Category Archives: Tech

Technology related stuff

New Digicam

*EDIT* I’ve started an album here for posting some images taken with the new digi. *EDIT*

Below you will find a picture of the new picture creating device that I purchased yesterday:

I have been craving a new digicam for some time now… and have finally arrived at this wonderful piece of electronics – The Fuji S700 (AKA the S5700).

This camera was a perfect buy for me because it gives access to advanced features while not destroying your bank account as bad as a Canon or Nikon. Given the lighter price tag, i did alot of research on this device and found only overwhelmingly positive user reviews. My decision was further solidified by being able to take a detailed look at Mickeyvb’s S5600 (essentially same camera, but 5.1 megapix vs. 7.1). A digital SLR is just too much camera for me, and i’m not a serious enough photographer to really justify that purchase. Therefore, an advanced point/shooter is my niche.

After a good play session on the mickster’s camera, and one more internet cruise looking for any reason not to purchase this camera, I finalized my decision and immediately withdrew the correct sum of money. I purchased the camera (Meijer. lol?) , a decent case for it (Best Buy), and then iced the cake with a UV filter and a Polarizer filter (Ritz camera). Unfortunately they only carried the Polarizer filter in a 49 millimeter size, so i had to also purchase an adapter ring to go from 46mm to 49mm. No big deal though, it was only like 3 dollars.

I haven’t had too much time to explore this camera yet, but here are my current likes/dislikes based on early opinions.

Likes:

Quick power on/off times (1 second boot up/shut down)
10x optical zoom
7.1 megapixel vs 6.1 in the Canon PS
Plenty of manual play room (shutter, aperture, ISO, etc.)
Comfortable, ergonomically sound design
xD Memory (I already owned 1.5 gigs of xD memory)
Image stabilization
Large clear LCD display
Seemingly very good auto focus – even in macro/super macro mode. I’ve taken pictures up to approximately 1 inch from target
Intelligent flash – pops up if you need it, stays down if you dont
Upon close, detailed inspection.. it is NOT an Olympus D580

Dislikes:

Only allows for 4 second exposures. This was fairly disappointing since the s5600 (which the S700 replaces) allowed for 15 second exposures. I can’t imagine why they would drop that capability. But, i also can’t really envision any time where I would use more than a 4 second exposure anyway.
Batteries – Takes 4 AA’s and due to the placement i do not see it possible to use Lithium ion or other. Looks like i’m stuck with the energizer rechargables.
Lens size. It was not easy to find filters for a 46mm lens.
Zoom controls are a little touchy. But, i am hoping this breaks in with use.
The flash seems somewhat harsh. But, it does have shooting modes that try to compensate for that.

Overall, I am really warmed up to this camera and really looking forward to dig into its capabilities. The fact that this Camera comes in approximately 150 dollars cheaper than the comparable Canon Powershot-IS is legitimately unbelievable. But, I’m glad it does. Kudos to Fuji on this product. I am mos def a fan.

BRB, DVD

7 Replies

Lately I’ve been experiencing various issues with my DVD rom drive. It wont be detected, it wont copy files, it wont read files, etc. Overall this has been pretty frustrating lately because i have had several important medias delivered by way of DVD. This has led to probably hours of struggling, and general cursing at this inanimate object. Then, for some reason – at 12.30 a.m. on Friday (technically Saturday) – I decided to finally BRB this drive, seen here:

After BRBing this hidous piece of equipment (note, never buy “Liteon” product). I then set my task of making my external DVD RW/Cd RW drive work on my computer. First, a flashBack: for Christmas this past year, i purchased my father a nice new shiny DVD writer. A Pioneer, I believe… Part of that Christmas present to him meant that I got to take his old DVD RW drive, an external usb2 device, and claimed it as mine own. Now… finally… 5 months later… I tried hooking it up.

With the ease of installation and configuration on Ubuntu 7.04, i figured this to be a plug and play operation. Pretty much Neg. This external drive did not even get detected. I went at it pretty hard for about an hour, and finally gave up. I had surrendered all hope and succumbed to the fact that i would just buy a new DVD drive, an INTERNAL DVD drive. Then, at that exact moment, the fires that forged mickeyvb churned with a breath of fresh oxygen and took over my being. I began dismantling the external DVD drive. I detached cables. I took out about a dozen screws. I cracked and pryed the plastic shell. Pieces and parts flew. And after about 20 minutes of sodomizing this external drive, i was left with an internal drive (right) and some trash (left):

That shell looks alot worse in person, and there are many more parts to it not shown. After all this was said and done, this drive fit perfectly and worked perfectly like any other INTERNAL drive. It was a fantastic moral victory, and so i am no longer in need of any DVD drive. Although this one only writes at 8x – it will do. 🙂 Now i can concentrate on the AVIC D3 and a new Digicam.

In closing, here is a picture of my gato – she pawed at screws and sniffed things. Obviously trying to help me in my endeavors, but not possessing any opposable digits, she failed to provide any adequate assistance.

Alltel’s Problem

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This post is also serving as a test to wordpress 2.1. I upgraded a few days ago but haven’t had a chance to utilize it yet. Not really much different. IMO – wait for 3.0

The world of wireless providers is a dark and sinister place. Hidden fees. Overages. Dropped Calls. 2 year contracts. Automatically renewing contracts when making a plan change. Hideously stupid assholes who call themselves ‘tech support’ or “customer support”. It’s got to be a tough market to get into, much less be a successful provider.

Alltel almost has it pegged. Their customer service has always been very good. Plan options are extremely affordable. For example, i added a data internet plan for my phone and it’s only $5 a month. I don’t get charged out the ass for text or picture messages. I make changes to my plan and my contract is NOT automatically renewed for an additional two years. When i “Roam”, i don’t pay any money extra for that. I can call 10 of the people closest to me from any network without even being charged.

For the most part – one must admit… Alltel has their shit together.

Then we come to it… the single most frustrating piece of this entire wireless pizza. Alltel has about as many phones to pick from as any local “big lots”. I mean seriously. It’s almost driven me to switch carriers and deal with all the bullshit from paragraph 1. They do not have any ‘cool’ or ‘innovative’ devices available. No Blackjacks. No iPhones (not that i’d want one). Their collection is stale. It’s literally horrendous. How about the cool new UTStarcom 6700 ? Hmm… sprint had that like 3 years ago and stopped selling it last year. Way to be on the ball…!

Wait… seriously the Motorola Q is coming out in March!! Hmm… apparently Verizon hasn’t had that for almost a year. GG Alltel. Just now they finally got the Razr V3m with an expandable memory card, which can be purchased in flaming gay red or Bright silver. hmm. Meh. heh. etc.

Then they take their lack of a phone selection, and they further cripple it. Alltel’s phones are all “Brew” based. Apparently this means that it is impossible to download, use, run, or even think about seeing any sort of java application on them. Can’t use Google’s new gmail app… Can’t use google maps. Can’t download java games that are steadily gaining popularity. My phone’s browser can’t even save bookmarks. Think about that. My phone can watch a full feature film (The Boondock Saints is on there, as well as all three of Vanbergs’ Heroics videos), but it can’t even save a bookmark.

Alltel, What the hell are you thinking. If you could get your shit together with phone selection and functionality, you’d be the #1 Cellular provider in this country by far. Get some new phones with the JVM, and until that time… enjoy being #5.

Beryl and Linux

4 Replies

Probably two or three times a year, i make an attempt to migrate to linux. I install fedora, red hat, suse, ubuntu, mandriva… Pretty much whatever I feel like at the time. I use it for a while, then i switch back to windows after a couple weeks. 🙁 Well, After some experience with all the popular distributions, i keep coming back to Ubuntu linux as my favorite. So, this week i’ve made it my project to migrate to linux for the final time. No chance of going back to windows. I downloaded and installed the newest version of Ubuntu (6.10) and then hooked my windows HD up as a slave and copied in all my files.

After getting everything set up how I wanted (mp3 playback, dvd, email… etc.) I decided to take a quick look into xgl because i had heard and read a little about it. I started reading about it, found some wiki’s… and before i knew it, 2 hours had passed and I had installed “Beryl”. It was surprisingly easy and painless to configure, and it runs surprisingly well on my computer. Beryl is a 3 dimensional window environment that integrates with the Gnome desktop manager (or KDE, but i like gnome better). It has some very cool features and functionality, does some very cool things, and pretty much is the 2nd coolest thing i have ever seen. (#1 is Jack Bauer killing Nina Meyers.).

My conclusion is that Beryl running on top of Ubuntu linux is legitimately the best operating system / desktop I have ever seen. The media players sync up my ipod, everything works beautifully. I am never going to use windows at my home again.

Here is a video i recoreded of me using Beryl/Ubuntu. Here are a couple of other ones if interested… Overall, i’m very impressed with the entire setup.

Rockbox slash WordPress Upgrd

13 Replies

Edit: Got some Rockbox screenshots from my ipod.
——————–
I finally got the motivation to upgrade to wordpress 2.0.5. Yay. Obviously it is only a bugfix/security fix release.More importantly, I stumbled across possibly the coolest thing on this entire planet: Rockbox for the Ipod. Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for alot of popular mp3 players, including the Ipod… I read a little about it, and after seeing some of its capabilities i decided it was time to give it a shot. I had previously tried IpodLinux a few times, but was never really happy with that product.

The “goals” of Rockbox and IpodLinux are totally different, even though they end up with a similar result. Rockbox aims to be a jukebox/music playing firmware replacement that is cross platform and written from scratch. Where as IpodLinux’s goal was to port linux onto the Ipod. After hours and hours of messing around with IpodLinux, and only being half successful (i never played an mp3); i decided that ipodlinux really sounds alot better on paper than it actually is in reality. Ef you ipodlinux.

Rockbox = much easier. I read the installation instructions… I had to downolad a couple of extract/write utilities for the firmware, run a couple commands to extract the apple firmware and patch the rockbox firmware into it, and i was seriously done in 15 minutes. Rockbox booted with no problems, and vastly increased the functionality of my ipod. Rockbox can play different file formats like OGG and flac, It has more extensible customization as far as a user interface and equalizer options, and it has all kinds of nifty plugins/games that come bundled in. I am never going to switch back to the apple firmware, or to ipod linux.

A summary of the cool features Rockbox offers:

Built in File/Directory Browser.
“Theme” Capability – make your own or download any contributed themes from their site. Which is good, because the default theme was rancid and boring.
Custom Fonts Capability – put an assortment of fonts on your ipod.
Enhanced Equalizer Capabilities
Seems to maintain all usb functionality. It even works with my DLO transpod FM transmitter in my car!
Awesome assortment of included games. Including Pacman, Doom (yes, doom), tetris, solitaire, pong, bejeweled, chess, sudoku, asteroids, that shooting colored bubble game… i mean seriously its frickin’ awesome
Some sweet plugins/utilities. Including a Gameboy emulator (so far i played tecmo bowl and bowling), Jpeg viewer, battery benchmark, stopwatch, disk cleanup util, etc. etc.
Can still boot the apple firmware if you ‘want’.
Overall “Cool factor” is there.. Ipodlinux didnt have that.

A couple “Not so cool” features of Rockbox:

Rockbox DOES NOT read/sync to the itunes databases. Therefore, you can’t sync music using itunes. Although i have a feeling this really isn’t rockbox’s fault. Apple would probably shut them down immediately if they reverse engineered that capability. Rockbox does half way make up for this with its own database functionality – so you can still filter/play by artist, album, genre, etc. But, you have to manually copy the audio files/folders of music onto your ipod.
Doesn’t play videos. I have an ipod video, so it would be nice to have the ability to play video files. If it can play doom, i would think it could launch a correctly formatted mpeg or avi.
Battery life. Rockbox likes batteries alot more than the apple firmware. 5-6 hours looks like.
Sometimes runs a little sluggishly when navigating the filesystem. Which to me was surprising, because it can only be used on FAT32. NTFS and/or other (mac) filesystems are not supported.

Regardless of those ‘negs’ – I thoroughly enjoy rockbox as an free alternative to the apple firmware. I’ll never switch back. I’ll see if i can get some screenshots or pics of my Rockbox somehow. But in the meantime checkout some screenies here and/or here. (2nd link shows themes, 1st shows the ‘default’ theme.)

If you own an ipod (or any other mp3 player for that matter), you should consider trying rockbox. Install instructions can be found here. They look alot harder than they really are. Unfathomably easier than ipodlinux. ef you ipod linux.

Eric VB.com

A Distinction Without a Difference…