Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Gadgets

  • Things We need for mp3 players and podcasts.

    I finally got around to reinstalling the Creative mp3 management program for my Creative Zen Touch player. It actually works better than I remembered it.

    I’ve avoided touching itunes (except when helping my brother load mp3s). But here are two features I really need:

    1. Setting quotas and pruning options for content on the device
    2. Keeping a log of all the podcast files I’ve transferred at any given time to my device. (I frequently listen to something once and then delete the file, then forget what I’ve listened to).
    3. (On my mp3 player) there needs to be a way to exclude certain audio files from Random/Shuffle play. (I’ll be listening to a series of pop songs, then my mp3 player will play some techie podcast about Python or SAP solutions; it really spoils the mood).

    In my limited look at itunes, itunes seems structured around the idea of scarcity; i.e, you couldn’t possibly afford to buy enough mp3s to fill an entire audio player! How do mp3 management/syncing programs deal with the fact that PC probably has 100x the amount of mp3s that my portable players have room for?

    Solution to #2: Create a directory on your harddrive called “Best of Podcasts”. Do not put it inside your mp3 search path. When this directory comes to about 4 gigs, burn a DVD for archiving. There, that’s simple.

    Another solution (sort of): the device display should indicate whether the mp3 has previously been played.

    Yet another solution: Podcast producers should label their podcasts better. “Episode 001”, etc. I suspect that podcasters nowadays are much savvier about metadata than they used to be.

    (Btw, I’m not particularly fond of the Creative Zen Touch mp3 player, something popular in 2004 or so. It ain’t bad. But I look forward to the time I will need to explore the latest generation of media players.

  • How to Know You are a True Geek….

    an extremely long thread on the Dell axim site. My fave: “. . . you don’t get settled into your hotel room until you’ve checked the WiFi signal . . .”

    An Axim user compares the Axim PDA with the iPhone and finds that the 2 year old Axim still wins.

    Some diabolical PDA people have created an iphone parody skin:

    iphonewm5as1

    And yes, Apple sent a cease-and-desist letter, saying the wrath of God will rain upon you for daring to do such a thing.

    All I have to say is: Apple, lighten up. It’s only a skin. If you didn’t want people to parody your skins, don’t put screenshots on the Net. It’s that simple.

    (here’s a description of how the person created a custom skin with CLaunch for the Today screen).

    Yes, it is true. I will be buying another Dell Axim. Story at 11.

  • Network Media Servers

    I am really close to buying a Network Area Storage solution. The frontrunner: Buffalo Technology Linkstation gigabit 250 gigabyte solution for $200. Actually, I may upgrade to the 300 gig solution ($280) after learning that installing the linkstation open firmware lets you install a server and media player software like swisscenter or twonkymedia (which apparently work well with my Avel Linkplayer DVD player via its ethernet connection).

    I have a lot of things on my plate now. I really don’t need the chaos of having to maintain a buggy opensource hardware solution. All I really need is a backup solution. On the other hand, I’ve always been a gadget/hardware kind of guy, and it would be a feather in my cap (and nice to mention on the resume) if I can claim to put this together.

    Update: Gosh, money doesn’t grow on trees. $300 for a backup NAS seems excessive for someone currently on sabbatical and trying to pinch every penny. 300 gigabytes; couldn’t I make do with 250 or 160? Maybe. But I have 4 devices (XP Desktop, XP laptop, Fedora Core 5 Laptop, Nokia 770 pda) I need to back up, many of which are media files, some of which are high definition files (and need to be viewed) on my HDTV. Those things, plus the advantages of having a nice media player interface on my HDTV/DVD player, makes spending $300 seem like not a big deal. Plus, having the ability to run media server software for my HDTV would really add to my ability to use my HDTV.
    Now all I need to do is buy a HDTV capture card, and I’ll be set (just joking).

    Update #2: By combining the order with two other things and ordering from newegg instead of amazon, I ended up spending $281 for the network storage server.  Not bad.

  • Nokia 770 becomes better, much better….

    I’ve been surfing through the maemo catalog for Nokia 770 PDA. I’ve noticed that growing pains have been solved, and a newly released Beta version of the OS promises to greatly improve the PDA’s functionality. On the bulletin board users are estatic about the improvements, although it is still only beta software, so users like me shouldn’t be messing with it. It’s hard to say when the final upgrade will appear, although it probably will happen within the month. Here’s a brief summary of the Nokia 770 improvements (and open issues).
    Notable things:

    1. PIM improvements. The linux PDA GPE had lots of good features, but it had several omissions. First, no good appointment alarm (apparently because Nokia didn’t make that functionality possible). Also, the calendar offered only rudimentary ability to set up recurring appointments (which annoyed me so much that I even filed a bug about it). This absence was a real deal breaker, but the developer got on it, and now it’s fixed for the 2006 version of the OS when it is released. Also even though there’s still no easy way to sync with Outlook, at least solutions are coming closer.
    2. microphone. Strangely, 770 came with a built in microphone that didn’t work. The new version not only has an audio driver, it also supports Google Talk, a web voice chat program (and here’s tapioca, a nifty new platform integrating VOIP with chat).
    3. Maemo mapper, a program that lets you map locations, seems to be popular and stable.
    4. apparently the PDF reader works much better. Also, fbreader–the ebook program of record–has been updated several times. Actually I filed a bug about that too which was fixed by the developer within days. Now that’s awesome!
    5. now it seems to come with a default password management program.
    6. performance improvements. Apparently the browser loads faster and the file manager has usability improvements.
    7. apparently, it now has an apt-get updating capability, making it painless to upgrade applications (it really wasn’t bad before though).

    My problem with Nokia has been stability of files I edit. I seem to have corrupted an awful lot of these files (although this may be related to my particular memory card or the applications I am using). The device still is rough on the edges, but so far, I’ve found gpe-to do quite useful. The browser, while not perfect (I wish you could change from landscape view to portrait view and you really can’t keep open multiple windows) works well enough. Fbreader works almost flawlessly. I found that I used the Nokia 770 as a lightweight laptop, something I could keep in my pocket (along with my bluetooth keyboard) and use when I didn’t feel like lugging that heavy thinkpad around.
    Still, when the new OS upgrade comes out, it probably will make nokia 770 more versatile of a gadget. Interestingly, the documentation on the wiki page makes it more attractive; often the nokia 770 had functionality, but it just wasn’t easily documented anywhere.
    Honestly, I had meant to play around with the 770 over the last few months, but lack of time prevented me. Now with the new OS coming soon, I probably will spend more time

  • Proprietary Soap


    4 Soap Dispensers
    Originally uploaded by tantek (thanks Matt).

    Tantek on why proprietary solutions will fail:

    Note the fact that there are not one, not two, but FOUR soap dispensing “mechanisms” here.

    Why? This makes no sense at all from the user’s point of view. Note: they are all empty except the bottle dispenser on the counter, so this isn’t a matter of offering a choice of soap to the hand washer.

    The soap dispenser market is highly proprietary, with no standards for dispenser/refill interfaces, and thus if you install a particular vendor’s soap dispenser, you have to then buy soap from them. Except when they go out of business (or otherwise fail to provide you with soap, perhaps they stop supporting a particular model of dispenser), then you are out of luck and need to buy another dispenser, probably from a different vendor. This “soap dispenser obsolescence” happened not once, but THREE times apparently for the Borders on 3rd st. between King and Townsend.

    Finally the staff reused a Torani syrup dispenser bottle and filled it with liquid soap (which I guess has about the same consistency/viscosity as syrup and so the dispenser “works” with either substance, which seems a bit disturbing).

    What’s the lesson here? Products that require proprietary refills will inevitably become useless, probably much sooner than you think.

    The market will eventually give up on such proprietary solutions and switch to something which perhaps doesn’t even require special refill packages, and can easily be refilled itself.

  • Taking a Risk with Ebay

    I did something today I thought I never would do: I bought a laptop from ebay!

    It’s scary, and the biggest stumbling block turned out to be the ebay seller’s failure to fully identify itself on ebay. Turns out the company does have a web presence , but I had no way of knowing that until after the purchase was finished. I made four different phone calls to make sure sure they were IBM business partners. (I spoke to IBM’s customer support from India, Georgia, New York, etc, and they were no help determining this).

    In my haste and disorientation I failed to notice that the same seller was selling something nearly identical on the next day; instead of a 60 gig drive, it had 80; instead of a CD writer/DVD reader, it had a DVD writer. Both items essentially cost the same. (Update: the ebay vendor agreed to swap laptops. Sweet!)
    Now I cannot be accused of lacking diligence or doing my research. The most maddening part about buying a laptop was 1)making sure I could afford it, 2)trying to find the best value, 3)trying to buy something that would run well in linux. The big sticklers turned out to be that the big companies were still fairly slow about shipping laptops, especially for laptops in great demand. I was going to a conference in the last weekend in February, so I really wanted to have something in hand by then.
    Gosh, most default configurations of laptops just don’t have enough RAM on them. Getting 2 gigs was a requirement for me, and yet, a good 50-75% of laptops still only carried 512MB (or if you were lucky, 1 gig). The other problem was that the big manufacturers were still selling hard drives with 5400 rpm; a considerable number of HP laptops (even the pricey ones) still were configured for 4200 rpm’s–which to my mind is unthinkable in this day and age.

    The other problem was Dell coupons. Lordy, they change every day, always expiring. Monday I qualified for $400 off, Tuesday I qualified for $500, Wednesday I qualified for $600 with a coupon code, Thursday I qualified for $300 off, and today I qualified only for a stinking $250 rebate. Yes, it’s kind of fun keeping up with them, but after a while it can be fatiguing. Finally, there is the problem of peace of mind. Dell offers extended warranties and even accident protection. In fact, though, getting a latop replaced can be a bugger. When the screen goes, it seems you have to throw the whole thing away. I would like to see laptop parts become more interchangeable (or at least easier to replace), but then again, laptops miniaturize a lot of components; even with my PC hardware repair certification, I don’t feel confident opening the back and fixing anything.

    Shall I whine about linux support? One good thing is that because I would be running linux, technical support wouldn’t be as much a deciding factor. On the other hand, I needed some way of knowing that other people had tackled the various HW configuration issues I would also face. With Dell, you had a choice of using Intel’s Core Duo integrated graphics (ugh) or upgrading with a $300 nvidia graphics card (double ugh!). The Core Duo laptops didn’t yet have a supported linux wireless driver (although Intel would be bringing one out very soon, they promise). But HP’s 64bit AMD laptop didn’t have wireless anything; you just had to use pcmia.
    A more basic problem is that vendors know their product the best, and yet they cannot objectively recommend the right option for a particular person. Do laptop hard drives need to be 7200 rpm? Or could they just be 5400? What really is the price difference between the three cpu’s you are able to choose?

    When you are on the Dell website and read the excellent sales information, you end up believing that you need everything. It’s not Dell’s fault; it’s just how information is presented online. Contrast that with buying a laptop at a store. You have 10 laptops in the store, and then you whittle them down until you find one you really like. Although I’ve spent almost a month researching laptops, I still can’t tell you what TFT is or whether there really is any difference between Sonoma and Dothan, or whether upgrading to 667MHz RAM would really make that much difference.

    Shopping online, you tend to view laptops as a sickly cousin of desktops, underpowered and inadequate. I quickly discovered that it almost never makes sense to shop for a lowend laptop. Buying a high end laptop adds longevity and flexibility to your laptop’s lifespan while imposing a heavy price.

    Here we see the cost of technological anxiety and corporate groupthink. Innovation continues at a rapid pace; mass production is driving down the cost of everything, and yet, we still don’t have a laptop that suits our needs for under $1500. When will it ever end? And why do “our needs” continue to expand where it always costs more than $1500 to satisfy them?

    Final thoughts: although I’m happy with my purchase (assuming all goes well), I can’t help feeling ambivalent. Should I have spent more? What if I have to do this…? Wouldn’t it be nice to have something bright and shiny with all the latest specs? On the other hand, the thought of all the money I avoided spending makes me feels like I barely avoided a harrowing accident.

  • One Awesome Battery Recharger

    While ordering my Marantz PDM 660 with basic mod, Mr. Oade referred me to an “awesome battery recharger.” I read some more about it, and gosh, it is absolutely awesome. Among other things you can change the settings to discharge completely, switch between fast recharge mode (which apparently is harsh on battery life) and gentle recharge mode. Also, you have a display to let you know the relative charge level of each individual battery and the status of recharging. (How many sets of batteries have I thrown away just because one of the batteries might be run down or defective?).

    (It’s called the LaCrosse Technology BC-900 AlphaPower Battery Charger and it’s available on amazon.com for less than $50).

  • SXSW Torrents are Back!

    I won’t be posting much for the next week or two, but I wanted to correct a point in a previous point about being robbed:

    SXSW already has links available to music torrents for SXSW 2005 and SXSW 2006. That’s awesome!

    On another note, I bought a replacement mp3 player, the Creative Zen Touch 40 gig hd player. The pricepoint is great ($240), it supports Windows Media (though not .ogg) (here’s a listing of ogg players ). Also, it isn’t a recorder, but I’ve already made up my mind to buy a Marantz 660 flash recorder with Oades’ mod). Besides in a pinch I could probably record with my Nokia 770 (which surely could play ogg files also).

  • Dell + linux + laptop

    Some resources: Dell linux community forum

    Dell Laptop yahoo group

    Jarod Wilson MythTV How to page (for FC4) and TV Tuners for linux laptops

  • Finding Rootkits on Windows/ Yum in Linux

    Rootkit revealers for Windows. From a slashdot forum on how to know if your machine is a zombie. The thought of this terrifies me.

    Here’s a list of valuable linux tools. Last night I made the switch to fedora (though I haven’t configured wireless or networking). I have to admit; I’m spoiled by gentoo’s emerge coolprogram commands. Which means I’m actually going to have to find and download various utilities (webmin, rsync, etc), to get them on my machine.

    I’ve been in rpm hell before, but hopefully the fedora yum/up2date solution will prove easier to manage. Aside from having a little more confidence in fedora than gentoo, I’m actually curious about how much RH/Fedora’s update solution has progressed. This time I’m a little wiser and more on guard. In RH I ended up installing/upgrading RPMs, installing binaries and then compiling things by source. The trick is making default paths the same for all your installs, which I was sloppy on before. Hopefully the linux standard base (LSB) will make this whole thing a lot less painless. Update: Here’s a how-to specifically on updating multimedia packages using Fedora. For example, you won’t have the mp3 codec unless you first obtain the specific package.

    I haven’t worked on a linux desktop in 2 years, although to be fair, almost all my tools are open source/platform neutral bits of software. So I might as well be running in linux. I can’t speak of hardware support or file explorers in linux, but I’ve been growing sick of them in Windows. To be fair though, USB support on Windows has been excellent, while linux has various hardware annoyances.

    Unfortunately, although linux-based synchronization solutions exist for a Pocket PC, in fact no good contact/calendaring application on linux is comparable to or compatible with Pocket Outlook. It’s one of those days when I really wished that Nokia 770 had arrived a year early.

  • Egress for PDAs

    Egress, a RSS Feed Reader for Pocket PC PDAs. Cost $12. Cool.

  • Ebooks vs. Simple HTML for PDAs

    The most interesting/useful content on my Axim PDA is not ebooks but my recipe collection. And basically I just save the files AS IS from my web browser. That is a bitch; lots of websites generate their pages dynamically so it is cumbersome (if not impossible) to download them offline.

    I like ebooks, but there are a lot of times it’s just easier to save some html pages onto my PDA. That got me thinking: how do PDA’s handle images? And how do you make stylesheets for PDA’s?

    Elika Etemad has an article about the basics.. Here’s a thread with some other links. Here’s a css wiki post about it.

    This raises a deeper question. If content on a PDA is downloaded/collected/converted by the user (and not the publisher or ebook site), won’t the future standard be just simple HTML?

  • Destroying an Ipod

    What does it take to destroy a nano ipod? Quite a lot, apparently. (thanks, Geek Radio).

    The 2GB iPod nano displayed amazing resilience to abuse during a stress test by Ars Technica: after throwing the device from a speeding vehicle at up to 50 Mph and running it over twice failed to stop the music from playing (despite its malfunctioning screen), according to the report. Ars finally manages to stop the music by throwing the Nano straight up into the air, roughly 40 feet, and letting it smash onto the concrete. The autopsy reveals “amazing engineering” and the usage of Toshiba flash memory chips rather than Samsung memory. Apple has also apparently moved away from Synaptics for click wheel manufacturing: the click wheel inside the 2GB Nano dissected appears to be designed from scratch, according to the report.

  • The Real Apollo 13

    After watching Apollo 13 for the gazillionth time, I finally went on the Internet and read up some more. Here’s a great longish 3 page article that sheds new light on the complexity of the rescue mission. Here are a few points I found interesting:

    • Unlike the film, the real crew didn’t figure out that the oxygen tank had exploded for quite some time. They just had wildly erratic readings, and couldn’t figure out a cause.
    • One problem with the mission was that they were launched to take a non-free-return trajectory. In other words, they wouldn’t whip back to the Earth in a relatively accurate fashion (as previous missions had done). That’s partially why they needed to do the burn.
    • Actually, although Mission Control seemed to be doing a lot of improvising, in fact, the module was built in precisely such a way to allow improvising. They knew that a certain percentage of switches would fail, so they factored in a lot of alternative paths.
    • One special problem was getting the engines/computer to start on descent. Without power they had nothing to “start the motor with.” They had to improvise on that.
    • The flight planners had actually run through several of the ideas in previous simulations, so they were not exactly flying blind. Even the idea for the astronauts to manually fly the controls by using a fixed point of reference on the moon came from a previous mission.
    • Speaking of technical documentation, in fact they kept a long catalog of all the procedures necessary to accomplish their complicated technical maneuvers.
    • Here’s an account from some of the people at Mission Control.
    • I live in Houston and my family was actually good friends with someone in Mission Control during Apollo 13 (who died a year or so ago). I never knew about Apollo 13 until the movie came out, so I hadn’t a chance to ask him to tell, but at his funeral many of his colleagues talked about that mission and others.
    • One wonders how easy it would be to go to the moon these days. Parts are cheaper, technology has evolved to a point where we have many technical solutions. And yet because the urgency has declined, astronauts would probably need to fly at a tenth or even a hundredth of the original cost. For Apollo 13, there was a lot of brainpower in Houston able and willing to solve these technical mishaps. These days, I’m not so sure that brainpower exists in the number that it existed in the 1960s.

    Great read! And yes, a great exciting movie!

    A slight excerpt:

    The principal problem NASA had with these neophytes was “one of self-confidence,” explains Kranz. “We really worked to develop the confidence of the controllers so they could stand up and make these real-time decisions. Some people, no matter how hard we worked, never developed the confidence necessary for the job.” Those not suited for mission control were generally washed out within a year.

    Now Kranz feared his controllers, battered by the events of the last hour, would lose their nerve. What happened next was a spectacular moment of leadership. “It was a question of convincing the people that we were smart enough, sharp enough, fast enough, that as a team we could take an impossible situation and recover from it,” says Kranz. He went to the front of the room and started speaking. His message was simple. “I said this crew is coming home. You have to believe it. Your people have to believe it. And we must make it happen,” recalls Kranz.

    In the Ron Howard movie, this speech was “simplified into ‘Failure is not an option,’ ” chuckles Kranz, who never actually uttered the now famous phrase during the Apollo 13 mission. Still, Kranz liked it so much, because it so perfectly reflected the attitude of mission control, that he used it as the title of his 2000 autobiography.

  • Media Centers with HDTV?

    Using a modded Xbox as a media center. You may not be able to play HD signals unless you upgrade the chip.

    Speaking of media centers, Haupage has some cool media/networking solutions, although it’s unclear about HD support.

    A slashdot discussion on the topic.

  • More DRM Perils

    I was thinking of buying a new mp3 player/recorder, the Iriver H340. It’s a high end product costing $350-400.

    H340 can play .wma files, which is a real plus. (My local library lets you download .wma audio books). That is partially a reason I need to buy this. On the other hand, a firmware upgrade from the iriver Korea site allows you to use the LCD to view videos. Now that is cool but, if you use the Korean firmware, you disable your ability to play any DRM-protected content. Apparently iriver hasn’t figured out to have video playback work with DRM. Or maybe it could, but it doesn’t want to spend the time and development resources. So what do I choose: video playback capability or DRM? This is one more example of the hidden costs imposed by DRM. I’m of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I oppose what it does philosophically. On the other hand, if it makes content creators more willing to distribute digital content (especially in this case for free!), then I guess it’s still a bargain.