mcbeen.com

Well. My iPod looks as though it lost it’s battery. Not so good. It’s almost exactly 60 days old. Luckily I’m within warentee. We’ll see how the process goes. A box is on the way for warentee service.

I’ll start this off with some background. I have owned three iPods. I bought the first of the first gen when they came out. I was still happy with it when my wife go it in the divorce. The battery was still working well after almost three years of use. The nthen got a shuffle and then a second gen mini a few months back. The shuffle was great, but it did not have an internal clock…

The mini has been a really nice gadget. The battery life has been great, the screen is wonderful, the size is acceptable. Then something happened. I still don’t really understand what. On tuesday, the unit stopped “charging”. I don’t know how else to describe it. I left the thing plugged in all night, but it never showed a complete charge. The next morning, I started listening, and got a low battery error. I plugged it back in, worrying that my battery might have died. It still never showed a complete charge. The next day, I took it and reset it after it shut down. The battery indicator showed empty, but then slowly started to fill, and then actually got up to almost 70%. After a few hours of playback, it again showed the low battery error. I reset it again, and am still listening to it without charging tonight, four days later. The battery has showed empty for at least the last six hours of play time. I fugure I’ll plug it in to charge after it will no longer boot.

It almost looks like there is a history function that got confused. I do have a charging dock in my car that it gets dropped into regularly. I’ll be in touch.

While I have been absolutely drowned in jargon at Veritas:Vision this week… I think this takes the cake:

lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal

So… your in Crystal, working with a database that decided it would be a GREAT idea to store all integer values as hex strings… Just use a hex conversion command right? Oh wait… there isn’t one… CRAP.

You can now rest easy knowing I have created a flexible conversion script in crystal syntax with no external modules. Just substitue your field for conversion in the top declaration. This script takes for granted that the field is flagged with 0x in the front. If you want to convert raw hex strings, then set line 3 to local stringvar hex_val:=hex_val.


Local stringvar hex_in :={your field to be converted};
if len(hex_in)>0 then
Local stringvar hex_val :=right(hex_in,len(hex_in)-2);
Local NumberVar strLen := Length (hex_val);
Local NumberVar i;
Local NumberVar result;
For i := 0 To strLen-1 Do
(
select (mid (hex_val,i+1,1))
case "a" : result := result+10*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "b" : result := result+11*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "c" : result := result+12*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "d" : result := result+13*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "e" : result := result+14*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
case "f" : result := result+15*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
default : result := result+val(mid (hex_val,i+1,1))*(16 ^ (len(hex_val)-(i+1)))
);
result;


Wow… My crazy jargon of the day… pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor

Fiona Apple saga shows Sony’s core dilemma | The Register

Some stories are painful to read. This is one of them, but probably not for the reasons you think.

» An important concession: MGM says ripping MP3s is OK | Open Source | ZDNet.com

So… Does this mean that all this copy protection crap Sony and other are putting on CDs is illegal? Seems like that would go for CSS on DVDs as well. Rather interesting since MGM and others as part of the MPAA and RIAA have spent the past 5 years villifying the people sustaining our fairuse rights. In fact, they went nuts over Apple’s emphatic claims of Ripping’s legality. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.

While it has been tested for eighteen months, it still is not ready for prime time. After installing it on a clean 2003 server at work, the server was nolonger bootable. Uninstallation failed as well. The machine locks up during boot, right after the splash screen shows.

So… You have been warned.

Found this interesting link over on Beccary’s blog. It calculates your typing speed in a little javascript. I run at about 50-60 a minute. How about you?

I’ve been in withdrawl for quite a few months now since the divorce. You might wonder what from. My Tivo of course. I went back and forth a few times on buying a new one, but finally decided to go the home brew route this time. After lots of thought and debate, I decided to give the snapstream beyond tv stuff a try. It started out bad. The machine I wanted to use had a graphics card that was too old (no directx 9), and the software simply would not allow me to use it. I could record, but not view. I then went ahead and built a machine from scrap that met the software’s needs. It took about two days of work, but I got everything working pretty good. I had to dig on the internet for drivers and stuff, and the IR blaster codes took me almost a week to get right.

Now that everything is up and running, I’m pretty happy. The interface is clean enough to use, and the features are similar to a real tivo. There are some notable missing goodies like tuner state persistance while going to the main menu. If you pause a show, go to the menu to schedule a recording for a show you just saw a comercial for… then you not only lose your place in your show, but the stupid tuner will retune your channel to what ever you were looking at in the guide.

On the plus side, there are some wonderful additions like webstreaming and copying your shows to your laptop for viewing on the road. You can also burn the video files right to a dvd.

I would not recommend this product for the casual computer user.