The "Timbuktu-Novac" project that went wrong

Let’s start with the remote access part first, because if you can’t control the PC, there’s no way you could run Skype on it, should anything go wrong. So we need a foolproof solution for reliably running a PC that’s also able to recover in case of failures.

Oh, and the hardware I had is of course my bootcamped iMac.

So… the first challenge is to figure out how to get Windows to autologon if there’s more than one user. You’d expect a friendly GUI control? No. You need to manually run a control panel widget that doesn’t seem to be available from anywhere else. Here’s the doc. Disregard all the registry stuff, “control userpasswords2” is the operative bit.

So… now we have made sure that when the computer reboots, should there be a power cut or anything else equally silly, Windows comes up all by itself. Fancy.

Next up: remote control. I knew about this Timbuktu thing that can tunnel all its traffic over the Skype app2app API. In theory, this is cool because it means you don’t have to use DynDNS or anything else like this to locate your home machine who is on a dynamic IP and whose address may thus change.

In practice, though, I’m not sure what I did wrong, but I just didn’t get it to work. It worked very unreliably with a Skype app2app connection. It was a bit better with the TCP/IP connection, but that kind of defeated the purpose. And at the end of the day, running home remote control over a Skype-based solution might not be the grandest idea. What if you need to upgrade Skype? Or exit it for a while to edit the config and then restart? Since the app2app thing didn’t work for me and I was left with the TCP/IP option, I couldn’t really see what advantages Timbuktu provides me over another thing that’s been working fine for me: VNC.

The VNC part of the project was actually OK, I installed the VNC server on the home machine and viewer on my laptop.

Instead of IP that can change, you can sign up for the free DynDNS service and install their client that automatically updates your IP on their registry if it changes. So the small DynDNS updater is always running on my home PC and no matter what’s its current IP, I can always connect to it with one DNS name. Nifty.

Plus of course some router/firewall configuration, as the name and public IP go to the external interface of my router, and you need to set up routing to forward this port to your home PC. As VNC uses just one static IP port, that’s easy enough. (Am I sounding geek enough yet?  )

So… now that the remote access is done, we got a PC running that we can hopefully access at all times with VNC. (One thing to note, though, is that in the free VNC version there’s no built-in encryption. So either you descend to more geekness and tunnel it all through some SSH proxy, or you just remember to never ever transmit any sensitive stuff with the link. Or you buy the version of RealVNC that has encryption.)

On to configuring the Novac TV thing. I have no idea if they’re available outside Japan yet. I got one shipped over to me by my friends there, thanks All the bundled manuals and info are in Japanese, but there’s an English instruction guide available. The package contains just the USB dongle, some connection cables and CD with software and drivers. You plug in the dongle to your USB port, connect your antenna cable to it, set Skype video capture device to it and should be done in theory.

In practice, again, I failed. First, I simply got no TV signal to come out of the thing. I know my TV cable and signal is fine, but the combination of my hardware and software couldn’t do anything meaningful with it, it just kept showing static. Through a myriad of Skype dialog settings, I finally managed to find the “webcam settings” dialog that shows you the available configuration options. Ahh, TV geekness… now is it PAL-G or PAL-B? These tables didn’t really help much. And I tried pretty much all the values, but to no avail.

The crashing is weird. Obviously Skype shouldn’t crash with this no matter what you do, perhaps I’ll get our audio-video guys take a look at what’s going on there.

Another quirk with this hardware is that the instruction PDF instructs you to set the sound input channel to “Stereo Mix”, i.e send everything that the card outputs back to the input/recording channel, so that Skype could transmit this to the other calling party. But the iMac’s sound device, indicated as “SigmaTel Audio”, simply doesn’t seem to have this channel available I’m using the “official” iMac Windows drivers from Bootcamp-burned CD. Windows Update didn’t offer any updates either. It DID offer an update for the TV capture device, which turns out to be a Trident card, but this messed things up even more as it confused the software switching the channels and doing the Skype integration part, which then claimed that the TV device is no longer available. So I reverted to the previous driver that was bundled.

The good outcome of this experiment was that I at least got remote access to my home PC, and the iSight works fine, so if nothing else, I can use it as home video monitoring :)