More Medion 8818 stuff

The Christmas break has been like the curate's egg as far as the new PC goes.

I successfully wrote my first DVDs - I discovered that my DVD player seems to read both +R and -R sucessfully.

However, I had more fun when it came to burning a CD from an ISO. This has caused me fun and games over the years; I do it infrequently and used to forget how to do it. Surely it's easy with Nero, I thought. But Nero didn't like trying to use a .cue file; it seemed like there was something missing from Nero, or whatever. I tried updating on-line and that didn't work - indeed Nero complained that it couldn't connect to the internet properly. (Subsequently I have decided that this was due to some behaviour of the Bullguard anti-malware. See below). So, I downloaded the newest Nero from the Nero website and installed it. The new version worked just fine but what should have been a really straighforward process took ages.

Then came the real problem. I was trying to add a collection of UK contour maps into my Garmin Mapsource installation. This requires editing the registry. To cut a very long story short, I ended up deciding that I'd messed things up so badly I'd better put the PC back into its delivery state and start again.

The recover procedure worked pretty well. I've now backed up the key recovery files onto DVDs, so I'm safer than I was. It's taken about a day to get things back to a pretty much full installation. I'm just missing my Garmin installation, which I've decided to leave until last. Nero caused some issues. The orginal installation worked fine but there does seem to be some problem with Nero and Bullguard; I ended up disabling the firewall while Nero was installing and then all went well.

In conclusion. Firstly, be very careful editting the registry (but you knew that). Secondly, Nero and Bullguard have a problem with their relationship. Thirdly, I was impressed by the reinstallation process that Medion supplied.

Now the PC is a bit more lived in

I recounted my early experience with my Aldi (Medion 8818) in a previous post. I've still not solved my Palm sync problem, but I have read that if I use an old version of Palm desktop it might work - we'll see.

Otherwise things are pretty good. I'm running with dual 19" monitors. The Nvidia set up is a little obscure for my liking and I've yet to work out how to configure things so I can switch between two screens and one large virtual screen easily. Anyhow, not a huge bother.

I've now got most of the software I use regularly loaded and running. Everything seems to run fine and the machine is much faster than I'm used to. And that's with Google desktop, MSN Messanger, etc. all running in the background by default.

I tried out the DVD buring software (CyberLink PowerDirector, PowerProducer, etc.) and it all seemed to work OK for very little effort. I've not tried Nero yet, but I'm sure I'll get round to it soon. I did, however, try out Microsoft MediaCenter - waste of disk space I suspect, but since I've not got any TV feed to the PC this judgement may be premature.

The only real complaint I have is that the wireless keyboard is rather particular about something. I'm not completely sure what yet, but from time-to-time it ceases to work as a keyboard; it works fine as a random substring generator though. Strangely the matching mouse seems fine.

Anyhow, very pleased so far.

More on rfid passports (ePassports) [and DVDs]

Today I saw an article on the BBC web site which made we glad that I've bought my anti-RFID passport holder. The disclosures in the article confirm what I've always thought, the rfid chip does nothing significant to increase security and does something significant to reduce security. Now, I may be wrong, I don't understand enough about the cryptography used (they do use some cryptography, don't they?), but it is possible that while it is relatively easy to clone a passport, it may be difficult to create a new one from scratch. To clone, all that is needed is to copy the (encrypted?) chip, to create a new one you may need to do the encryption and you might not have the key. Does anyone know? Maybe there is method behind this scheme, rather than the madness of increased costs and decreased security.

So what has this to do with DVDs? When I had the CSS scheme first described to me, I couldn't understand what it was good for. Clearly it didn't prevent cloning a DVD - if you clone all the digital content you have a clone of the DVD. A serious fraudster - one with a pressing plant - shouldn't have a problem in mass producing fake DVDs. Then I realised; the mechanism was there to enforce the licencing policy. To play back the DVD you need the algorithm. To get the algorithm you need to sign a licence. Provided CSS is patent protected you have a case against anyone producing a player which doesn't confirm to your licencing terms. If it's made by a licencee, they're in breach of their licence; if it's made by a non-licencee, they're in breach of your patent.