Category: electronics

Phones Should Ring

Published September 22, 2008

Danielle just sent me a link to this comic, xkcd #479, saying that it is me. Yes, I don’t like musical cell phone ring tones.

The ringer on a phone is designed to be an interruption. It’s point is to draw your attention to the fact that someone (or something) is calling you. It is to notify you that something requires your attention. For maximum effect the noise doing so should be distinct from other day to day noises, perhaps even slightly bothersome; exactly the same as an alarm clock sound. Therefore, I don’t understand why someone would want a favorite song of theirs to be providing this notification.

I really wonder why would someone want their favorite song’s hook being used as a device to grab their attention and prompt them into action. Are people trying to turn themselves off to something?

This thought doesn’t even begin to touch on how many musical ring tones happen to be in a frequency range which doesn’t do a good job of standing out from background noise, making it so that the user doesn’t hear their phone when it rings. Or what about those which start out quiet enough that the first five seconds of ringing isn’t particularly audible. Isn’t the point of having a phone ring so that one can hear it?

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Stony Creek Mountain Bike Videos

Published September 16, 2008

I mounted my old Coolpix 5400 on the handlebar of my bike in order to get some video of bike rides.

Yesterday I decided to go for a bike ride at Stony Creek, but before doing that I grabbed some small pieces of non-slip foam and some cable ties and strapped my old Nikon Coolpix 5400 to the handlebars of the bike. (This is how it looked when riding.)

The resulting videos aren’t great, as being mounted on the handle bars made the video jerky and noisy, with every little movement, bump, and vibration translating into shake, blur, and noise. However, I think they are interesting enough, and in one of them you can even watch me fall.

These videos are only short, couple minute segments of what I feel are some of the more interesting pieces of single track at Stony Creek. Length was limited by the recording time of the camera.

Here’s the videos on YouTube in high res, including the one of me falling (#3):

· The Pines #1
· The Pines #2
· Roller Coaster #1
· Roller Coaster #2
· Roller Coaster #3 & Me Falling
· Roller Coaster #4
· Roller Coaster #5
· Marker 26 to 25
· Back to Parking Lot

The original, and thusly higher quality, MOV files straight out of the camera at https://nuxx.net/videos. Just be warned, they are large:

· stony_creek_15oct2008_pines_1.mov (46.3 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_pines_2.mov (46.4 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_1.mov (45.9 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_2.mov (25.5 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_3.mov (24.8 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_4.mov (45.7 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_rollercoaster_5.mov (38.8 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_to_parking.mov (46.6 MB)
· stony_creek_15oct2008_up_mount_sheldon_26_to_25 (22.5 MB)

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Esquire Is Good For Something

Published September 10, 2008

The front page e-ink display and PCB from the cover of the October 2008 issue of Esquire magazine.

Yes, I too picked up a copy of the October 2008 issue of Esquire. The magazine itself is going in the trash, but I pulled the front panel apart so that I could poke with an e-paper / Electronic Paper / E-Ink display. I must say, this is a very nice, very high contrast display. If this were put in some more portable, more durable, more cost effective form than the Kindle (and without the data network crap) I could see myself getting one to use for reading.

When the magazine was sitting on the front seat of my car, glancing over at it reminded me of $RANDOM_NEAR_FUTURE_SCIFI where magazines are shown sitting on tables and racks blinking and flashing away. To be honest, I found it as irritating as a banner ad. I hope this isn’t where things actually go tech-wise.

Also, when I arrived home today I noticed a lot of dust and cut marks in the asphalt near my garage door, which makes me believe that something is being done about the sunken area there. What’s strange is that it’s been like this for years without issue. I’m not sure why it’s being fixed now.

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Bike Photography and GPS Fixin’

Published August 18, 2008

Yesterday I headed out to the grand opening of the Skills Park at Stony Creek Metropark. I’d intended to ride a bit, but I ended up spending most of my time there just taking photographs like the one above. (That one was taken by sitting under the gap in the Flo the Fro stunt and using the Peleng 8mm fisheye. If you’d like to see more of the photos, take a look at the album entitled Stony Creek Skills Park Grand Opening.

After getting home and meeting up with Danielle we went and got food, swung by my work to pick something up, went to Best Buy to grab a pack of universal screen protectors for my new phone (eek, expensive!), then I came back here and fixed the Garmin Edge 305 I’d previously mentioned. My first attempt was to bridge the connector PCB to the main one with wires, but there wasn’t quite enough room for them. Instead I just ran the battery pack wires directly to the related test points on the main board then sealed the thing up with hot melt glue.

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Crooked Tree

Published August 15, 2008

I really like riding past this tree on the portion of the mountain bike trails known as The Snake at Stony Creek Metropark. This tree keeps leaning further and further over, and I imagine that soon it’ll actually fall and make for a log to be crossed. There’s something I really like about coming around that corner and having to lean under it.

Yes, I know the photo is really blurry. Sorry, it was getting dark and 1/7th of a second is hard to hand hold, especially after climbing a bunch of grinding hills. Here is a clearer photo of the same tree and my bike, but from an angle which doesn’t show the tree and trail as well. Also, a few more biking photos have been posted to my catch-all biking around local places album, if you’d like to see them.

Next time I’m out I’ll try and take a picture of the corner at the top of The Snake which I previously couldn’t make it past, but was able to easily ride through twice (out of two attempts) tonight.

A friend of mine is having problems with his Garmin Edge 305 GPS. He’s reported that it will periodically turn off while riding, which seems to be attributable to the battery contacts in it losing contact briefly, so he asked if I’d take a look at it. It seems that the unit has a set of pressure contacts which connect the battery, speaker, and USB connector to the main board, held in place when the unit is glued shut. This set of flexible pins has to make contact with this PCB while the whole unit is mounted on a bicycle bouncing down rocky and rooty trails.

I think that to fix this I’m going to fit two wires for power from the non-contact part of the pads on the back panel to test points on the main PCB. This should ensure that the power connectors are always good. USB and speaker probably aren’t as critical, and I don’t want to try and cram too many wires into a housing not designed for them. I’ll give this a go tomorrow as tonight I’m relaxing.

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Nokia E51 Fr1st Post

Published August 14, 2008

The first image taken with my new phone, a Nokia E51.

My new phone, a Nokia E51 arrived yesterday, but due to some issues at work I didn’t have enough time last night to open the box.

Tonight I did so, took some photos (to be posted later) and dropped my SIM into the phone and tried it out. So far, it’s great. The casing is nice, it’s reasonably sized, the buttons feel good, and the camera works great. The image above is scaled down to the same resolution as my old phone did natively.

If you’d like to see the full-res image it’s here, while this page contains the resized version. Note the EXIF header, which has been confirmed by jhead and will make sorting images captured for my moblog album much easier:

c0nsumer@reason:/Volumes/MMC/Images> jhead 14082008.jpg File name : 14082008.jpg File size : 310470 bytes File date : 2008:08:15 01:58:28 Camera make : Nokia Camera model : E51 Date/Time : 2008:08:14 21:47:38 Resolution : 1600 x 1200 Flash used : No Focal length : 4.9mm Aperture : f/3.2 Whitebalance : Auto
c0nsumer@reason:/Volumes/MMC/Images>

Now it’s time to relax, particularly after this last week of work. Hmm, maybe more poking with the phone, though… It’s nice to see OBEX working via Bluetooth.

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New Phone Ordered

Published August 10, 2008

I’ve brought up the possibility of acquiring an iPhone a couple times previously. While I still feel they are really nifty devices I’ve decided to instead replace my failing and almost four year old Nokia 6600 with an unlocked Nokia E51 purchased from Amazon for $249.99.

I currently have T-Mobile service, out of contact, with me paying around $40/mo for 600 anytime and unlimited night and weekend minutes. This price is right in line with other contract-based deals, but is without the contract restrictions. I should just be able to drop the SIM from my 6600 into the E51 and have it work. If I were to purchase an iPhone I would have to sign on with AT&T for ~$70/mo (plus taxes and fees) for the next two years after spending $300 on the phone. This is lots cheaper and should still meet all my phone wants and needs.

The E51 has received good reviews, and seems to be a descendant of the 6600. Beyond the basic modern phone stuff it has/is:

· (Supposedly) supported by iSync.
· 2 megapixel camera.
· 802.11b/g with VoIP (SIP endpoint, I believe) support for on WLAN.
· Browser / email client / multi-platform IM client and some office-type apps.
· Metal case.

It seems like it’ll be a pretty nice phone. I find it strange that none of the US providers offer this as a bundled / packaged phone but that might be because it’s a basic office-type phone without full keyboard, shiny (and very profitable) media service tie-ins, or a particularly shiny UI. I anticipate it’ll just be a decent, usable smartphone without being overly large or expensive.

I hope I can use the VoIP (SIP?) client, but I think I might have to talk with about that, as he both knows scary amounts of telephony stuff and can provide such a service.

If you’d like to read more about the Nokia E51, here is its page at Nokia’s US site.

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8GB iPod Touch For Auction / Sale

Published July 27, 2008

Due to an interesting series of events (more on this at some point in the future) my sister has had to purchase a new computer and such for herself. As part of her purchase of a Macbook she received an 8GB iPod Touch for free (after rebate). She doesn’t need the iPod, so I’m attempting to sell it for her.

I am currently selling it via eBay auction #290249097988 with a starting bid of US$1. If any of you are interested in purchasing it I can make it available outside of eBay. I expect that we’ll get somewhere around US$240 for it once the auction has closed, but I’d take US$220 cash (or equivalent). This goes for folks overseas or not. Yes, that’s a much better price than you’ll pay for one at a store.

This is a brand new iPod purchased a couple of weeks ago at the local Apple store at the Partridge Creek shopping center. It comes with the original receipt, so there should be no problems with any sort of warranty support on it. It should also be quite easy to get the 2.0 firmware (jailbroken or not) on it, if you so desire.

So, anyone want it? Otherwise I’ll just leave it up to the eBay peoples…

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How To Make an iPhone 3G Fail

Published July 20, 2008

A iPhone 3G at the Apple Store rebooting after I managed to crash it by viewing a 7MB JPEG.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been contemplating an iPhone 3G as a replacement for my aging (and failing) Nokia 6600. Today I went by the Apple store at the local outdoor mall^†, Partridge Creek to spend some time playing with one. Unfortunately, I crashed it hard once and made the UI slow horribly another time. I also ran into one other potentially show stopping bug.

First, 3G was a lot slower than local wireless. When using 802.11 things zipped along nicely, but 3G was still wholly acceptable on both web pages and maps. I think it’d be just fine for mobile use.

I then wanted to try to see how it renders my personal site, including my photo gallery, so I loaded up a few things. Everything worked great, except for when I’d try and visit a full size image in the gallery, then the image wouldn’t display. For example, take this page. It worked great, except that large image of the P3 case just simply wouldn’t display.

Thinking that maybe the iPhone had problems with large images I then browsed to https://nuxx.net/images and tried to view this image. While downloading and rendering it (via 802.11) the phone got really slow, the volume buttons and ringer switch stopped responding, and then phone laggedly noticed that I’d turned it sideways. The whole phone was very slow, and after four or five minutes of being nearly unresponsive it gave up. The phone was displaying partially downloaded image and half-heartedly rotated screen (it must have noticed that I’d been moving the phone around) when it went blank and rebooted, displaying the screen shown above.

After the phone rebooted I made a point of disabling 3G, thinking that maybe the phone was somehow failing over to it and just let it go with 802.11. (This is done by turning on airplane mode, then turning WiFi on.)

The image was then able to load and display, although it took quite a bit of time. I can’t help but think that the iPhone just isn’t set up to deal with / display images of this size. With how popular digital photography and things like Flickr in particular are, I’d hope that Apple would have found a way to deal with it. Wanting to break things further I loaded up this 9.7MB JPEG panorama of a part of the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson. This too caused the iPhone 3G to lag horribly and the UI to become unresponsive, but eventually (after maybe four minutes) it acquired the image and displayed it. This time the phone didn’t crash.

While I can understand that a mobile device might not be able to handle images of this size, I think there should be something in place to ensure that the end user experience doesn’t turn to crap. Also, I really don’t like how the image in my gallery silently failed to display.

^† Speaking of outdoor malls in Michigan, check out the map of Twelve Mile Crossing at Fountain Walk, aka The Fountain walk, in Novi. See all the empty space? I don’t know what developer could possibly think that an outdoor mall in a state with Michigan’s drawn out, harsh winter and frequently rainy summers is a good idea.

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iPhone 3G In My Future?

Published June 10, 2008

With Apple’s announcement of a new 3G iPhone, I think one might be in my future.

I’ve had my old Nokia 6600 since October 2004, and it’s just starting to fail. The screen is becoming dark and blue tinted, the photos (example) just aren’t that great, and some of the buttons are starting to fail. The battery on it is also really quite bad, and I have to charge it every day else it’ll fail.

Currently I pay around $47/mo after taxes for 600 anytime minutes, unlimited nights and weekend, and no data via T-Mobile. If a plan via AT&T can give me ~300 anytime minutes and the same unlimited nights and weekends, along with a comparable data plan, for a somewhat similar price, I think I’ll go with an iPhone.

I need to be sure that it will work with my custom iPod setup in the car, which ties the line out into the stereo and power into the iPod for charging. I also want to be certain that when the iPhone is receiving power via the dock connector and playing that it automatically pauses when power is cut. I use this feature to ensure that the iPod automatically pauses when I turn off my car, and I’d like the iPhone to do the same thing.

I figure that I’ll probably end up getting a Bluetooth headset for use when actually talking to people while driving. I rarely do this so I’ll probably first try using my old headset first, then maybe get a new / better / longer lasting one.

Hopefully this will work out well and meet all the goals of getting a phone with a better camera, display, and battery, while at the same time providing me with a nice mobile network terminal and one less device to carry.

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