Fighting with computers

From time to time we witness significant changes on how things are done. In terms of how we listen to music in the last ten years I've seen several interesting changes. Ten years ago I bought my wife her first MP3 player: It was Diamond Multimedia with 32 MB (yes, Megabytes) that could hold a couple CDs of 128kbps MP3 music. Since then on I've bought many other MP3 devices for my household. However, that marked the end of traditional media (CD-audio) for our portable uses. While MP3 players have been around for quite a while, it seems that Apple's iPod is now the king. And while kingdoms do not last long in this market I guess Apple has done something right. Many people (like myself) are device-centric. For quite a while I favored Creative players and while I've never bought music from iTunes, I've bought some software there. Meanwhile I've stopped buying from Creative after problems with several players. And now that I have time I've played a bit with anot...

It's been hectic times around here, mostly due to different changes at my workplace. Now it's time to start thinking on having some vacation. A summer trip seems a good idea but this year I've selected Norway : beautiful but expensive. While there are tons of information on-line, I have found details are a bit sketchy. This is likely due to the fact I'm interested on cheap accommodation. Maybe the average wages in Norway are much higher than in my home country, Spain. I've got some trouble getting things done online. There seems to be some odd behavior and this booking website , when browsed with Firefox on Ubuntu 8.04. The worst thing is that it was this the browser I was using when booking my flight with Norwegian.com and I was offered a very competitive car-rental price at the end of the airplane booking process. Unfortunately when trying to go to book the car I was offered an almost empty page. I was wrong when I thought I could go back to the former page too. S...

No, I'm not going to complain about the output quality (at least not yet as I'm still waiting for my order). What I want to complain about is the fact that your iPhoto Book orders do not show up on your Apple Store account. And apparently this oddity has been happening for quite a while . That means that there is no way for you to know about your order status. Of course there is a confirmation email sent to your Apple ID email but, what if your .mac account has expired? (then you no longer have access to that email). To make things worse, once 1-click order has been activated iPhoto will not ask you for an additional confirmation when issuing a new order (I guess that's the 1-click beauty once your Apple ID email account works nicely). Calling customer service did not help much, as I was assured my credit card was not billed and somehow I had no pending orders. Calling my bank gave me another version: My credit card was billed (and apparently my order was taking longer tha...

Not yet very affordable, but better than I expected. This is my opinion after buying an ebook reader. Mine is branded Papyre 6.1 but it's named Hanlin v3 in other countries. It's manufactured in China (what a surprise!) and it runs Linux (it has an ARM processor). Definitely worth watching at. However I have not used it for more than a few minutes so I do not have an opinion about the long term usefulness of the device. But if it delivers what I've seen in the tests it is more than worth it. Now I'm sorry but I'm back to reading, please do not disturb. Update: The reading experience has been better than expected. And the availability of contents has also been better than expected. What I have not find, however, is a shop with the latest books. But that only meant some books cannot be bought but they might be available somewhere ... For example, I was reading a paper copy of this book in Spanish. And I had no trouble finding an electronic version. There is a cheap...

Years ago, in a distant galaxy, I was a member of ICSI . Now I've been surprised about one their offerings to the community: A network analyzer . It's Java-based so it won't work unless you have Java support in your browser and you're happy running digitally signed code. You may learn a couple of things about your network connection.

A succession of breathtaking sequences shot from the air is the newest release by this widely awarded photographer. It's really worth watching. You can get the movie for free! Movie is available in theaters all over the world (but apparently not in USA) and also in YouTube in HD . Although the beauty of the images might be better enjoyed on the big screen, you can have a look at it on-line. What amazes me is that it is the creators of the movie who decided to release it on YouTube at the same time than in theaters. The release details were given on a press conference . The movie has been sponsored by PPR , a French multinational in the fashion business.

I've found the network transfers to take forever on this device. Between 1 and 2 Mbytes/second is really slow by todays standards. It means around 4GB per hour. I'm happy with the torrent download functionality I mentioned on a previous entry but there is a catch: What if your download contains a sequence of RAR files? Yep, it happened to me with a 16GB download. Moving this back and forth to a PC would took more than 8 hours!! So the obvious idea is ... why not to have unrar command on the SPP? And this is what I did. I looked for the source code , and using a buildroot ext2 image file I compiled unrar command . Now I can telnet to my box and launch it without the need of moving files back and forth. It's not lightspeed but it's minutes instead of hours. The other improvement was to add SSH functionality by borrowing dropbear binary from OpenWRT project . Please have a look at dropbear documentation so you can install in properly on your system (a few files and links ...

My old analog camera is also giving me trouble. The symptom was that many pictures had just a small fraction of the total field. This can happen when shooting with flash if the sync speed is not correct (flash fires when shutter is half-open only). However this time I was shooting outdoors without a flash. After a few iterations with Google led my to a photo on Wikipedia with exactly the same type of residue I've found on my camera. A few more searches led me this article that explains the causes of the problem and a possible fix. Aging and heat turn a piece of foam inside the camera guts into an oily tar that ruins the shutter operation. Did you think you can keep on using your old camera, maybe not if it as a twenty years old Canon EOS.

One of the bad things about DSLR (aka Digital Reflex) cameras is the tendency to get dust in the image sensor (as these cameras use removable lenses). Whether it is just dust or pollen it may eventually be shown in your photos (like the spot I show on the right: it is just blue sky). For not so big spots, they may go easily undetected. If you want to check for dust in the sensor the simplest way seems to take a photo of the blue sky with the smallest aperture possible on your lens (F22 in my case). Detecting the problem only serves to make you nervous, but fear not, it can be fixed. There are different ideas and people who would talk for or against any of them. I do not feel comfortable risking my camera sensor without reading quite a lot before doing one thing or another. Apparently there are several ideas that can help: Air blower. Dry dust removers. Wet dust removers. Send the camera to the manufacturer for a professional cleaning of the sensor. The first three is something you can ...

Programming when your target system is not based on x86 architecture and you use a PC for development can be done using a cross-compiler. There is a GNU cross-compiler for many different platforms. What if you'd like to test the code without using the target system. There are good news too, as you can use qemu emulator to get a system with a non-x86 architecture emulated on your x86 system. But you might want to get a development system running on your same target hardware. This is interesting if you have a way of accessing the target computer filesystem. It can also be interesting if you want to be able to fine tune the set of versions and libraries to be used by your development system. Here is when buildroot comes in handy. Buildroot allows you to create a development environment for your embedded system around uClibc (which is a scaled-down version of glibc used for many Linux-based embedded systems). With this tool you select the architecture, kernel, compilers and librar...

Some people are keen on the idea of using cellphones as a remote control. After all they are usually around, have a small size, a nice display and even some of them have an illuminated keyboard. Among the choices for interfacing with another equipment, Bluetooth seems to best choice: more standard than infrared and lower power requirements than wifi (besides not many phones have IR or wifi). Around this concept of using your Bluetooth cellphone as a remote was created AnyRemote project. I've tried lately for a home project and I'm very happy with this suite. Yes, it is actually a more complex system than I expected: You cellphone needs a special program to act as a remote, this program in written in Java and you need to download it to your phone. Then server software is installed in your computer and a set of configuration scripts tell your computer what to do when each key is pressed. On the other hand, user menu is provided on cellphone display (there is even a midnight com...

Hardly more than 90 days old, our MacBook 2.4 was already featured here as it has already caused me some trouble. Not a good thing I have to talk about it again: Yesterday it stated to make fan noise when idle, and the display backlight was changing for no apparent reason. After several unsuccessful attempts, I've found this article about resetting SMC as somewhere else I was suggested it might help. Unfortunately though the SMC reset did help with the fan noise it left my system with no ambient light sensor. Whether it was related or not I do not know, but now I cannot use F5/F6 to change the keyboard backlit which remains off. I get a forbidden sign as if the ambient light was very high so as not to require any keyboard backlit. Unfortunately this seems not to be the case in my dark room and it still refuses to allow me to switch the backlit on. The next exercise on the list was to perform a PRAM reset, that did not fix anything either. And, according to Apple support, the next ...

I was not sure what gift I would get for Father's day. A colleague of mine was very happy with his last gadget, a multimedia hard disk that could reproduce High Definition content from its 1TB disk and it could also record from a video input. I already own one (older) version of that (Freecom Media Player) so I was not impressed with the idea, but my friend insisted I should try his unit at home. I brought the system and I hooked it to TV. I tried some HD content I had around and I liked what I saw, so I was sold. I would be replacing my TV computer whose SAT receiver card is no longer in use as I switched to a cable provider years ago. Still that computer was serving me well, still with its original SUSE 8.2. The Iomega unit does have HDMI, components and composite video outputs, plus an optical audio output. It has a host-mode USB socket that accepts external storage (i.e. another hard disk). It can also be connected to a computer by USB (a B-socket in this case) to be used as ex...

A few years ago I was excited when Zinio started (what was to me) a new business: Electronic magazines you can download and see them in your computer display. Zinio model required a DRM-ed software on your computer and Internet access to double-check the binary file you've stored in your computer was one you're entitled to see. Platform-dependent and not so flexible made me walk away from Zinio. However, for a number of years I've been a paying subscriber of Circuit Cellar magazine whose model was, IMHO, simpler and better: a PDF file. Today I've learned that this magazine (that sometimes has featured articles by me) is adding (not moving) a new flavor for their electronic version. One version powered by Mymaganizes.net , that in essence is a Flash-based viewer similar to the one at Issuu . I guess that besides free content the company also manages users subscriptions. By checking on-line I can see that now Zinio has also enabled a browser-based reader that does not r...

A recent project I'm working on needs to behave as a Modbus slave. Not that Modbus is a complex protocol, but it is always handy if you can save yourself the effort of doing your own implementation. After some trouble I've got FreeModbus library up and running. While looking around I've also found some cool tools like modpoll that can allow you query a Modbus slave. And while I had some trouble with the Linux binary (libstdc++5 was missing), the Windows binary runs happily under wine too. Another great set of tools are these ones . You can even connect your Excel spreadsheet to values obtained from a remote slave! It was fun to realize there is even a Modbus for Arduino implementation.

Over the years and hard disk changes and backups and new computers and OS installs I've got a pretty untidy photo collection, scattered across several disks. I wanted to make a clean and tidy library on my main desktop using F-Spot. Unfortunately this program does not have yet a duplicate detection feature (it seems to be available in the latest version though). So I've ended up with many photos repeated on my new library after importing from different backup copies. I thought I could do a simple script to find those files with matching md5sum, no matter the filename, so I could remove the photos that appear more than once. But I was glad to see that somebody did it first . Of course the same idea could be applied to MP3 files or any other type of file. The only drawback, if you want to be picky, is that md5sum covers the whole data of a file, so a change in let's day EXIF data in a JPEG file will render the file as different even though it may contain a duplicate image. Sa...

It's not new. It's not original but it seems to me the easiest way to put together some audio with a synchronized slideshow. I mentioned Slideshare three years ago , but now I've learned they offer a cool on-line service (no software to install on your computer) to create synchronized-audio slides. Vertical printing machine View more presentations from hj43us .

I've never been a fan of Bézier curves , but sometimes they are useful. Maybe my main complaint is acknowledging the fact that I've been incapable of getting a curve just right on the first attempt in any vector editing software. Maybe it is just me. So when I saw that Inkscape was adding support for a new type of curve I have never heard of before I started to pay attention. Of course this is old news for some of you, but I've been busy with other things and I have not checked the development version of Inkscape for quite a while (maybe a sign that I'm quite happy with 0.46 version). The thing is that Mr. Levien was smart enough to develop an alternative to Bezier curves and kind enough to grant a free license of his patented technology to GPL software. Thanks to this Inkscape can brag of supporting a new type of curve not available on commercial software like Illustrator. A library is available on Sourceforge too. But it won't be fair to the effort of Inkscape ...

Barcodes have been growing to pack higher data density. 2D barcodes can pack more data than older 1D codes. Many cellphones can decode barcodes as the are equipped with a camera good enough for the task. There is a cool project that offers code for doing that with a variety of phones, including iPhone and Android. Unfortunately it does not seem to work with my Nokia E71 phone (it has to be some kind of curse, as the built-in barcode software that came with the phone does not work either). However I still can use the phone to take a picture of the codes I'm interested on to have them decoded on-line. You can try this form to decode a file with a picture of a barcode. An alternative to using the cellphone for decoding the barcodes on-line (that can be expensive depending on your data plan) is to download those images to your PC and to use a simple script to get them decoded. I used curl tool for doing that as it has HTTP POST capabilities. It worked great.

Last summer I renewed my two main desktop computers. I was looking for something compact but easily upgradeable. Not very expensive and reliable. I've got good experiences in the past with ASUS barebones, so I went for this one . All but a small detail have worked like a charm since day one. I was amazed to see see that even suspend worked nicely with Ubuntu 8.04. But then I realized the system sound was gone when waking up from suspend. And it seemed the only way to get it back was to reboot the system. Several forums reported the possibility of adding some parameters to the sound driver module so it will reload appropriately when resuming. Unfortunately the two first hours of attempts were unsuccessful and I decided I could live without it. However, days later I've found another post where what it is suggested worked for me too: add these lines to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-dig options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1 options snd-hda-intel single_...