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Treo 650 is mine November 30, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : treo650 , 4comments

I’m now the proud owner of a new Treo 650. The recent election over here distracted the eBay punters so despite being a new Treo, it went for under $220. In the days before and after some used Treos went for that price (and the last batch of new Treos was going for closer to $300).

PalmOS. Oh the memories. I didn’t realize this but the 650 was one of the first models to feature Palm’s new NVFS system. I suppose 3 years ago the problems would have been really annoying to people but software seems to have been updated in the intervening years and I haven’t noticed any problems so far.

My data isn’t ready for the device yet (it’s still stuck between Qtopia Desktop 2 and Qtopia 4.1). I haven’t even managed to find Linux binaries so despite installing the Linux loader app I can’t actually see what it’s like.

The hardware is cool. I’ve already found some software bugs and strangenesses (like having the focus move the opposite direction to the key I press and requiring my computer to be discoverable to do a HotSync over bluetooth – despite the devices being paired).

I downloaded Google Maps and found out that Optus had magically sent the GPRS/MMS/WAP settings to my phone. I was sitting there thinking, “but I haven’t configured bluetooth networking yet” before I realized it was connecting over GPRS. Very smooth but I don’t think I get terribly good rates for data over GPRS so I shut it down before it went too far. Apparently there’s a built-in GPS chip but it’s only usable for E911 service. The Linux guys don’t seem to have found a GPS chip. It’s not mentioned on their hardware page. I suppose if I want GPS I’ll end up getting one of those bluetooth things.

I’ve ordered a case, screen protector and because it was so cheap, a bluetooth headset.

Back at Dreamworld November 25, 2007

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We went back to Dreamworld today. My dad was off watching a bike race in the morning so I went on a bunch of rides with the kids. I took Emily on the chain swings, the bumper cars and on the Avalanche (now called the spooty spin). She enjoyed all of them.

We had lunch and then I went on some rides with my dad. The tower of terror was open this time so we went on that and scored the front seat. We did the Cyclone again and scored the front seat on it too. It’s quite a different experience to the back seat. We went on the Nickelodeon coaster which was ok but not really something I’d go on again. We went on the Wipeout and my dad managed to miss his car key when we emptied out pockets. As you can imagine, it came flying out during the ride. It’s a good thing we’re in a drought because otherwise it would have been under water (the whole ride is dry at the moment). One of the attendants was an ass, saying we would have to wait until the end of the day for someone to get it but one of the other attendants got it for us.

The kids got to see Captain Feathersword and Wags the Dog and they played in the play room again. They went to the feeding zoo but it was really busy.

We met up and headed over to the wet rides. I was hoping Emily wouldn’t be too tired and would want to go on and she did. Bree watched Isaac and the rest of us (pop, nanny, Emily, me) went on the rapids ride. Emily managed to pick the worst seat, going backwards the most and both Emily and I got wet. Emily loved it though and wanted to go on it again but we went over to the log ride instead. Pop and nanny were in the front and Emily and I were in the back. When we came down the hill the water came surging over the sides of the log and Emily and I were both drenched. Luckily Bree had purchased a new shirt for Emily, I just went topless.

One the way out I stopped at the chip vending machine. I saw it the first time but didn’t get any so I was determined to get some this time. It’s a machine that vends freshly fried chips. It takes about 2 minutes and the chips were pretty good, though they were also $5 which is pretty steep for the amount we got (to be fair, chips from anywhere else in the park would have cost a similar amount, my sandwiches both days cost $8.50 each). I suppose it’s not so crazy to think about a chip vending when they’ve got pizza vending machines. It’s also a chance to get some greasy food. Unlike the bad food I remember from visits years ago Dreamworld seems to sell mostly healthy stuff everywhere these days. Of course, there’s still sugar-loaded products everywhere, it hardly seems worthwhile to make us eat a sandwich and then give us a slurpee to wash it down.

Another fun day. The kids were again totally worn out. Emily was as good as I’d expect but it’s Isaac that has really surprised me. I really didn’t think he’d handle the long, wearing days as well as he did. He even walked most of the time, covering a huge distance. I guess he’s growing up.

Restoring Windows November 22, 2007

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My previous backups of Windows were all done with dd. The problem with this is that you need to restore to a partition of exactly the right size. Since my hard disk is a different size, both Disk Utility and Boot Camp Assistant are creating a partition the wrong size. I tried using diskutil directly to create an accurately-sized partition but after restoring Windows I ended up with a system that wouldn’t boot.

After a bit of searching for a way out I found Winclone. I used it to copy the files off my restored partition, created the partition with Boot Camp Assistant and then restored with Winclone and the result was a system that booted. Yay.

I’m not sure if I can use it for backups but it’s not every day that you get a new hard disk.

Isaac turns 2 November 22, 2007

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Isaac has turned 2 and we celebrated by taking him to Dreamworld. We took my parents so that Bree would have someone to help watch the kids and I could go on the rides. There have been 3 new rides since the last time I went to Dreamworld and I went on them all. The cyclone is remarkably rough given that it’s new. It’s got one of the slowest loops that I’ve ever been on which is cool. The claw is a definite vomit comet, cool but don’t eat before you go on it. The motorbike coaster was a bit of a disappointment. It’s different and the seating arrangement is novel but it’s really slow to get on and off (you have to take off your shoes) so the line takes ages and it’s not really that different to a regular coaster. It doesn’t even go upside down. Also, really big and really small people simply cannot ride on it. While waiting in the line I saw a few people that couldn’t ride. I suspect the problem was wide legs.

Since I was going on rides I didn’t really get to see all the kid stuff. Wiggles world was a bit of a let down. There’s the boat, which is like a play ground only with less things to do (liability and all). There’s a teacup ride, pretty standard. The big red car ride is really slow. It was probably the longest wait I endured all day yet one of the shortest lines (and I didn’t end up going in because Bree wanted me to take a photo of them as they came out). There was only 1 other attraction there, a play room with various toys. The kids loved it.

We took Isaac off Losec about 6 weeks ago now and he’s been fine. He’s drooling quite a bit which makes me think his teeth are still on the way.

Eve's got a new hard disk November 20, 2007

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My hard disk arrived today.

The longest part was copying the instructional video to my DV camcorder (I was originally going to use Bree’s laptop to watch the video on but the disk didn’t arrive on Friday like I’d hoped so Bree was home).

The actual job was easy. I haven’t done much laptop work at all but I’ve done a heap of desktop building. Laptop work is the same only more cramped and with smaller screws. I used the notes here and the instructional video from OWC (link doesn’t work properly, you’ll have to click “Hard Disk” then scroll down to MacBook Pro).

The first thing I noticed when booting up is that the new hard disk seems to have a louder “idle” noise than the old disk. It’s not unpleasant though, like the sound of air moving rather than a whine. Given the rarity of using the machine in a really quiet environment and Fan Speed ramping up my fans aggressively once the machine is over 50 degrees, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.

The restore is still going. Interestingly, the backup disk is having a really hard time of this. I think I might do a clean backup once I’m done (clear the disk and then backup) since it’s pretty clearly suffering the effects of file fragmentation.

A store that gets it? November 18, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so far

Wow.

I needed to purchase a Torx T-6 to install my new hard disk (which hasn’t arrived yet). I thought my hard disk was going to arrive on Friday so I didn’t want to wait for delivery from an online store. However, I wasn’t even sure what a T-6 was so I went online to do some research.

I found Dick Smith Electronics and was pleasantly surprised.

I’ve tried looking at the websites of offline shops before but there’s generally either nothing useful there or what they in stock is significantly more expensive than what I can buy the item for online.

When I’m online I can search, I can browse a consistent, sorted, list of items, I can read more about the product than you can fit on the packaging, I can see what the item looks like (instead of what the Marketing department decided to put on the box). The list goes on. Most importantly, the cost of buying online, even with shipping seems to be less than the cost of buying from offline shops. Some things, especially larger items are easier to pickup from an offline shop but much of what I get doesn’t fit that description.

The Dick Smith site (which I found while searching for online shops selling T-6’s) is a real online shop. You can buy online (and have it shipped) or check the stock availability in any of their stores. You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen an offline shop with a comprehensive online category. I really don’t understand why it’s taken so long for companies to get that this is a good idea. I hope other shops start doing this too.

I located a suitable item (a multi-bit set, I’m a sucker for those) and it was in stock so I stopped at my local store to pick it up. Ironically, I ran into the same problem I have with most offline shops. I couldn’t actually find what I was looking for. The floor staff could point me in the right general direction but they didn’t even know what a Torx bit was. I didn’t end up finding the item I’d looked at online but there was a similar one there (that I’d missed while looking online). It was also a multi-bit set and while cheaper, it was good enough for what I need.

Now all we need is the ability to pre-purchase items online and have them waiting in the store for us to pick up :)

Dangerous bug in eBay's new Bid Assisant November 14, 2007

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eBay has a great new feature, bid assistant. You find a bunch of similar items you want, tell it how much you’re prepared to pay for each one and it bids for you until you win one or they all finish. Unlike manually tracking auctions it means you don’t need to log on when one auction ends to know if you need to bid on the next one.

However, there’s a bug. You cannot have less than 2 items in a bid group.

Here’s what happened to me.

I put in 5 Treos, filled in the amounts and sat back to wait. Then my hard disk died so I thought, “no problem, I’ll just tell it to stop”. Oops, you can’t do that.

Seriously. You can’t just tell Bid Assistant to stop. WTF?

I thought, “ok, I’ll remove all of the items that haven’t been bid on (which was 4 of the 5 items). That’s when I stumbled onto the bug.

So… there I was, not wanting to spend any money on a Treo with Bid Assistant just waiting for the first auction to end before it would bid for me and I had NO WAY TO STOP IT. WTF?

I emailed eBay support and got a bloody form letter reply (from Ruby M) about retracting bids. WTF?

I emailed again and again I got a bloody form letter reply (from Alexander S) about deleting items from bid assistant groups (though failing to note the bug I had discovered). Again, WTF?

I can’t stand “support” people that just copy and paste standard answers to problems without actually bothering to read the messages they’re replying to. This is a BUG in a new feature of eBay and instead of saying “thanks for finding this bug” they’re sending me form letter replies. Oh, and between this afternoon and now they’ve stopped accepting replies to support emails. Now you have to use a bloody web form to reply to their replies. WTF?

No thanks to eBay, I’m off the hook because someone outbid me. Still, I won’t be trusting the Bid Assistant feature again until eBay have fixed this nasty bug.

Replacing my Greenphone November 14, 2007

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So I’ve had a Greenphone for what seems like ages now and while it’s nice, it’s got problems that are starting to really piss me off.

1) Battery life is crap. I can’t trust it to last 2 days anymore. I think this is mostly because of the TAT table debacle (where following the published instructions to upgrade to the GPL-compliant bootloader blows away the ADC calibration data, causing the battery to be overcharged). We figured out a way to calibrate the ADC and write this to the TAT table (along with the Bluetooth MAC address) but despite this, my phone still can’t last 2 days if I take any calls.

2) It doesn’t always wake up for alarms. It’s not Qtopia that’s a fault here but atd or something in the hardware. If I wake up the device manually the alarm goes off but I’ve had a number of near misses because of this and that’s just not acceptable. TT no loner cares about the Greenphone (well, we all still use them to test Qtopia on but we have no more hardware for sale) and hardware issues haven’t been something we’ve been particularly good at fixing, mostly because we’re missing big chunks of kernel source (stupid binary-only kernel modules) and we have no specs for most of the hardware.

3) No PIM sync. I hacked something together to get Qtopia Desktop 2.2 (holding the data left after my A300 died) talking to Qtopia 4.1 but due to a variety of reasons I never got this to complete a 2-way sync. I’ve now got changes to the data in Qtopia Desktop 2.2 and Qtopia 4.1 with no way to sync them together. Not even Qtopia 4.3 (which finally features Qtopia Desktop, now called Qtopia Sync Agent) helps here because I don’t use Windows or Outlook (and that’s the only thing our customers care about so it’s the only thing that was given priority).

Bree asked for a “blueberry” the other day. She meant “blackberry” but more specifically meant PDA-like functionality with PIM sync. To my chagrin her cheap Nokia (series 40) has a good-enough calendar and is now setup for one-click sync to iCal via Bluetooth. It gives her what she wanted and highlights for me just how much I’ve been missing since my A300 died.

So what are my options?

A Neo? Ha! The Neo is the most ugly and unusable phone I’ve ever seen. No buttons, a screen you can’t use your finger on and no slot for a stylus. What were they thinking? For the money it costs to get a Neo I could just get an iPhone.

I briefly used a Motorola ROKR E2 before I got my Greenphone. It runs a Qt/E 2.x based system so getting Qtopia running on it should be relatively easy. It might even have decent PIM apps but I’m not really interested in wrestling my data into whatever format it requires because it’s not my phone (it just happens to sit on my desk because nobody else wants it). I think the ROKR can sync to iCal so it might be a useful way to get my data home. I never bothered doing that in the past because Qtopia 1/2 has a serious bug with it’s “unique” ID generation, no checking for duplicate “unique IDs” and disastrous results if multiple “unique IDs” end up in your dataset (ie. don’t sync with more than one desktop/pda combo).

A while ago now, someone got Linux running on the Treo 650. There are screenshots floating around showing Opie (a fork of Qtopia based on the GPL releases) running on it. I’d really rather the Centro (because I’m not a fan of “big” devices) but it’s CDMA only and since Palm hasn’t actually managed to release a Linux-based device yet, support for newer hardware requires people willing to hack on them and it looks like support for anything other than the 650 is spotty at best. If I’m going to pick up a Treo for Linux development, the 650 is what it needs to be. Oh yeah, and while I’m busy fixing up any problems with Linux and getting Qtopia running there’s my old friend PalmOS to use. Unless you are really keen and install a new bootloader, Linux on a Treo is started from a PalmOS app (like loadlin which loaded Linux from DOS) and runs from an SD card. That means I can quickly and easily switch between environments, kind of like Boot Camp on my Mac.

Since my hard disk is dead, I’ve had to postpone my Treo purchase. I’ve already lost half a dozen or so auctions on eBay but I’ve seen how cheap they can go so I’m prepared to wait for demand to reduce. Strangely, it seems that used Treos go for around $180 while new ones (that aren’t “buy it now” only) go for around $200. I expected the difference to be bigger.

Buying a Treo means I won’t be getting an iPhone but then I only wanted one so I’d have hackability and PIM sync. The iPhone would require an expensive data plan while the Treo can use the cheap plan I’m currently on.

Eve's hard disk dies November 14, 2007

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The bad sectors have caught up with me again. My disk, once dying then apparently ok has developed bad sectors again. I’ve lost half a dozen files from my home directory. I’m not even going to try rescuing my system (my last backup will do). This time the bad sectors are all over the disk, not just in the Windows partition. As far as I’m concerned this disk can no longer be trusted (I’m sure the self test program will once again report no errors but my data is worth more than some stupid program’s report).

So I’ve ordered a replacement drive, a 160GB Seagate ST9160821AS. It might just be coincidence but every non-Seagate drive I’ve ever owned was loud compared to all of the Seagate drives I’ve had. I’m kind of bummed that the 250GB Seagate that I’ve heard rumors about isn’t around. I would have preferred the extra space but then 160GB is a step up from the 100GB I’ve got now (which I haven’t really managed to grow out of yet).

This comes at an inopportune time. I was about to get a Treo 650 (more on that later) so that will have to wait now. I was never really interested in getting the same size to replace the disk simply because I am getting close to growing out of 100GB (I did briefly overload the drive holding some temporary DV footage, that stuff is HUGE). The disk is costing me $1 per GB. I could have paid $300 for the same thing. It makes me sad to think that people will pay such ridiculous prices for things.