Hardware
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I've been having an interesting problem: two almost-adjacent two-hour classes that require me to run back to my dorm after the first class is over, so that I can recharge my laptop. Annoying? You bet.
I researched an extra battery but found out that one would run me $180, and I wouldn't be able to use my docking station with it. So I came up with this:
"This" being a 180-watt-hour battery pack constructed from two UPS batteries and a car adapter. Now I can run around for eleven hours without having to plug in - although my...
Today I brought my watch to have the battery replaced - I figured that was a simple enough process. After trying Wal-Mart and Target, both of which told me they didn't service digital watches (strange, seeing as Wal-Mart is usually where I bring the watch to replace the battery), I brought it to a small local jeweler and ended up having to pay them eleven dollars just to replace it.
But it doesn't end there. When the jeweler's gave me the watch back, I found out that none of the buttons on the side were functional. Furthermore, part of the seal...
I managed to scrounge up yet another dead LCD monitor today. This one sat on a desk for about three years and had a relatively uneventful life, yet managed to fail anyway - with the exact same problem as the ViewSonic one I got a few weeks ago, no less. A real testament to how they don't make them like they used to!
(For clarifications, though I thought I had fixed the ViewSonic monitor, that actually turned out to be a side-effect of heating it up with the hairdryer. Once it cooled back down, it went right back to shutting off.)
A: What can't vinyl tape fix?
The button board had been acting flaky for awhile, and often to set the clock I'd just open it up and short the accumulator pin to adjust the time. It turned out that the material between the buttons and the board itself had dried out over the years, thus squishing instead of depressing as expected. I tore it out and used some tape in its place.
(to Antony: this is the same one I modified earlier. Why buy a new clock if I can just fix up what I have?)
While on my way home from the post office today, I found a relatively new-looking ViewSonic LCD sitting out on the road, so I picked it up and carried it home with me. I plugged it in and, surprisingly enough: "No Signal" flashes on the screen for half a second, then the entire thing shuts off. With a computer attached: "No Signal", and again shuts off half a second later.
I find it interesting that, of the six or seven CRTs I've found in this manner, only one hasn't worked. By contrast, the three LCDs I've found, this one included, have...
I dropped my laptop off at the FedEx store today for shipping back to the HP repair plant. Some of you may remember some of the problems I had last time around, where my laptop took a month to come back after getting lost in Costa Rica, so I'll be interested to see how long it takes this time around. Antony seems to think that last time was a one-off incident, but I have a feeling this will take awhile.
In the meantime, I'm stuck using my Pentium 3 box at home, and I'll be taking my Pentium laptop around as...
Due to financial constraints and the upcoming transition to college where I'll have less desk space to work with, I've decided that I'll be selling off two of my three video game consoles. I've been debating for awhile which ones to let go of. My options are:
The PS2. This one isn't doing a whole lot, and I've already finished all of the games I have for it. I don't use the DVD or CD player on it either. However, new games are still coming out on the PS2, meaning that I can continue to play some...
It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when...
By now, some of you have probably seen the photos of how dirty my Model M keyboard got before I cleaned it. That keyboard hadn’t been cleaned at least since I acquired it in 1996, and I can’t be sure that its previous owner had cleaned it since its date of manufacture in 1989. Of course, the keyboard really never left my desk, so it wasn’t that bad of a dirt magnet.
Enter my laptop. Going on three years old this July, it’s been everywhere from hospitals to restaurants to train stations – it quite literally provokes a, “Do you know...
Well, it’s official – my laptop has a problem cooling itself again. I might end up buying canned air and cleaning out the fan and heatsink before assuming the worst, though.
It seems like the computing industry has never really come to consensus on how to make a good keyboard. I’m an avid Model M user myself, and I’ve managed to convert some of my friends over to ‘80s-style clicky keyboards made by IBM and Unicomp. In my own opinion, IBM came the closest to making a truly good keyboard – and for all I know they did. The buckling spring technology used by vintage IBM keyboards gives really nice tactile feedback, but does so with the added expensive of auditory feedback. Given, some people like the sound, though for...
I recently got back from a week’s vacation in Europe (to Antony: the trip cost less than your iMac, MacBook Pro, or PowerMac G4), but I’m not in the mood to talk about that just yet. Later this week, when I’ve mostly recovered from jet lag, I’ll give a better description. I can say now that I took 1157 photos and a bit over 110 minutes of video.
My replacement screen came in the mail while I was away, so naturally within two hours of getting home I tried it out. It turns out the seller actually gave me an XGA...
I’ve been mentioning for awhile now that the number of lines down my laptop’s screen has been on the rise. My original intention was to wait until the new school year to replace the screen, though with the appearance of a tenth line earlier this week, that became somewhat prohibitive to my ability to actually operate the laptop without an external monitor attached.
Perhaps by some interesting coincidence, I happened to be talking to Andrew about horizontal lines through the screen of a digital camera, and decided to give eBay another search for a replacement laptop screen. Though my searches for...
A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I got together and came up with a variant of poker that we called, "Geek Poker." Geek Poker is like regular poker, except it's played with PCMCIA, CardBus, and ExpressCard cards instead of a standard paper deck. The deck is created by pooling all the geeks' cards, and several categories are chosen appropriately. If there's a category with only one card, then it's permissible to make that category a wildcard (for instance, our wildcard was a TV tuner). Here's an example hand:
The cards are:
Megahertz 14.4k V.32bis fax...
Rather than simply throw out my non-landfill-friendly trash, I keep my so-called "e-waste" in a box underneath my bed. Needless to say, it's starting to fill up, and opening the box can sometimes make my eyes begin to water. This box is home to dead hard drives, useless write-once CDs, damaged floppies, blown electrolytic capacitors, burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, and some dead (and even leaking and sulfated!) batteries. So therefore, this box contains varying amounts of lithium, sulfuric acid, zinc, manganese, mercury, cadmium, and various other heavy metals. Does anyone actually dispose of these by any particularly "safe"...
From the garage of my friend's uncle comes some more old tech. First up is a Dell OptiPlex GX1. It's one of those older, late-'90s Dells with a desktop form factor. The specs appear to be a 500MHz Pentium 3 CPU with 128MB of PC-100 SDRAM and a 6.4GB hard drive. I can't figure out anything else about it just yet: while it was preloaded with Fedora Core 3, I don't know any of the username/password combinations to actually log into it, and I can't seem to get the CD drive to read burned CDs. It's a good candidate for...
Around this time last year, I switched from my old analog phone service to digital GSM through T-Mobile. Service was prepaid, so I loaded $100 onto it and forgot about it for the rest of the year. Just a few days ago I got a message stating that the funds I had loaded on were about to expire. To my surprise I still had $16 left. That works out to just seven dollars a month. By comparison, the cheapest plans I've been able to find start at $19.99 a month, and even then I do know people that can rack...
I woke up this morning with "WEAR SHOES" scribbled on my hand. At the foot of my bed is a pair of shoes, no pun intended. After the disorientation of the first five seconds of wakefulness dissipates, I remember that I stepped on a light bulb yesterday, and that there are probably still small glass fragments on the floor.
I also notice that it's dark - darker than usual, at least for 8:45 in the morning. But of course, we can blame that on me too, for leaving this in front of the window:
Using the canned air I got for...
By popular demand, I updated my list of PCs to better reflect my current holdings.
What do you get when you cross a snowstorm, Web server, webcam, and an ironing board?
At the time of this writing, the storm hasn't started yet. The photos this thing is taking are available over here, updating every five minutes, or at least while it doesn't get too dark for the camera to see anything but it's not updating anymore since it's dark out.
I recently found myself in the market for a smartphone. Today's selection of smartphones is pretty miserable, if I may say: gPhones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and a bunch of Windows Mobile handsets. Instead of producing good-quality smartphones, it seems like the cellphone industry is focused on on creating more useless features and less usable gadgets. So, presenting a decent smartphone:
The Handspring Visorphone was arguably the first commercially successful "smartphone" (before that, Nokia had a few communicators, and Kyocera had created what was essentially a Palm III with a phone kludged onto the bottom). Seeing as we already had a Visor Deluxe...
Earlier on I blogged about the two discolored lines down my laptop's screen. Unfortunately I now have five of them, and it looks like a sixth one might be developing. I'm stumped as to where they're coming from; if I bend the screen just right, they'll disappear, so maybe it's a broken trace or a loose cable. Either way, some of you have known me long enough to remember the ultimate fate of my old HP laptop's screen, which was much worse:
A few people have asked why I don't send it back for repair. Yes, the three-year warranty came standard,...
The hard drive in my backup NAS died before the hard drive in my laptop...
So should I try fixing it, replacing it, or switching to DVD-RAM?
I finished up my radio recorder today. Its primary purpose in life is to record four hours of WFNX radio content to a CompactFlash card, and so far it seems to work pretty well.
It's built off spare parts and various things I got off eBay. The concept is such that the radio (duct taped to the side) is fed to the line-in on the computer, where it's exported in WAV format (36KHz/16-bit) to a 2GB CompactFlash card that can later be played on my laptop. The entire thing is then connected to a light timer, which turns it on...
In retrospect, buying a couple of CD-RWs and DVD-RWs instead of spindles of record-once media would have been a good idea. I'm in the process of getting rid of some twenty CDs worth of outdated Linux distros (Red Hat 6.2 or Mandrake 8.1, anyone?), expired time-demos (to which we can argue that Microsoft is not being environmentally conscious with Longhorn and Longhorn Server builds that expire), and free trials that I no longer have licenses to.
For the time being I'm going to keep them aside. I have a pile of burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, dead rechargeable batteries, and the...
Slashdot has an interesting poll up: how much storage space will you need in 2018? Now that many people have well surpassed the 100GB mark, here are some extrapolations I've made.
In 1998, I was using a Compaq 486 with a 120 megabyte hard drive, which if I recall was brimming full when I quit using it. I had a box of fifty or so floppies that contained homework, so 50 * 1.44mb = 72mb. I can't remember if I had purchased my EIDEMax controller card and CD drive yet, but assuming that I had, I owned three data CDs. (For...
How would you like to stare at these colored lines all day?
I don't know exactly where they're originating. I used a pair of binoculars to zoom in on the affected pixels to figure out exactly what's going on screen-side. It turns out that the yellow bar is generated by the red and green subpixels for that column being stuck in the on position. The blue bar, as you may have guessed, is caused by the blue subpixels being stuck. Blue in the first bar and red and green in the second work as expected, so if I display pure white,...
Antony got a second Bluetooth laser mouse today and is calling himself poor, so I'd like to show him an actual poor geek's collection of mice:
From left to right: 2x Mitsumi PS/2 scroll mouse, Microsoft Serial-MousePort Mouse 2.0, Gateway (Microsoft) Trekker 2.0A Wheel Mouse, Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A, Logitech Serial-MouseMan, and Logitech MouseMan. I can't find the controller card for the InPort bus mouse, so I can't tell if it works or not.
I would like to point out that none of these mice are cordless, optical, or even USB-compliant. The newest one of the lot (the Trekker) is from 1998,...
I figure that at the very least, I'm getting one more year of use out of my laptop and went ahead with buying a new battery. I opted for the six-cell instead of the 12-cell or the 6/12 combo, which I was able to find on eBay for $38 (which is considerably marked down from the HP price of $149 and the Newegg price of $78). I'm glad I did; the six-cell battery offers just over three hours of battery life, and as of yet I haven't managed to purposely discharge the entire thing. Road trip, maybe?
On Saturday, I accompanied...
I seem to have gone through my main mobile phone battery and my two spares without charging any of them. Each battery lasts about nine days, which means I haven't bothered to throw my phone on the charger in nearly a month.
I still haven't managed to find any new job offerings, though I managed to make up for a week's pay (based on my pre-August paycheck) by selling my old TV tuner and two PCs on Craigslist, though that possibility clearly won't last long.
I personally prefer the 24-hour clock to the more common 12-hour clock. On most OSes and even some obscure devices such as my wristwatch, it's possible to selectively output a 24-hour time. It turns out there was a way to do this with my clock radio too.
My clock is a Lloyd's J274 circa 1978. The clock portion is based on a Sanyo LM8361 chip, which has a select pin for a 24-hour mode. The clock physically has no switch to enable this, but it turns out that by soldering a wire from pin 38 to ground, it's easily enabled, making...
I'm beginning to realize that HD is like The Matrix. You don't really know high the resolution is until you see it for yourself.
Recently I found myself in the market for a new capture card, as my previous one had developed a rather bizarre habit of resetting every ten minutes. While tapping the input button on the front of it wasn't that big of a deal, restarting VLC after the sudden gap in the feed crashed it turned out to be an ordeal of hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del, ending the process, restarting it, and opening the card as a feed could take...
Earlier this year I installed Linux on my $40 Motorola router. Since then, I've discovered various ways in which this can be beneficial and turn my $40 router into something closer to a $400 Cisco router.
On the performance side, I overclocked the CPU from the stock 200MHz to 216MHz, which gave me a noticeable increase in routing bandwidth: almost 6Mbps, for a total of 18Mbps. If I install a suitable heatsink, I can take the BCM4712 CPU all the way up to 300MHz. Using DNSMasq for DNS forwarding eliminated many of the problems that stemmed from Motorola's firmware, and with...
I certainly have been posting more than usual, haven't I?
Sometime last year, my school ditched their old circa-1978 Tandberg Educational Language Lab and replaced it with a newer Sanako lab. The new lab uses PCs instead of cassette tapes and, perhaps most important to this post, new headsets. While they were in the process of getting rid of the old lab, a couple of people and I asked if we could take some of the old headsets. Unfortunately, these old headsets used a 6P6C connector instead of 3.5" stereo connectors, so we couldn't just plug them into a computer and...
I figure I can live with my hard drive as it is now. I haven't yet been encountering massive problems related to corruption, so I suppose that frees up my hard drive funding for other purposes. That said, I'm considering new batteries for my laptop, since the one in here now is anything but useful.
The two batteries I'm looking at are a 6-cell and a 12-cell, so that should I buy both, they could be used in conjunction with each other. The first is an independent-brand PB994A-ER, 10.8v at 4.8Ah, which I can get about 3.5 hours off for $79....
Admittedly, I'm surprised that there's something of an active market for CRTs in today's age of flat-panel displays. Most of you know that I recently replaced my 19" Emerson CRT TV with a 17" Sony Trinitron, which I'm now using as an HD-capable set along with a colorspace transcoder. Just a few days ago, I managed to sell the 19" TV for $25 on Craigslist to somebody that wanted it for a game room.
Today, my friend and I found a great Craigslist deal: 17" and 19" Dell FD Trinitron monitors, conveniently located just off Storrow Drive in Boston, for $20...
I can't help but talk a bit about my own uses for USB, the universalized successor to just about every other external port save for video that was available on the original IBM PCs. My laptop lacks a parallel port, floppy drive, and the two PS/2 ports, but features three USB ports in their stead. What's hooked up to them? A parallel adapter, a floppy drive, and an adapter with two PS/2 ports. Pure genius, folks!
Then there's the issue of incompatibility. I recall, back at a trade expo in the 1990s, seeing somebody with an OCR wand hooked up to...
As I had mentioned earlier, I bought a hi-definition VGA transcoder box, so that I could effectively gain the ability to view true HD signals on my computer monitor without actually having to dump $500 on an HDTV. At the moment I only have 480p-capable hardware, but for $50 I'd say it was a good investment to be able to do 720p and 1080i in the future.
I took a gamble and bought a no-name "Hi-BOX" off eBay for a couple of reasons. The Hi-BOX was $15 cheaper than Neoya's X2VGA 2.0 and Vdigi's VD-Z3. The X2VGA simply doubles 480i's sync...
I almost feel guilty about not updating, regardless of the fact that I'm talking to a massive network of computers, which are being stared at mostly by people I've never met in my life.
I wanted to hold off on this post until I received some parts I ordered last week. As you already know, I upgraded to digital TV earlier this month. I decided to take things one step further and finally order the component-VGA transcoder I've been talking about for the past year or two, along with appropriate cabling to hook up the gadgets I have that can run...
Having uncomfortably finished three term papers earlier this month, I decided to buy a PS/2 to USB signal converter so that I could use my IBM Model M keyboard with my notebook.
(Yes, I colored in my Model M's cable such that it's PC97-compliant. =D)
This turned out to be somewhat difficult, for two reasons. First, the Model M is based around en entire Motorola 6805 CPU rather than the standard-issue Intel 8048 microcontroller. Rumor has it that the keyboard was designed as such to facilitate a hardware terminal emulator, though I've never been able to confirm this. As a result, the...
I suppose it's rare to find me discussing television in a positive manner, so savor the moment. In preparation for next year's analog TV switchoff, I purchased an Insignia NS-DXA1 digital tuner at Best Buy today (with some financial aid from W, of course).
I get the idea that I don't give digital technologies as much credit as they deserve. Yes, sometimes they fall awry of their intended purpose and almost always are used to satisfy some purely monopolistic restriction. This year, though, I've transitioned to digital sources twice. The first occurred earlier this year when I switched from the AMPS...
So, for the next two months I have an Xbox on loan from a friend. Provided I don't damage it, I can keep it free of charge until June, otherwise I owe him $50.
I seriously can't believe I'm saying this, but Sony actually has a better design than their competitors for once. The Xbox takes up more floor space than a laptop and stands as high as a Gamecube in the process. The PS2, meanwhile, packs even more components (or in this case, space for components, as the PS2 doesn't ship with a hard drive but includes an internal drive...
<sarcasm>Aren't my post titles creative?</sarcasm> I've been trying to post something here all week, though it's been boring enough that I haven't found anything substantial enough to dedicate a full post to.
Yesterday I joined the 10k Good Friday Walk. I'd put the number of walkers somewhere slightly over 300, as we managed to overflow the 250-seater auditorium at school upon returning. Not a bad experience overall, perhaps with the exception of the weather: while it was 41°F outside (which, around here, isn't so bad for this time of year), the wind gusts of over 35mph kicked up the salt and...
I now have reason to believe that the problem with my laptop this time around isn't a flat-out defective mainboard. Rather, it seems that the DC input jack came loose from the back of the unit: it'll provide power if the plug is held in at an angle. I find it interesting that this very thing happened to my old HP laptop twice before I settled on buying a considerably more durable port replicator to remedy the issue.
For now, I still haven't got a clue whether or not I should be trusting the machine to work any further. I'm...
I've semi-officially given up on laptops. They're a great concept that were ultimately destroyed by the constant drive to create cheaper products, which in turn results in a product that works for maybe a year and a half before exhibiting serious problems.
My nx6325 decided to kick the bucket yet again, a mere three months after I received it back from HP's support facilities with the so-labeled "defective" motherboard replaced. It's now exhibiting the same problems yet again, which have (among other things) driven me into a rage of sorts about the quality of manufacturing nowadays. A number of people have...
This list of PCs was requested by a friend of mine that didn't believe I own nine PCs. Even I'll admit the story's quite far fetched, so this may at least dispel some doubt and elaborate as to how I acquired the machines to begin with. Please excuse the quality on some of the photos - I didn't have pictures on file for some of the newer machines, and since my standalone camera is broken I ended up taking pictures via video camera again. I'll update them if and when I decide to buy a new memory card for the...
Just whose idea was it to include all of these viewfinder messages on the Panasonic PV-704:
I can understand a few of them: the time/date and battery meter, for example, are invaluable. On the other hand, why do I need to constantly know that the self-timer is off? The automatic focus motor is dead, so why can't I turn off the "MF" message that signifies I have the camera switched into manual? Why is the second counter labeled with an "M", and why doesn't it reset when I take the tape out so that it doesn't count up to 9999 on...
Here's a list that's been steadily growing in my Documents folder for the past year and a half:
Desktop hard drive > 1.5gb
120gb PATA desktop hard drive
Laptop power supply, 19v 2.93A (~60 watt)
128MB SmartMedia Flash Card
3 PS/2 to SDL cables
ATX case
USB floppy drive
Internal floppy drive or CD drive
Neoya X2VGA2
PS2 component video cable
Gamecube digital component video cable (not...
Is it just me, or does everyone use a cellular phone in place of their landline nowadays?
I find it quite interesting that today's generation has been indoctrinated to use the "new" form of so-called quick communication: SMS messaging. In theory, it's great: no need to be in front of a computer to send and receive non-voice conversations, so you can have a few conversations running simultaneously. In practice, the story's completely different: with tiny thumb-keyboards and three-line text displays, not to mention a complete lack of threaded SMS messaging on most phones, the practice is a mess. Best of all,...
UPDATE 2/13/08 - There were seven discs, it turns out, instead of ten. Most of them were kids' games with an ESRB "Early Childhood" rating, which seems to shed some light on what actually happened...
I've had to repair replace a good few CD drive mishaps in the past: a floppy stuck in a CD drive, two CDs stuck in a CD drive, and even piece of salami stuck in a CD drive. But nothing, and I repeat, nothing, has come close to this:
Don't let the look of it deceive you: there aren't just seven discs crammed in there. Quite...
Has anybody ever noticed how every small device seems to come with its own space-wasting, low-output AC adapter? They often take up the two adjacent plugs on standard-sized power strips, and sometimes get needlessly hot.
I have an ATX power supply laying around, so I decided to ditch some of the smaller hardware in favor of a larger, more centralized system based around it. Using a pair of scissors, I cut the AC blocks off a few old adapters that were either broken or intended to power hardware that I no longer own, and then stripped the ends of the resulting...
There was an open parking space at the mall. It's officially a cold day in Hell.
While this is coming from someone that's been using a weak analog network for a few years now, GSM signal strength is quite impressive. I was holding the analog and digital v60 phones next to each other on the way home: as the analog signal faded in and out and occasionally dropped out altogether, the GSM signal stayed fixed with a full signal. Not bad for a fifteen-year-old network. T-Mobile's in-store reps are very friendly: I called in and was greeted by someone at the...
...So why did AT&T turn off my phone today, January 10th? It seems like AT&T has found a loophole of sorts in the FCC's mandate where AMPS will be discontinued on February 18th: the analog cellular towers are still up and running, and I can still dial out, except every call is forwarded to a tape that tells me to upgrade my phone. Anyone attempting to call the number is now presented with a message stating, "This phone has been deactivated." If I were to receive that sort of message with no warning, my first thought would be that the...
Not quite what you were expecting? AT&T's dropping their AMPS service, so I needed to buy a new phone that runs on a digital network. The Motorola v60i came in AMPS (right), GSM (left), and CDMA, so I picked the GSM version up off eBay.
AT&T is the sole analog provider left in the area. Now that I have the option of switching providers, I'm moving to T-Mobile: their prepaid airtime rates are over three times cheaper than AT&T's.