New Monitor, Simple Solutions when Troubleshooting DVD Players and Other Complex Systems, Hiding Your E-mail Address On Your Website, Interesting Website Usage Stats

Argh, been remiss here in posting, way too busy. Hmmm, I feel that I've said this before...

New Monitor

I just acquired a new 22 inch LCD widescreen monitor (the one on the right in the pic above). Very nice unit, large and bright.

But I wasn't supposed to have it until Xmas.

My wife ordered it from Staples and, well, they didn't package it in anything but it's original padded box, with a picture of it on the outside. Word to the wise; make sure it's gift packaged if it doesn't come re-packaged or if you're not sure.

Which meant the UPS guy handed it to me, and well - I knew what I was getting for Xmas at that point.

It's a great monitor, and after some custom resolution settings for my video card (so things aren't stretched - the video driver itself had no setting for this directly, though it's control panel also had a custom resolution setting) I was having a ball. But from looking at other people's stuff too many people have bought widescreen monitors (when their computers didn't come with them) and everything is super-stretched on the screen, but they don't notice it or don't care or can't figure out how to adjust it. Same with TV's...

I have now moved my 19 inch CRT to the side as the second monitor, replacing a 17 inch CRT. The 19 inch CRT looks huge, like a tank compared to a Porsche. And I need to take the base off the CRT to even both of them up vertically (the CRT's base has always been a bit high).

If you haven't tried a dual monitor set up give it a try. And you don't need two video cards either.

In the following pic is a bit of a comparison between the CRT (on the left) and the LCD (on the right). Much better color, much brighter more vibrant pics on the LCD. And this is after twenty minutes of tweaking of the CRT to try and make it comparable to the LCD display.

To be fair though - the trusty old 19 inch CRT spent a good portion of it's life in Korea (where it was made, BTW).

On a side note - the "STICKY" text was something a friend of mine was working on, and made a good comparison for simple colors.

Simple Solutions when Troubleshooting DVD Players, and Other Complex Systems

Sometimes, even in something complex and uber-complicated as computers and electronics; the simplest solution is the answer. And I think that's something a lot of us forget.

A good example.

We have a very nice LG DVD player; it upconverts for our HD TV, has lots of options, and even reads memory cards (which we've never used, like that USB port on our TV).

One day a crossed-out menu item started appearing in the top right corner of the screen. It was very intermittent and sometimes we could watch an entire movie and not see it appear. Other times it showed up all of the time, blinking on and off, popping up and disappearing.

Our first thought was that a button on a remote was being pressed, maybe by a remote buried under a magazine or book (after all, we have a large number of remotes).

Having eliminated that my second thought was a stuck button on the DVD. But it's not that old, and we never use the buttons on top of it. That can't possibly be it, we thought!

But it was the most logical assumption.

I tried a number of things, including cleaning the DVD, different connections (maybe a bad HDMI cable as it seemed to be related to the resolution), etc.

We even called the manufacturer's help line, tried a bunch of things.

Predictably one of the things seemed to work while we were on the phone, we thanked the Indian girl and not more then twenty seconds after hanging up the crossed-out menu item showed up again.

Of course, both my wife and I assumed that that was the end. Throw-away equipment nowadays.

A little further investigation using various menus showed that what seemed to be 'sticking' was something to do with the resolution switching, as previously suspected. While on the set up menu it would cycle through the available resolutions endlessly.

We checked the remote once again - nothing holding the button down, not even pointed at it, I dropped the batteries just to make sure.

Of course, there's a duplicate resolution-switching button on the top. But we had never actually touched it. I fiddled with it, thinking if it was sticking that bouncing it up and down might make it stop or at least point to it being the culprit. It didn't seem to make any difference.

Again - no, it can't be just a bad button, it has to be in the electronics. We started looking around for new DVD players, possibly a Blueray (still expensive!).

But coming from an electronics background - I decided that it was at least worth a try to mess with the button itself, mechanically and electrically. I held out near-zero hope that this was it.

Half an hour later, after disassembling the offending device, I had disconnected the suspect button using a soldering iron and desoldering tool carefully threaded between the electronics.

With the button hanging by one connection I half-assembled the player and gave it a try.

No crossed-out item in the corner. A couple DVD's later and still no problem. I desoldered the last connection on the resolution button, buttoned everything back up and tried yet another DVD. Still no problems.

So now it works fine, sans the resolution-switching button on the top. Not visible as I left actual the plastic cover that was on top of the button inside, and if I wanted to I could get another button to replace it but - again - we never use those buttons.

I'm sure that most people aren't going to have the resources nor the knowledge of soldering that I did in this case.

But it is a good demonstration that sometimes the simplest and most common sense explanation, even in extremely complex systems, shouldn't be discounted like we initially did.

Hiding Your E-mail Address On Your Website

One of the most important things nowadays when setting up and running a website is hiding your e-mail address from spammers, yet still allowing people to contact you. And hiding it both from automated harvesters as well as those in third-world countries who are hired to manually grab e-mail addresses off websites.

The latter is a method where a moderately motivated person can get your e-mail even if it's encrypted with a piece of JavaScript or similar method. Which previously was one of the best ways to hide your e-mail.

So nowadays it's much harder. The best way is to use a form for feedback, I think.

And let's face it - some visitors don't even have e-mail set up on your computers. They use web-based e-mail so when they click that "old-fashioned" e-mail link that normally opens a new e-mail message in your e-mail program - nothing happens or it opens an e-mail program that isn't even set up.

With forms your e-mail never appears anywhere readily accessible, and you can add additional fields, if needed, according to the uses of your website.

Works great, and highly recommended.

But, a real enterprising spammer might look at the source code of your form and get your e-mail off that. Very few of course, but it's still a possibility.

There's ways around this too, using CGI or PHP forms. But again, a quick look through the source code to find the PHP it's calling, and maybe a specialized program, will reveal your e-mail in it also. And again, there's more ways around that, but that's a subject for a different time maybe.

But a real simple way is to use a free form mail service instead of messing with it yourself.

Like this site - Email Me Form. It's easy and free, and works quite well. It also archives every form you get (and also can archive any spammer attacks, or mistakes by dumb users), has CAPTCHA as an option, and best of all even a spammer looking through the source code of the form page won't reveal your e-mail address, because it's not stored there. In fact, it's not stored anywhere on your site and can't be accessed through the emailform site.

The forms are nicely customizable and you don't even need to supply a page for your form if you don't want to - let them do it.

You can see a use of it at my Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern NY website, this one uses the form hosted at my site and processed through the Email Me Form site. Another example is the contact form that can be accessed at the bottom of my HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo site - with the form hosted directly (a bit simple; this one) on the Email Me Form site and processed through there.

Great site, and if you don't like that one there's many more sites that will allow you to do this for free, or you can similarly keep it on your own site using various pieces of software and yet still hide your address.

Interesting Website Usage Stats

A stat counter is great for both seeing who is visiting your site, as well as targeting traffic via search engines and links.

I use the site StatCounter.com primarily, as they do an excellent job, though there are many nice free and paid services out there, as well as some great stuff you can host directly on your own site to do the same. Some will even show you real-time stats i.e. who's on your site right at that moment.

With this you can track individual IP's, where they are located, how long they stay on each page, what site they were on before your's and what site they go to afterwards, what OS and browser and resolution they are using, what keywords they used to find your site if they found it via a search engine, which search engine they used, the path they took through your site, and analyze keyword and site usage statistics as well as other points of data.

Invaluable for bumping your site up the search engines and tweaking Meta tags and keywords on your site.

Here's some interesting OS, browser, and resolution stats from one of my websites - my Jefferson County History site - during a certain time period. Just a side-note, not sure how visitors to my historical site compare to average visitors elsewhere.

270 54.00% MSIE 7.0 117 23.40% MSIE 6.0 70 14.00% Firefox 3.0.4 13 2.60% Firefox 2.0.0 8 1.60% Safari 1.2 8 1.60% Mozilla 5.0 5 1.00% 4 0.80% Firefox 3.0.3 2 0.40% MSIE 8.0 2 0.40% Chrome 0.2 1 0.20% MSIE 5.5

As you can see the various versions of IE still have the lion's share of visitors. No surprise here. The blank one is likely search spiders.

327 65.40 Windows XP 131 26.20 Windows Vista 16 3.20 Windows 2000 14 2.80 Unknown 8 1.60 Linux 2 0.40 Mac OS X 1 0.20 Windows 2003 1 0.20 Windows NT4.0

Nor surprising, I don't believe. XP continues to dominate even with new computers having Vista installed by default, for the most part.

212 43.89% 1024x768 139 28.78% 1280x1024 70 14.49% Unknown 29 6.00% 800x600 28 5.80% 1152x864 5 1.04% 1600x1200

A good 28 percent are using 1280x1024. Large screen monitors? Widescreen monitors? Do they like it that way or just never changed the default resolution?

	483 Enabled 17 Disabled

This one shows number of people who have JavaScript enabled and disabled. For security reasons some disable it, but so many websites use JavaScript for menus and other interactive pieces. I guess I'm surprised that even this small number of people have it disabled. It's a good example of why you should always provide alternative means of navigating your site.

Acer XP Drivers, HD Confusion, Laziness - Contactify

Acer XP Drivers

Wow, a lot of feedback from people wanting to switch from Vista to XP on this laptop, and similar models. I guess that tells you something.

Here's a few things to help you in case you're not dual-booting with Vista and need your computer's specs (and/or you can download a freeware system info program like the last free version of AIDA):

Acer 5520-5334
Nvidia GeForce 7000M/nForce 610M
Atheros AR5007EG (Wireless adapter)
Nvidia nforce networking controller (wired network adapter)
Realtek HD digital audio (Audio)
HDaudio soft data fax modem with SmartCP (modem)
Phoenix BIOS

Some of the drivers I found said that they were for Vista with no mention of XP. Some worked, some didn't, some still worked by manually using the drivers. The latter I had to extract and then manually update the drivers from the extracted files.

So, below is a list of the drivers themselves that worked for me. You can find these, for the most part, at this site (this dude is doing similar for his laptop but it's a slightly different model) and this site. If you still can't find them do a search for the filenames or driver names or device names in Google or at one of the free driver download sites, like Driverguide.com.

Here's the driver filenames, in the order I think it best for installing them:

Foxconn Modem Driver 7.62.00 or foxconn_modem_driver.zip
Modem driver. Unzip to a directory and run the SETUP, I had a few problems getting this installed because, I think, I installed it after the audio driver. I'd recommend installing this first or second.

15655 nvidia video drivers.exe
This was for the video primarily. It installed and worked great, no problems.

realtek_hd_audio_driver.zip
Unzip this and run the exe. Installed fine.

Chipset_MCP67M_1313_vista_x64_x86.zip
This was trickier. You need to extract this to a directory. Then go into your Control Panel, click System, then Device Manager. Find the system devices that are in error, like the coprocessor and some fo the unnamed ones. Right-click on them and select Update. Click the second option (Install from a list or specific location) and navigate to where you extracted the file. Go through all the sub-directories, eventually you will find that it updates the coprocessor and the MCU. It takes a few tries of the above process.

TouchPad_ALPS(PNP0F13)_V7.0.1101.11_Vistax32_WHQL.zip
Installed fine. I wouldn't normally install this as the default mouse driver works fine for the touchpad on this and other laptops. But I couldn't get the settings for the mouse driver to be exactly the way I wanted. The " increase accuracy" made it pause too long before moving. The ALPS software fixed this, and the nice edge scrolling and tap-right-click is nice too.

There are some more drivers list at the second site above available for the webcam, webcam software, smartcard reader, etc. I didn't install these as mine worked fine after installing WinXP.

You can also find the other miscellaneous software for the extra buttons and Acer's e software, none of which I installed. If anyone else tries these and they work in XP let me know. In fact, please drop me a note or feedback if you find any better methods, better order to install the drivers, more drivers for this laptop, or whatever. I'll post it here.

HD Confusion

There's certainly a lot of confusion when people are discussing HD TV, Blu-Ray DVD, HD DVD, whether people need to do anything before the shut-off of the analog TV signals comes along next early next year. Then throw in HDMI cables and all the different kinds of TV's and you triple the confusion, at least.

One thing people get confused about right off the bat is the difference between "digital" and "HD" TV.

All HD TV is digital, but not all digital TV is HD. Digital is a way to transmit the signal, HD is the format of the signal itself. Just plain digital is usually a lower quality picture then HD, but higher then analog (low quality). Plus, digital can carry a number of channels on one frequency in the same bandwidth as analog carries one channel.

HD TV is capable of resolutions up to 1080 of vertical resolution (1920 horizontal), progressive or interlaced. But right now you probably won't see a whole lot of them at that high of a resolution. Most will be the 720 or so. Consider your old analog TV signals - 250 lines of resolution or so.

Blu-Ray and HD DVD are also capable of 1080. Even though there are two difference formats with very different methods of presenting the data on the DVD; they are similar in what you see and their use. Blu-Ray DVD's do hold a slight amount more data then HD DVD's, but to you; the consumer, they are going to look the same on your HD TV - whichever one you use. Some DVD players are coming out that play both formats.

And it should be mentioned that your regular, run-of-the-mill DVD's have great picture quality as is (depending on the studio and release of course). An HD DVD or Blu-Ray DVD is only going to be a portion better then an "old" style DVD, visually.

To get the absolute highest resolution on your TV you need HDMI cables at this time. If your TV doesn't have an HDMI jack there are probably going to be other connections that are going to give you a good or great picture, maybe even components jacks that will still give you 1080.

One thing to remember about HDMI cables - they're all pretty much the same. As long as they are built correctly and don't break on you or fall apart; it just doesn't matter whether you bought them for $15 or for $100. Of course, the guys in the electronics stores are going to tell you differently.

It's just like these stereo shops that try to sell you gold-plated, super-thick monster cables. Unless you plan on running your Dolby Surround Sound speakers a mile away from your receiver you're wasting your money. Hate to tell some of you audiophiles but copper's copper and aluminum's aluminum.

As to the whole switch-over to HD...I'll leave the "why's" and "whatfor's" to others; the reasons and conflicts and justifications by the FCC and television networks and such (I already ranted a bit about this in a previous message).

Firstly, technically (and contrary to popular belief) the shutdown doesn't mean specifically that everything broadcast over the air must be HD, but it MUST be digital. And it doesn't cover low-powered TV stations. And some specific-purpose ones will still be transmitting in analog a bit longer then the official deadline - February 17, 2009.

If you get your TV off an antenna then you definitely need either a TV with an HD tuner built-in (everything you buy from now on) or an external tuner/receiver that will receive and convert the signal from HD to either plain analog or a high definition signal your existing TV can interpret. You can sign up for the voucher from the government that will help you get a cheapo HD converter box.

If you have an older TV without HD you can still get a good HD picture by getting a converter box that outputs with RCA cables, S-Video, Component, or HDMI. With an HDMI output you'll get a high quality HD picture, same with Component if your TV supports it. With S-Video and RCA cables it won't be as good, but still very nice. If you have an old television with just a composite plug (the thing the big thick cable sticks into) then the best you'll get is an analog picture (though it likely will be better then your TV without the HD converter box).

This switch-over doesn't directly affect cable or satellite providers. Notice I said "directly" because it's more complicated.

Your cable provider may want you to get a box if you don't have one, or switch to digital or even to HD. They probably don't need to, but they may anyway.

Most people with cable get their local channels through the cable, so this all won't affect them for the most part (again, depends on your company and possibly their equipment to some extent).

Satellite signals have been digital for years. You don't need to do anything differently either - unless you happen to get your local channels off an antenna in addition to getting your other channels off the dish.

So this is where it gets tricky.

I heard a guy at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago explaining this whole thing to a co-worker. He did a great job at going through the whole concept and who needs to do what until he got to the satellite part. He told his co-worker that those with satellite wouldn't have to worry about switching over either.

Wrong. Incorrect. But, it depends...

If you have a dish and get your local channels off the dish (like if you're in a good-sized market) then you have nothing to switch over or worry about. You're digital, you're golden, no worries.

But not all local stations in all parts of the country are on the satellite dish. Basically, the local station has to send their local content to the dish company, who then re-transmits it to their satellite transmitters, which then gets sent to the satellites, which in turn rebroadcasts it back to the people in that market who want to watch the local channels. It's round-about, but those people don't need an outdoor antenna or the aggravation of having it and maintaining it, switching back and forth, lack of signal, etc.

As you can imagine it's not always fiscally possible for smaller local TV stations to do this, or at least not at this time.

So some people with satellite dishes get their local stations off an 'old-school' antenna, or not at all; which puts them right in the same boat as the people who ONLY get their TV off an antenna.

So you may have a nice dish sending you high quality digital signals or even HD signals, yet if you're in the boonies your only local TV stations (like if you want local news, local programs, etc) come off a pair of rabbit ears or a roof-mount antenna and in crap-a-vision analog.

Speaking of antennas; there's absolutely no difference between an analog antenna and an HD antenna. But it's another rip-off by some of the electronics stores, both big chains and small shops - because they'll tell you that you need a new antenna for HD. Yes, a "special" HD antenna. A good rip-off for them, right up there with "monster cables".

Don't forget your audio too. Who wants incredible video without at least good sound? Even a cheap Dolby Surround Sound Systems can sound real good. Bug a good one sounds REAL good!

And course if you don't want to run wires there's alternatives.

Wireless speakers come in both RF and IR but they don't always have enough bandwidth for a full frequency range, and there can be timing and interference problems. The new (and expensive) "psychoacoustics" sound bars use a bank of speakers in a kind of "audio trickery" to make it sound like you have speakers all over your room. This idea has been around for many years but never quite perfected until now. I remember experimenting with it as a kid.

There are, of course, multitudes of kinds of TV's. The most common:

Plasmas - the best pictures, but prone to fading and burn-in and a definite lifespan - 5-7 years. These can theoretically be extremely large.

LCD's - usually your blacks aren't so much black as dark gray and there can be long response times so you see pixilation and compression artifacts in scenes with lots of motion, this is getting better and better. Plus dead pixels are fairly common.

Rear projection - these can be CRT projectors where the picture is bounced off a large mirror onto a display screen (good picture but prone to fading, burn-in, etc) or DLP where micro-mirrors, a high-powered lamp, and spinning color wheels or prisms are used to project the picture onto the tiny mirrors, many times one to a pixel. Drawbacks can be long response times and the possibility of certain people being able to see the prismatic "rainbow" effects (and sometimes subsequent headaches and such). Another major con is the lamps have a definite lifetime, some say a few years (would depend on your usage of course). Some new ones use an LED in place of a high-powered arc lamp, increasing the lifetime of the TV (likely it will last as long as you have the TV, or at least as long as another component fails). But sometimes this can be at the expense of a higher response time, causing the possibility of an increased "rainbow" effect and more compression artifacts when there's lots of motion.

And lastly good old CRT's. Big, heavy, but tried-and-true. Limited to 'smaller' size screens.

Sorry there's no reference links above. Wikipedia is your friend.

LaZy/Burned Out - Easy Feedback Box

I've been working on a couple big projects this week. One person wanted a "small" eCommerce system set up. He had bought a whole package through his hosting company quite some time ago but he could never figure out. He finally admitted defeat and contacted me, I set it up (though it turned into much more then a "small" system once he saw all that could be done with it, no complaints from me) but I have to say, the ease that the package brought to the whole process was refreshing, though it still was a lot of work involved.

The other project didn't come out so well. I had mentioned in a previous blog about setting up a wiki for Jefferson County.

I've set up a number of wiki's for fun, for learning, for testing, and also for a few customers. They all worked great and still do.

But none of them had the traffic that this Jefferson County one caught once it was opened to the public. Unfortunately the hosting company we set it up on sucks. Ipowerweb. Sucks. Badly.

I'm sure you'll find lots of bad reviews for them, especially their limits on database query access. Ugh. I've put SOOOOO much work into this, just for the fun of it - no pay for this one.

So now the database won't work, I know the temporary fix for it as well as the permanent one (which requires some hacking into the wiki's code) but now the database is corrupted - AFTER USING Ipowerweb's database fix.

What a pisser.

Anyway, I'm just finishing up a few things on another website. But previously I had received some responses here along the lines of not being able to contact me.

There's a contact link at the bottom of this blog, as well as the ability to leave comments.

So I decided to go ahead and add a little contact box for the blog.

On blogs, websites, and other sites on the Internet a lot of times people jsut add their e-mail in a link. VERY VERY VERY BAD! Spam robots will eat this up, especially if your site is linked well to others and in search engines. Over time you'll have so much crap in your mailbox you won't know what to do with it, even with spam filters.

I use either a little Javascript applet that encrypts this from direct harvesting, or a form.

The latter is probably the best method. But I'm lazy today, and got too much I still need to do today. Not to mention a bunch of snow coming down that I'll have to shovel/snowblow at some point on top (Wow, it's really coming down).

So I'm going to use this nice little free service that does the contact box for me. It's called "Contactify" and creates a little form box for you, complete with anti-automation anti-spam verification. Very nice.