Bits, pieces, and fun stuff
Bits and pieces have been trickling in for the past couple of weeks and I’m ready to start playing.
Hey! Why is it I can get next day delivery from Texas, but I order something from Mississauga and it takes nearly 2 weeks to arrive?
Anyway, here’s the PC:
The PVR 350 and 500 cards:
Big-honk’n-hard-drive, dvd burner, and ram:
I’ve wanted a Bluetooth enabled cell phone for a long time. I tried switching to Rogers and a Sony T68i a couple of years ago but their network has this annoying habit of dying 3 blocks from my home (not good when your cell is your primary phone) so I had to switch back to Bell Mobility.
Unfortunately Bell has the crappiest selection of phones on the planet. It’s taken forever for them to get a Bluetooth phone (that’s not a PDA, or limited to headset connectivity) in their lineup. They’ve finally done so with the Motorola E815.
I picked one up at a Bell Mobility store last night. Though the E815 is not the slickest phone around (I’d prefer a RAZR) it’s that whole "beggars not being choosers" thing.
When I got home I paired it with my laptop and that went without a hitch. I was able to get iSync to successfully sync my Calendar but it failed to sync my Contacts with a "The connection was lost while talking to the device. Device "Motorola Phone" synchronization failed" error.
It turns out that this is a common problem (as noted here, here, and here). Apparently there is a setting in the phone that conflicts with iSync and prevents it from succesfully syncing your contacts. The recommended solution is to perform a seem edit on the phone to disable the offending feature. To do so requires a Windows XP machine, software, drivers, an expensive USB cable, and a bunch of headache.
The alternate, I discovered, is to use OnMadeSoft’s OnSync. OnSync is a $US12 piece of shareware that provides and alternate means of syncing your AddressBook with your phone. I downloaded the demo and tested it, and it works great. OnSync also gives a great deal of control over the format of the phone contacts entries which is nice.
I am saddened to learn from the Make blog that John Simonton, the founder of PAiA, and probably one of my all-time electronics hobbyist heros, died of cancer sometime last week.
Although I was never able to afford any of his kits as a kid, a friend of mine built the Gnome, and I drooled over the PAiA catalog endlessly. I cannot understate the impact his kits and articles in Popular Electronics had on my electronics career.
create digital music has a good post with plenty of links to commentary and forums.
PAiA has made a resurgence in recent years, I hope his passing will not effect the availability of their kits.
Inspired by Make, I’ve decided to get my hands dirty again by building a PVR (personal video recorder) for fun. Tivo’s aren’t available in Canada and any of the commercial units are just a tad too "closed" for my liking.
I’m going with MythTV as the core application running on Linux (there is a decent overview of MythTV here). The distro I’ve chosen is the very slick KnoppMyth. It looks like it is definitely the quickest way to get to the end result without having to spend a lot of time hacking Linux (which I have done in the past and would prefer not to have to do again).
Gaining access to Canadian TV listings was a little bit of a concern initially but it looks like MythTV works with a feed from Zap2it Labs.
I downloaded the latest version of KnoppMyth a couple of days ago and the Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-500 cards arrived this morning.
The PC I chose is an off-lease Dell GXF240 (P4 1.7 – small desktop). I liked the form-factor, but the card cage may be a little small for the cards (at least the PVR-500). I’m hoping I can get them to fit, but think I’m going to have to do some Dremel work. It was only a couple of hundred bucks, so I don’t mind experimenting.
The 300GB hard drive, DVD burner, and PC should be arriving shortly. Then it’ll be time to get to work.
Leave it to Apple to come out with a multi-button mouse without multiple buttons. Instead they use sensors under the skin of the mouse to detect where the click occured. In addition there are “force-sensing” buttons to detect if you squeeze the mouse and a scroll ball that tracks vertical and horizontal scrolling.
It’s wired and at CAN$ 65 it’s a little expensive. But that’s OK, I’ve got a pair of scissors and absolutely no aversion to debt.