Okay, just got my new OLPC yesterday and I have been playing around with it.  Definitely an entirely new paradigm and one that will take some getting used to.  I’ll be posting more of my thoughts in a review a bit later, however, I wanted to talk about how to get around an immediate problem that I had getting my OLPC to talk to my Wireless Network.

I use WPA2-PSK which is generally the strongest wireless security option available today to the home user.  An even stronger version makes use of RADIUS and a back end user authentication service like Windows Active Directory, but most home users simply find running something that sophisticated to be more trouble than it is worth.

My WPA key is an evil 63 character alpha numeric that includes symbols as well.  You can generate some pretty strong ones using Steve Gibson’s Password Generator.  For some reason, there is a bug in the OLPC code that makes it refuse to accept the ASCII string.  You need to covert it to Hexadecimal for it to work.  WPA clients generally take the ASCII WPA key you enter, combine it with the SSID of your wireless network and hash it to create a 64 character Hexadecimal value.  The client on the shipping version of the OLPC has a known bug that prevents this from working correctly.

Generating the hash manually is a pain, but fortunately, some kind soul has created a web page that will do it for you.  Navigate your web browser here and you will get a page that will let you enter your SSID and WPA ASCII key.  It will then return the 64 character Hexadecimal value which you simply cut and paste into the Password field on your OLPC and you are good to go.  As I said, this works with the WPA2/AES system I am running.

Have fun with it.

In a past posting, I complained about the lack of performance with the Microsoft HD-DVD player under Vista when trying to play HD-DVD movies on my dual core Athlon system. Since that posting, I have learned a few things;

First of all, decoding the H.264 HD-DVD stream requires a lot of processing power. It can take a moderately high end Core 2 Duo processor to about 70% – 80% utilization when viewing really complex action scenes. It unfortunately can completely overwhelm my poor Athlon 4800+ dual core – maxing both cores out and causing frame drop. For testing, I use the King Kong HD-DVD that shipped with the Xbox HD-DVD player and I jump to one of the action scenes – the one where the heroine is sacrifices to the gorilla. You would think that with a reasonably high end NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS card, this would be powerful enough to handle the decode.

You would be wrong.

Are you one of those people who has their whole house covered by a wireless network? They certainly are convenient; you can just whip out a laptop wherever you are and you have Internet access (or stream your media files, or do work, whatever). Now, one of the problems however is that once you go outside your house, things are not as great. Wireless signals degrade significantly when they have to pass through exterior walls. I had this problem myself; My wireless access point gave me good coverage inside the house, but the signal degraded quickly in my back yard. Moving the access point was not a solution as it did not really help and left half of my house with poor coverage. So, the solution was pretty easy; use an outdoor AP. The only problem is that these “weatherized” APs are fairly expensive even on eBay (commanding upwards of several hundred dollars). I figured that there was a cheaper way; build my own using consumer access point equipment. That’s just what I did and you can too. Here are the parts that you need:

Linksys WRT54G family router ($50 on Amazon, but can be found cheaper)

Linksys Power over Ethernet Kit ($36.00 on Amazon)

Sealed Outdoor Electrical Box big enough for the router (Hardware Store)
A long Cat 5 Cable

Like many people, I have been waiting for the “perfect” one box solution to streaming recorded TV as well as movies and other video files to my television. To date, I have had to settle on a two box solution. I have been a Windows Media Center user for a couple of years now – I use a dual tuner card in my Windows Media Center 2005 box and have been using a Linksys Media Center Extender to stream recorded content to my TV upstairs.

One of the limitations in the Media Center Extender has always been that it can only stream files encoded in MPEG-2 and Windows Movie (WMV) formats. This is fine for some things, but neither format is the one that I use to archive my DVDs. MPEG-2 files are just too large and WMV files essentially suck. Now I know that there are some transcoding solutions out there that allow one to re-encode a file on the fly to WMV, but there are two issues with that. First of all, it puts a load on the machine doing transcoding and until recently, the machine I was using for my Media Center really couldn’t handle that. I have since upgraded to a dual-core AMD system, but I found that when I tried to play transcoded video, I lost the ability to fast forward and rewind.

To address this problem, I used a second box, A D-LINK DSM-520. This box did an adequate job – it was capable of playing both DIVX as well as the MPEG-4 files that Nero Recode created but it crashed periodically and the fast forward/rewind was very slow. It was way to easy to accidentally hit stop instead of pause in a darkened room mid way through a movie which meant that it might take 10 minutes of fast forwarding to get back to the point where you left off. Plus it was a second box, which was not ideal.