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As mentioned in my my previous post where I review the Samsung Story station, this external harddrive suffers from an annoying flaw: The drive spins down after 5 minutes of inactivity. This is highly irritating when watching a video, pausing it and trying to resume it after just 5 minutes. Notable hard disks that also suffer from this problem are some of the Western Digital WD Mybook external drives. The problem is that manufacturers provide no way to disable this annoying “feature”. Googling reveals there are many people who have a problem with their hard disks shutting down or spinning down and entering power savings mode after a couple of minutes, and I don’t really like any of the solutions presented.

So I coded HDDCoffee. It keeps your drive awake by accessing it every couple of minutes. The access interval is user defined. The program is coded in C#.NET and aimed to be light-weight and unobtrusive. It runs in your system tray and takes up minimal resources.

The app starts minimized, so just double click its icon in your system tray to select the drives it should keep awake and the access interval. Minimize it and the power-save problem is history. Download it here: HDDCoffee (HDDCoffee.zip 80KB)

HDDCoffee screenshot

You may notice that HDDCoffee is not licensed. This is because it’s barely 100 lines of code and anybody could write it in 30 minutes. If you like it, please leave a comment here. If you want to share it, be my guest. If you want to sell it, all the best!

I recently acquired the 1.5TB Samsung Story station (HX-DU015EB) and I really couldn’t be happier. Initially I wanted to go for the Seagate Freeagent of the same capacity, but after seeing an almost 50% negative review rating on both newegg and amazon.com I decided to go with the Samsung instead which got excellent reviews.

The problem with the Freeagent is that the enclosure is terribly designed. Lack of padding, air-flow and heat-dissipation accumulates into a disastrous mix of  factors that result in a far higher-than-normal rate of failure. Please note that I’m not saying Seagate is bad, there’s nothing wrong with the drive inside the Freeagent, in fact the 3.5″ Seagate it’s based on is quite impressive. It is the enclosure that’s the main cause of the troubles, and unfortunately you just can’t get past that.

Enter the Samsung Story station: housing one of Samsung’s Ecogreen drives spinning at only 5400rpm it might not be the fastest beast on the planet but it does have two major advantages over the Freeagent: It runs quiet and cool. Since I only have a USB2 port available on my laptop, the lower read and write speeds didn’t bother me as the USB transfer rate would be the bottleneck anyway. Low noise levels and reliability are far higher concerns for me and in these categories the story station ranks highly. The external enclosure itself is pretty decent for its price and helps keep the drive cool with its brushed metal cover and air vents, and (to a degree) less vulnerable to small bumps with its internal padding.

I couldn’t be happier with the Samsung, but it does have one major drawback: In Samsung’s eternal wisdom and compassion for the planet, they decided to introduce a power-save feature that spins down the drive after 5 minutes of inactivity. I’ve read on forums that the Western Digital Mybook external drives also suffer from this flaw, although it seems their spin-down timer is longer. Unfortunately, this power saving mode can not be adjusted or disabled, and this makes for some frustrating video viewing when you pause for longer than 5 mins and have to wait for the drive to spin up again when you want to resume watching. Samsung, if you’re listening: for the love of Dawkins PLEASE LET US DISABLE POWERSAVE MODE. Fortunately the solution is a 30 minute coding session with HDDCoffee as the result (keeps your drive awake). I’ll write about it in my next blog post.

If you don’t like reading long posts, here is a quick summary: I’m not saying piracy is good. In terms of gains vs risks, piracy makes more sense than purchasing for individuals. For the individual, piracy is purely a moral issue.

START OF POST:

With the release of Windows 7 today, I had a discussion with my friend about why it is important to purchase legal software and support the developer. While arguing with him that there is no good argument for piracy, I realized with a shock that there is no good argument against piracy either.

I invite your input on this controversial claim, but let’s leave morals out of the discussion for just one second and look at this purely in terms of personal gains vs personal risks.
Pro’s of piracy:

• You get software/media for free that would have cost you money otherwise or that you might not have been able to afford.
• If you pirate a product and it doesn’t work on your system, doesn’t work as you expected, or is of inferior quality then there is no loss to you.
• You get software/media that is not restricted or crippled by DRM and annoying splash screens/ads/anti-piracy announcements/menus that can’t be skipped.
• You can get access to software/media that is not available in your country at the time.
• There is almost no risk of being caught.

Con’s of piracy:

• Pirated software may be more difficult to update and could lead to vulnerabilities and malware infections.
• In the highly unlikely event that you are caught, you could face civil (not criminal) charges as long as you weren’t making money from it.

A brief look at the pro’s and con’s of obtaining media and software via file-sharing networks makes it clear that the piracy option delivers relatively massive gains for almost zero risk. Just in terms of capitalist financial theory, it doesn’t make sense for you to pay for software or media at all! What it boils down to is that if piracy is not an economic or legal issue, then the decision to pirate or not is entirely a moral issue.

Now I challenge you to make a single argument against piracy that is not in some way based on morals or ethics. For instance, you might point to the popular anti-piracy slogan “You wouldn’t steal a car”, but stealing a car is very different economically speaking. Morally, it is just as wrong to copy software as stealing a physical object, however stealing a physical object involves vastly more amounts of risk. The gains are still high, but the risk involved in stealing something becomes a much bigger factor than in the case of copying bits of data. So, again leaving morals out of it, stealing a car’s gain/risk ratio is just far lower than the gain/risk ratio for piracy and economically speaking the risk is just too high for most people to consider it. Also, stealing a car deprives somebody of their possession, but copying a CD still leaves the original owner with it to do with as he pleases.

You could say that piracy damages the economy, and thus influence us all adversely, but this is not necessarily true. The vast majority of entertainment and software that is purchased in South Africa is produced overseas. Every single sale of an international product sends money from home to another country and out of our economy thereby decreasing our GDP and contributing to a trade deficit.

Are you saying I should pirate?

No! What I’m saying is that piracy is morally wrong, but there’s no real non-moral argument against downloading a movie/music/game/software. There’s not really even a point to this post, other than it being a challenge for you to prove me wrong.

Support developers and creators of entertainment. They deserve it. Show your support by giving them your money and encouraging them to deliver more and better products. On the flip side, if you buy a movie and it sucks, or you spend a bunch of money on a game and it doesn’t deliver, or a R150 CD only has one good song, or Microsoft asks your R1500 for an OS that Vista should have been when you bought it, then where is your moral compensation for that? hmmm?

I wanted to “pulse” four seperate LEDs on each of the four PIC16F690 PWM output channels. The correct mode to use is the enhanced PWM output – single output mode with pulse steering. Sounds hard, but it’s really not. Here is a link to the source: pic16f690_PWM_ex.c

The source code should be self-explanatory. To set up the correct mode you use:

/* use pulse steering with single output mode */
CCP1CON = 0b00001100;

To work out PR2 and T2CON you use this website: http://www.micro-examples.com/public/microex-navig/doc/097-pwm-calculator.html

You set the each of the following registers to 1 to turn on that output port:

STRA (pin5), STRB (pin6), STRC (pin7), STRD (pin14).

And then you just make a loop that varies CCPR1L  from 0 to 0xff and back down to 0 again.

Easy as pie. Have a look at the source code for a more detailed explanation and a function for pulsing the LEDs. Leave a comment if you have any questions.

Maybe it is just because I only recently acquired a decent system for playing games on, but I’m noticing that many of the games being released these days have some incredibly beautiful soundtracks. Sure, there have always been games with soundtracks worthy of praise, but over the holidays I played three, recently released games, with some pretty decent music.

First of all, everybody’s favourite (and considered by many to be a perfect game)
Portal theme – alive.mp3: Portal alive.mp3

You really have to finish the game to appreciate this song. It might sound cool and all, but it really just doesn’t have the same meaning if you haven’t played the game. The song is basically the conclusion of Portal, so you just can’t listen to it without the back-story. Portal is included in Valve’s Orange Box set (R317), which also includes the multiplayer masterpiece, Team Fortress 2. If there is one game (or collection) from 2007 worth buying , it would be the orange-box.

Hitman 4 Blood Money: Jesper Kyd – Ave Maria: Ave Maria
I don’t really have an opinion about this game as I haven’t played more than the first level. The theme song in the menu is “Ave Maria” by Jesper Kyd. Some people prefer the piece as performed by a more mature female voice, but I think the imperfections in the child’s voice performing this version actually makes better.

Clive Barker’s Jericho – Theme of the First Born: Jericho First Born Theme
This is an in-game track. It is only 1 minute long, but I find it more haunting than the end- or menu tracks. The game is pretty straight forward with a pretty decent plot. Unfortunately, the ending is severely lacking…

Another reason I’m suddenly noticing so many cool audio tracks could be because I just got the Logitech Z-4‘s last week. They’re not going to blow you away with volume, as they are designed for desktop PC use, but in terms of quality they are pretty impressive for a “budget” speaker system, and I am very happy with them.

This is an article I wrote on DNS Tunneling. Click here: DNS Tunneling guide.
I posted about Labyrinth (now LabyrinDNS) earlier, but the project started becoming an effort to port openVPN code to python. And there is still the issue about getting someone to host a proxy for me.