Here’s where I’m up to – pretty darned amazing considering it’s not Microsoft…

For some background, last week I managed to get 5 used Dell computers working from a batch due to be sent off for dismantling… I put the latest Linux onto them and three of them are already being shipped off for use as simple online-joining machines to be used at Exhibitions and a further two 2 are on test for spares. I used the USB install of the latest Ubuntu.

Armed with the knowledge of savings made and savings to be made, I spent part of the weekend seeing how far it is possible to go in making an Ubuntu Linux machine into a general workhorse. Not many people get the opportunity to experiment like this – especially with more than one type of laptop.

The bad

• Out of 3 different types of Dell laptop, none of them completely work with external monitors- one model don’t acknowledge the external monitor, two others get the resolution wrong. Clearly that part of the new Ubuntu still has a little way to go.
• Right now email is having an issue with drafts, something that just should not be giving me problems – but then I am trying to load a LOT of emails onto this clean new installation. More on that later.

The good:

Ubuntu just works generally and the installation comes complete with a variation of “Open Office” that looks like a fine substitute for Microsoft Office as long as you’re only using the basics. The operating system also comes along with Firefox and Thunderbird (mail). Amazingly – if you only want to “give it a go” on an existing system, Ubuntu runs off the memory stick WITHOUT affecting your laptop! I went for the full install.

I discovered that Thunderbird as installed is out of date and updated it using the installation manager. I installed VLC, Skype and XBMC (X-Box Media Centre).

• XBMC works as well or better than on the PC and is a great media centre for all types of media – video/audio/imagery – apparently it works with the standard Microsoft remote – I’ve ordered a cheap one one ($4.50 inc IR USB adaptor) to test. The remote monitor issue is a show-stopper for now however as you need to be able to plug the laptop into a TV to make great use of XBMC..
• VLC works perfectly and plays videos smoothly.
• Firefox works perfectly and the FLASH add-in can be installed as part of the base installation. But note – you cannot run NetFlix on Linux as it does not support the necessary Microsoft Silverlight.
• Skype works so well, I plugged a Logitech camera into the laptop and Skype picked it up without any drivers! I doubt Skype will handle multi-user video however.
• Dropbox works perfectly, making my centrally-stored files from Windows available in Ubuntu and vice-versa.
• Thunderbird… here’s the potential game-changer… I installed the calendar add-in – all work with Google – none work with Exchange – or rather, not out of the box. I discovered something called DavMail Gateway – and after some fiddling it now sits patiently in the background – and enables Thunderbird to handle – wait for it – fsb email, calendar and contacts – not yet tried notes and I suspect that might be slightly harder to crack. I’ve not yet messed with shared calendars but it does handle normal calendar and appointments perfectly. Like Firefox, Thunderbird handles add-ins.

  I now have an iPad-style unified inbox (which is more than Outlook can manage) and once it’s finished importing the many thousands of emails in my Business and private Google accounts I’ll confirm if this is a waste of space or not – but up to now, it looks like competition for Outlook AT LAST – one reason being – the search WORKS. In addition, thanks to the plug-ins, I have properly threaded inbox options, HTML signatures, mail-merging, delayed emails and more. Thanks to a package called SHUTTER I can grab parts of the screen and simply paste into emails – just as I can in Windows.

I said that Linux would not handle Silverlight… well, as an old hand at VMWare Workstation, I didn’t hold out much hope when I read that the free Linux version of Oracle VirtualBox can run Windows 7 in a box for such emergencies… well, it can – and it does it quite well, good enough to run video on Windows 7 or other variations of Windows – in a window – or full screen right in Linux.

Thunderbird is not without issues and as yet I feel more “comfortable” with Outlook – but that could be simply habit – so  I’ll follow this up in a future blog…

Finally the program installation package – Ubuntu has a side ribbon and installing programs results in their icon appearing in the collapsible sidebar… with a download progress bar inside – exactly as you would find on an iPhone or iPad.

Amazing how things come on.

But what if you just HAVE to have Microsoft office 2010 and other Windows programs? Well this is not free but a package called CrossOver promises specifically that – running of Office 2010 and other Windows programs DIRECTLY in Ubuntu without an emulator or other “tricks” – how well THAT works remains to be seen.  For a free operating system I thought the cost of around $55 was a tad high for my CURRENT use.

More bugs?:  As well as the external screen issue (and this may well be limited to DELLs) I found that putting the machine into standby leaves the hard disk running – which kind of defeats the object as it will flatten the battery in a relatively short period.  That needs addressing.

SO while Farnell mess about (by the time it gets here there will no doubt be a competitor – or everyone will have lost interest) I’ve been playing with ARDUINO..  This is essentially a circuit board with breadboarding facilities – housing an ATMEL 328 chip and peripherals.

Well, I say Arduino – I’m using their IDE but having gotten to grips with it I’ve taken the inexpensive route – I have basic chips onto which I’ve blown the bootloader (a programmer takes minutes to put together – nothing to it) and they are so good you need next to nothing around them.  I wasted a good part of the bank holiday messing with the WIZNET Ethernet board that lets these chips talk to the Internet only to find they’re not that reliable  – well, not reliable enough to put into, say a thermostat.  So I picked up a very basic Ethernet card which needs a software TCP/IP stack and I have to say, in less than 15k of code I have the thing up and running.. that includes Ethernet (using a proxy web page and just passing info back and forth – only a masochist would try to put together flashy web pages on one of these things), serial comms and more.

For anyone new to this, the Atmel chip has 23K of program space, 2K of RAM and 1K of EPROM – don’t let the terms fool you, the program space and eprom need no special tools or voltages to program and you interface to USB on your computer for compiling code etc…

Well worth Googling ARDUINO for more information.

The model B with Internet connection has a lot going for it – at the price it could easily make a remote controller with the addition of a relay or two – so remote control of heating etc all become possibilities. I just hope they don’t get carried away with success and start jacking prices up.  It is to some extent in the same market as Aduino and other low cost solutions – if the price is right and the development kit free and flexible it might just be a winner… time will tell.

Peter Scargill

The purpose of this note is to show you how to extract any block of information from a page, based on the ID of an item in the page.

So above we see the source page…. inside there you’ll see a DIV with id=”stuff”.

In our target page if all we wanted was to bang the whole lot  the whole lot from the above into a DIV of id=”mytarget” for example, we could write this…

where the URL above is replaced by the source page name (remember in this example the source has to be on the same domain – there are ways around this not covered here)

DATA is the entire contents of the source page – and we’re pushing that into the local div ‘mytarget’.  Not a lot of use… what would be really nice would be if we could copy the entire contents of one block on the source to another block on the destination… might even have the same name – doesn’t matter.

There’s your solution – copies the html from source ID “stuff” to destination ID “mytarget”.  Easy.  If you don’t want the html, just the text, play around with the two references to “html” replacing one of both with “text”.

Peter Scargill.

Ok, so why is this important? Well, if all you do is browse the web it’s not. If you ever SEND large attachments – it IS important but WAY more significant than that is when you want to use SKYPE and other live audio/video comms tools.

Think about it – you and I are using SKYPE  – I am SENDING you my video and you are SENDING me your video..   you can have a THOUSAND MEGABYTE download and it does not make a halfpenny-worth of difference – if your UPLOAD speed is rubbish.

Here’s mine..

I got that measurement using www.speedtest.net – great program – the PING is just the turnaround time – how long it takes to get a very short message back once you’ve sent one – this should be under 50ms or thereabouts…. shorter the better – if you’re unfortunate enough to have 2-way satellite broadband it’ll be a LOT worse (higher) – due to the physical distance the signal has to travel to the satellite, down to the ground station, up to the satellite and back to you. Satellite is NOT good for Skype.   Download, well as long as you get 2Mbps or more reliably you can’t really complain though 10Mbps or more would be really nice. So for PING, SHORTER IS BETTER.

Ok, here’s the critical bit – I get fairly good broadband for someone who lives in the country and my upload speed is “acceptable” at 0.6Kbps on average – it’s MORE than enough for Skype video (and multi-video connections need even MORE bandwidth).  The best I’ve managed is a 5-way video conversation at medium quality level.

If you connection VARIES this doesn’t really matter for web browsing but is critical for Skype. The BBC iPlayer and YouTube use you download connection only – and are not LIVE anyway – so they can be BUFFERED  – none of this happens with Skype – you need fast, reliable upload capability all the time. If you are getting less than 200Kbps per second at times – then you can forget Skype video, if it drops anywhere near 100Kbps, you can forget quality audio as well.

So – if you have a need to complain to your ISP – make sure you test using the program above – on a WIRED connection (so you’re not introducing another potential problem into the mix) and make sure no-one else is doing anything significant on any other PC in the house (like uploading or downloading, checking mail etc).  If your upload speed drops for a while or overall below say 200Kbps – get onto your ISP and GRIPE LIKE HELL (which in many cases means they’ll have to get that old monopoly BT onto the job!)..

FOR UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD, particularly UPLOAD, LARGER IS BETTER but also this needs to be consistent – if it’s jumping around that is no good either for LIVE stuff like SKYPE.

Hope this is helpful.

Peter Scargill

The following are just a few tips to ensure you get the best from your iPhone.

Firstly – the deal-breakers:

Lighting – if you know the lighting will be poor, forget it. The iPhones are awful at handling low light, often resulting in blurring and grainy images.

Sound – ever stood in a church or large school hall – the reverberation -  the internal microphone in the iPhone suffers from such effects at just a few feet from the mic (like most mics – the reason they hover mics over people’s heads in  the movies or use hidden radio mics). Get a plug-in external mic – preferably with a long lead. Maplins do a great lapel-mic (though I had to change the plug to make it fit the iPhone  – I’m sure an adaptor is available).

Tripod – no matter how hard you try, holding iPhone by hand is not going to work well – you can remove shake in software but it doesn’t hold a candle to starting off with the phone mounted on a rock-solid surface such as a decent tripod. Look up eBay for suitable clamps. There’s a tripod here but I would not recommend sticking the zoom lens on – pictures look awful..

Dirt and Grease – the big let-down here is the lens – the slightest bit of grease, finger-print, dirt on the lens will ruin the quality because of its tiny size. Don’t even consider taking a video or pictures unless the lens is spotlessly cleaned with a soft, dry cloth (commonly known as an unused handkerchief).

Duration – you should always use the best quality settings to get high quality you need lots of memory – stick with videos segments of a few minutes each if possible or you’re going to spend all day getting the material onto your PC.

Here then is how I have managed to produce half-decent quality video, given decent lighting. I use an iPhone 4.

I purchased a tie-clip microphone from Maplins for under £20 – and this plugs into the iPhone (effectively preventing the speaker working while it is plugged in). The lead is 3 metres long, suitable for interviews. I had to change the plug for the iPhone).

The App I use is called Filmic Pro and It will take video at the highest quality (1280px * 720px, 24 frames/second) at 16:9 format – this ensures a quite reasonable image with no unpredictable changes occurring. Automatic sound level control is turned off.

The image below shows the controls – the one below that shows what they are for. Essentially you make sure the brilliance and focus are right, start the recording, set all 3 controls to ON… and start your video.

And below, the help screen.

The controls are easy – “focus lock” will stop the focus changing if someone walks past the camera. Modern low-cost autofocus systems work the wrong way – if they are just out of focus they go WAY out of focus – then work their way back toward sharp focus. “Exposure lock” stops the camera dimming if light levels change which they do all the time in any moving scene. “White balance” takes a little more thought – the camera wants to compensate for too much of any one colour – to get professional results you have to make sure the imagery looks right at the start – then use the control to LEAVE It that way.

Essentially you then make your recording – then using the normal iPhone lead to your PC, offload the file to the PC – doing this wirelessly might not be a good idea when the file is large. Incidentally the iPhone is probably not your best choice for long meetings or interviews – you will run out of memory – don’t be tempted to chose a lower quality setting. In a test I took a 2 minute video and the file was over 200MB long. So this approach is best for short interviews of a few minutes – or multiple scenes take at different locations.

The App is set to record at the highest setting, 24fps, 16:9 format.. and it outputs MOV files which you can then import into an editor.

Some more setting screenshots..

That’s it, if you want more information, let me know.

Let me start by saying – I’m one of the worst offenders – like others I assume my gear will work forever and, like human beings,  if it gets any problems will generally,  somehow, sort itself out!

Of course that’s not the case. Everything man-made that we own will eventually pack in – or we’ll scrap it before it does… simple fact. Today we rely more and more on increasingly massive storage to keep our movies, music, pictures, documents and more. Most of us avoid thinking about how it would be if some day it just stopped working.

Over the years I’ve tried different backup solutions and managed real enthusiasm for short bursts before getting back into my old habits.  What I needed was a solution that would work and continue to work in the background without needing my unwilling participation.  Oh, and the solution had to be CHEAP.

As it happens I’ve another requirement… I want to access my files when out and about – sometimes overseas and that includes playing my movies and listening to music. Now, you can get solutions to access your home or office equipment remotely but there’s a snag when it comes to any kind of high speed streaming. Let me explain…

What do I mean by “streaming” – well, when you go to YouTube to watch a video, you’d not want to sit waiting for it to download – could take ages, so the way it works is that the video plays AS IT IS DOWNLOADING – i.e. streaming.  So let’s say your home/office has 8 meg broadband, you might think that’s easily enough to let you stream your video to, say your mobile device – but here’s the snag –changes are your download speed is 8 meg but your upload speed is a tiny fraction of that… and to stream – you’d be SENDING the information out – not pulling it in – hence you are limited by the upload speed of your account. For movies unless you’re happy with really poor quality, 400Kb (not an untypical upload speed) is a tad slow – and would also prevent some uses of your computer while this is happening (SKYPE for example needs all the upload bandwidth it can get – as it works in the same way – you are SENDING information).

I had an additional requirement that I wanted my TV to play movies at the highest quality – even if I turned the computers off!

So in my case the ideal solution would be some kind of local backup AND cloud backup – the first for media streaming to the TV, iPad etc., the second for remote use.  Each would need considerable storage, would need to be reliable and automatic needing no attention on my behalf.

Here is what I’ve done – you may find it helpful, time permitting I’ll come back to this and put in some technical meat…

Internal backups

You be aware of the term NAS drive, this usually takes the form of a box that plugs into the mains and your network – and acts as a stand alone file storage. There are many – some are expensive, some need special drivers to work with your PC. I checked out many of these solutions and found the NetGear ReadyNas Duo to be the best low-cost solution. This small black box costs barely over £100 and can take 2 identical drives of pretty much any size. Indeed I got a package deal for £200 which included a pair of 1 Terabyte drives.  Without going into un-necessary technical information, the box gives you the capacity of one of the drives – i.e. in this case 1 Terabyte – but maintains backups between the two drives – so that if either one goes down, nothing is lost. (for info 1 Terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes, or a million Megabytes – or in more modern terms around 2000 movies).

This device is very clever, it will send you an email if one of the drives fails, you can replace the drive without removing power and when it has finished backing up to the new drive, it will send you another email.

In use – it merely appears on your network as a drive – that’s it, nothing else. Of course it is FAR more powerful than this but as a minimum, that’s what it does.

Next decision, backup software – how to get files from the PC to the NAS drive. That’s easy – almost every free or cheap backup solution out there turns out to be not cheap or not free. The one exception I’ve settled on is Microsoft’s Sync Toy. It is utterly free and without advertising, the only catch is it does not schedule syncs… but… Microsoft kindly fit out every Windows PC with a task scheduler that’s easy to use and there are many guides on the web as to how to put the two together – takes minutes to organise and I now have a backup/sync solution that works every morning in the early hours. You can even have it do the backup then turn your PC off when it’s done. I leave mine on (many years of use suggests PCs tend to pack in when you turn the power off or on – I leave mine on (minus the screen) and have very few problems indeed).  Synctoy can managed backup JOBS and you have a choice for each job as to whether to SYNC files or to backup without deleting anything – all very comprehensive, cheap and easy to use.

Cloud backups

That’s the local backup attended to – of course if the office burns down that won’t do me any good and it does not address the remote access/remote backup solution. Enter LIVEDRIVE. This is a cloud service offering unlimited backup to the web for as little as £49 a year (or much cheaper if you shop around for products based on this service). Simple enough – you have a program that runs on your PC and backs up whatever you tell it do in the background and YES you can limit how much of your precious bandwidth it uses – the only thing I will warn you about is that their customer service is rubbish, getting answers out of them is like getting blood out of a stone – but the software and service work. It might take weeks to back everything up – but once that’s done, its merely a matter of uploading files that change – all in the background, all without attention.

To explain HOW to implement these backup solutions would make for a long article and it’s all been done – simply Google the information. Suffice it to say it’s not hard, does not take a lot of time – and once in place you can relax in the knowledge that your system is now fireproof

Here’s a simple piece of coding – almost too simple – it uses the JQUERY library (not shown) to simplify cross-browser coding.

<script language=”javascript”>
function alertMsg()
{
    var gm=”/admin/ajax_keepalive.asp”;
    $.get( gm, function(data) { $(“#myTimer”).html(data); } );
    var t=setTimeout(alertMsg,10000);

}
alertMsg();
</script>

This simple piece of code works as follows…

The purpose of the code is to put an incrementing number into my web page… that’s all – but the number is coming from another page.. and the purpose of this is to stop session timeouts by making sure that even when the user is idle – something is happening.

The function alertMsg() sets up the address of a web page which returns nothing more than an incrementing number. Every time you call the page, it returns  an incremented number – and the jQuery then forces that number into a SPAN on my web page.  You’ll note that the following line sets a 10 second timeout to call the same routine, over and over.

Finally the routine is called – which puts up the display and sets the timer to call the routine in 10 seconds – ad-infinitum.

Except that it works a treat in Firefox – and doesn’t work at ALL in Internet Explorer. 

There are TWO unrelated issues here – showing the differences between the browsers.

Firstly in Internet Explorer, the routine is never called (alertMsg()) in the first place – because the DOM is not ready when the routine runs – so the timer never gets set.  It would not matter anyway because Internet Explorer CACHES the call to ajax_keepalive() – and so it would  return the same value instead of an incrementing value – EVEN THOUGH calling this page directly in either browser WORKS a TREAT.

Here’s a version that works for both…

<script language=”javascript”>
function alertMsg()
{
var gm=”/admin/ajax_keepalive.asp?r=” + Math.random();
$.get( gm, function(data) { $(“#myTimer”).html(data); } );
var t=setTimeout(alertMsg,10000);

}
$(document).ready(function()
{
alertMsg();
});
</script>

Note that I’ve added a random number onto the end of the page call – as a parameter which never gets used – but it prevents cacheing… also I’ve wrapped the function call in a jQuery document ready function that makes sure this code (AlertMsg()) does not run until the DOM is ready.

Firefox does not need any of this stuff – Internet Explorer does – and we’re not talking old rubbish here – we’re looking at Firefox 7.01 and IE 9 !!!

Armed with a budget of £300 I went off onto the web in search of new kit – and I’m very pleased with the end product… The system includes Gigabit wired networking, 80211n multi-point wireless and load balancing/fall-over protection in case my primary service provision fails and to share out the load a little when the grandkids are over hogging bandwidth. I’ll explain this….

But first, the starting point… when we moved over here into the countryside 11 years ago I was on a budget, having spent a bomb kitting out my home office, I simply bought bulk networking cable, a bunch of connectors and I was very lucky to get some second hand ADSL router kit from friends. One of those routers is the Draytek Vigor 2800vg which of course is too old to handle modern high speed 802.11n wireless but which has MORE than done it’s tour of duty over the years and is still an excellent and supported router.

I’ve had access to all manner of ADSL modems and most of them by comparison to the Drayteks seem “amateur”.  I ended up with 3 of these and a Netgear unit giving 4 access points around the house – I also had Orange Wireless but that was so bad I turned it off. The Drayteks have all SORTS of useful tools that other kit simply doesn’t have – like decent bandwidth monitoring facilities, VPN, interchangeable aerials (I had WAY oversize aerials on my main unit to get more range).

Why so many routers/access points? Well, our house is a cottage and it’s built out of lots of VERY thick stone – WIFI just does not go through this stuff so you might have a great signal in the living room – walk around the corner to the kitchen and it’s gone. Also as we’re on one floor the distance from the kitchen to my office is quite large.  So one Draytek router acted as the ADSL router and access point (wired and wireless), the others as simply switches/WIFI access points. I also had a dedicated 16-port switch as I have lots of kit to plug into when I’m doing a bit of R&D. The two main machines and my NAS drive (network addressable storage – i.e. a black box with 2 disks in it) are all connected together by wire as WIFI is too slow for some operations – like moving massive files back and forth.

We have Internet access via the organisation I work with – and we also have Orange Broadband. Why the latter?

Well, I would not use Orange by choice but as we had a house phone line and Maureen has an Orange phone, they gave us broadband for a fiver a month – can’t really say no to that especially as it gives her free calls to Orange mobiles (the kids). Both broadband setups are limited by the BT cables here in the village and give around 6.5Mb/s download and around 500Kb/s upload. The Orange router is that big grey thing on the left and it’s useless, not reliable at all but I recently found that by sticking a timer on it so it resets overnight – it becomes reliable. Not much use however without some kind of automatic fall-over if it’s in use at the time (backups etc). We were going to upgrade this until I saw the reviews of it’s replacement on Amazon – voice after voice slagging off Orange for supplying the new unit – so – stick with the devil you know.

I’d been using a software switch on our computers to select between the two networks (main network and Orange backup) to try to do some kind of load balancing -  but of course that doesn’t work on mobiles which don’t support the software etc. and it’s manual and  “fiddly” so I included provider switching in my goals for the upgrade:

• Faster wireless
• Faster wired connection
• Better coverage
• Some kind of automatic switching/backup/fall-over

We have Apple TV and my videos and music etc. are stored on the NAS unit  so speed of connectivity is important – a request from the TV has to go off to Maureen’s computer – which gets the video from the NAS box and pipes it back to her computer and on to the Apple TV… it doesn’t take many bottlenecks to mess that up.

Well, I ordered the replacement gear and the first stuff that turned up was the cable (of interest I used CABLING4LESS – they seem pretty good and delivery was quick) – I chose ready-made lengths of CAT5-e (why not CAT6? From what I can read it’s for perfectionists and the price difference is high – I also had some decent cables which were gigabit-certified and wanted to use those).

Ok, back up a second – what’s the difference between the cables? If you look at your average network lead, there are 8 connections at each end. Cat-5 only uses 4 of them – whereas Gigabit networks need all 8.  So to have a Gigabit network your modem, switches and cabling all need to be updated to CAT5-e or better. But the cable is cheap -  I think I spent £30 in all.

I bought a range of colours of Cat5-e cable and started checking to see what needed replacing. The first shocker came when looking on the roof at some of the original cables put in place a decade ago – totally SHOT. I’ve never seen cable disintegrate so quickly on touch! Amazing what several years of even British sunlight can do.

So it quickly became a gutting operation – all but one grey lead (which miraculously is in perfect condition 11 years on AND is certified for Gigabit operation – as it spans the building I was quite relieved not to have to throw that one away).

Next stop the main ADSL router. I did my homework and I’m fairly confident I picked the best of the lot – the new Draytek 2830n. This really is a winner -  with dual inputs (3 if you include the ability to use a 3G dongle as a backup -  but we’ve no 3g in the village so that’s redundant), 4 Gigabit ports, multiple LANS, multiple VPNs… load balancing.. name it and it’s got it – well under £200 from Amazon. Took around half an hour to get that running with the existing kit – which includes a 16-output switch in my office for the various gadgets.

First things first – the 802.11n higher speed WIFI claims better speed and better range and I noticed a marginal improvement in range almost immediately. That’s at ONE end of the building. I then fitted a TP-LINK TL-SG1016D 16-port Gigabit switch to replace the old switch to give me some more connections – one of which attachés to the lead which goes right across the building to another, smaller new unit, the TL-SG1005D 5-port Gigabit switch – which then feeds Maureen’s computer, the Apple TV and a new TP-Link 150Mbps Wireless N Access point at the far end. The large switch indicates what speed the connection is running (10/100 or gigabit) with green indicators which is great.

Finally I had to wire the Orange ADSL unit all the way back to the Draytek second input and make sure the Draytek was aware of the incoming Orange network. Interestingly I had a problem in that I wanted to keep the same DNS (domain name lookup) – and the only one I could find at first was OPENDNS -  but they charge if you have more than one incoming IP address – I resolved the problem eventually by forcing the network to use GOOGLE’s DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and up to now they are working a treat.

For Wireless I gave both units the same name – ensuring they were using completely different wireless frequencies which are ALSO distanced from the frequencies used by neighbours.

The result  – even the iPad now works seamlessly anywhere in or around the building. The overall range is WAY better – but now needing only 2 wireless units and not 5.

Apple TV works smoothly – and having set up the Draytek to work from the main ADSL line, falling over to Orange (tested by simply pulling the broadband line out – operation continues more or less seamlessly, the only change being the external address changes of course) it’s all working a treat, no failures, drop-outs etc. – and all the kit is green – keeping power usage to optimum levels (this if often overlooked – the cost of running this stuff mounts up as it’s on 24-7).

More detail as time permits – if you Google these products – all I can say is they work for me. Update a few weeks later… still working perfectly, very satisfied, no gripes.

Internet radio is not a new phenomena, “Shoutcast Radio” by Nullsoft (Winamp)  has been available since 1999 and has continued to grow ever since. PC users have been able to listen to their choice of worldwide radio stations since then – which is fine but not a lot of use on the move.

Recently several things have happened recently (I refer here to the UK, American viewers have had satellite radio options for some time now while we’ve been stuck with the umpteen regional repeats of the BBC and a handful of alternatives on FM) which has made mobile Internet radio practical.

Firstly, mobile phones have become smarter to the point where Android and iPhone devices for example can handle fairly sophisticated programs in the background as well as transmitting audio via Bluetooth to car speakers.

Secondly, the mobile network has improved. THREE company claim to have just about the best 3G network – now, I know Orange customers will say that Orange and O2 collectively have a massive network – but take it from me, in rural areas, for example the A69 in Northumberland, you’ll find much of that is the older kind of connection which simply is not fast enough to “stream” music.

Thirdly more car radios than ever now either have an “auxiliary” socket for audio or handle Bluetooth connections for audio (sadly, still not enough).

Ok so what do I mean by “stream”?  Well, downloading tunes before you play them is not really practical for mobile radio and so Internet radio is “streamed” which means your device at any time only downloads enough to be able to play the tune. As the music plays, the next few seconds are downloaded ready for use etc etc… continuously. This allows for continuous play after a short delay. That delay determines to some extent how well the service tackles signal drop-outs – ie what happens if there is no signal for a couple of seconds or so due to a combination of poor signal and obstructions.

Let’s take my setup as an example… I have a Mercedes with an auxiliary socket for audio. The car handles Bluetooth but only for phone calls so I bought a Belkin Bluetooth audio receiver which requires power, connects to the Bluetooth on your phone as a kind of headphone device- and transmits the audio from the phone through a 3.5mm stereo jack to your home stereo or car radio. It works a treat and the quality is high. In my case I have a 240v supply in the car but the unit operates on low voltage so anyone with a bent towards a soldering iron should be able to adapt the unit to run off the car. Some folk have questioned the quality of such devices, I’ve had no problems at all.

That takes care of the hardware and for software I use “TuneIn Radio”which costs a couple of pounds at most on Android and iPhone devices. Hundreds if not thousands of radio stations available at the touch of a button are now available to anyone who puts the effort forward to make it work.

Be aware that using Internet radio eats up your mobile data so a few hours in the car listening to Internet radio could put pay to a few hundred megabytes easily – make sure your service provider does not impose limits on how much data you can use. Orange for example despite claiming “unlimited data use for iPhones, in fact have rescinded on that and have a “fair use” policy, which translated into English means they underestimated the amount of data people would use.  Three specifically state “all you can eat” in many of their contracts and there is no fair use policy. So make sure you’re with the right provider.

So what about drop-outs – with radio the signal quality degrades and you end up changing channels all the time when on the move (unless you only ever listen to BBC in which case you’re missing out) but with Internet radio this simply does not happen. If you have a bad or no signal for more than a few seconds, the music simply stops and may pick up when you get back to a half-decent signal – but to put this in perspective, a trip down the M6 will see areas in the mountains of NO radio signal at all while Internet radio continues un-hindered.  In my experience, using THREE as a source of Internet (either on the phone or using a MIFI dongle to supply WIFI to the phone) it is pretty much swings and roundabouts which is best in terms of availability – but of course with the latter you don’t have to change channels as you do, with, say BBC local radio.  My local Northeast radio for example is available on TuneIn Radio and I can pick this up anywhere in the world, not just while I’m in the Northeast.

I hope if nothing else this article gets you to investigate Internet radio – a wonderful alternative to rather limited FM radio.

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