I recently purchased a Dell monitor and upon opening it up and plugging it in, I noticed a bright blue pixel ’stuck’ on towards the center of the display.

Note that a ’stuck’ pixel is different than a ‘dead’ pixel. A dead pixel will be dark, while a stuck pixel will be a primary color - red, blue or green and constantly on.

I read this article on fixing a stuck pixel. I also came across Jeff Patch’s article which refers to a video created by Nick Toohill. However, after practicing all methods for a good hour nothing seemed to be working.

I kept the video playing overnight; I also used more and more pressure to ‘massage’ the pixel. I’m not sure how to describe the pressure I used - it felt pretty unnatural to be pressing on your LCD screen that hard. At some points, you could see ‘crystal’ patterns below the pressure point and they would take a few seconds to go away.

After about two days solid of playing the video over the pixel in question, and randomly coming in to ‘massage’ the pixel, it started to flicker in and out. Another day and the pixel was gone for a good bit - I left the video playing another night, and I am happy to report that the stuck pixel is gone and hasn’t reared it’s ugly head again.

I am hosting the ’stuck pixel’ fixer video here in case it is taken down from the original source. This video cycles between all of the pixel colors, then does a white/black cycle. Keep this video looping over the pixel you are trying to fix.

To summarize:

1. Loop this video over the pixel you are trying to fix.
2. Massage the pixel and surrounding area using increasingly hard circular motions.
3. Use a damp rag to massage the screen - evenly distribute the pressure you are applying.
4. Go to step 1.

Hopefully you will have the same success at fixing that damned stuck pixel! This method should work for any LCD where you can play this video type and where the LCD isn’t behind a glass enclosure (I’ve heard this working with PSPs, Portable DVD Players, and monitors).

For Christmas my wife and I decided to replace our aging circa 1998 19″ CRT with a new LCD Monitor. After searching the web and reading numerous reviews, I decided to purchase the Dell SP2008WFP LCD Monitor. Some of the major features of this monitor are:

• 20″ Widescreen HD LCD Monitor
• 2000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio
• 1680 x 1050 native resolution
• 2ms Response time
• Built in 2MP webcam
• 2 side facing USB ports and 2 bottom facing rear ports

For full specs please see the Full Product Page.

For the first time ever I’ve compiled a quick video review of the Dell SP2008WFP - press play to watch the review. Look below for more in depth analysis.

Dell’s monitors come with a 3-yr advance shipment replacement policy, which means that if your monitor goes bad, they will ship you a replacement after you send your defective one back. This is one of the main reasons I ordered directly from dell rather than one of my other favorite places for PC Hardware - Newegg.

First Impressions

Upon first unboxing and turning on this monitor - my first thought was “WOW”! It looks so much sharper and brighter than my old CRT monitor, and even compared to my other Dell LCD monitors at work it looks very sharp. I even had to turn the brightness levels down a bit.

I put on a movie to test it out - when - CRAP! A stuck pixel! There was a stuck blue pixel right in the middle of the screen. Since this was my first experience with a stuck pixel, I was a bit discouraged. Furthermore, I read on Dell’s site that they will only replace a monitor if there are 6 or more dead/stuck pixels. Note that a ‘dead’ pixel is one that is black, and a ’stuck’ pixel is one that is red, blue or green. Upon doing some research - I found out that a ’stuck’ pixel is normally fixable and isn’t as bad as having a dead pixel. After using some methods that I had discovered, it did end up fixing itself after a day or 2, and hasn’t returned since.

Daily use

For daily use the SP2008WFP really excels. The brightness really makes your screen ‘pop’ and everything is extremely sharp. It is best to run at the screen’s native resolution - 1680 x 1050. Depending on your eyesight and how far the monitor is from your seat - you may find fonts to be a bit too small. This can be fixed by modifying the window’s default font size to ‘large’ and setting the default Firefox or IE font size. Personally I had no problems reading the font at this resolution but my wife said it made her eyes twitchy after a while.

The two side USB ports really come in handy for those who use USB Keychains (that includes me!). The bottom ones can be used for a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle or for other USB peripherals.

I added the optional speaker for this monitor. I realize that the audio coming out of it is not spectacular, but since we have a child I wanted to do away with my BASS BOOSTER powered system and this does nicely. The speaker is powered, and has a blue light to let you know it is on. The right side includes a volume control and the left side has inputs for headphones and a microphone. Another nice feature is that the volume control works for the headphone volume, thus eliminating the need to change the volume on the system. My one ‘gripe’ on the speaker is the the volume control does not let you mute the volume without turning it off completely. That meaning that it gets down low and then click off. I wish it would go all the way down to mute and then turn off.

Video

Video looks great on this monitor, even in a bright room. In a darkened room, I did notice some LCD backlight leaking through on the edges on dark scenes in movies. This effect wasn’t overwhelming and I only noticed it when I was looking for it. In a bright room, the blacks look very black and the colors still very crisp.

Webcam

The 2 Megapixel webcam is pretty decent. The drivers indicate that it is actually a Creative webcam built in. The quality is really pretty good, and worked right out of the box for me in programs such as Skype. The built in software allows you to record video, capture images, run motion detection (security) capture, remote monitoring, and ‘time lapse’ video. These functions are neat but not usable for me, so I disable this software to prevent it from adding unneeded system programs. Also, if this software is actually running, it will interfere with other capture programs such as Skype. If you need to run more than one program with your webcam, use Splitcam.

Conclusion

This monitor is a great upgrade from someone moving from a CRT and even from a smaller LCD. The price you can find on Dell’s website is not the cheapest 20″ Widescreen LCD, however it is one of the only non-iMac monitors you can find which includes this webcam ability - which other monitor manufacturers will surely follow. For my own personal uses, it seemed like I could get a 22″ plain LCD or a 20″ with webcam. Time will tell if this was a good purchase, but I think my desk really thanks me in that I have consolidated almost every item on my desk into this one item (excluding my scanner - I don’t think they will be merging monitors and flatbed scanners anytime soon).

At $289 this monitor seems like a good deal and I would recommend the purchase to anyone looking for a new monitor! I figure if I want more desk space in the future, I will move to a dual monitor setup and get a cheap 22″.

This happened on a few of my accounts - specifically the IMAP accounts on my Windows Mobile 6 device. Apparently this was a problem back with Windows Mobile 2003 but it seems to have resurfaced in Windows Mobile 6.

Even though all messages in an account are read; the “1 unread message” message still shows up on your Today screen. This happens when the internal unread message count becomes de-synced with the real message count. Instead of polling the server for unread messages, Windows Mobile keeps an internal database/registry key with this number. This problem also manifests itself in having “-1″ unread messages or another off-count.

Luckily, it is pretty easy to fix. Download this program from freewareppc. Transfer and run the .exe from your device. It analyzes your accounts and fixes the internal database “unread” count.

Meebo, which I have recently been turned on to, yesterday released an iPhone client which is basically a web interface to their chat website (which integrates AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, gtalk, and more). It looks great, take a peek:

That is great that they are developing this and I applaud them for their efforts of releasing updates on mobile devices.

Now, maybe I have iPhone envy, but wouldn’t it make sense to release this for Windows Mobile since the market share that Windows Mobile has is MUCH greater than iPhone? According to Gartner, Windows Mobile shipped a little over 3 million devices in the 1st quarter of 2007 alone (and that number does not even include “Smartphone” devices). iPhone, according to their own estimates [MacNewsWorld], will sell a million units by Sept 30th.

I asked Meebo about their plans for Windows Mobile. Here is the response I received from Sue:

As far as a Windows Mobile version of meebo, it’s
something that we’ve thought about and are interested in, but at the
moment we don’t have development time and resources to add support for
every device we’d like to.

Here is where it gets tricky. There may be a great market penetration for Windows Mobile - but it is not easy to develop a web app for it because there is no standardized browser platform. Sure, you have Internet Explorer Mobile, but let’s face it - IEM is program is not very good at rendering web pages and would be a nightmare to develop for. Each version of Windows Mobile has differences in IEM that designers would have to be conscious of. The other browsers that Windows Mobile users have the option of using: Opera Mobile, Netfront, Minimo - do not have enough market penetration to make it development worthwhile. [on a sidenote, Opera Mobile is the best browser for Windows Mobile, give it a try if you haven't already.]

Hence, we have the major difference between Windows Mobile and iPhone OS. Windows Mobile, although an “open” system that allows developers to create their own programs, has the problem of having a high cost to develop because you need to have Windows Mobile programming experience.

On the other hand, the iPhone, with it’s “Closed” OS, has a standardized browser that works well and is easy to write web code for. Web publishers around the world are free to write code for it in their native programming languages because the browser is the component that renders the graphics and takes care of the network.

So how is this problem resolved? Nintendo seems to have fixed this very same issue by offering Opera for Wii via the Wii Shop channel. Wii users who install this browser have many options available out there for web interfaces that are designed specifically for the Opera browser on Wii - most notable of these is Orb, which has a beautiful interface for the Wii. Microsoft, ever the profitable company it is, wants users to use IE on Windows Mobile and therefore bundles IEM.

Microsoft needs to get with the program and make their browser easier to write for and more standards compliant. If that doesn’t happen, then we are definitely looking at an iPhone future for mobile devices.

If you use Windows Mobile, please contact Meebo and let them know that you’d like to see a Windows Mobile version of Meebo!

If you can access the internet fine using PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) on your Windows Mobile device over Edge or 3G, but when you switch to Wifi Internet Explorer always times out (It says “Loading…”) - then you are probably dealing with the dreaded “hard coded proxy” problem. In this situation you have Wifi wireless enabled and Opera and other internet applications work fine - but PIE will not work.

The issue is that PIE is trying to connect to the internet via a proxy, however if you are using WiFi there is no need for this and the proxy server can not identify you since you are not on AT&T’s (Cingular’s) network.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

The default setting that forces the proxy to be used is:

"EnableAutoDetect"=dword:00000000

Change to:

"EnableAutoDetect"=dword:00000001

Do a soft reset on your device and PIE should now be able to access the internet again!

Windows Mobile 5 did not seem to have an easy way to have YouTube mobile videos (3gp files streaming over rtsp protocol) play to your phone.

However with Windows Mobile 6 Professional and HTC’s “StreamingPlayer” software - playing YouTube Mobile videos, at least through PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) is easy.

If you don’t have HTC’s StreamingPlayer - check here. After installing the software, you may also need to modify your registry in order to allow rtsp streams to be opened by the player. Here is a link to the registry entries you need to make - again courtesy of XDA-Developer’s forum.

Save the above text to a .reg file, and import to your device (for example, using RegEdit for WM6)

Hopefully if all went well - when you visit http://m.youtube.com, and click play video, the HTC player will launch and play the video. After the video is done the player will automatically close and bring you back to the browser.

Note that for the above to work, you need to either have wifi access or an unlimited data plan for your wireless account - because streaming video WILL take up a lot of data!

Update 8/8/2007:

Screenshots!

Main Youtube Mobile Screen on WM6

Video Page on WM6

Video Playing

In Landscape mode - you can see the quality of the video is not that great even over WiFi

For another great article on getting this working, check here.

Introducing systemBash’s first Windows Mobile theme: Black Grass.

This totally free theme features a grass background and a black menu bar. Text is white and accents are green. It in meant for pocket PC / Windows Mobile version 5 and above.

systemBash Black Grass Theme

In case you are wondering what the clock/center menu uses, it is phoneAlarm and uses this theme.

I received an interesting mail from CallWave this morning:

Great news: CallWave is reinventing voicemail – again! — with two fantastic enhancements to the CallWave service:

1. VtxtSM: A new feature that transforms your voicemail into a concise text message that you can read on your cell phone or email.
2. PhonePage: A permanent, searchable web-based archive that lets you treat all your mobile messages just like email. Use your PhonePage to read, hear and save your messages, send texts, call back, organize your contacts and more.

You have been selected to participate in the CallWave VtxtSM and PhonePage Beta Test. There’s no charge to participate. All we ask is that you agree to provide feedback and answer a brief survey after using it for a few days.

If you would like to try the new CallWave VtxtSM and PhonePage features, simply reply to this email with your mobile number, and tell us you want to be included. We’ll notify you when it’s activated.

Thanks for using CallWave!

Sincerely,

The CallWave Team

I’ve been using CallWave’s Visual Voicemail feature for a few months now. It is great - instead of using Cingular/AT&T’s voicemail system, I switched to CallWave’s system. It has a number of features AT&T simply does not have - including e-mails with voicemail attached as a wave file, and SMS notification of voicemail which replaces the “Voicemail” notifier on my phone.

This service that CallWave is going to be testing - Vtxt and Phonepage - sounds like it is going to be speech-to-text detection of voicemail messages. I’m curious as to how accurate the translation will be because in the past PC based speech recognition has been hit or miss, but a lot of time has passed and maybe it is a bit more accurate than it used to be.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Click here to enter into the CallWave Vtxt beta!

Here is the problem: you have a DVR/HTPC hooked up to your TV downstairs, but you have other televisions in your house you wish to use to access the HTPC. How do you distribute the Audio/Video signal to these other television sets?

One solution to this problem is Crossbar MediaCaster, which was kindly provided to me for review by SnapStream Media.

The basic idea of this hardware is that you are creating a “private access channel” AKA Avcast® entertainment network, which is then provided content from any device which outputs an RCA signal.

 

 

In the box:

• 1 x CableCaster - Establishes the Avcast entertainment network
• 1 x MediaCaster - Provides the content for the Avcast network
• 1 x IRcaster - sends IR signal over the Avcast network
• 1 x IRdetector - receives IR signal
• 1 x Notch filter - filters a channel range to allow Avcast network to utilize a channel
• 2 x Coax Cable - to connect MediaCaster/CableCaster to coax network
• 1 x RCA Cable set - to connect HTPC to MediaCaster

The setup of the system is rather complicated and requires that you both have access to, and know the setup of your home coax system which is already built into the majority of homes built in the past 30 years. If you have cable television, then you most likely have this internal network already set up.

Step 1:

Locate where the cable comes into your house. You need to intercept it where it splits off to go into separate ends of the house.

 

 

The CableCaster unit plugs in here. Also you will need A/C power. There is a plug for input - the input cable from your cable provider. Also in between the cable provider and the CableCaster goes the Notch Filter. This device blocks a channel range, so that the CableCaster can broadcast on this channel.

Step 2:

The MediaCaster is then plugged into cable network near or at your HTPC. You will need to have access to the coax network in your home if you don’t already have this near to your HTPC. This part will also need A/C power.

Step 3:

 

 

Plug your Audio/Video device (in this case, a DVR running SnapStream BeyondTV). This means you will need to output the video and audio in RCA format - so make sure you have the necessary cables/converters to do this.

Step 4 (optional):

At the remote end, connect the IR Caster and IR Receiver to the coax network. This will allow you to use the IR remote at a remote location to the intended receiver, the signal will be broadcast over the Avcast network to the MediaCaster unit.

In my case, I used the BTC Wireless Remote and Firefly remote, which were both able to reach to my upstairs room and control my PC.

Now that everything is set up, you can see my remote TV with my HTPC desktop running!

 

 

I must admit, it was very cool to be operating my HTPC from another room while seeing the content broadcast over a CATV channel. This signal is now available from anywhere in my house - allowing me to enjoy my recorded content over any cable-equipped television set.

There are several large drawbacks or flaws to using this system.

- First, the HTPC must output in 1.33:1 ratio format, meaning if you have your HTPC set up to output to an HDTV in widescreen format (16:9). I could only get my setup to output one or the other, meaning I had to make sure my aspect ration stayed in Standard format.
- Secondly, the notch filter also seemed to filter out content which it should not be filtering. Specifically, my Motorola set top box became useless. On Demand stopped working, as well as HDTV signal quality dropped dramatically - causes dropouts in signal.

These drawbacks really limit how you are able to use this system. In my case my wife really relys on the OnDemand service from Comcast - so this is a deal breaker for me. If your cable TV provider is not comcast, then you might not have this same problem. Also the system is fairly complicated to set up, so it is for advanced users only.

Final verdict:

 

Recommended
Recommended to those with advanced knowledge of cable/HTPC workings and specific requirements

 

Product provided by: SnapStream Media
Review date: 5/1/2007

If you have an HTPC which uses software such as BeyondTV you can use a remote for the majority of the time but there are times where you will want a good old fashioned keyboard, for surfing the web or other PC maintenance tasks. Sure you could use a wired keyboard or mouse, but who really wants to be tied to your Television which might be across the room. Typical wireless keyboards may only work several feet away from your PC. The 9019URF works at least 3.5 meters (10.5 feet) away from your PC, and in my experience it worked in another room on a different level, through the walls. It uses Radio Frequencies (RF) which can go through walls and does not require line of sight.

The box contains everything you need to use the keyboard:

• Wireless RF Keyboard
• USB PC Interface
• CD with optional drivers and manual
• 2 x AA batteries for the keyboard

Installing the keyboard is as simple as installing the batteries, and plugging the USB PC connector. The keyboard works out of the box in this setup. However, if you want to use the special “media” keys to launch your internet browser or e-mail, you will need to install the software which came on the CD, or download them from BTC’s website.

As I have hinted above, the BTC 9019 includes a pointing device right on the keyboard.

This pointer works fairly well while using your keyboard. It also has left click built in - if you wish to use right click, you will need to use the button to the immediate right of the pointer. Also to the immediate left, a scroll up and scroll down button have been placed. This is very handy while you are viewing any web pages.

Integration with any HTPC or DVR software, such as BeyondTV, works just as well as with any other keyboard. It is nice to be able to use the finess of keyboard/mouse combo when controlling BTV, or your system in general.

I had a small issue with the receiver where it seemed to lose its connection when I held the keyboard at a certain angle. This only seemed to be at a certain range, and moving the angle of the keyboard always fixed the issue. After moving the receiver on top of my entertainment system, rather than behind, the issue seemed to go away. This indicates to me that this keyboard might be susceptible to RF interference from components. When placing the receiver, make sure it is as far away from components as possible.

Overall the keyboard feels solid and not as cheap as I expected considering it’s bargain pricetag. At $35 as of 5/2007 from the SnapStream Store, it is a great deal.

I give this keyboard a:

Highly Recommended

Would Recommend to Family and Friends

Provided by: SnapStream
Review Date: 5/1/2007