Category: Gadgetology

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Gadgetology

NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo!

you can cut my arm off, but leave my goddamn wi-fi card alone!ARGH. Daddy is not happy. Daddy is, in fact, pissed. Something bad has happened to daddy’s little portable computer thingie. Actually, I don’t think Evan did this, because I’m pretty careful about not letting him get his grubby little paws on my Mobilepro, so I’m really perplexed as to how this happened to the wi-fi card that accounts for, oh, 99% of the little machine’s usefulness to me:

fire will rain down from the sky...oh, and yeah, almost forgot, Earl's wi-fi card will almost be bent in half.

As you can see, the antenna end of the wi-fi card has been physically bent upward, to the point that the casing is actually buckled. I don’t think Evan could’ve done that unless he got hold of the machine and hit a home run with it – and to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t happened. … Read more

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Gadgetology Home Base

Give us this day our daily power outage

At around 5:30 this morning I awoke to an ominous thunderous sound. It wasn’t actually thunder, but Xena thunderously knocking on the front door wanting to be let in before the actual thunder got here. I let her in and then shut down the Avid, which I had left on all night to render some stuff, and then we got yet another monsoon, and more flooding (hey, maybe we’ll get more Gamera!) and what’s becoming an almost daily tradition: the storm-induced power outage. I’m sure with storms rolling through just about every other day that there isn’t a chance to do a really comprehensive repair job on substations and whatnot, but it’s getting kind of silly.

Please Squeeze. I’d have something insanely cool to show you video-wise right now, except that all of a sudden, I can’t get Sorenson Squeeze to run on a single machine in my house. I’ll admit that I haven’t tried my wife’s laptop yet (though it has other issues that make me hesitant to even try, such as rolling over, powering down and playing dead with no warning), but it’s incredibly frustrating – this also means no new site video for stuff like Phosphor Dot Fossils (this has also held up a promo video that I’ve put together for the PDF DVD, which I’m sure is probably helping sales to drop off significantly, which they have). So maybe “incredibly frustrating” is being a bit on the charitable side. I’ve submitted a trouble ticket, though I have the feeling the fix will be “Upgrade to our new version for $XX!” I really don’t seem to be having much luck on the computer end these days, which is a surprise, because normally it’s purely mechanical problems that give me massive headaches. Which makes this next bit all the more surprising…

Holy #$%&, I fixed the air conditioner! Okay, maybe fix is too strong a work, because it wasn’t really broken, just frozen over, and this “fix” involved pointing a hair dryer on full heat at the ice until it melted away, and then taking a bucket full of warm soapy water and cleaning the intake vent, and then changing the filter that I should’ve changed probably a month or two back, which, if I’d done it then, this probably would never have happened. So on the balance of it, purely mechanical things still caused a massive headache. But I actually fixed it – if you want to call it that – without calling anyone out to do it, which I couldn’t afford anyway, which surprises me as much as it does anyone else. Still, I doubt the high-priced HVAC techs of the world have anything to fear from me. There are still plenty of people who are willing to pay them big bucks to aim a hair dryer on full heat at their iced-over intake.

More fun with Globat. Welcome back to Globat.com, fine web hosting and the home of Internal Server Errors galore! Today’s issue: “Server shutdown in progress.” Repeatedly. Sometimes you can actually get what you want from theLogBook’s databases…and just as often you can’t. The really fun part of this is on Scribblings, where each server shutdown forces me to go in and reconfigure my anti-spam plugin from scratch. If Globat sucked any more, they’d be off the Suck Scale on my suckometer. I can’t get the site moved away from these bozos fast enough.

Here’s hoping I can get some good Sorenson Squeeze lovin’ soon, because I’m eager to show off this…thing…that I want to show off. He said vaguely.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Gadgetology

Thanks for the memories

The memory card snafu has been solved! Pantech pointed me in the direction of an incredibly useful piece of software called Easy Photo Recovery which recovered – get this – all but two of the photos that had vanished from the offending memory stick. (The two casualties were from this week’s ToyBox piece, and since that’s already posted the originals aren’t needed anymore.) This program is just amazing, and I had no idea anything like it existed – and I’ll probably be calling on its services in the future, since this isn’t the first oddball disappearance of memory stick photos I’ve ever experienced, and because I take a lot of pictures. (I don’t know anyone with kids who doesn’t, actually.) … Read more

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Feedback Gadgetology

Stop shirkin’ and start workin’: the fall of Queeg.

Not too long ago – not even a month ago, in fact – I was raving about the new LaCie “Big Disk” Ethernet network drive I’d gotten, which added a desperately-needed terabyte of storage to my network. After copying most of my media (including my whole directory of Evan photos) to the new drive and making sure it was performing as promised, I started to gradually delete the stuff off the local hard drives on Zen and Orac.

At about the ten day mark, it started getting weird. In short, Queeg started living up to its namesake, trying to elbow out other machines for the *.*.1.1 slot on my router – very weird behavior. LaCie tech support thought that was odd, but couldn’t really offer any solutions, and any attempt to force Queeg to settle down at a specific address rather than a dynamically-assigned one brought about even weirder weirdness.

Then I couldn’t get files from it anymore. BIG problem – kinda defeats the whole point of having a freakin’ outboard mass storage device, no? LaCie tech support sent me two patches, neither of which fixed the problem, and in fact made the thing start acting weirder – I couldn’t modify any settings because the system firmware insisted that the drive was completely out of space and couldn’t handle any more. Then last night, it lost its “shares” – its directories full of stuff that I had moved there from the other two machines. I thought it had lost the data. LaCie’s answer to this was to send a return authorization number to ship the drive back to them, but they said that there was no way they’d get their fingers into the pie on recovering the 600 gigs of data I’d offloaded to the drive.

I know that every hard drive in the world, in every computer in the world, will someday fail. It’s moving parts and motors, which wear out. I accept that. That’s why you’re probably never going to go out of business making hard drives (at least until they’re phased out in favor of stable mass-storage-grade flash drives). But you know, three weeks? That’s a new land speed record. I’ve pretty much made the decision that I’m not going to take LaCie up on their offer – I’m going to return the drive to Amazon and get my money back instead, and get a 1TB internal drive for Zen..by a different manufacturer. Zen’s overdue for getting the dust blown out of it anyway – it needs to be opened up as it is, might as well stick a drive in there while I’m at it.

So, the grade for LaCie’s 1TB “Big Disk” Ethernet Drive is an epic fail – it might be a great product when it works, but when it doesn’t you’re going to be saddled with some of the most inept tech support you’ve ever seen. I’m used to outsourced-to-India call center flunkies not being able to cope when your tech support call diverges from their script. I’m not sure what the excuse is for these jokers.

Also, in the future, I think I need to stop naming my network nodes after cranky-ass sci-fi supercomputers. Apparently the deck’s stacked against me on the hardware manufacturer end anyway, so I need to do myself a favor and stop tempting fate.… Read more

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Gadgetology Gaming

Oatmeal? Where we’re going, we don’t NEED oatmeal.

And now, the newsThe first batch of PDF DVD orders is out the door! Thanks to everyone who’s spending their stimulus checks with me. I hope you find the results stimulating. Wait, there’s got to be a better way to word that…

I’m waiting for the arrival of another new pair of Avid drive cables to test out a new (to me) pair of Avid drives that I just got. I’m a bit nervous about the drives in question because the fellow who sold them to me put both of them, with ABSOLUTELY NO PACKING MATERIAL, in a standard Priority Mail box and shipped them off. No “fragile” written on the box, no nothing. WTF!? It’s bad enough that, due to having a slightly older generation of Avid hardware than what’s in use now, I have to buy other people’s used drives. It’s even worse, however, when those other people turn out to be total freaking idiots.

Speaking of massive hard drives, the project to transfer my media files to the 1TB drive is more or less complete. I’m terribly terribly pleased with this drive thingie. It also passed the “breakout test” on Friday morning as a nasty storm blasted through – I got it shut down fairly quickly, and the plugs pulled. We didn’t have to take shelter or anything, but I also didn’t want it to get zapped by lightning. I could’ve very easily picked it up and walked off with it at that point.

I finally finished my official write-up on the Oklahoma City show; you can read that here. Rob also has his review posted here, with a bit on the afterparty here, which as usual I couldn’t stick around for long because I had to be back home the same night. If I’m ever well-rested for one of these shows, or I’m actually Hey kids, it's Mr. Fusion!able to stick around for a while afterward, fear for your lives, for it is a sign of the apocalypse. Speaking of which, one thing I couldn’t find a place to mention in my review without it being a total non-sequitur was that, just as we were about to get on the interstate from Alma (which is kinda sorta more or less where we both live…near…), Kent and I saw a Delorean toodling down highway 71. No Mr. Fusion, just a Delorean. What makes it even funnier is that we both stared to see who was driving this thing through Alma of all places, and almost in unison we looked at each other and said “Wilford Brimley.” 😯

Nothing else immediately spring into my sleep-deprived mind at the moment, so I suppose this concludes this core memory dump. Please check back later, I may have something coherent to say. (Though I’ll admit that the likelihood of that is very low.)… Read more

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Feedback Gadgetology

Critical mass (storage)

Stop shirkin' and start workin'!I’ve been calling for backup for months, and at long last, backup has arrived.

I’ve spent most of today transferring files to a new 1 terabyte network drive that’s now sitting on my network. It’s a nice LaCie “big box ethernet drive” (hey, that’s what it says on the box!), which, I’m going to say judging by the size of the casing, is probably two 500GB hard drives in a RAID configuration. It’s got a lovely big blue eye that flashes when it’s being accessed. It hasn’t gotten extraordinarily warm, despite the fact that it’s sitting in a warm corner of a warm room (said corner also contains 3 other PCs and 5 LCD monitors, along with speakers and other gear). Very importantly (at least to me), you can configure whether or not you want it to be media-streaming capable. Remember the whole blow-up a few weeks ago with the crippled cell phones? Mass storage devices like these are starting to fall victim to the same problems: my friend Kent has a similar device, except made by Western Digital, which he got at a fire-sale price right before Christmas. But the pricing wasn’t just seasonal: WD wanted to clear the decks of inventory and get a revised version of the MyBook 1TB ethernet drive in the stores, which came with complimentary crippleware demanded by the RIAA which prevents the drive from streaming music or video files. Hey, thanks, RIAA, for assuming that the consumer’s a crook! Maybe we’ve ripped our own CDs to our own hard drives for use in our own home, ya know? Inconceiveable, sure. But it might happen. You never know. This LaCie drive has no such crippleware; those wishing to use it in a small business setting have the option to switch media streaming off. The security is scalable, you can assign passwords and user accounts from an insanely intuitive admin console accessed via browser, and for someone like me who might want to use it as a “breakout drive” (i.e. turn it off, pull all the connections, and evacuate with it in the event of fire, tornado, etc.), it’s not overwhelmingly big or bulky. I hope I never have to do that, but it’s yet another option to have in mind. I’m terribly pleased with it.

Anyone wanting to snatch one of these puppies up is more than welcome to pick it up in theLogBook.com Store; I managed to find the links for it in nearly every country except Canada, whose Amazon subsidiary doesn’t do the electronics thing. (What gives, Canada?) I heartily recommend it. It’s not cheap, but for someone like me who’s got a heap of media crowding out the other computers’ drives, and occasionally keeping work from getting done (this thing even takes up some slack for the Avid), it’s a beautiful thing. Should I ever completely fill the thing, additional storage can be added via a USB port on the back of the drive, and the casing is designed so that the additional drive – well, assuming you get the LaCie 1TB USB add-on drive – can simply slide into place on top of this one.

Home of the WOPR
A shot of the newly revised desktop on the Avid, which I network to the other machines to shoot graphics, audio and video files back and forth so often that I leave permanent shortcuts on the desktop. (For those occasions where I have to pull something from a less-frequently used directory, I keep the ol’ Win2K Network Neighborhood icon around under “Home of the WOPR” – WOPR being what I call my LAN.) As you can see, I very quickly named the new network drive Queeg – so stop shirkin’ and start workin’!

Oh, in case you can’t tell from the funky wide angles in these photos and yesterday’s accidentally humorous shot of Evan vs. Bowser, I’ve also replaced the fisheye lens I misplaced in Las Vegas. That helped to turn what would’ve been an otherwise innocuous shot of Evan chattering away into everyone’s favorite photo of the day. 😆 Speaking of which, you’d better believe that the gobs of baby photos have migrated to the new drive too.… Read more

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Gadgetology Serious Stuff

Fun facts about Alltel and consumer deception.

I'm kinda mad right nowSo my wife got a new Samsung Hue phone from Alltel – nice little gadget, bluetooth, camera, the whole works, and pretty cheap too. I was even thinking about seeing if father’s day might come a little bit early this year after seeing it in action. 😆 The one hiccup she’d really had with it was when she tried to pair her bluetooth headset to it – she couldn’t ever get the two devices talking to each other, and had to go back to the store to do it, where one of their sales/service people took the phone and the headset behind closed doors and got them to work. That really should’ve been a red flag right there.

She wanted me to put the slideshow of Evan pics on there that we’ve both had on our Nokia phones for ages; this was basically an animated GIF that cycles through numerous pictures of the little guy from the day he was born up to the latest round of professional pictures we’ve had taken of him. With the Nokia phones, I was able to just bluetooth the GIF across and be done with it; this also accounted for the bizarre collection of ringtones that both of our phones sported, everything from the Lexx theme to Katamari music to the haunting Torgo theme to Starcon 2 tunes to a gob of ELO MIDI ringtones (don’t ask me how that happened).

Anyway, I couldn’t just send the files across to her new phone via bluetooth. After going through the documentation (custom printed for Alltel) and finding them extremely, almost suspiciously lacking in information about the use of the bluetooth feature, I did a little bit of digging around online and that quickly got my blood boiling. Here’s the deal: Alltel cripples OBEX file transfer on the Samsung Hue phones. You can’t use it. Only they can, on their premises. They’d rather charge you extra for a USB cable and their proprietary software, when in fact neither of the above should be necessary. They don’t want you to bluetooth your own MIDI files to your own phone in your own home. They don’t make money that way. They make money by you buying ringtones, etc. through their store, or through their affiliates who give Alltel a kickback to thank them for letting them sell to Alltel’s customers. They don’t want me beaming a few MIDI files across from my computer.

Via a member of the family, we actually have the ear of one of Alltel’s VPs, so we tried to play the old nepotism card, a phone call which yielded another very interesting fact: Alltel only sells one phone with all the features unlocked, and that’s the Motorola Razr. So hey, if you’ve got one of these unweildly, non-user-friendly bricks, there’s finally a perk in it for you. Yay for you!

In a few minutes we’ll be going to pay them a visit at the store where the phone was bought, point out that we were looking at getting a second one just like it, and then insisting that we can’t buy another one – or for that matter remain as customers of Alltel with any phone – unless this feature is unlocked so the phone works as advertised. I’m not glued to my cell phone 24 hours a day, I don’t txt my bff all the time (zomg!), I’m not really a “power user”. We just like having our kid’s smiling face on our cell phones, and a few oddball ringtones. Is that so wrong? Apparently Alltel thinks so.

I have a gut feeling we’re going to walk out of the Alltel store looking for a new cell phone provider.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gadgetology

Media, mutts, mercy!

The living room media PC project continues; installing Nero has solved a lot of problems; stuff that was playing with no audio is now playing with full audio. Yay! There are still some kinks to work out in getting theWindows audio/speaker settings, Nero’s audio output settings, and the living room’s occasionally baffling Dolby Pro Logic receiver to cooperate with each other, but that’s a job best left to the A/V engineer in the family…oh, wait. I guess that’d be me. I did conquer the mystery of why MP3s weren’t streaming from Zen (turns out the m3u playlist files use relative file locators instead of absolute ones – i.e., if the playlist is for an album contained in my “ELO” directory, the playlist entries are actualy “../elo/*.mp3” rather than the full network address leading to the right machine, the right drive, and the right branch of my directory bonsai tree. Obviously that’s not gonna get you jack from another computer – it has to be called up song-by-song. This is just a wee bit of a pain in the butt…but, as usual, I have – as they say – a cunning plan.

In the meantime, while my friends in Oklahoma and Missouri have been digging themselves out of a fresh glacier that’s been dumped on their heads since this time a week ago, we’ve just been getting rained on. A lot. This has resulted in, somewhat predictably, a very soggy dog. I let her in tonight and wrapped a towel around her so she could dry off somewhere other than all over the living room carpet. Lo and behold, she actually kept it on while she ate her specially prepared dinner consisting of dog food and, from last night’s dinner (ours, not hers), green beans and ostrich steak juice. Yum.

Xena chows down

Xena later wolfed down another bonus helping of “human food”, some leftover scrambled eggs. Actually, saying she wolfed it down is underselling it a bit. I thought she was just going to eat the damn plate the way she was going after it. We have a kitty who loves biscuits, a dog who likes eggs, and I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a cat here who doesn’t like a bit of bacon. Smart money says the dog would make quick work of any available sausage too. Breakfast is therefore served here at one’s own risk. (We also have a cat here who likes dog food. I’ll let you guess who.)

And what’s Evan doing during all of his dog-drying and media meddling? He’s workin’ that binky, of course.

Bink bink bink bink bink

Evan has started making this great gurgling/burbling/rolling-R sound (and he’s not even Scottish!). If I can just teach him to say “Mercy!” before doing his rolling-R thing, then look out, Roy Orbison.… Read more