René Rebe

A long long time ago, 2+ years or so, I got the Apple Bluetooth Headset to accompany my iPhone. The Apple Bluetooth headset is pretty, astonishing, and awesome(!) tiny, slim and sexy. One could say of superb design –a design icon– that could live in a museum (like near the G4 Cube at the Museum Of Modern Art).

However: It features the worst audio quality I experienced, ever. Even worse than an IBM PC XT/AT PC speaker. Noisy, damped, and other block artifacts that sound like skipped, dropped Bluetooth packets. Absolutely uncomfortable to talk over. Some is certainly due to the monophonic and low bandwidth Bluetooth Headset Profile (HSP). However, other headsets sound at least somewhat better, and usually do not have that many gaps, due poor Bluetooth signal, dropped packets, whatever.

Battery life is also not that stellar, some some hours of talk time, and a day standby (or so). Which is certainly no surprise given the tiny nature of the device, and the therefore absolutely miniature battery somehow squeezed into it.

The biggest selling point certainly is the smooth iPhone integration, including the automatic pairing when connected to the dock connector, and battery level indication in the status bar, and recharge lock screen.

In retrospect, the Apple Bluetooth Headset is actually the gadget I least used, ever. Given the poor Bluetooth connection and battery life it is certainly no wonder even Apple stopped sales and took it off the market just months after it went on sale.

I wanted to try out Bluetooth stereo audio for some time, now, and just got myself my first bluetooth headset, ever (more on that in another post). As audiophile my first impressions where a little mixed, but eventually I figured out why they where worse under Apple’s Mac OS X, even compared to Apple’s iPhone 3G. Some excessive research turned out why (beside the crappy SBC codec mandatory in A2DP): OS X’s “BluetoothAudioAgent” may use forbidable low bit-rates for the forbidable bad audio codec by default! The straight-forward, cut’n past-able tweak is as simply as running this in your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent “Apple Bitpool Min (editable)” 52

The max may be 64, however, 56 did resulted in the agent to connect to my headset, 52 worked. Please post a comment if a higher rate works for you, or you need an ever lower value (btw. the default appears to be as low as 2! …). Now with the tweaked setting a lot of the noise, hissing, and other compression artifacts experienced with A2DP under Mac OS X are gone!

On the way I found out something likewise interesting: The menu extra’s (the little widgets in the top-right area of the menu) show alternate versions when clicked with the Option key hold down (unlike other, regular, option-click context menus for this easter egg a possibly enabled, real right click is not enough, you have to Option-click).

For example the WiFi one shows some internals: BSSID, PHY mode, channel, encryption, … the Audio one lets you switch your audio sources (!!!), the Battery one shows the condition, and the Bluetooth one display the version, and entries for the Bluetooth Explorer, Diagnostics Utility, and PacketLogger. Neat!

Which finally brings me to the UI way to do this tweak: Option-click the Bluetooth Menu Extra : Open Bluetooth Explorer : Utilities : Special Options… : Audio Options : For A2DP connections use these bitpool values: Minimum : 52

Personally I find the “Special Options…” particularly amusing.

By-the-way: performance metric on the side, on an underperforming Atom Z530 iTunes consumes 11% CPU (3% on a 2.2GHz MacBookPro) decoding an average MP3, and the BluetoothAudioAgent a little more than 16% (5% on a 2.2GHz MacBookPro) to encode the audio stream into the sub-standard SBC (Sub-Band-Codec). Not only would MP3 codec over A2DP support in more headsets and Bluetooth stacks save at least those 16% of the re-encoding, it would also save some of the 11% initial decoding, and improve audio quality by magnitudes!

Hardware vendors, please? Guess it’s time to bring my own advanced-codec Bluetooth headsets to the market

I do not believe it, until I see it.

This would be way too strange to become real. I mean what would they gain? Not much actually, they can produce their own, optimized, ARM flavor already. The only benefit would be to take ARM away from competing companies. And in that case they would end up with a huge, unprofitable subsidy – unless they lay off most of the ARM staff.

However, if Apple really would cease ARM supplies to competitors it would certainly hurt the whole embedded industry – given that nearly any crapgadget, from your mobile phone, router, access-point to the NAS near you is powered by an ARM cpu.

Well, then, if that really turns out to be true, and Apple would indeed stop licensing ARM to others, there still are MIPS, SuperH, AVR32, heck, even PowerPC. Well, even x86 gets more energy efficient, (think post Atom silicon) … So the other companies still have options to continue their business.

So instead they could also directly burn their money. But still, I get to think that is an good Aprils fool – just 21 days off, …

PS: From my own experience AVR32 is pretty competitive on the performance per watt scale, if they just would scale their core IP to the GHz range (up from the current 140-200 MHz), …

My current displays are a little aging, and with Apple not coming out with updated Cinema Display, and disqualifying itself with those glossy ones I can not work with (too many reflections, need my eyes some more years, …) I got to think about what be the perfect display color. White (light, grey, silver, aluminum, etc.), or black. Some argue for some improved visual screen contrast with black border. Currently my very old ViewSonic display are kind of silver (plastic), and the likewise, but less, aging Apple Cinema Display is aluminum:

Just comment, what do you think?

(Image courtesy Mac Rumors.)

I want one two! I never quite liked the chrome bezel of the iPhones up to now (1st, 3G, 3GS). The frameless style is exactly what I envisioned.

However, a slightly smaller display would not fit into my vision – I’d prefer a slightly bigger one (not just in terms of resolution), to make reading websites or other material more enjoyable. But then again, that might hurt iPad sales, so a smaller iPhone display would certainly favor people getting an iPad for reading. On the other hand I really prefer just to take one device “that fits all” around with me.

I really do not want to be the Apple employee who actually lost the phone in the bar! Unless, of course, it was an intentional leak – to make the media and us desperately long for it, awaiting the new iPhone in the summer.

In the past decade I lived without any Microsoft Windows flavor near me. However, for multiple reasons (e.g. being able to answer Windows questions to my parents in law) I thought it’d be a nice idea to leave the Windows 7 that came with the for occasional “let’s see how the menu item is named there” reboots.

While I initially had triple boot (via Chameleon, not GRUB, it just looks better) last autumn, it broken some time thereafter. As I said, I do not really “need” Windows for anything, less so abroad, so i left it in that un-bootable state for the time being. However, now that I injected an SSD I reinstalled anything, anyway. And just when I had everything installed and setup this stupid Windows 7 beast refused to boot, yet again (with the strange “hardware changed I can no longer boot” message I was already used to)! The Windows installer media repair function was no help, either.

The internet was silent on that matter as well (ok, guess not too many dual-booting their Hackintosh), so I invested some time to finally track this annoying thing down. After some intermitted hours of re-install and analysis it turned out the Mac OS X’s fdisk is the culprit! Zero’ing out the new and optional “disk signature” (4 bytes at offset 440 [0×1B8 in hex]) of the MBR:

— mbr.doesntwork.hex 2010-04-16 20:04:35.000000000
+++ mbr.works.hex 2010-04-16 20:04:26.000000000
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
0000180 bb 01 00 fc ac 3c 00 74 06 b4 0e cd 10 eb f5 c3
0000190 0a 0d 62 6f 6f 74 30 3a 20 00 65 72 72 6f 72 00
00001a0 47 50 54 00 74 65 73 74 69 6e 67 00 64 6f 6e 65
-00001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 00
+00001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 b8 29 01 00 00 80 00
00001c0 14 00 af fe ff ff 13 00 00 00 ad 60 49 06 00 fe
00001d0 ff ff 83 fe ff ff c0 60 49 06 c0 60 49 06 00 fe
00001e0 ff ff 07 fe ff ff 80 c1 92 0c 00 cd 0e 06 00 00

So Windows 7 (I assume since the new BOOTMGR was introduced in Vista) uses this disk ID to identify the boot device for startup, sigh!

Finally I know why Chameleon ships a custom fdisk, though their README could be clearer, e.g. using a “./” prefix in their sudo calls, and pointing out that preserving the disk UUID is vital for Windows versions since Vista.

Now after the WePad demonstration, which was just playing a mockup video inside the Windows Media Player, I guess Neofonie needs some private lessons how to build, and introduce a Linux tablet, even more so that the JooJoo tablet is already there, and is shipping:

• never ever show-cast it with Windows
• even less so if it is x86 based, there is virtually no setup cost, hell take any Linux, ChromeOS, Android or -as last resort- Ubuntu near you
• don’t claim a cheap Asian OEM device is “designed in Germany”, in times of the internet people will notice
• don’t just start importing an Asian OEM device when others (iPad, JooJoo) are already shipping, and don’t wait another half a year until your employees learned to create a Linux product, by that time the underdog is even less hot
• don’t name it like a utility to pee, the lesson should already be learned after Nintendo’s Wii

That’s was the basic introduction, as Mr. -red scarf- Neofonie is located in Berlin, too, he may feel invited to contact me for some more private Linux and marketing lessons (and Asian connections).

Yesterday I ordered at the Jacob Elektronik online shop for the first time. Although I have a mixed history with those non-major online stores, the price for the Intel X18 SSD was pretty good.

Long story short: it’s actually no long story, they shipped it it just some hours after I ordered, and it arrived in just 24h, that is today!

So you want to upgrade the quite slow Toshiba, MK1235GSL (4200rpm, quickly auto head parking, so that (any OS) UI freezes on FS object access until the disk spun up again).

Fortunately it is pretty easy to open, disassemble the Nokia Booklet. The keyboard can be flipped open by pressing back 2 clips with a plastic (like credit) card, and the keyboard sides with either a tiny plastic tool, or a fingernail.

(more…)

…but Sony indeed removed the OtherOS functionality with the v3.21 PS3 firmware update on April the 1st. So in order to use the primary function I purchased the 64bit PowerPC and Cell equipped small form factor workstation, I now have to carefully avoid to ever update the firmware again. Oh wait, there still is George Hotz to help out.

I’m crossing my fingers if that allows me to update to the more energy efficient PS3 Slim.

Certainly not the smartest move from Sony, to highly motivate some thousand, if not ten thousands, programmers -certainly some of the brightest minds, using it for super-computers in university labs- to regain access. Maybe even beyond the former restricted access, but now to the RSX, one more SPE, or Slim, as well.