Balaji’s Blog

Firmware upgrades for the BlueAngel Q7 – A HowTo

At COMEX 2009, I picked up a Chinese-made set-top media player, called the Q7. Made by a company called Blue Angel, the tiny box packs in an amazing feature set:

• Supports RMVB,AVI,DIVX,MKV,MOV,HDMOV,MP4,M4V,PMP,AVC,FLV,VOB,MPG,DAT,MPEG file formats
• Does HDMI Output upto 720P
• Built-in Flash memory of 2GB and USB-Host Support

The feature I was most intrigued by however, was a note buried in the instruction manual – it claimed that the manufacturer would provide firmware upgrades for the device!

Since this a device manufactured in China, even finding the manufacturer’s website took some digging around. Eventually, I did locate the site and after viewing it through Google Translate, I was able to download the upgrade installer. Awesome right?

Well not quite – as I had to go through quite a few hoops to actually get the installer to actually run. I figured that I might as well put down the steps on the Web for other folks who might be having the same problems as I did.

OS Compatibility Warning: The installer simply does not work under Vista. Trying XP Mode etc. on Vista is of no use. I have no idea whether it will work under Wine/Linux but for now I recommend sticking to Windows XP.

1. The latest firmware upgrade for the Q7 can be found here. Scroll down and look for the link text in green (or you can try this direct link, but I have no idea how long it will work)

2. The site is a bit slow, so be prepared to wait 15-20 mins for the file to download, even on a broadband connection.

3. Once you have extracted the files, you will wind up with a set of folders like so:

4. Extract the 2nd set of RAR files and we get the following:

5. If you are on a English-language version of Windows, the Mandarin characters can cause a lot of problems with launching the installer. I recommend renaming the files to something like “q7upgrade.img” or the like.

6. I also suggest placing the files under the root of C: drive or some partition. It definitely won’t work with folder names containing spaces. Here’s the folder structure that worked for me:

7. Next you need to launch the installer application. The 2nd round of RAR file extraction would have created a folder and a disk image. Look for an application called “LiveSuit.exe” in the folder:

8. When you launch LiveSuit.exe, you will get the following window:

Note: If you would like to see the actual Mandarin characters used in the installer and get a translation of what they mean, please see Ashwin Nanjappa’s comment on how to enable Chinese character support & translations in Windows. Thanks Ashwin!

9. Click on the first icon (a packing box?) and locate the IMG file that you had extracted earlier. Once you do this, the second “gear” icon becomes active:

10. Now plugin the Q7 into your PC. It will be recognized in Windows as a USB 2.0 Flash Device

11. Once you get the “Hardware installed” popup in Windows, click on the gears icon in the LiveSuit app (Step 9 above)

12. You get a prompt of which very little is readable, except for one very important button:

13. You will now be prompted to install drivers for the device. The USB Drivers are located in a subfolder inside the folder you launched the Livesuit installer from, i.e:

Once you have navigated to the correct folder with the drivers, your “install drivers wizard” should look like this:

14. You might have to run the Driver install wizard twice before the actual upgrade starts. Once the Driver install completes, the LiveSuit installer takes over:

15. Eventually, you get another unintelligible popup:

16. At this point, you have upgraded your Q7’s firmware – Congratulations! What do you get from this you might ask? Well the highlights are:

• Proper resume from Standby when using the power button on the remote
• Support for SUB format subtitles
• Better MKV Support
• Support for UTF-8/UTF-16 encoded subtitles.

Not bad at all eh? The entire release note is available on the webpage where the firmware is hosted, but you will have rely on Google Translate if you can’t read Mandarin – here’s a translated link

Post-Firmware Upgrade Warning:

• After the upgrade, the On-Screen menus default to Mandarin again. You will have to go into the Settings menu and select the “Globe” icon to be able to change the language back to English.

16. If you are wondering how to exit the LiveSuit application, here’s a hint – it isn’t the regular close button on the App window. Instead you need to click the little running man/AIM icon:

That’s the HowTo. Let me know in the comments if this helps or you have any problems. Happy Viewing!

This is what a hacked together push solution looks like

Sitting at home and trying to beat a particularly nasty throat infection, I decided to follow-up on a tweet of mine and put together what my push-email/calendar solution looks like:

To summarize, it currently uses:

• 6 different sites for the Calendar – Dopplr, Upcoming, Remember The Milk and fbcal feeding into Google Apps Calendar. Nuevasync syncs a subset of my Google Apps Calendar to my Samsung i600 phone. Remember The Milk feeds into my Google Apps email.
• I use Google Calendar Sync for my desktop calendar that lives in Outlook 2007.
• I had a sync setup between my phone and Outlook as well, but stopped using that after some significant grief.
• I sync my Google Apps mail via IMAP on my phone and backup using POP3 in Outlook 2007.
• Regular Gmail is synced via IMAP and some magic sauce using Seven.

It probably has too many moving parts and is overly dependent on various free services. But it works well enough for me.

On the state of location networking

Location-networking is meant to provide two experiences:

1. Broadcast your location to your friends and FoaF network in the hope of making unexpected connections; and

2. Share comments and rich media (photographs, video, voice etc.) about your experiences at a particular location.

This then, is the state of my location networking experience one year on:

Two problems have remained stubbornly unresolved for that entire period

1. The lack of two-way sync between Brightkite and Fire Eagle – While I can understand why Google Latitude won’t play with Fire Eagle, I’m puzzled by the reluctance of the other players in location networking like Brightkite and Foursquare to integrate with Fire Eagle. Integrating with Fire Eagle would allow location-networking providers to stop worrying about how their users send updates to their service and focus on making the experience more fun to use. Instead, all the players in location-networking are guilty of listening only to the echo-chamber hype of early adopters and providing solutions only for the platforms the geeks love, i.e., the iPhone, the Blackberry Bold generation and the Android OS. This is remarkably short-sighted considering:

a. While the iPhone is the fastest selling Smartphone today, it still isn’t beating older Blackberries, Windows Mobile or the Palm OS in terms of installed base.

b. No Smartphone is coming close to beating the "dumb" cell phones install base

If location-networking is to really become as ubiquitous as social networking, it has to run on a variety of platforms and require little by way of a hardware minimum. The promise of location-networking, to open your phone and see the location of not just your friends but of your FoaF network is truly remarkable. But meeting only the needs of the echo-chamber will keep location-networking a niche product, until it is killed off by the geeks who abandon it for the next cool thing on the horizon.

2.  The lack of rich metadata for any media shared through Brightkite – Let’s ignore the fact that Brightkite does not support video uploads to Flickr (despite the fact that Flickr has had  video in place for over a year now). No, my complaint is about how little metadata is passed to Flickr when I send a photo to Brightkite.

a. No tags

b. No Titles

c. Email subject as description

c. No EXIF data

Using the Email Subject line as a description isn’t a very great idea either – why can’t we specify the Title via Email Subject and the description via Email Body? Isn’t that more logical. The lack of tags means these images are going to be very hard to surface via search. All in all, it’s a very limited and clunky solution for something a lot of other products do very well.

I had hoped that 2009 would be the year that location-networking really started to take off. It now seems like location-networking will continue to stagnate until someone builds a product that not only works for the early adopters, but for the early majority and the users after that

A 1000 years of History – Barely remembered

Part of my 3 week trip to India earlier this year included a visit to a series of temples in Tamil Nadu – popularly known as the "Navgraha temples". I came away from that trip amazed at the enormous potential for tourism in Tamil Nadu and saddened by how much of it goes to waste due to frustratingly archaic customs.

Driving into a tiny village of 10 or 20 houses that holds at it’s centre an enormous temple complex that covers a square acre of land left me wondering what was this place like in it’s heyday. Or walking down a 500 foot hallway with curved archways soaring 50 feet into the air, you wonder whether the European architects of the Renaissance were really all that original. When one finishes praying at the Garbha graha of a temple and notices that every square inch of the rock is covered in gold leaf – it’s a glimpse into the enormous wealth of those Pandian kings that drove this building spree.

Astonishingly, almost none of these locations suffer from the typical infrastructure woes that plague most Indian tourist destinations. Reasonably good governance has been a hallmark of Tamil Nadu politics for decades now – translating into rail and air access to the major towns in this temple belt, 2-lane all weather roads to every village, and 5 bars of cell phone coverage wherever you go. And if you have to cross a dry riverbed on a rickety wooden bridge that creaks with every motorcycle that brushes past you – well that’s part of the adventure isn’t it? You also get reasonably decent accommodation (that can be booked on the Internet!) and great South Indian food in every restaurant. So why are these places unknown outside South India?

The first problem I believe is that annoying rule of "No photography allowed inside the temple premises". Whether it was due to Hindu priests believing that photographs stole the deity’s soul or the bureaucrats fearing thieves would use the photographs to decide which temple jewels were worth stealing, all you can get are photos of the temple entrance or it’s Gopuram. Which after the 50th such photo, tends to get really old. How do you promote a place when you can’t even show it to another person?

The other issue is with the Hindu customs – which barely tolerates Indians of other religions entering the temples and outright refuses to let foreigners in. I see the crowds of foreign tourists at the temples in Singapore’s Little India, which (no offence) have barely a fraction of the history of some of these "Navagraha temples" and wonder how much these tourists would be amazed seeing the crystal Lingam that the temple priests in one place claim was placed there by Lord Muruga himself. What would they make of the story of how the stone Lingam in one temple leant to one side to allow Lord Brahma, cursed to be born a human, garland the statue and thus attain Mukti? Every idol and nearly every tree in these temples has a fascinating, richly detailed history that could reward and entertain the patient traveller.  Yet thanks to concepts like "aacharam" and "madi", they remain out of bounds to any foreign tourist who might make it this far.

I want to wrap up this post with the incident that truly defined this trip for me. We arrived at one temple a little too early and one of the ubiquitous vendors suggests we take a walk "just a little while away" to a Lord Venkateshwara temple that had just re-opened. We walk barefoot down a stony path trying to avoid the goat dung underneath and the curious village dog around our ankles. Finally, we come to a red brick wall which opens up to reveal two "shelters" thrown together from wood planks hastily nailed together. We walk in and a temple priest informs us that the temple is probably over a 1000 years old and was hidden by the jungle till someone "discovered" it a few years back. He points out the single remaining Vimana of the original temple, stained dark green and with a single stubborn tree still growing out of a crack in the roof. I look at the serene face of Lord Venkateshwara, his features blurred by centuries of rain and neglect and wonder how many generations of people have walked by, not knowing they were being blessed by an almost-forgotten God.

India still has the power to surprise and move us – it’s cynical, careless children.

Pondering Friendfeed and Twitter (maybe a little too much…)

Ruminations on Friendfeed after making my first “block”:

1. Since Friendfeed allows for “fake follows”, should I just follow everyone who follows me? After all, I never need to see their updates.
2. I finally understand the power of lists in Friendfeed. With every other tool, S/N ratios have to be controlled through manual curation of follow-lists. On Friendfeed, that’s never a concern.
3. A classic sign on Twitter of “spammers” is someone with a huge “following” list. If I did start following 12000 people on Friendfeed would I become a “spammer” in someone’s eyes?
4. If I was following 12000 people on Friendfeed, would that “cheapen” the “silent attention” that I pay to my friends lifestreams. In other words, would their assessment of my “ambient social awareness” be tainted by the thought “he can’t possibly keep up”. After all right now, a lot of conversations with my friends in real life slip between contexts of “on IM you said” and “on twitter I saw..”. Would that disappear if I was following 12000 people here because folks would assume I couldn’t have kept up?
5. Am I plate-of-beans’ing this?

Related idea – Even though URLs on Twitter Profile Pages are no-follow, spammers follows millions to drive up SEO Rankings for URLs in their bios & names. Should Twitter: a) add noindex,nofollow o follower/following profiles? b) remove links to follower/following profiles for not-logged in users/search engine bots? c) remove bio or not-logged in users/search engine bots?

Getting it wrong – Twice

Browsing through the Straits Times this morning, I came across a photograph that was attributed to “flickr.com”:

Attributing the photo this way is wrong in a couple of ways:

1. Flickr is not the organization that “owns” these photos, it’s merely hosting them.

2. If the photo was licensed under a Creative-Commons license, the Straits Times should have attributed the photographer in the article, under the terms of the license.

I decided to look up who had posted this photo on Flickr to determine which license the photo had been made available under – that’s when it got really puzzling.

I couldn’t locate this image on Flickr and it was only when I broadened my search to Google that I located this image:

Blog post with original image.

Looking through the source of the page, I can’t find any link to Flickr – only to a Japanese-language webpage that has very little information.

So it appears that not only has the Straits Times screwed up how attribution should be done for photos taken from Flickr, they have actually sourced the image from some other website and forgotten to link to the correct website.

A change of address

A note for folks who subscribe to the blog via RSS:

Thanks to the Google-Borg  buying out Feedburner, I’ve had to change my Feed  URL slightly. The new address is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Balajis_Blog . Please update your subscriptions accordingly (and hopefully you won’t take this as the oppurtunity to unsubscribe from my blog…)

Fake story, real UI –Photoshop in the movies

From the Evernote archives…

Hollywood is well known for fake UI in movies – you know, “Unix is easy“ or the “VB GUI Interface“. I’d say most geeks get a kick of seeing just how removed from reality Hollywood computers can be.

I was very surprised then to spot a familiar looking application during a scene in the movie “National Treasure” (a fairly forgettable movie otherwise):

I think to myself “Wait. Isn’t that…?“. As if reading my mind, the Director zooms in for a closer look:

Yup that’s Photoshop alright.

What? You don’t believe me. Ok, I created a comparison image those of you who say “fake”:

If that’s a fake, that’s a damn good one. I wonder if Adobe got any royalties for the use of their software in the movie. If they didn’t, I’d say they have pretty good grounds for a lawsuit right there

PS: That blue wallpaper in the background looks awfully familiar too. Any mac-heads can confirm/deny?

Protected: In which I make up complicated graphs for simple things

Information Overload and Creativity – Simplicity is the key

A combination of events got me starting the New Year reflecting on attention and personal creativity.

The first event occurred while listening to an episode of the Brainy Gamer Podcast.  At some point during the podcast, every journalist interviewed mentioned being on Twitter. Having found their viewpoints interesting, my first instinct was “Hey! I should go follow all these folks on Twitter”. But then  the thought of adding another dozen high-volume tweeters to my already over-busy timeline just made me quail.

Even as I pondered what was my S/N cut-off for Twitter, I found myself in a fairly unique situation – without any podcasts to listen to or books to read on my train ride to and from work for almost 2 weeks. At first, I fidgeted and checked Twitter obsessively on my phone. But then a fairly remarkable thing happened – a number of ideas and observations started going off in my head. It seems like my brain has been itching to think on its own for months and I’ve been drowning it in too much information instead

Apparently, I’ve been deluding myself into thinking I could handle all the information flowing my way with no problems. Now, this is a pretty common complaint – “There’s too much to read!”. The stock answer is pretty easy as well – “That’s because you haven’t figured out how to filter the really important stuff yet”. AKA Filter Failure.

The lack of tools to help me build the right filters is something I’ll come back to later. But what I really noticed from this information overload was how it was affecting my own creativity. A constant minute-by-minute decision of “Read? Don’t Read?” that left me curiously unsettled after an hour or so of going through my feeds. As Laura Roeder put it:

After spending an hour-and-a-half going through my feeds, simultaneously twittering links and posting articles to my link blog, I’d find myself distracted and twitchy. To the extent that I would not be able to bring myself to start writing and dawdle at some website or the other until it was time to shut down the computer and go home.

It seems like I have reached an inflection point – I could continue as I had for the last year or so, adding to my reading list and twitter all the time ,while spending less and less time actually acting on all that knowledge. Or I could take a good hard look at what I was really interested in and focus on that instead.

What am I really interested in? That’s a hard, hard question – ask yourself this “What’s something I really, really like; have fun still doing; but don’t have the time anymore for?”. For me, a couple of things became obvious – one was Gaming and the other was Technology.

Gaming was my first big Geek love – I fondly remember those endless hours spent playing F-117, AoE, AoK, Caesar III… At the same time, I realized I haven’t played a game even half-way to completion in years. Gaming news tends to be a real fire hose as well- even if I limited myself to PC gaming, the updates would come thick & fast and often I’d barely glance at the headlines. So this was the first category to get cut – something made easier by the fact that I still listen to a couple of gaming podcasts.

So 13 feeds down, 289 feeds to go.

Making sense of my passion for technology was much harder. I had tried to compensate for feeds with endless updates by switching them to headlines-only mode. The thing is – once I switched to headlines mode, I’d find myself only reading articles that have “interesting” headlines. It felt like I was becoming that mouth-breathing, linkbait-sniffing Digg fanboi that I so detest. Or it could be I had just validated Sturgeon’s law – “90% of everything is crap”.

In the absence of a more scientific approach – I went with my gut instinct. I moved a few feeds into the doghouse (literally):

Once I’d done that – I forgot about them. Didn’t check that folder for days – kept hitting the “mark all as read” button. After a week or so, I realized that at no point did I feel like I was missing something by not reading these feeds. With that realization Lifehacker, NY Bits and a few others were consigned to the trash bin. A minor victory over information anxiety!

Earlier in this post, I complained about the lack of a scientific way of choosing which feeds I don’t want – and that wasn’t a joke. Buried within the FeedDemon UI is a way to check my “attention” score for every feed I subscribe to. When I did check this for my Tech feeds, I was extremely surprised – BoingBoing was first by a wide margin, with kottke and Daring Fireball in distant 2nd place. That pretty much told me the attention scores were all wrong, because here’s my “attention” gut-check:

I think what is missing is a more “semantic” attention score. What are the topics I read the most? What keywords are common across the article I’ve added to my shared folders? I think that I love reading about operating systems, design and odd facts, but do my reading habits support that belief? I feel like if I had this sort of information, I could simplify my reading list some more.

How long will this new approach last? Too early to tell yet – but certainly, being able to go through my entire feed-list in less than 1 hour last Sunday felt great. So does the Rescuetime graph that tells me I’ve spent just 30 minutes on average in my Feed reader during January. But if my notebook is any indication, I think my own brain is thanking me the most