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This is obvious, but I ran into it head first last night. After listening to half an hour of the CBC Radio 3 podcast on an already-low battery, my poor phone beeped once and sat lifelessly in my hand. Luckily, I had already confirmed my plans to meet up with a friend after work, so there was no real danger in not crossing paths and not being able to contact each other. Forethought wins… this time.

Aside from that, there is one other problem that I’ve noticed. I don’t always catch an incoming text message when I’m listening to music. The beep blends in remarkably with electronic music. Calendar alarms are a little more aggressive, resulting the media player pausing for the alarm; I presume that an incoming phone call would do the same.

I don’t know when the problem first started, but for several months, I’ve been unable to resize a video on my home computer. I never really took the time to figure out why until tonight. The culprit is the sis driver for xorg. It was defaulting to the blitter method for Xv, leaving my videos fixed size. The solution was to add this line to xorg.conf:

Option “XvDefaultAdaptor” “Overlay”

And just like that, full screen is actually full screen and not a big black bounding box around a small video.

I gave a brief seminar today at work discussing board-level serial protocols, specifically I²C(Inter-Integrated Circuit) and SPI. It was largely a comparative look at high-level implementation of circuits using the two standards, followed by a brief look at interfacing SPI devices to the Analog Devices 21369 DSP SPI Controller.

The talk went well enough, but it’s the side conversations that might become dangerous. Speaking with a couple of my co-workers, I’m seeing a chance to turn a neat idea into a funded project. But if it doesn’t get funded, it might become a slightly expensive personal project. It’s possible that I may try to get a Blackfin sent home¹.

¹ This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up my search for a DSP development tool-chain that runs under linux.

I sat down to watch a movie with a friend the other night and a forgotten problem reared its ugly head again. I was attempting to play a Region 4 DVD in a laptop that was born in Region 1. Since the laptop is running WinXP¹, I was warned and prompted to change the region setting for the DVD drive. I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to futz with computer stuff while my friend was waiting for the movie to start.

New Zealand has held a stance on protecting consumers from region coding. However, many computer-component DVD drives have region coding built in. Since my DVD collection includes both Region 1 & 4 discs, switching back and forth is a very short-lived solution, and given that switching is recorded in hardware, undoing it is very difficult.

My options are largely based around software DVD decoders that don’t involve checking/setting the region. This is normally not a discussion, since the linux-based movie players do software decoding. Herein lies the final hurdle: for some reason that I have yet to discover, all of the movie players that I’ve tried have recently stopped being able to resize video to full-screen. I haven’t had the time to investigate this enough to come to a solution, which is why I was playing the DVD on the laptop in the first place, but it’s really starting to annoy me. I will need to solve this one properly if I’m going to be able to live without a TV/DVD player in the house.

¹ This is the second time since purchased in 2002. The reason is that Analog Devices does not have a tool-chain for DSP development that runs under linux.

After watching my typo-averages skyrocket over a couple months of having a broken LDC, I have finally gotten a new phone. Although I was given a recommendation¹ for a Vodafone 715, I ended up going with a Nokia E65. It’s a used phone, picked up from TradeMe.

I’ve only had about half a day of use out of it, and so far, it seems like a pretty damn good phone. I’ll have to watch my battery usage to see what sort of condition it is in, but there doesn’t seem to be any usability defects. I’ve been able to exploit a few of the nice features, like wireless access, but I have a lot of configuration yet to do (pick up email, prefer data to not come over over-priced GPRS, get some music on there).

There are downsides to buying a used phone. There is no warranty, there may be defects, and you may get more than you asked for. In this case, 44 images, 3 videos and a bunch of email in an authenticated IMAP email connection. I like to think that I’m one of the good guys, though. Everything was deleted as I found it. I have no need to exploit someone who didn’t clean up properly after himself. Besides, he included a 2GB memory card and adapter. I certainly won’t complain about that. I will have to get a set of headphones that work with the Nokia data port. I could use bluetooth, but why drain the battery faster than necessary?

I’ll probably write more about this phone after I get used to it and learn more about it. I’m pretty happy off the start; I hope that continues.

¹ The 715 is a very capable phone. I’d recommend it as it was recommended to me, especially for the price. However, I was taken by the wireless smart-phone capability of the E65.

Apple’s new toy is set for release in a few days. I won’t be getting one. Why? Because Vodafone’s data plans are crap.

I realise that Vodafone is subsidising the cost of the phone, but those data plans are horrible no matter what you think the phone is worth. Given that Vodafone offers data plans for non-iphone users, it might be better to buy a phone off-plan. The Broadband Everyday plan, comparably 1GB/month, is only $59.95/month. Over two years, that would cost $1438.80. Add an 8GB iphone for $979 or a 16GB model for $1129 and you’re sorted. No need to waste the extra $4500.

Actually, I think it’s more than about price for me. I think the phone is overly hyped. More gadget than I want or need. I’m more interested in what’s about to happen in the used-phone market.

It’s finally come to an end. Zombipod has ceased to be resuscitable. I currently don’t have a working mp3 player¹. The drive spins up and clicks angrily before trying again. I may be able to replace the drive, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort of finding a new microdrive. On the other hand, I still have a problem with my cracked LCD display. My phone needs help, my ipod needs help, neither of which will be fixed.

The answer will be to go shopping. I’ve been getting into the mindset that dumping out money for new gadgets is a bit silly. Sure, the new iphone is coming to New Zealand, but it’s more gadget than I need or want to pay for. It actually makes more sense for me to look through the resales on TradeMe and see if I can find something being tossed away.

The use case has already been defined – I’ll need something that can be a phone and be a music-player. Storage capacity will be important – 2GB of capacity is mandatory if I’m going to use it for both music and podcasts. I’d like to stay away from the Windows Mobile platform, though. It strikes me as asking for trouble, regardless of how stable or light-weight it may actually be. Nokia seems like a safe choice, but I’m unfamiliar with their recent product lines, although the N73 seems to measure up well. I have some research ahead of me and, hopefully, some smart shopping. In any case, I need to be able to get files to and from it from linux and it would be preferable if I could manage contacts and messages with gammu

I hope I’m not asking for too much all at once…

¹ That’s only mostly true. My phone has a media player built in, but with only a few megabytes of memory available for media storage, I only get a few short podcasts on there before it’s full.

A couple articles have crossed my radar about reusing energy that’s already been used in one form. The first talks about thermoelectric conversion, which can generate current based on a temperature differential. In the second story, a Canadian company has started to market its waste hydrogen as an energy source. It would be otherwise vented off, but it’s a valuable resource to those willing to use it.

The tales of woe continue – ZombIpod is failing in a new way. Instead of always needing to be taken apart and have the cable reseated on the disk, sometimes a reboot will suffice in bringing it back to life. There has been a couple instances over the last few days where a song would pause for a moment and continue; I assume that a read error occurred and the audio buffer underflowed. Finally, it stopped playing this morning while I was at the gym, requiring surgery to resuscitate. I don’t think this is a new mechanism, just a slightly different death vector. My guess is that there have been intermittent errors, and crashes, leading up to a normal failure this morning.

I hope this doesn’t mean that the hardware is getting worse. I don’t want to have to replace this thing just yet. It still does what I need it to do, so long as it doesn’t get dropped or bumped. I know better to store stuff on there that isn’t also somewhere else, so if it dies, I shouldn’t be too put out. However, I don’t want to buy a new gadget. I’ll have a look through the used market if I need to replace it.

On the other side of the sync cable, there is another problem. Debian BTS lists part of the problem, but it goes further than that. I’ve just discovered that letting kernel 2.6.25–2-686 touch the ipod causes an I/O error that hangs all my terminals. Nothing of significance hits /var/log/syslog either. Bummy. It looks like I am going to have to bring home my USB cable instead. Until the new firewire stack is more stable, I need to stay away from using it for my ipod.

¹ I may actually tie this together with a new phone, since my cracked LCD refuses to fix itself…