Posted by Scott Laird
Sun, 02 Dec 2007 05:50:54 GMT
I bought my wife an Olympus 790SW point-and-shoot camera before we left for Hawaii on vacation, and I’m growing increasingly fond of the little thing. It doesn’t really compare to my Canon 5D’s image quality, but it’s so small and handy that it’s easier to carry. Even better, it seems to be indestructible–it’s submersible and can be dropped up to 4.5 feet without breaking anything.
In other words, it’s the perfect beach camera for families with small kids. Plus, you can take it snorkeling, just in case one of these pops up:
Sea turtle
or some of these:
Reef fish
There are more pictures on Flickr if you’re interested.
It also takes semi-decent video. I wouldn’t confuse it with a HD camcorder, but I wouldn’t take the camcorder in the water, either. Here’s my son’s first time snorkeling:
It’s around $260 on Amazon, if you’re interested.
Tags family, photography, review, vacation | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:32:08 GMT
The parts for my latest home PC arrived yesterday afternoon and Gabe and I spent a couple hours assembling them into a workable system. It’s amazing how much help a 4-year-old can provide, even around delicate PC parts. I now have a working Athlon 64 3000+ (S939) system with 1 GB of ram and a reasonably large amount of disk space sitting on my desk. I’m going to be using this for Xen testing, but I’ll write more about that later. For now, I want to concentrate on the hardware.
I went out on a limb a bit when ordering this system, because the motherboard I picked, MSI’s RS480M2-IL, is the first motherboard on the market with ATI’s first Athlon 64 chipset (the Radeon Xpress 200), and Google doesn’t give any clear Linux success stories for the motherboard or chipset. However, this is the only socket 939 board that I could find with on-board video, and I really like on-board video for servers. It was also quite a bit cheaper then buying a comparable board plus an AGP video card. A bit of poking around suggested that the SATA ports might be trouble, and it was unclear how well X supports the on-board video, but I don’t really care about either of those for this system. The parallel IDE ports and Ethernet are the only really important parts for me.
So, after installing all of the hardware, I burned a new Ubuntu install CD and gave it a spin. It booted up okay, found the network, found the IDE hard drives, and installed without any serious problems. Ubuntu’s install CD doesn’t seem to have a driver for ATI’s IDE chipset, so I was stuck in slow PIO mode, but it still worked. Once the install finished, I rebooted and watched Ubuntu try to add all of Gnome and OpenOffice to my nice little server system–yikes. After stopping that, I installed gcc, downloaded the source for Linux 2.6.11.4, and build a new kernel.
After booting the new kernel, almost everything looks okay. Here are the drivers needed for this hardware:
- IDE: ATI IXP (in stock 2.6.11)
- SATA: libata’s sata_sil driver detects 4 SATA ports. I have no SATA drives to use for testing, though.
- Ethernet: 8193too (in stock 2.6.11)
- IEEE1394/firewire: OHCI1394 (in stock 2.6.11). Only lightly tested, but able to mount disks connected to FW DVD burner.
- USB: EHCI (8 ports USB 2.0)/OHCI (4 ports USB 1.1). Looks okay, but untested.
I’m currently fighting two problems:
- Massive clock skew–the system clock is running twice as fast as it should. This is usually a power-management issue or a BIOS bug. A lot of new systems suffer from this, and it shouldn’t take too long to fix.
- The system won’t reboot cleanly. Linux shuts down okay, but the system hangs and I need to hit ‘reset’ before it’ll reboot. This is probably related to problem #1.
Update (3/18/2005): Disabling the APIC fixed the clock problem, but not the reboot problem. I tried changing a number of power management settings without success. Most likely, the APIC will start working with a future BIOS revision. This problem seems to be preventing me from booting Xen right now, but that’ll probably be fixed by a new version of Xen in the fairly short term.
Posted in Linux, Computer Hardware | Tags athlon, motherboard, msi, review, rs480 | 155 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:52:02 GMT
As regular readers know, I recently turned up a new DSL circuit at home, replacing an older, slower line that Verizon had refused to upgrade for months. As part of the upgrade process, I needed to buy a new DSL modem. Instead of using an external DSL modem (DSL-Ethernet bridge would probably be more accurate, but “modem” seems to have stuck), I decided to buy a Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL modem. I had two main reasons for preferring this internal modem to a generic external model:
- Better control over upstream buffering, for better VoIP QoS.
- Better visibility into the modem’s state, so I can syslog minor outages and notice things like speed changes.
I chose the Sangoma model instead of a cheap, generic card because the manufacturer strongly supports its use with Linux, and a number of people on the Asterisk-Users mailing list have recommended it. I paid $115 plus shipping from BSD Mall.
Read more...
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags adsl, dsl, linux, neetworking, review, s518, sangoma | 6 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:10:00 GMT
I’ve been in the market for a new phone for most of the last month, and I settled on the
Motorola MPx200 early last week. The MPx200 run Microsoft’s ”Smartphone 2002” software, a pared-down version of their PocketPC/Windows CE operating system. I haven’t had a PC running Windows on my desk for years; I’m traditionally a Linux guy, although I’ve been using an Apple PowerBook for almost two years as my primary computer. So, I’m going to try to answer two questions:
- How well does the MPx200 work?
- How does it work with the Mac?
The phone itself seems well-designed. It’s a flip phone, roughly the same length as a credit card but slightly narrower. It’s about the same thickness as my PowerBook. This makes it smaller but thicker then my old Sony/Ericsson T68. The screen is bright and clear. In indoor lighting its as good as any small screen that I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how well it works outside; I’m in Seattle, and it’s winter :-).
The Smartphone platform differs from Pocket PCs and Palm by not using a touch-sensitive screen or stylus. Instead, it’s more like a traditional phone, with a semi-joystick and a couple menu selection buttons. This makes it usable one-handed, at the cost of some flexibility. This is clearly intended to be a phone first, and a PDA only tangentially. On the other hand, it has a decent CPU (TI OMAP at 132MHz) and somehow manages to have room for a SD card. You can install new software onto the phone; there are emulators for most handheld gaming platforms, IM clients, ebook readers, and media players available. It’ll play MP3 files and display JPEG files, plus small Windows video files right out of the box. It has a basic calendar/contacts/tasks suite, plus a POP/IMAP mail client and a small version of IE.
There are a few nice features that struck me at once. First, the USB connector on the bottom is a standard mini-USB connector, so it should be easy to replace if it gets lost. Next, the phone can use the USB cable for networking; since AT&T Wireless’s IP connectivity is so expensive, this is a nice feature. Third, the phone will charge itself directly over the USB cable. This means one less cable to carry when traveling, and one less wall-wart hiding underneath my desk at work. Fourth, the contacts/call log/speed dial setup works very well. In general, if you start dialing numbers from the “home” screen, the phone will start filtering through the contacts and call log lists, and show you entries that match the numbers or letters that you entered. So, if I enter 6 2 7 (6 is MNO, 2 is ABC, 7 is PQRS), the screen shows me the entries for my boss (Mark) and my sister-in-law (Mary). This is the only time that I’ve ever seen a workable form of autocomplete on a phone, and it doesn’t get in the way of the common case–if I was actually calling 627-1234 or something, I could just keep dialing and the obvious thing would happen. It’s not a bad design; I’m kind of surprised to see it coming out of Microsoft.
On the downside, the battery doesn’t last very long. I’ve seen claims of 24-300 hours for standby time; mine seems to be in the 48-72 range, but I’ve never really let it go that long without charging. I actually ran it dead playing solitare over the weekend; with heavy use I doubt it’d last much longer then a day. Fortunately, it charges fast and comes with two charging cables (AC and USB). Motorola refers to the battery that comes with the MPx200 as a “slim battery,” implying that a longer-life model is available, but they don’t list it on their website, so I doubt that it actually exists.
The built-in email client claims to work with POP3 and IMAP. It doesn’t support SSL in either case, and I don’t think it supports anything better then plain-text authentication. However, it does seem to work with POP, and it even does a decent job handling attachments. You can email pictures to the account that the phone checks, and it’ll download and cache them for you for offline viewing. Out of the box, the phone can handle MP3s, JPEGs, and windows-encoded video, and there are tools for playing MPEGs. I’m not sure how useful that is on a phone, but flexibility is a good thing. The phone supports MIDI and WAV ringtones. With a bit of a hack, it’s possible to store WAV files on the SD card and use them as ring sounds and alarms.
In general, I like the phone. The combination of size, format, bright screen, usability, and flexibility make me pretty happy.
Now for the bad news. The third-party sync software (Pocketmac Smartphone 3.0) is abysmal. It just barely manages to work well enough to keep me from returning the (otherwise excellent) phone. In general, Pocketmac Smartphone feels like what I’d expect from an open-source project around version 0.7–most of the functionality is there, but it misbehaves all the time, and a lot of things just don’t work the way you’d expect them to work.
- I have to reboot my Mac every time I want to sync. Once I’ve plugged the phone in and then unplugged it, Pocketmac won’t recognize it again until I reboot.
- It crashes all the time. I’ve had it crash 3-4 times per day.
- It doesn’t always sync right. I have a calendar entry that I moved from 4:30PM to 11:00AM and it refused to update the phone. Similarly, I have a couple contacts that won’t update either.
- The calendar sync doesn’t work right. Right now, it duplicates a couple entries every single time I sync the phone, so I keep having to go in and delete duplicate entries in iCal. I’ve had it delete entries from iCal as well, which is completely unacceptable.
- Even when it works, the iCalendar handling is bad–each comma (,) in .ics files is escaped with a backslash (\,). Pocketmac doesn’t handle this right, so I have a phone full of entries like “go to Costco\, buy lunchmeat”
- There’s no way to sync only specific calendars. I have a couple information-only calendars that I’m subscribed to in iCal, but I only display when I’m looking for information from those calendars. Unfortunately, Pocketmac syncs those onto the phone as well, completely swamping my personal calendar entries with noise.
I’ve had a tech support ticket open for almost a week, with no response at all from them. I can see it sitting in their ticket queue online, status “open”.
Fortunately, they have some competition in this space–Mark/Space also makes Mac<->PocketPC sync software. They don’t support Smartphones right now, but I’ve seen a handful of requests. Hopefully the situation will resolve itself–either Pocketmac will improve or Mark/Space will replace them. Until then, the phone still syncs, sometimes, and that’s good enough for me at the moment. Barely.
Update:Pocketmac’s support people finally got back to me and pointed out a couple mistakes that I’d made with respect to my tech support request–I didn’t read the notice that they were all at Macworld for the week, and I didn’t send the tech support ticket to the right group inside the company. Oops. They’re looking into my problems now. I’ll post another update if they get things to work.
Update: See my updated MPx200 status.
Posted in Phones, Handheld and PDA | Tags mpx200, review
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 10 Sep 2003 01:02:11 GMT
It seems like we don’t get out to see many movies these days, with the kids and all. We finally made it to see Pirates of the Caribbean last week. I enjoyed it, but I’m glad I didn’t fight the rush when it first came out. I need to re-watch Bend it Like Beckham, but I think I liked Keira Knightly better there then in Pirates. On the other hand, Keith Richards, er Johnny Depp’s pirate character was great.
The movie seemed to drag on longer then it really should have, but it was still fun. I figure I’ll end up buying the DVD when it shows up at Costco.
Posted in Movies | Tags movie, pirates, review | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 26 Aug 2003 02:38:37 GMT
A few months ago, I came to the conclusion that I’d never get any work done when constantly dealing with all of the little distractions that come from working in a shared office space. I miss my private office. Oh, well. Anyway, I bit the bullet and bought a set of Grado SR-60 headphones. They sounded nice when I was trying them out, but I wasn’t all that impressed with them when I plugged them into my PowerBook.
First, most headphones claim need a few hours or even days of use to “break in.” After a day or so, the Grados did sound a bit better, but there’s no real way to quantify or repeat that, so it might just be Audio Lore. Second, I discovered that the Grados sound better if I shift them up and back a bit on my ears from the Position of Maximum Comfort. They sound better then, but they’re less comfortable. They still didn’t sound all that hot with the laptop, though, and I was starting to regret buying them. Interestingly enough, they sounded better with my wife’s iPod. So, apparently my PowerBook has a cheap headphone amp. Apparently that’s normal; most consumer electronics equipment comes with cheap headphone amps.
Fortunately, the electronics industry is just great at building new things to sell to work around problems like this, and $99 later I was the proud owner of an Echo Indigo PCMCIA (CardBus actually) soundcard for my laptop. The Indigo is sort of an interesting beast; it’s a soundcard designed for headphones. It has a pair of 1/8” headphone jacks on it and an analog volume dial. It has drivers for most recent versions of Windows as well as OS X; unfortunately the Mac drivers would crash your box if you ejected the card until a month or two ago. Grrrr. It works perfectly now, though.
Sound quality-wise, though, the Indigo has been perfect from day one. It’s clearly better then the built-in headphone jack. Everything sounds way clearer. Music is more enjoyable. The Grado/Indigo combo sounds way better then any home stereo I’ve owned.
The only real problem is comfort–the Grados get uncomfortable after a couple hours of listening. They’re a bit scratchy, and they start to feel oppressive after a while. Plus, they don’t block any of the ambient noise in your environment, so the only way to block noise is to turn the volume up louder. I like loud, but then everyone else in the office gets to share, and I get a headache after an hour or two.
I should probably mention that my office is especially loud right now–I have a pile of Cisco gear 5-10 feet from my desk, including a 7505, two 7204s, a Cat 6505, and a couple PCs with industrial-grade cooling fans. It’s loud. It’s hard to conduct conversations at normal volumes.
So, I just bought a set of Shure (yeah, the microphone people) E2c earphones. They go in the ear, not on it. Think “earplugs with speakers in them” and you’re won’t be far from the truth. The jury’s still out on the Shures; they’re reasonably comfortable, and they block lots of noise, but they don’t sound nearly as sweet as the Grados.
Posted in Music | Tags echo, echoindigo, grado, gradosr60, headphone, indigo, review, sr60 | 4 comments
