Hardware
Archived Posts from this Category
Wed 24th Sep 2008
Running monitors at higher resolution.
Posted early evening, filed under Hardware.Most monitors seem to be able to be driven at a higher resolution than it says they can. In some cases, the higher resolution gives a better picture, in other cases it doesn’t.
My work just bought me a new LG W1942T, which is rated as running at 1400×900, which for a 19″ monitor isn’t that high. My laptop (15″) does the same resolution. It’s possible to run the W1942T at 1680×1050, but I really don’t know if the blurriness is caused by that, or if it just isn’t the best monitor available.
My boss bought a 22″ LG monitor, which is rated at 1680×1050, but it does 2048×1280 quite comfortably. And I have an nice old Dell E172FP, which looks best at 1344×1074, rather than the 1280×1024 which it says it can do.
After my last post, I has kinda bummed when the same thing happened again. Luckily, the same process fixed it, but I really don’t know why it occurred to begin with. I think the same fault was fixed by fsck, so that might have something to do with it.
Anyway, I took some snaps this time.
I wasn’t able to take a shot of the initial boot screen (ironically, it caused my phone to crash. Twice).
This second one shows how the text is now overwriting the green corruption. Sorry about the blurriness, but if you look carefully you may notice that the file with the incorrect block count is pcscd.pub, or something. This appears to be the file /var/run/pcscd.run, but I don’t really know what this does.
Sun 16th Mar 2008
Daring Fireball: Foot, Meet Bullet
Posted early in the morning, filed under Nokia E65.I’ve not commented on iPhone related stuff before: mainly because I don’t have an iPhone, and won’t be getting one any time soon. It’s not that I don’t want one, but they aren’t coming out in Australia, and my new phone has still got a long way to go before it is out of contract.
The latest post, however, piqued my interest. Because it doesn’t just apply to iPhone, or any handheld device, but any computing device in general:
How are they even going to know which apps do continue to run in the background? They won’t. A likely reaction would simply be to regret ever having junked up their iPhone with any third-party apps at all.
I have a Nokia E65, and one of the “great” features is true multi-tasking. I say “great”, because this feature burned me not too long ago.
I use Salling Clicker - mainly as an automated syncing system, but also for interaction between the phone and Mac in other ways - from a Growl message when I receive a phone call, and my iTunes pausing, to sending SMS via bluetooth. Typing is much faster on a normal keyboard! (Granted, this is using emitSMS, not Salling Clicker, but, meh).
Recently, I installed a bit of software that allowed me to download call and SMS lists, so I could access them and interpret my data usage patterns. It installed a background helper agent, which I didn’t even realise. Some time later I noticed I wasn’t receiving as many phone calls as before. It wasn’t a big difference since I mainly use the phone for calling, rather than receiving calls, but nonetheless it was a difference. When out at dinner with family, it came to a head. It turned out that every time someone tried to call me, the call was rejected, but not to voicemail. A second call immediately worked.
When a call came in, the phone displayed a (very short) out of memory error, and then this immediately disappeared. The light came on, which made me realise just how often it had occurred. I had seen the phone light turn on sometimes while my phone was next to me, but because the message was so short-lived, it had vanished by the time I looked at the screen. I’m talking less than a second here.
It turned out the faceless background app was using up all of the phone’s memory. Receiving a call initially failed, but if another call came immediately after, then it would work. I guess some memory was being freed, but being used again a short time later.
Long story short - I didn’t use the software I had installed, so junking it (and removing the installed helper, which wasn’t real easy) fixed the problem. But because the problem was intermittent, it was pretty hard to nail down.
I don’t even remember what the software was called. But I’m much more cautious about what I install onto my phone now.
Sun 17th Feb 2008
Fix Bluetooth connection errors with emitSMS
Posted early evening, filed under Phone.I use the excellent and free emitSMS for all of my SMS sending-from-my-Mac needs, and it works a treat. However, for some reason in the last couple of days it has stopped connecting properly to my phone, a Nokia E65.
I’ve had lots of hassles with this phone, and thought this might be just another one. But I’ve restarted both the phone and the Mac, and no joy.
If you look at the back of the emitSMS widget, you’ll be able to choose the serial port to connect to. If you try changing the port to one of the standard ones, it should give an almost immediate error. If you change it back to your phone’s serial port, and it hangs forever, there is a solution.
As can be seen from the image above, I’ve just created a second Dial-UpNetworking bluetooth port, and used that instead.
Open up System Preferences, and visit the Bluetooth panel. Select your phone, and select Edit Serial Ports… from the utility menu.
Add a new serial port using the plus button, and duplicate all of the settings.
Click Apply, and then change the serial port back in emitSMS. It should connect and identify your phone.
Well, I’ve bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini Core Duo to use as my media centre. The old Xbox just doesn’t cut it anymore - the two things I need to be able to do are play H.264 movies, and record video from Digital TV, and it can’t do either of these. I’ve had to purchase an eyeTV USB TV Tuner to do the latter (and I’ll be returning my Miglia TVmini2, since it doesn’t do what it is advertised to do - which is play Digital TV properly, or do scheduled recording properly).
The machine was ordered online via the Apple Store. I’ve had issues with NextByte in the past, so I was a bit loathe to purchase through them. I rang them anyway, figuring that if they had one in store, I could order it, and collect it the same day.
They didn’t and said that they had about 6 on order, and there weren’t any in Australia.
Now, I knew that wasn’t the case, as Apple have a 24 hour shipping note on this model. So, it was “no thanks” to their offer to place an order. And I ordered online.
Within about 5 hours, my order had shipped. And, for evidence that it has been shipped, TNT have the following data about my package:
So, I’m all excited. My new machine is supposed to arrive tomorrow…
Ah, I’ve been there. Mine was dual-booting OS X onto an unsupported Dell PC. I had a second Hard Disk that I was putting it onto, yet somehow I managed to screw up the Windows partition as well. Luckily I didn’t destroy the laptop. And I never got near the sharks…
And, yet another plug for xkcd.com - if you haven’t subscribed to his RSS feed, then you really should.
Sat 24th Nov 2007
Review: miglia TVmini2/equinox The Tube
Posted mid-morning, filed under Hardware , Television.I lashed out yesterday, and bought something that I’ve been wanting for a while.
A USB TV Tuner stick.
I went for the miglia TVmini2, as it was (I thought) fairly inexpensive. I’m not sure I made the right decision right now.
There are just a few things I don’t like so much about the Nokia E65.
Firstly, and foremostly, there is a noticeable delay when doing particular actions. For instance, pressing the Address Book key and then typing a name in means you invariably miss the first couple of letters. And it only sorts by the start of the name, not text within the name.
Secondly, and at times more annoyingly, if I happen to close the slide at the same time as another action happens, like someone hanging up on the other end of the phone, it turns off.
That’s right, the phone goes dead. I then need to wait (minutes, it feels like) for the phone to finish starting up again.
The camera is badly placed, too. Not that I want to do video calls, but I can’t see the caller and them see me at the same time. because there is only one camera, and it is on the back.
Another annoyance is that address book entries don’t have a default number by default. And it takes ages to go through (delays each time) to setup the defaults. And these don’t sync properly with Apple’s Address Book, so if you reset your phone (for instance, to see if you can fix the shutdown bug), you lose all of the defaults you have carefully set up.
There is no autolock. It prompts you to lock when you close the slide. You can install software to automatically lock after a period of time, but if you close the slide at the same time as when the autolock kicks in, the phone turns off.
Bluetooth appears a bit dodgy at times. Sometimes it no longer connects to my computer, and I need to restart my phone. I think it is more to do with the phone than the computer, but I’m not sure.
Battery life is crap. I didn’t want to have to charge my phone every night, but if I use WiFi, then I do. If I just use Bluetooth, which I need to have for synching, then it’s every second day.
Salling Clicker is awesome. I have an addon script that synchs my phone every day, and it displays incoming and outgoing caller information via Growl. It also fades my system volume, and pauses iTunes when I am on the phone. This is the sort of thing that computers should do. All of the time.