Category Archives: Commentary

Opinions

What to do when the Kodak Perfect Touch, isn’t.

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I use Kodak Easy Share Gallery (formerly Ofoto.com, before Kodak realized they needed an online photo printing service to complete their digital transformation) to produce prints of any photos I want to display. [It’s cheaper and easier than buying and feeding a high-quality photo printer, and although it takes a few days to receive the prints, I generally don’t need instant physical copies, especially as you can tell it to send parts of an order to another address.]

One thing you have to keep in mind about the prints from the Easy Share Gallery is that they are all automatically re-touched by a computer running the “Kodak Perfect Touch” algorithm. This process tries to remove red-eye, saturates color, and does a brightness level correction. All in all, it generally improves most consumer snapshots. However, if you are printing an already perfect photo (either taken by luck, or already re-touched by an expert) the KPT system will noticeably over saturate colors.
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Silicon Dust replacing HD Homerun power adaptors

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Back in January the power adapter failed for my Silicon Dust HD HomeRun (a network HTDV tuning device).

They replaced my power supply and claimed that they were seeing only a 1% failure rate. As late as March 28th they were sticking to the "less than a percent" figure. Eventually on June 3rd they posted an offer to replace all SW20-S050-15 power adapters.  Unfortunately for me, they did not send an email to all customers, so I did not find out about this until my power adapter failed (today) and I went to submit a trouble ticket and saw the notice.  I guess that "1%" were causing them a lot of problems…

I've been very happy with the HD HomeRun unit itself, but once again, the el-cheapo power adapter is my weakest link and is keeping me from watching TV until the replacement arrives (and since it happend on a Friday, I'm probably without TV until next Wednesday at least).

So, if you have a HD HomeRun with one of the older adapters, head on over to the replacement page and order a replacement before yours dies.  (So far the forums haven't listed any fires started by the failing power adapters, just dimples of melted plastic on the side due to the failure, so hopefully they are not dangerous.)

Compressive Sampling: Beating the Nyquist Limit for certain signals

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Compressive Sampling is a new field of sensing theory that sidesteps the traditional Nyquist sampling limit. The Nyquist limit is an information theory result that says to perfectly capture a signal which is bandwidth limited at a certain frequency, X, you must take 2 times X samples per second.  So for example, if you want to perfectly detect a 20Hz sine wave, you must take 40 samples a second. To perfectly represent audio that humans can hear (typically understood to be sounds in the 20-20,000Hz range) we must use 40,000 samples per second (40kHz). CD audio uses 44.1kHz, and professional audio systems typically sample at 48kHz a second.  [Note that the number of samples per second has nothing to do with the quantization, or accuracy of the samples, so audio that is sampled at 20 bits per sample has more information (and less noise) than audio sampled at 16 bits per sample.] Continue reading →

Fixing a missing bluetooth icon, battery charge indicator, and update notifier in Ubuntu

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Notification Icons

For the last week my battery indicator and bluetooth icons had been missing from my top panel in Ubuntu. When I did Bluetooth stuff the pop-up "speaker balloons" from the bluetooth applet would still appear at the corner of my screen, but the Bluetooth applet itself was "invisible". I finally figured out that what I was missing was a "Notification Area" for these applets to "live". Right-Clicking on the Panel, Selecting "Add to Panel" and then adding the "Notifcation Area" (from the Utilities category) fixed my problems. Indeed, I then found out that the Software Update notification icon had been trying to tell me about software updates, but I hadn't seen it, so I had to install several software updates!

Ipod Touch (8GB) Review

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An Apple iPod Touch review, with special attention paid to use with Linux and open formats:

Pros:

  • Very nice high resolution screen. (480×320 at 163dpi)
  • User interface is very slick and easy to use after a minimal learning period.
  • Built in WiFi (802.11b/g) with very good mobile browser (Safari).
  • Methods to hack (jailbreak) it and install 3rd party software are widely available, and many 3rd party applications are already developed for it.
  • Base model has a generous 8GB of storage, 16GB and 32GB models are available.
  • Design: Aesthetically, it's solid. Hardware, software, feel and aesthetics, everything is great!
  • Battery life is good (5 hours of video, 22 hours of music, use of WiFi reduces this significantly).

Cons:

  •  It's expensive. Almost $300 for the base model. (I won mine in a raffle, otherwise I wouldn't be reviewing it!)
  • Funky machine readable file-system format for storing music: Why is F03/KLJE.m4a my Spin Doctors – Cleopatra's Cat? What's wrong with a human readable filename, Artist/album/song storage paths, etc…) 
  • Doesn't support music encoded with Ogg Vorbis.
  • Doesn't mount as a standard USB file-system.  (You need iTunes, or a iTunes clone to move music/photos to it, and can't use it as a USB drive.)
  • Uses a non-standard (not a mini-USB) connector. (Yet another cable to carry around.)
  • Integrated battery prevents easy customer replacements.
  • Lacks many features of the full iPhone (Bluetooth, camera, cellular data/radio, speaker, microphone).
  • Chrome on the back scuffs MUCH to easily. I've carried mine in dedicated hip pockets and after only a week I still have visible scuffs and scrapes on the "chrome" back.  Hopefully the glass on the front will resist scratches better than the "chrome" on the back. I still have the plastic protective cover that it shipped with over the glass screen, and am considering buying a static stick screen protector after my experiences with scuffs on the back.

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Best applications for a Jailbroken iPod Touch / iPhone

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If your iPhone or iPod Touch is jailbroken, you can use the Installer.app to load and install many different applications. Below is the list of the applications that I found to be useful, fun or interesting: 

If your iPhone is not jailbroken, you will not be able to add any of the above games until they are added to the apple store. You can always play web-based games found on AppSafari: http://www.appsafari.com

Hacking the iPod Touch – Jailbreak to 1.1.3 w/ extra apps

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General info:

How to put an ipod touch into restore mode: Plug it into your computer, and turn on iTunes, then: hold the power and home buttons down until it resets. Release the power button, but keep the home button held until it enters recovery mode.

How to restore to a specific version of the firmware that you have downloaded to your computer: Use iTunes but instead of just clicking the "Restore" button, you hold the shift key down and then clicking the "Restore" button. This gives you a file selecton dialog that you can select a specific firmware file on your local hard drive. NOTE: You can also "upgrade" to a specific firmware version in the same way, but shift-clicking on the "Upgrade" button. At some points the difference between a Restore and an Upgrade is very important! (e.g. after jailbreaking a 1.1.1 and running OktoPrep, you should UPGRADE to 1.1.2, not restore!)

VERY IMPORTANT: Turn off "Auto-Lock" in the General->Auto Lock control panel!!! You will have to do this every time you upgrade/restore to a new firmware. Nothing messes up a firmware upgrade like the ipod locking halfway through it and turning off!

Here are a few guides that I found to be the most useful for jailbreaking/hacking the ipod Touch:

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Human powered generator

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Diagram of the generatorLots of people have built human powered generators. I like this one for two reasons:

1. It's designed to harvest waste energy. (It helps your body stop your knee from swinging at the end of the forward swing, something your body uses energy to do anyways.)

2. The evaluation included serious medical studies to determine the amount of metabolic energy it "takes" from the human.  (to get a watt of power, it increases the human's load by less than a watt. By comparison, a hand crank generator takes 6.4 watts from the human for each watt harvested)

Failing power supply

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Catastrophic failure of a power supply

For my MythTV media computer I use a network based HD-TV tuner from SiliconDust . I've been very pleased with how it works, the form factor and feature set. However, over christmas it suddenly went dead due to no fault of it's own. The 5V 2A power supply had failed. (It is plugged into a UPS with surge suppressor, so I'm relatively sure it was caused by a component failure and not bad input power.) If you look at the photo of the failed power supply (left) next to the replacement component that SiliconDust sent me (right), you can clearly see where something inside melted (and/or forced) the plastic case to bubble out, leading me to believe it was a relatively catastrophic failure.

This reminds me of the trouble I had with the original iRobot Roomba. I had my initial robot replaced under warranty two times  (3 total robots) due to power supply and battery charging issues. Each replacement had a completely new (and different) power supply system, and it was clear that iRobot was iterating through  designs until they found one that was robust.  I only hope that this power supply failure was due to one bad unit, and isn't indicative of the average lifespan of the power supplies supplied with the HDHomerun.