myself trying to explain, to one older person or another, how to turn the TV on.

Now, you might think that turning the TV on would be simple.  But, when you look at the typical basic home TV setup these days, you have four components: the TV, the VCR, the DVD player, and the cable or satellite box.

Each of these components comes with a remote.

Each of these remotes has features for controlling the other three components.  Only those features don't work, because they're not all the same brand, nor the same vintage.

So the first order of business is to determine, and explain, which remote controls which device.  In so doing, it is not helpful that, for example, the DVD-player remote has a button which purports to turn the TV on and off.

The next thing to explain is that pressing certain buttons on any of these remotes will cause it to cease controlling the device with which it arrived, and instead attempt to control some other device which you don't have.  You may find the remote for your Zenith TV set is sending messages to someone else's Zenith DVD player, while your Panasonic DVD player ignores it.  This necessitates a recovery plan: if it stops working, push this button to make it start controlling the TV again.

Then there's the whole business of finding the input-select button on the TV remote, figuring out how it works on that model, and explaining how to use it.  It doesn't help that the VCR and cable box have their own input-select functions, which generally don't do what you want, and are labeled based on a topology that doesn't match anyone's actual installation.  (Yeah, of course you route the video from the DVD player through the VCR.  It's the obvious thing to do, when the VCR was there first.  Then you learn about Macrovision.)

So, yeah, remotes are a serious aggravation... but the universal ones are neither the solution nor the problem.

"The telephone company does not want your die-um."

My parents are still on dialup Internet access.  Have been for years.  Back in the 90s, I got my mother signed up for a free e-mail account on Juno, then Juno started offering relatively cheap dialup TCP/IP, so she signed up for that.

Well, a heck of a lot of things become nigh-well unusable at 56K.  Windows, for one: those pesky security updates take for-freaking-ever to load.

So, it's past time to being them into the exciting new world of broadband.

I actually tried to do this several months ago: go to Yahoo's DSL page, and proceed through all the stages of signing up.  If I recall correctly, part of the signing-up process was going to involve a call either to or from the land line that was to be used for the DSL... which appeared problematic, given that we were using that line for the dialup access to sign up for the DSL.

I don't remember if that was what blocked our efforts for that day, or if we ran into a step of the process that had an "OUT OF ORDER" sign on it before getting to that point.

Anyway, today I took my travel laptop over there, plugged my cellphone into it - look, Ma, your phone works in the meantime! - and visited dsl.yahoo.com.

Well, Yahoo is still advertising the SBC/Yahoo DSL thing.  Except that it notes that SBC is now AT&T.  And, if you select AT&T as your existing land-line provider, you're promptly redirected to AT&T's web site (on sbc.com), which says nothing whatsoever about Yahoo.

Well, I didn't really see the need for dragging Yahoo into  it anyway.  So, punch in the area code and first three digits; get to the right page for the area; punch in the complete phone number (the site not bothering to remember what I'd told it earlier); find the $20/month no-commitment plan (plus $50 for the modem); click "Add to cart"....

Oops.  Add-to-cart gets a blank page.  As in, contains no HTML whatsoever.  Try again: same thing.  Does their site not know what to do about Firefox 3.0, so it just returns blankness?

Start over, in Konqueror.  Now add-to-cart works.  Select the $50 modem, self-install, sundry other questions... confirm this is what we want... click the "Checkout" button...

...and get a page that announces that the site is out of order.  Down for maintenance.  For your continued comfort and convenience, passengers will remain seated until the lemon-soaked towelettes arrive.

Grrrr....

Well, maybe they'll just have to call up Comcast and get Internet service added to their cable.  I've been avoiding that, as Comcast has a horrible reputation for customer service, and the last couple of times cable guys have come out to their place to install stuff, they've gotten it wrong.  (And, of course, the shiny new Digital Cable doesn't come with a user manual.)

I'm quite happy with my ISP (Raw Bandwidth Communications), but their low-end DSL is kinda overkill for my parents, and not cheap by today's standards.  It's looking suspiciously like the cheap basic household broadband is unobtainable, though.

Off-topic for the day...

...but nearly as annoying as the common cold...

As I was printing out some important work-related documents, my laser printer (that Brother HL-5250DN I bought a while back) ceased functioning, all its LEDs angrily ablink.

Cycling power got it to wake up, illuminate its happy light, begin accepting data, and maybe print a page or so before going to angry lights again.

According to the manual:

What I have here is a Main PCB failure.  Yikes!

Except... isn't that the sort of thing that turns up during power-on self-test, and not later, after printing a couple of pages?

After considerable futzing around (and a nasty bruise upon the knee), I've developed a powerful suspicion that a document in the queue was causing the firmware to crash, and the trap handler declares a hardware failure, on the assumption that the firmware Just Wouldn't Do That Sort Of Thing (stack overflow, wild pointer, watchdog timeout, whatever).

So, rather than an actual hardware failure, I believe what I have is a buggy PDF file causing the buggy Acrobat reader to generate buggy Postscript, causing the printer's buggy BR-Script interpreter to flake out.

Whew!

Good thing I didn't really, urgently need hardcopy of that particular datasheet anyway.

Why don't these things come with lifetime warranties?

Well, that nice digital oscilloscope I scored on eBay back in 2004 - a TDS644A - is now irreparably dead.  Almost everything still works, but it no longer triggers, and the vintage-scope-repair guru informs me that this failure mode involves multiple things wrong on the acquisition board, at least some of them not repairable with available methods & parts.

So, barring a replacement acquisition board turning up - maybe from a unit with a busted display - that scope is now officially deceased.  Not triggering makes it useless for most of my purposes.

The good news is that the market for used test equipment seems to be slow at the moment, and digital 'scopes are going relatively cheap on eBay.  Between that and a certain lack of urgency at the moment (my little 2-channel, 100 MHz portable scope is still working fine), I can probably get a good replacement that fits my budget and schedule.