You can run a JVC Everio without the hard disk! September 29, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentTo get to the hard disk you need to remove 4 screws (phillips size 0) from the side/bottom (they’re all attached to the side panel). Removing the side panel takes a little bit of effort due to some plastic tabs. In here is the hard disk with some big rubber things on each corner, presumably to minimize vibrations.
The hard disk as a ZIF connector which can be removed by pulling really hard or really easily if you flip the tab first. The ribbon cable connects to the camera and it can be removed from there by flipping a bit up.
The camera runs just fine with the hard disk removed. It seems to think the drive is there and will report errors if you try to use it. Simply tell the camera to use the SD card for videos/stills and you’re good to go.
Or rather, you would be good to go if the SD slot wasn’t broken. I don’t think the SD slot in this camera has ever been used and I had to try a few cards before it managed to do anything at all. It said to format the card and it did that but then it said the card was full. Bummer.
So instead of using an SD card I’m going to get a CF to ZIF adaptor and a 133x (slow) 8GB CF card. These will fit nicely in the space vacated by the hard drive. It’ll cost about $55 and the CF card will give me 2 hours of high quality or 4 hours of normal quality recording. More capacity doesn’t seem to be worthwhile for what I’m expecting to use the camera for. Less capacity doesn’t actually cost less to buy. I could get a faster CF card but I wanted this to be cheap and I need to transcode everything as it comes off the camera anyway.
The CF to ZIF adaptor has been ordered. I’ll test it with a spare/borrowed CF card before getting the 8GB card.
Can you run a JVC Everio Hybrid without the hard disk? August 23, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSo my dad just gave me his JVC Everio Hybrid camcorder. Why? Because after a trip to Africa, the hard disk has the “click of death” syndrome. It was only with a bit of coaxing and luck that I got the videos from Auntie Hazel’s Africa trip off of the camera.
I said to my dad, “you should be fine to rip out the hard disk and just use an SD card” but he decided that sounded too complicated and gave it to me. So I have a video camera again (our last camera had CCD death, we still have it to read the DV format tapes it used).
The only thing is, while I have found mention of the type of hard disk in this camera (a 1.8″ thing like what the iPod Classic uses) I can find no mention of people opening the camera to get at the disk. I’m not even sure it’ll want to work without the disk in place. However, the camera isn’t reliable now (the disk clicking stops the camera from booting) so I guess there’s nothing to lose in opening it up.
Wish me luck.
Update 29 Sept 2009
It seems you can run a JVC Everio without the hard disk.
I want a new laptop June 18, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSo I want a Pre (even more now that it’s proving to be so hackable) but Apple’s recent laptop update has got me wanting a new laptop too.
My MacBook Pro is a first gen and while it still performs the duties I ask of it without complaint I can’t help but look in envy at the new machines.
First there’s the new tech. Newer, more efficient CPU with 64-bit capability and VT instructions. The SD slot will come in more useful than the ExpressCard slot ever did.
Next is the battery life. Thanks to the LED backlight, new battery tech and more efficient parts these things get up to 8 hours of battery life.
The graphics are interesting. From what I can find, the 9400M GPU performs about on par with the X1600 I have now (possibly better since my first-gen machine uses an underclocked X1600). One of the reasons I could never consider moving to the MacBook was because of the drop in GPU performance that would bring. I’ve been enjoying playing games on my machine and while the X1600 isn’t extraordinary, it’s a world away from the Intel GPU performance the MacBooks were saddled with.
There is an option to get a 9600M GT on the 15" models but I can’t really see the point when that model is $500 more than the model without the 9600M GT. The 9400M isn’t going to be a downgrade and that’s good enough for me.
Given my preferences, I’m actually faced with a choice I didn’t expect to get from Apple. My target machine has a 2.53Ghz C2D CPU, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD and 9400M GPU. The choice I get is screen size. It’s amazing the two product lines have merged this far. I guess that’s why they’re calling the 13" machine a MacBook Pro now.
So what does a 15" screen cost you these days? $300. Here’s the thing though. Previously the MacBook had some advantages over the MacBook Pro (to offset the smaller screen). Battery life was better, wireless reception was better and the price was significantly lower. With the current lineup, the only advantages I can see to the 13" model are 0.5kg weight reduction and $300 cheaper. The downside is the that resolution drops. The physical screen being smaller isn’t a problem, just the loss of pixels. It’s not like the machine itself is significantly smaller, 2cm less depth and 4cm less width. I’m definitely leaning towards the 15" model.
Will this make a difference to me now? Probably not. Such a machine would be purchased primarily to take advantage of the new capabilities of Snow Leopard.
Posted from Safari 4 June 10, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSo the final version of Safari 4 is out and it seems to be good. None of that “tabs on top” garbage. I had a few issues with plugins (InputManager “hacks”) but then that happens with every major release. Thanks to the presence of the Safari 4 Beta, the plugins that had problems all had updated versions available.
I did have to drop Inquisitor in preference to Glims though since the former has not released an update supporting Safari 4. Glims has even better session restore functionality than Safari Stand does which leaves Safari Stand doing flash blocking only (ClickToFlash doesn’t yet have a binary release supporting 10.4 but once it does I’ll be able to use that and ditch Safari Stand).
The most important function of Glims (and before it Inquisitor) is to turn the “Google” box into a “Google AU” box. Glims also gives me favicons on tabs. It can do a heap of other things but I like to keep things simple.
Update 11 June 2009
So one of the things I’ve always liked about Safari was the progress meter in the URL bar. This is now gone although there is still _some_ indication of progress. The new Loading blob (with spinner and stop button) starts out dark grey and seems to become light grey once the page itself has been loaded. It seems like Safari now forces the page to render once the page has loaded and it then continues to re-render as additional elements (images, etc.) come in. For all I know Safari has acted like this before but with the loading blob colour change it becomes obvious that it is doing so.
I have a page that goes and fetches things from the body onload method and this action made the loading blob stay. I wouldn’t be surprised if any running JavaScript (or perhaps only user-innitiated JavaScript) causes the loading blob to appear.
CodeWarrior vs GCC and sting literals March 31, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSo one of my favourite Palm games is called Pocket Rogue. Finding the binary on the internets isn’t too hard but the source code is another issue altogether. The source is something I’ve wanted to get access to ever since I got my Treo 650 because there are things the game could do better on this system (eg. high-res bitmaps, better support for the keyboard). I eventually stumbled onto the code one day a while back and re-did the work to make it build under PRC-Tools (I originally did this years ago when I had a Visor Edge).
So anyway, the app randomly crashed on me and I couldn’t figure out why.
Thanks to my recent discovery of How to debug apps under POSE I now know the reason. It’s because of this:
static char *pos = “1007010304050206″;
…
pos[x] = pos[y];
That is, the ‘pos’ buffer is meant to be initialised to a particular value, is preserved across invocations of this function and may be modified (this ‘may be’ is why the crashes were random).
The Pocket Rogue source code is a CodeWarrior project so clearly this construct works with the CodeWarrior compiler but it fails in GCC because *foo ends up referring to data in the storage heap and modifying that without using DmSet causes a crash.
WTF?
Actually, it does make sense. You see “some string” is a literal string and modifying a literal string has undefined behaviour (according to the standards). A literal string should be considered a ‘const char*’ (or for C++ people, char const *). That is, you get a pointer to data that is constant. While some implementations/compilers happen to put string literals into memory that can be overwritten, this is not guaranteed. In the case of GCC for Palm OS, the pointer you get points to the string inside the binary, which of course resides in the data heap (or for NVFS devices, DBCache).
The correct way to initialise this is with code like this:
static char pos[10] = “1007010304050206″;
What’s the difference?
The bad version said “assign to this pointer the value of this string literal” which gives us an address to read-only memory. The updated version says “copy this string literal into this 10 byte character array” which means a memcpy is done behind the scenes.
I would guess that this is what CodeWarrior was doing implicitly.
iTunes 8.1 hates my iPod Shuffle (rev1) March 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , 6commentsI got bitten back when iTunes 7 first came out. It took quite a few versions before I could upgrade from iTunes 6 because the handling of my iPod Shuffle (rev1) was problematic.
It has happened again.
This time it’s iTunes 8.1 and the behaviour is very strange indeed.
Here is my iTunes workflow.
Process:
1) Plug in iPod Shuffle. iTunes opens and shows the shuffle playlist.
2) Sort by last played.
3) Select everything played now*, handily sorted to the top.
4) Sort by order (this reveals any songs I skipped over). If there were skipped songs, add them to the selection and drag the lot over to a holding playlist.
5) Click Autofill. While waiting for this to complete, process the holding playlist.
6) Click Eject.
7) Quit iTunes.
* iPod Shuffle does not record the last played time so iTunes puts in the sync time for any songs that were played. It’s not an ideal solution but it’s better than what we had when the shuffle first came out (last played was not updated at all).
The point of the holding playlist is for me to be able to change things about songs. Usually it’s because I don’t like a song anymore but I’ll also use it to notify myself of problems in audio (eg. bad panning).
The sorting bit requires that I listen to songs “in order” on the iPod. Since iTunes creates a randomized playlist this is fine (no sense in randomizing a randomized list). I have a fairly complicated playlist system setup so my music rotates onto the shuffle more or less frequently based on ratings and last played dates. Perhaps similar to the “play higher rated songs more often” but much more tuneable.
So after installing iTunes 8.1, I noticed a problem. When I sorted the playlist, the songs I had been listening to were not at the top. This has occasionally happened in the past due to the iPod randomly deciding to start in the middle of the playlist but a soft reset of the iPod (press play 3 times quickly) was enough to fix that. With iTunes 8.1 the problem was consistent. Actually, no matter how I looked at it I could not discern a pattern to how the on-screen view of the list was translated into what the device played. When I synced, the on-screen list changed such that the songs the iPod played were in order, though at the wrong end of the playlist. Occasionally I have had the on-screen view in iTunes fail to match the device but “Copy to play order” always fixed this. Now it doesn’t seem to do anything.
I have no idea what is going on. It’s like there is some kind of randomization going on underneath the covers that I cannot control or turn off. I have reverted back to iTunes 8.0.2 and now all is good again. Sadly, my playlists have been set back a few days but I suppose it could have been worse. You generally have to revert to the saved iTunes Library when downgrading. Luckily the only changes to my library in that time were a few days of last played updates.
Chrome tabs, cheating? March 11, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSomething I didn’t quite notice until after I wrote this scathing retort about Safari 4 is that Chrome cheats with its title bar.
The screenshot I took is here:
It’s not at all obvious from that screenshot but Chrome is running on a Windows XP machine with the Classic theme. Why? Because not one of the widgets visible there is drawn through Windows. Interestingly though, this doesn’t bug me (which is strange, because I’m normally the kind of person to be bugged by UI inconsistencies).
When it comes to everything other than the title bar/tab area, I can understand the lack of native widgets. Browsers generally have their own L&F that doesn’t match the platform. All the browsers I have near me have at least some custom-looking widgets on their title bars. Mind you, I don’t think this should extend beyond the toolbar area. Safari 3 on Windows didn’t have anything native. It looked like a Mac app down to the scrollbars and font rendering. That’s not a good way to do things. Chrome seems to use native (or at least native-appearing) widgets where possible. Safari 4 matches this behavior which is something I applaud. Firefox used to (possibly still does?) use non-native Windows-looking widgets. I always remember being annoyed at how Firefox never fit with the desktop style on Linux. Mind you, my current Firefox 3 build does seem to match the desktop style so perhaps they’ve fixed it. Either that or I patched the Firefox package when I installed it.
So the title bar…
I’m not sure if Apple is replacing the title bar completely and emulating the look and feel of the system. If they are, they’re doing more work than Google did since there are at least 3, possible 4 styles they’re emulating – Classic, XP, Vista Basic, Vista Aero (I’m not sure if Aero is a separate style or not).
Despite being non-native the Google title bar doesn’t concern me. Perhaps it’s because it looks like a Vista title bar and that was familiar enough. Perhaps it’s because it gets the controls close enough to their correct locations. Could Google have used/emulated the look of the Classic and XP themes and still had their awesome tab bar? I think so. Why? Google have come out and said they’re not going to monkey around with title bars on Linux and Mac. The first screenshots of Chrome on Mac show they’re not kidding. I think it also clearly shows what Apple should have done with the tab interface in Safari. See how clearly the tabs stand out? See how there’s a title bar above the tabs to click on? You most likely won’t end up with the same seamless transition between title bar and tool bar area on Linux (depending on your Window manager/theme setup perhaps) but I think it’ll be fine. Supporting the Classic and XP themes would likely involve the same trade off, losing the seamless transition that’s there now. For all I know, using native Vista title bars would have the same problem. Perhaps that’s why they cheated in the first place?
Oh yeah… and Safari 4 once again failed because I went to click on a Window while writing this post and managed to close a tab instead. I could rant about this, or just point you to this rant that nicely mentions how click-through should be handled.
Palm Pre vs Nokia 5800 XpressMusic March 9, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : 5800, computers, pre , add a commentSo I’m just not that into the iPhone and the Pre hasn’t materialized yet. Palm’s delay could cause them to lose a fan because my eye has been caught by the 5800.
Working at Nokia means that I get to see various prototype devices. If it wasn’t for this, I would probably not even know what a 5800 was. I saw one at the office, got to play with it and even though it was a prototype running pre-release software I was impressed.
The UI is no iPhone/webOS killer but I’ve always been a function over form guy. Symbian/S60 is a solid platform capable of getting the job done. If I need it, there’s StyleTap for running my legacy Palm apps (an option the Pre cannot have while apps must be written in JavaScript).
Development is superior to webOS. I’ve tried to get excited about Mojo but it’s really hard. In contrast the 5800 will run native code and thanks to Qt for S60 I’ll be able to use an API I’m already familiar with. The only downside could be a need to use a Windows machine for development. Hopefully this will let me avoid that though.
The phone comes with 8GB of removable storage (“something or other”-SD). There are already 16GB cards available for that slot too. Not that I necessarily think I’ll need more than 8GB of storage but knowing I have that option is certainly nice.
The 5800 officially goes on sale in Australia in 11 days.
Safari 4 FAIL February 25, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSo Apple released Safari 4 today. I’ve tried it at work and at home (both Windows and Mac) and it gets a big FAIL from me.
I tried it on Windows first. I run XP with the Classic theme. That’s the one that looks like Windows 2000. Safari looks terrible and out of place. The window decorations are indeed native, except for those horrible tab things getting all over the title bar. The rest of the window has some horrible pastel shading with plastic-looking widgets. I’ve seen a screenshot of what it looks like on Vista and it’s not too bad there, it kind of fits in. It may also fit in with the XP theme but the Classic theme? No.
Open up the preferences app and you get a strange mix of standard Windows widgets and Mac widgets. I’d rather see all Mac widgets or all native widgets than this mixup. It’s quite jarring.
I found a bug too. Click on Customize Toolbar and the whole app just hangs.
When I came home I installed it on my Mac. I run 10.4 because that’s what came with my machine and I don’t see anything particularly compelling about 10.5 (10.6 looks interesting though, bummer about the 32-bit CPU in my MacBook Pro). Anyway, Safari actually managed to look respectable here. Mind you, I have UNO installed so that may have influenced the look a bit. I’ve noticed that newer apps have a Leopard-ish colour scheme that doesn’t really fit with 10.4, that’s why I installed UNO in the first place.
I found a bug here too. Opened a bunch of tabs at once then the UI just froze. Pressed Cmd+W until the tabs had closed (the UI did not reflect this though) and the window went away.
Lets talk about the tabs. They don’t fit even on Mac OS X. They’re clearly modelled on Chrome but there’s something that Chrome has and Safari doesn’t and that’s a title bar. Sure, Chrome makes it seem almost as if it’s not there but it is there and it works like you’d expect. That’s important and worth the extra pixels required. Even the Mac Chrome version in development keeps this separation of title bar and tabs (though it strangely avoids putting tabs underneath the window management buttons).
So Safari 4 is one big FAIL to me. Buggy and ugly. If I wanted faster JavaScript and ACID3 compliance, I’d install a WebKit nightly.
Update 2 March 2009
So I’ve tried Safari 4 with the XP theme and as I suspected, it looks much better. In fact, I’d say that with the XP theme Safari 4 for Windows looks nice. It’s still hamstrung by the lack of a title bar but it doesn’t look ugly.
I’m posting this update from Chrome. It seems to look the same no matter what theme you’re using (though obviously, the controls take on the appropriate appearance). If I used Windows as my primary OS I’d definitely consider using Chrome (I’ve already done some tweaking of Firefox to make it more Chrome-like).
Chrome also (correctly) puts the close tab button on the right side of the tab. Sure, on a Mac you can put it on the left but on Windows it goes on the right.
Update 2 March 2009
Here’s some more Safari annoyances (not specific to Safari 4).
Why does Safari insist on creating the default window at the full height of the screen? This is so annoying!
Why is the status bar disabled by default? Chrome shows how to have no status bar while displaying everything that would normally be displayed on the status bar (ie. a temporarily-visible bar).
Why is the (useful) bookmarks toggle button only available on the bookmarks toolbar? IE gets this right. Chrome gets it half-right (no easy way to see bookmarks without opening a new tab).
Why is the main toolbar becoming less customizable? First it was the Google search box (you could remove this in early versions). Now I can’t remove the Add bookmark button? The search box is redundant because the location bar can be used for searches (or at least it should be able to do this, all the other browsers have this functionality).
Back to the tabs. I took some screen shots. This is what tabs at the top should look like.
See how easy it is to see that there are tabs and where they are? See how obvious it is that you can still click above the tabs to move the window? Here is what Apple did instead.
Yuck.
For completeness, here’s Safari with the XP theme.
And Safari on Vista.
Hey, what happened to “Top Sites” on the Vista machine?
QWERTY vs Dvorak is a lie? January 18, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentWow. It turns out that in the dim recesses of history, a giant hoax was constructed. Dvorak invented his new keyboard layout then proceeded to try and convert the market. It looks though like the accepted version of history (that luck kept QWERTY in place) is wrong.
There’s 2 parts to this article. The first is that QWERTY is better than Dvorak (or at least, that Dvorak does not have enough of an advantage over QWERTY to convert to it). The second is that the distorted QWERTY myth is kept alive to support anti-market policies.
I can’t comment on the second part of the article (though it doesn’t surprise me in the least to hear it) but I taught myself Dvorak so I can comment on Dvorak vs QWERTY.
I taught myself Dvorak back when I was at Uni. It was painful and slow for about 2 weeks but I think that I eventually met and even surpassed my QWERTY speeds. I say “think” because I never measured my results.
There were 2 major problems with Dvorak.
1) It is not friendly to coding or Unix.
2) Many, many environments have a hard-coded assumption of QWERTY layout. Only a hard-wired Dvorak keyboard can remove QWERTY entirely.
The first comes about due to the focus on typing English words. Some of the important meta-characters are moved about and suddenly writing code (at least, C code) becomes harder. The problem with Unix is that it was designed by lazy people that had QWERTY keyboards. As an example, the simple “ls” command becomes a hand-cramping operation in Dvorak, exactly the kind of thing Dvorak was supposed to avoid! I suspect that if Unix had been created by people using Dvorak keyboards the commands would have different names.
The second problem is a problem because I didn’t have the money to buy a hard-wired Dvorak keyboard and you can’t just plug any old keyboard into any old machine. One of the things I needed to do while learning Dvorak was to banish QWERTY altogether. I replaced the key caps on my keyboard but every time I used any other machine I was again forced to deal with QWERTY. BIOS, Games, etc. tended to avoid the OS-provided keyboard remapping which caused problems.
After I had learned the layout, I memorized the keys and went back to QWERTY key caps. That made swapping between machines a little bit easier but still, most other machines aren’t setup to do key mapping to Dvorak. Strangely, I found it better to cope with Dvorak on my system and QWERTY on other systems than I could with Dvorak and QWERTY on the same system. In the end though, the use of Dvorak on my machine slowed down my QWERTY typing on other machines and I tend to use other machines quite a bit.
So while I did get faster typing Dvorak it was false economy. I wasn’t a particularly good QWERTY typist to start with. I’m much faster now at QWERTY than I was before I learned Dvorak. Faster than I was with Dvorak? Perhaps but I’m not sure. I haven’t used Dvorak in years.
So go and read the article. It’s really long but it’s an interesting deconstruction of a long-believed myth.