Entries from January 2007 ↓

While exploring alternate energy sources, I decided to try generating electricity by using the latent heat (or lack thereof) in Dry Ice, or solid CO2. The most direct (and solid state) way to generate electricity from a temperature differential is a peltier junction, which a 12V car cooler/heater unit happens to have. The pre-built cooler is also nice as it has a large aluminum bucket in the bottom to act as a heat sync for the dry ice, and a large heat-sink on the air side as well. (The mounting system for the peltier & heat-sink is very critical, so it was nice to find one pre-built.)

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Have you ever been asked for ID when buying candy? I did… (Note that this also means that my lab has Hershey's mini Reeses cups in white and milk chocolate.)

The Samsung Blackjack is a nice piece of hardware. The screen is beautiful, it is well proportioned and fits well in my hand, the scroll-wheel makes it easy to select from menus, and it's thin enough to be carried in a hip pocket despite the factthat it's wider than most phones. The camera is adequate for a cell phone, and the speaker is plenty loud. The phone actually has two speakers,one in the ear-piece, and one on the back that is used to play audio from everything that isn't a phone call (movies, mp3, speaker-phone). The only downside to this is that people behind your phone get better (and louder) sounds than you do, which may be good for sharing music, but isn't as appreciated when you're watching a movie in public. As with every other 3G device I've played with (namely the LG CU500) a standard Bluetooth headset works for call audio only, and will NOT play mono-only sound from the movie/mp3 player. See my rant on 3G phones and why I hate this.

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I have tried out two 3G phones that work on the Cingular Network, the LG CU500 (a flip phone) and the Samsung SGH-i607 (a.k.a. Blackjack) Windows Mobile smart-phone. Both devices support the A2DP Bluetooth profile, for connecting stereo Bluetooth headphones to listen to stereo audio in movies and music, but… Continue reading →

The key to teathering your linux laptop to your Cingular Blackjack phone is enabling the Bluetooth DUN profile on the blackjack. Although it shows up by default, it won't work unless you are running the Internet Sharing application.  (Which, Cingular has hidden from you, yay carriers!) Continue reading →

For some reason, Mandriva has moved the default bluetooth link key location from /var/lib/bluetooth to /var/lib/lib/bluetooth.  So, if you are looking for link keys (to delete to force a new pairing, etc) add an extra lib.

When running linux, you sometimes want to connect to a cell phone (using it as a modem) over bluetooth.

Different cell phones use different RFCOMM channels to export their Dial-up Networking service on.

Here are the commands to use to find which channel you should use: Continue reading →

Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks (USB) is the USB web-cam I use. I like the small size and the clip on mounting system works great with the IBM X31 Thinkpad.
Mandrake 10.1 includes PWC (Philips Web Cam, the chipset that is used) support out of the box, but it only supports QCIF images (176×144, quite small) images. To get support for full size images (up to 640×480) you will need to install the kernel source rpm, and visit this site to download the pwc-10 package. I had no problems installing it from the full source code (as opposed to just the kernel patches). Continue reading →

SyncML saves your data

I have been looking at the SyncML standard as a solution to keep the calendar on my palm pilot in sync with the calendar on a Nokia 9500 on the off chance that I don't want to carry two devices at once. SyncML was first developed for synchronizing cell phones, so the Nokia 9500 has a built in sync client. I explored two different clients for the Palm Pilot, the free Funambol open source client, and the Synthesis AG SyncML client (which costs $25 for the standard version).

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Don't buy the (first-gen) iPhone (new)!

The iPhone looks amazing. Coming from Apple you know it has to be slick, and the demos and reviews from people who have actually played with it back that up. I'm sure it will be a great phone and music/video player that will sync seamlessly with your Macintosh personal information programs. I want one myself, but here are the pragmatic reasons why you shouldn't go out and buy the first generation. Continue reading →