Recently I spent 40 minutes on the phone dealing with my Aunt’s laptop, which had mysteriously stopped getting on their household WiFi Network. My mother also had a problem with her laptop’s touchpad–it had stopped working, and she could only use the laptop with a USB mouse attached. What did both of these problems have in common?
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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 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
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!
An Apple iPod Touch review, with special attention paid to use with Linux and open formats:
Pros:
Cons:
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
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:
Lots 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)
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.
Google Reader (a web based RSS reader that I use to track and read various sites and blogs) has a recommendation system that will give you recommended blogs to subscribe to. It uses the RSS feeds that you are currently subscribed to, and then looks to see who else is also subscribed to those feeds. It then looks for feeds your "neighbors" are subscribed to that you are not subscribed to, and recommends them.
Two of my top three recommendations were in Korean. Juding from the pictures and a few babelfish translations, they are a news website and a fashion/entertainment website. Two possible conclusions to draw from this:
1. I'm more like an average korean reader than an average US reader. (Somewhat possible given the technically orientated blogs I subscribe too.)
2. A lot more Korean uses use Google Reader to read their RSS feeds than English users and are polluting the recommendation system.
My suggestion: Don't recommend a feed that is in a language that the user has never subscribed to before. But wading through a few useless recommendations didn't take much time, and near the bottom of my list was a suggestion for the Girl Genius comic, which I did find useful, so overall I found the recommendation system useful.