NFL Red Zone

We've just recently switched to Comcast from DirecTV. Having done so, I've gotten my first taste of the NFL Red Zone channel. I'm not sure if it's an introductory thing (and will be turned off at some point), or if it's something that comes with the package I've signed up for. All I know is that on DirecTV, you had to pay for the NFL Sunday Ticket package ($300 a year) to get it.

It's the ultimate in short-attention-span football coverage. They put up whatever game happens to have a team in the best scoring position at that moment. No commercials, no bullshit.

It's a wonderful alternative to being stuck watching nothing but the Raiders or 49ers most Sundays around here.

Update It turns out it was a free preview for this weekend. Bummer.

VTA, CalTrain and Clipper, part 2

I heard back from VTA.

Clipper will not be accepted on VTA before Spring of 2011.

So in the meantime, everyone who is a monthly pass holder on Caltrain starting in October is going to get screwed out of their local fare credit on VTA.

Ausgezeichtnet!

Never mind that I have yet to ride on a VTA bus that doesn't have a clipper terminal at the front covered in a garbage bag.

Really now. How much training does it really take for the driver to recognize the correct form of "beep" noise when a card gets tagged? Yes, I understand that for VTA to actually switch over in a big way to Clipper is going to be a much bigger deal than that. But how about a fucking baby step? How about turning on the terminals that are already installed?

Damnit, why must it always be that government employees forget who they really work for?

pyTivoX... FTW!!!

So we have a TiVo Premiere in the living room connected up to our TV. Since we have only the one DVR now, our TV in the bedroom would ostensibly be useless, so I moved the mac mini from the living room in there. We can use iTivo to watch shows on it.

But that means that we now have no way of watching dvds in the living room, since the mini was the only DVD drive out there.

Turns out, there's a good solution.

PyTiVoX is a program that acts as a server that does the opposite of TiVoToGo - a sort of TiVoComeFrom, as it were. It will take a directory full of video files and put up a server that looks just like a TiVo. If you ask a real TiVo to transfer a file, it will convert it to MPEG2/AC3 on the fly and transfer it over. Alternatively, if you have a TiVoHD or Premiere, you can stream the stuff instead of transferring it (it shows up in the Showcases menu rather than in Now Playing).

So you can rip a DVD with Handbrake, toss the resulting video file into a pyTivoX share directory and then watch it on the TiVo. It takes a little extra time for Handbrake to do its work, but even with that, it's a good solution.

The only pity is that it doesn't work for DRMed content you can't break, such as iTunes video purchases or amazon movies or the like. But as long as they keep either making DVDs or making the stuff available on Netflix watch now, I'll be happy.

Watch for fraudsters!

We had a yard sale this afternoon, and a fellow came up and bought a pile of DSL equipment. He asked us if we could break a $100. We said 'sure' and I went inside (we keep most of the money inside) to make change.

I came back out with 5 $20s and we did the transaction, him taking the modems and his change.

My wife Scarlet, said just after he left, "Check that bill." She just had a feeling.

Sure enough, the watermark on the bill was the one for a $5 (it wasn't Ben Franklin, like the other $100 bills we got today). I ran after him and confronted him about it and we reversed the whole transaction (yes, the $20s he gave back were legit).

Beware!

Lies, damn lies and marketing

I cancelled our DirecTV service this evening after being a customer for more than 15 years.

As is always the case, my cancellation was handled by the "save" department. This is the bunch of phone reps whose job it is to do whatever it takes to prevent you from canceling your service. Every subscription service oriented company has them. Some are more pernicious than others. It should be no surprise at all that companies are working harder than ever to make their web sites handle every possible customer need conceivable.

Except that one.

No, AOL never had a "cancel my service" button. Neither did XM.

Netflix, to their credit, does. And they don't hide it. It's the third link down from the top of the page on the "Your account" screen. They ask you why you're leaving, but otherwise they don't make a fuss. Even if I didn't have them on my resume, I'd admire that attitude.

The DirecTV guy I had on the phone tried to drag Comcast through the mud in a couple of ways - comparing the customer satisfaction ratings of the two companies. He even said, and I am quoting him directly here, "Did you know Comcast has no HD?"

After a moment of stunned silence, I told him I was looking at an HD picture as we speak. He then said, "no, that's 720p. Comcast has no true HD."

Oh. My. God.

Let's look at the situation here.

Comcast's goal is to deliver as much video as they can with as little bandwidth as possible. Ironically, that's also DirecTV's goal - a goal that DirecTV has achieved by switching over to MPEG4 as their main HD codec, which raises the cost of their receivers. But never mind that for now.

720p and 1080i actually take about the same amount of bandwidth. So if you were of the mistaken opinion that 720p was somehow not "true" HD (which it is, by the way.480i is SD, 480p is ED and anything above that is HD), what benefit would it be for Comcast to somehow transcode all 1080i programming to 720p?

No. 720p and 1080i are equal alternatives. 720p is good for high action programming, like sports, and 1080i is better for mostly static programming. But there's never any need or justification for anyone to spend the money to convert one to the other.

Far more likely that that DirecTV rep was lying. Go figure.

The one disappointment I am left with in this whole thing is that we somehow wound up with one of our DVRs being leased. We had an HR21 die on us and it was replaced, and we didn't own the replacement. Go figure that out. So they're going to ship is an empty box to mail it back. Whatever. Even without that, we should wind up getting about half of what we paid for the TiVo out of our old DirecTV gear on eBay.

And with TiVo, we get TiVo to go, so we can liberate our programming from the confines of what The Man says we can do with it. And that, more than anything, is what pissed me off about DirecTV. They went so far out of their way to lock down their programming that they made their service unusable, and/or used that draconian lock to squeeze extra nickels out of us.

No thanks.

The new Apple TV

Oh, Steve, you could have really revolutionized the living room if you'd just have tried a little bit harder.

Where is the iTunes app store for the Apple TV?

Yes, fine, you added Netflix streaming. But what about Pandora? What about XM/Sirius? What about Hulu? What about all of the other streaming media sources on the Internet that want to get onto the TV?

Maybe that's what AirPlay will wind up being. If AirPlay is an API feature that will be available universally to all app store developers, then the AppleTV will wind up being nothing more than a remote display for iOS. That would be ok, I suppose, but if AirPlay is limited to the iPod app, then, again, it's the same opportunity lost.

I see from the AirPlay page that they're going to make AirPlay available to third parties. Please, TiVo, please add AirPlay receiving. Please.

TiVo + Comcast begins

DirecTV is fired.

The TiVo Premiere arrived Tuesday night and Comcast came yesterday.

We'd been using DirecTV for 15+ years, so when we moved into our house we never hooked up the cable. A month or so later comcast physically disconnected our cable and left it dangling in the wind. So when we called them up for new service, I assumed they might need to cut off the last few inches of that cable, put a new connector on it and plug it in.

I was a little surprised that the tech instead actually replaced the entire drop. But he did a solid, professional job, and he arrived on time in the middle of the two hour window. All in all, I now have as high an opinion of Comcast's field service techs as I do of PacBell/SBC/AT&T.

Installing the CableCard took way too long and was way too much trouble, but this may simply be a self fulfilling prophecy. We stuck the card in and he made a phone call to give two series of numbers to the mothership. That done, the TiVo went into a mode where it was trying to acquire the channel list. That went on for too long, so we started doing stuff. What finally worked was repeating guided setup. Either doing that fixed... something... or it simply took so long to do that in the meantime the card got whatever it needed from the mothership and turned on. The problem is that both I and the tech had heard so many horror stories about TiVos and CableCards that we expected the worst from the start.

The biggest problem we face right now is that the TiVo has four copies of our local stations. Not kidding. We have our antenna plugged into the TiVo along with Comcast so that we can get some of the out-of-market stations that come in for us. So, for example, for KTVU, we get it on 2-1 (antenna), plus a copy of the signal on the analog portion of the cable, an SD digital channel and an HD digital cable channel. This is ok, except that I caught the TiVo taping a suggestion from the analog cable channel! Bad TiVo! If you're going to tape a suggestion, at LEAST tape an HD version if it's available (or at least include some sort of option to let me pick which to prefer)! So now I need to go through the channel list in the TiVo and remove all of the SD versions of channels for which we get an HD version.

The only other complaint I have about the TiVo is that it refuses to use the 1TB eSATA hard disk I plugged into it. Instead, they insist that I buy a particular one. Grumble. I can only assume that they've run into support issues and have taken this extra step to cut down on the number of support calls they get related to low quality eSATA drives. Fortunately, the eSATA drive they want you to use doesn't cost more than the same drive does otherwise - that is, they're not charging a premium for it being TiVo compatible. I'm probably not going to go out and get one, however, since the whole idea behind having a TiVo is being able to offload the shows from it onto the computers using iTiVo.

Hypocrites amuse me

Saw a guy getting ready to board the train this morning. His bike had a sticker on it that said "People powered - no oil (wars) required."

Uh huh.

What do you think they use to fill the tank of that locomotive at the front of the train you're about to board? Last I heard, CalTrain hasn't switched to biodiesel.

And even if he were so principled that he decided he would bike all the way to where he was going... Did they use canola oil to grease the chain on that bike?

You want to say that you're taking the train to cut down on our dependence on foreign oil, that's fine. Me? I take the train because I can sit here and blog or watch a movie or whatever instead of having to deal with traffic.

But it's ludicrous to self-righteously claim to be opting completely out of our petroleum-diven lifestyle. Even more so when you do it while boarding a train.

Power Supplies - The latest irritating technology stumbling block

For the third time in a week, an electronic gizmo in our house has failed in the same way: its low-bid Chinese wall-wart power supply has failed.

A power supply simply needs to take household power and turn it (usually) into either 12 volts or 5 volts DC with somewhere between 500 and, oh, say, 2000 mA of current.

This is a problem that has been solved for well over 50 years now. It's not complicated. It really, really isn't. Even if you throw in the safety requirements of UL it shouldn't cost more than a couple of dollars (when you're talking about buying in bulk). Of course, for the consumer to go out and buy a replacement, it's more like $10-$20 every time one of these damn things blows out. And they seem to last about 2 years.

Really?

Have we become that disposable a society?

The big problem is that when a device dies, the majority of consumers aren't going to be equipped or technically savvy to diagnose the problem and realize that simply replacing the wall-wart is enough. No, they'll run out to the store and buy a new device. And guess what it'll come with!

So I'll start off the hall of shame right now. Here are the devices that I've had to replace the power supply well, well prior to the end of the device's useful life:

HDHomeRun - This is now actually the second time in about 5 years that the wall wart has died. The first time, Silicon Dust had a recall program and replaced it at no cost. Apparently, they replaced it with one that was just as shitty. UPDATE: Silicon Dust says that they switched vendors a couple years ago, and that the first replacement was sent before they did so. They are going to replace the power supply free of charge, and this time using the new vendor's supply that has not been quite so problematic.

Roku - The wall wart for the Netflix player died on us this week. According to the searching I've done, this is something fairly frequent. Roku's FAQ has suggestions for diagnosing power supply failure, and their store has a replacement supply for $10 - both of which suggest that this issue has come up frequently enough for them to prepare a response.

Apple - I bought an AirPort Express from my nephew. It tested fine at his apartment, but when I plugged it in at home, it had failed. And, again, the Internet is alive with reports of these dying and suggested repair strategies. This is a much worse failure, because the power supply is internal to the unit, and it is impossible to non-destructively open the case.

TrendNet - I bought two Gigabit Ethernet switches at Fry's. Both of them experienced power supply failure within a year of purchase.

All of these companies should be ashamed of themselves. There's just no excuse for selling a device with a power supply that doesn't outlive the device by a factor of at least 5.

Key Wrapping with HSMs

Using PKCS11 with JCE means that you can use HSMs to house your private keys, which protects them from theft or misappropriation. And that's a very good thing.

With JCE, you use instances of subclasses of Key to perform cryptographic operations. Keys can be PublicKey, PrivateKey or SecretKey objects. SecretKey objects represent keys to use with a symmetric algorithm, like AES. PublicKey and PrivateKey objects comprise a key pair used for asymmetric algorithms, like RSA.

What PKCS11 does is replace SecretKey and PrivateKey objects with sham objects that represent index numbers into the HSM. When you ask JCE to perform a cryptographic operation with those keys, it instead actually delegates the task to the HSM. The HSM will look up the keys, use them internally, and return the result to you. When done that way, the secret material never leaves the HSM.

But what happens when you have to manage potentially thousands of keys? That's too many to store in the limited storage space of an HSM, and having the HSM root through its storage to find the key you want isn't what it was designed best to do.

No, instead you should use a database to store all of the keys. But the problem is that the database isn't cryptographically protected the same way an HSM is.

The solution is in the Cipher class wrap() and unwrap() methods.

What you do is you establish a SecretKey in your HSM. Give it an alias of "WrappingKey" or something of that sort. If you ask your HSM to generate such a key internally, then it will never be allowed to leave the HSM. That's a good thing. You then generate whatever keys you need and use the Cipher wrap() method to turn the private key material into an encrypted byte array. You can write that byte array to the database with confidence, since there's no use you can make of that byte array without the secret key that was used to encrypt it, which is safely encased in the HSM.

Now what if you want to use it?

You fetch the bytes from the database again and use the same Cipher object to unwrap the key. What you'll get is a PrivateKey. But as we've seen, PrivateKeys that you get from an HSM are just sham objects. You don't actually get to see that PrivateKey - it is merely a reference to the key in the HSM. You then can use the HSM to perform whatever crypto operation you need to do on that key. The HSM doesn't permanently store the unwrapped key - as soon as the sham object gets dereferenced, the PKCS11 module will tell the HSM to throw it away. But done in this way, the unencrypted form of the private key never leaves the HSM, nor does the encryption key that wraps and unwraps it. Your database can be used to keep track of the potentially millions of private keys you need to keep track of, but no human eyes will ever get to see even one of them.

Think ahead, people!

Folks, really now.

If you're in a line for a ticket machine, and there are people behind you, you should take the opportunity you have while waiting to go digging through the Bag of Holding you call a purse to pull out your credit card and have it handy for when you get to the front of the line.

I mean, it can't be a surprise that you're going to use it. Yes, I can see that if you're unfamiliar with the machine, you won't know exactly when or how it will demand your card or cash, but what else is it going to do? Ask for a retinal scan or a DNA sample?

Safety reminder

While I was waiting for the train this morning, I observed a situation which could easily have resulted in someone being killed.

The Northbound #231 train was approaching the Santa Clara station. Because of its design, passengers for Northbound trains must cross the Southbound track in order to board the train. To mitigate this, Caltrain has a "hold-out" rule that forbids more than one train from passing through the station at one time, plus they tell the passengers to always wait on the far platform until the train they intend to board has arrived.

There is a southbound express train that rolls through Santa Clara shortly before the 231 is scheduled to arrive. This morning, it was running late.

So looking to the right from the platform, everyone could plainly see the 231 train approaching to arrival. If you didn't also look to the left, you would not, however, have seen that Southbound express also approaching.

Now, only one train can come through at a time, so the two trains get on the radio and decide who's going to go first. This morning, the 231 decided they would hold-out, probably because the other train was late and wasn't going to stop in any event.

So if you weren't careful, you'd have looked to the right, seen the 231 train approaching, not noticed it was actually stopping short of the station. You then might have stepped onto the Southbound track to cross over to the other platform and disappeared in a puff of pink fog as the Southbound express roared through at 79 mi/hr.

Now, to be fair, CalTrain is actually as we speak retrofitting the station with a tunnel so that no passenger will ever need to set foot on an active railroad track ever again. And 6 or so months from now when they're done, that'll be a good thing. And the construction has actually improved the sight-lines to the North, which is the predominant danger.

But in the meantime, if you use that station, please, please be careful. The rest of us don't need to have our morning commute fouled up by having to wait for the coroner to mop you up. I get to make that joke, because it nearly happened to me.

On grey water duming

Environmentalists are often amusing in the contradictory positions they're willing to take. The latest example is the ban on cruise ships dumping grey water within 3 miles of shore.

At first, that sounds like something that you'd sort of expect to be a bad thing. But then how do you reconcile that with cities being incentivised to use grey water for irrigating parks and other public places? If it's illegal to dump it in Monterey Bay, how ought it to be a good idea to spray it on the lawn at the local public park?

Just to be clear, grey water is not sewage (that is, toilet output). Grey water is water that has been used, but other than for septic reasons. Think water from showers. So if shower water shouldn't be dumped in the bay, then should people be allowed to swim in it?

And is making the cruise ship wait until it's 3 miles offshore significant? If it's dumping while the tide is going in, the tide will carry it right into shore.

Norman, coordinate.

VTA, CalTrain and Clipper

We're quickly running up against a situation here.

Caltrain has said that we should switch from paper monthly passes to Clipper monthly passes starting in October.

A 2+ zone CalTrain monthly pass gives you local fare credit on VTA busses and light rail. I use this every once in a while to take the #60 bus home from the Santa Clara CalTrain station.

VTA does not yet take Clipper. VTA has yet to issue any statement of any kind as to when they might. There are Clipper terminals installed on every VTA bus I have ridden on this year, so far as I can remember, but they're covered over by plastic "out of order" bags.

I'd be happy if VTA would just come out and say when they expect to remedy this situation.

Microcell report

The latest rumors about the microcell are that AT&T and Cisco are working on what sounds like a fairly major overhaul. The rumor mill is talking about a hardware upgrade, which would mean AT&T would swap out all of the units deployed so far.

That the problems that we are having with the microcell couldn't be fixed with a simple software update would be astonishing to me. From what I've read from people who have analyzed the pictures of the microcell motherboard in FCC filings, the chipsets being used certainly seem like they'd be capable of handling the workload without any trouble. The only possible problem I could imagine would be that they maybe didn't give the thing enough RAM, since the speculation is that the board is running some sort of Linux variant (specifically, BusyBox) at least at the higher levels.

A lot of the speculation has centered around the upload cap, but that doesn't quite ring true, at least for us, since the problems have always been that we got garbling on the calling party's audio, which has nothing to do with the upload data channel.

But, perhaps, the CPU gets maxed out trying to deal with audio and data at the same time. But then, wouldn't we get bidirectional garbling?

And shame on AT&T for not being more forthcoming about the problem, their plan for fixing it, and the timing of that plan. They've had plenty of time to figure out what's going on. It's one thing to sell an opaque appliance device to your customers and tell them nothing about how it works so long as it actually works. But you can't just sell a box that doesn't work and then just refuse to say anything out loud about what you're going to do.

Apple's "death touch" iPhone 4 antenna problem and the response is a stark contrast. Apple responded in less than a month with their analysis of the problem and their action plan for working around the problem. Their analysis, by their claim at least, is that the problem was/is much less widespread than has been made out, and they've said that anyone who wants one can have a free case.

AT&T, by contrast, has remained silent for months (at least) about this problem, that from all appearances is a show-stopper for huge numbers of people who have bought the device.

Oh, and they tested this thing for almost two years prior to rolling it out.

AT&T, you're making it real, real hard to stay loyal. You really are.

Teachable moment

In all of the fussing I've been doing over our Internet connection and the microcell lately, I came to discover that the latency on our connection had suddenly become about 40 ms, where it used to be much, much lower than that.

This happened after I had swapped out the Netopia modem/router combo for a separate Speedstream 5100 modem and a Linksys E1000 router.

I just couldn't believe that a separate PPPoE router would add that sort of latency to the connection. In trying to figure it out, I put an Ethernet switch in between the modem and router so I could conveniently connect a laptop simultaneously up to that segment to talk to the modem to get its current line quality metrics and such.

Well, long story short, over the weekend, our link not only had the high latency but started dropping 3-5% of the packets. That's enough packet loss to make the connection seem like EDGE. It was horrible.

Well, we had AT&T come out to check the line, and the technician reported that when he plugged his own laptop in, he saw the latency (as I did), but the packet loss went away.

Turns out the home-made Ethernet cable I had made to go between the modem and router was bad.

That's the one piece of equipment in the mix that I never tested and assumed was good.

Oops.

The latency, it turns out, was caused by the DSLAM putting us in interleaved mode rather than fast-path. So the tech changed that up. Our first-hop latency when the connection is not being used is now an astonishing 7 milliseconds (from quack).

So big ups to AT&T - at least the part of AT&T that runs our DSL line. The Microcell folks... well, the jury is still out...

Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad - Together At Last

Why Apple didn't design this in as an option I'll never understand.

As I explained in my last post, using a Mac Mini as an HTPC hasn't been quite ideal until now. The Magic Trackpad plus the Wireless Keyboard make ideal bedfellows for the mini in the living room... If only they were joined at the hip.....



Achieving this isn't too difficult. The most desirable factor for this is that the two should be as rigidly attached as possible, yet the bond can't be permanent, since you wind up with the power button of the keyboard jammed right against the battery door of the trackpad (or vice versa if you're left-handed). So some sort of Velcro attachment is the best mechanism I could think of. The only trouble is that velcro can shift laterally to some extent. So I went with a 3M product called Dual-Lock. It's like velcro, except that it's genderless and since both sides of it are made of stiff plastic, it tends to be much better at holding still.

I found the stuff at Orchard Supply (Home Depot didn't carry it), in a two-pack of 3"x1" pieces (it's actually a 4-pack - there are four pieces, which makes two complete fasteners). I also bought an 8x10 sheet of .Lexan. I used a hacksaw to make a 6"x3" sheet and attached one strip to each end and two about a half inch apart straddling the middle. I then stuck the mating pieces on, peeled back the adhesive and stuck the keyboard and trackpad on.



So, There! I fixed it!

It's not absolute perfection. With the whole thing in your lap, you notice that there's really nowhere to rest your palms, like there would be on a real laptop. And you have to watch out that your left pinky doesn't accidentally contact the trackpad and skitter your mouse pointer off on a tangent. Also, because of the thickness of the whole thing and its proximity to the bottom of the trackpad, the rubber feet won't ever touch the desk if you set it down. This makes the mechanical buttons in the trackpad useless, unfortunately. But if you don't provide a stiff support for the bottom half of the connection, it won't be as stable as this solution allows.

Magic Trackpad - the missing feature

The Magic Trackpad is the product I've been waiting for Apple to release since the first Mac Mini came out lo those many moons ago.

I bought a mini almost immediately after they came out to use as an HTPC, and it's served that role very well indeed. The only drawback is that we've had to use a wireless mouse to use the thing. That's less than a couch-friendly solution. We have a table between our two chairs in the living room, but that means that if you're in the right seat, you have to mouse with your left hand. Not very convenient.

The Magic Trackpad solves all of that, since it doesn't need to sit on an actual surface in order to work (unless you want to actually make the internal button click - then you must push the pad downwards on its feet. But the trackpad can work just fine without ever having to be clicked physically).

But now the only problem is that the trackpad is a separate unit from the keyboard.

If you set the trackpad next to the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, it's obvious that they were designed to sit next to each other. It's only natural that you'd want to actually attach them together so that you could pass them back and forth on the couch as a single unit.

So why didn't Apple include some sort of mechanism to do exactly that?

There are some objections that need to be overcome. First, when the two are side by side, the battery door of one of them will sit right on the power button of the other one. So the two would need to be able to be routinely separated in case you needed to push the power button and to change the batteries.

So duct tape and rulers aren't going to be a 100% solution.

No, this is going to require some sort of rail and groove setup to allow the trackpad to slide into place, yet still be able to be slid off to change the batteries.

I look forward to multiple postings on There, I Fixed It covering this topic.

Microcell: Light at the end of the tunnel

It turns out that, thanks to the 3G Microcell support forum, we might have discovered an explanation for the problems we've been having with the microcell.

If, while the phone is connected up to the microcell, you have the cellular data switched on, that can cause the audio of the call to get garbled.

To test this out, I called my parents' house several times and had them recite poetry. Those calls where the cellular data was enabled suffered periods of choppy audio, and those calls where the cellular data was turned off did not.

Furthermore, while the cellular data was turned on, I turned off wifi and ran a speed test. That, however, did not induce the problem. So it's not all data use during a call that causes this problem, but only certain data. My speculation is that it has something to do with either location services or push notification.

The workaround for now is to disable cellular data while at home connected up to the microcell. This is not really a very good workaround, however, since the steps to go turn it on and off are 3 levels deep in the Settings app, and without cellular data turned on lots of capabilities of the phone are unavailable.

Hopefully, AT&T will figure out what's going on and fix it sooner rather than later.

Microcell: You're Fired!

We've had the 3G Microcell since they became available in April, and since then we've suffered three particular symptoms that have made using the phone aggravating:

1. There's an extra third to half second of latency.

2. About every fifth call or so the calling party will, at some point, vein to sound like they're speaking in tongues. This will clear up after a few seconds, or the call will drop, one of the two.

3. Sometimes when you place a call it will just immediately say "call failed" and you have to retry.

We've had a support ticket open all that time, and it just never got any better. But the very last straw was when it started shunting incoming calls straight to voicemail without ringing.

Enough is enough. I went to Fry's and bought another YX510. With that, at least the phones work properly in the house.

I really want the unlimited calling plan from home. That plan dovetails nicely with how Scarlet and I use the phones. But the device simply doesn't work. All the more surprising given that the spent almost two years in field trials.

And, apparently I'm not alone. A lot of forum posts I see make the same complaints.

Our microcell is currently exiled at a friend's house. He says it's working ok for him, for now. We'll see. But if it does wind up being a success, then it's likely because the macro network at his house is weaker than at our house. That too would dovetail with the reports I've read. So maybe the microcell works well at filling in coverage where no coverage exists, which is arguably it's purpose, but not merely as a means to offload AT&Ts macro network (and get unlimited calls in the bargain).