Core Dump

Many years ago, in a previous life, I worked as a part-time radio DJ in small-town radio. It was an interesting experience and I l earned a lot of useful things about recording, editing, and mixing voice and music recordings. The technology has changed a lot since then, gotten a lot simpler and cheaper, but the basics are still the same. Tom Johnson covers a lot of these basics in his post, What's the Best Microphone for Screencasting, in which his quest for better sound on his screencasts leads him to examine several different pieces of equipment and recording techniques. If you are podcasting or screencasting, this is well worth reading.

Labels: hardware, podcasts

The original Asus Eee PC is a nifty little machine at a very reasonable price. As much as I'd like to have one, I couldn't use it because the screen is just too small. But Asus has brought out a new model, the 901, with a slightly larger screen and a faster processor. It's something I might consider buying, as I found when I went to Vancouver, travelling without a computer is immensely frustrating. There's a review of the 901 here.

Labels: hardware

Bob Doyle's overview of DITA editors and other tools, DITA Tools from A to Z is now available from the dita.xml.org site. It was originally published in Intercom.

Labels: hardware

A subwoofer is an essential part of a good home theatre system, but they can be tricky to set up. Because bass sounds have a long wavelength, it's easy to get standing waves that can cancel out a lot of the sound. In my case, the bass is quite a bit louder at the back and side of the room, compared to where we sit to watch TV.

CNet has put together a subwoofer setup guide to help you overcome some of these issues. The guide covers placement and positioning, and connectivity and tuning.

Update: And quite coincidentally, here's an article on how to tweak your surround sound system so that big subwoofer doesn't blow you out of the room or get you in trouble with your neighbours.

Labels: hardware

There's a bit of a controversy going with Creative and their users right now, after Creative jumped on a user who was modifying their drivers so users of older sound cards could use them with Windows Vista. Consumerist has a long post about what's going on.

Creative's executive team will be coming in to quite a mess Monday morning, thanks to its VP of Screw Ups, Phil O'Shaughnessy. Friday morning, he posted a warning on the Creative customer forums that told programmer Daniel_K to stop writing his own drivers for their X-Fi sound cards. The cards still won't work on Vista over a year after the OS was released, because Creative hasn't released drivers for them—but by Mr. O'Shaughnessy's account, Daniel_K is "stealing" from Creative by making the cards work. Then the weekend happened.

Over the weekend, Creative's forums have exploded with posts from angry customers who have sworn to stop buying their products. There's already a boycott site up at boycottcreative.com.

I have an original Audigy sound card which I transferred to my new PC, only to find that while Creative has updated XP drivers, most of the original utilities for the card are no longer supported. Guess I'll be looking for a new sound card manufacturer the next time around.

Update: Wired has an interview with Daniel_K, in which he explains just what modifications he made and why. It definitely looks like Creative was crippling the drivers for its older cards to drive sales of the new ones, to the point of deliberately introducing bugs in the drivers. Shameful behaviour. I won't be buying Creative again.

Labels: hardware, Vista

The RFID Guardian is a real hardware firewall - it's designed to block the output from any RFID tags you have on your person.

The RFID Guardian project has released the hardware and software schematics for the latest version of its personal RFID firewall. The RFID Guardian is a device that detects all the RFID tags on your person (passport, transit pass, bank-card, toll-card, car keys, etc), and interdicts them so that they can't answer queries anymore. The Guardian can clone all of these tags, and emit their signal on demand, but unlike a dumb tag, the Guardian only emits when you tell it to, and gives you a central way to set and enforce policy about when you will be identified and by whom.

Labels: hardware, security

NEC has a new ultra-lite laptop, and it's pretty darn close to being a machine that I might seriously think about buying. NEC's 12-inch VY10A 14-hour battery life and 2.1 lb weight make it mighty appealing. Replace the 40 GB hard drive with a 32 MB flash drive and it'd be just about perfect. And probably well out of my price range, sigh.

Labels: hardware

Twenty-five years ago, if someone told me that typewriters would have almost completely disappeared, I'd have laughed at them. I can't remember the last time I saw a typewriter - maybe five years ago in a dentist's office where it was being used to type envelopes.

I've owned three or four, but never the one I really wanted - an IBM Selectric. They were beautiful machines, and I've never found a computer keyboard that comes close to the tactile joy that was typing on one of those machines. The only typewriter I have now is a virtual machine - the logo of my Internet Resources for Technical Communicators site. While I miss the physicality of writing on a typewriter, there's no way I'd ever go back to writing without using a word processor.


The Virtual Typewriter Museum is an extensive site devoted to the history and lore of typewriters. You can read about their history (and demise), browse by brand, and view pictures of assembled and disassembled machines.

Labels: hardware

Herewith, a couple of incidents that illustrate what can happen when hardware has buggy firmware.

I've just spent more than half a day debugging a document that did one of the weirdest things I've seen in my career as a technical writer - it would cause a networked printer to reset its network interface.

The doc in question is a large technical specification, about 110 pages, with lots of embedded Visio diagrams. When I printed the document, it would get up to page 84, and then the printer (a big Xerox Document Center 460 PS), would reset it's network interface, the job queue would clear, then after a couple of minutes, it'd reload the queue, try to print the document again, and repeat the process. Given that about 50 people use this printer, it did not make me popular. There was about a 5-second window in which the printer would let me delete the offending job - trying to delete the job felt like playing a video game - if I didn't get the timing just right, I was hosed.

After a lot of messing around deleting section breaks and diagrams and so on, I finally figured out that the problem was one large Visio diagram. After I deleted that from the document, all was fine.

I've seen complex diagrams fail to print and generate a printer error message. But this is the first time I've ever seen a document crash a printer. Incidentally, it would print fine on a different, smaller Xerox.

I am the happy owner of an iRiver 1 GB flash memory MP3 player. It's small, well made, sounds good, and records both voice and FM. It's almost two years old and is still working, something of a surprise considering I use it for hours almost every day. But rececently, it's been rebooting itself a lot when playing MP3s.

There didn't seem to be any real pattern to the reboots. I'd be listening to a song and suddenly the player would reboot and jump to the next song. Needless to say it was annoying, especially when it was happening to every second song. I thought that it might be due to the flash memory being corrupted, in which case I'd probably need a new player.

I finally decided to see if I could find any information about the problem on the Web, and after a bit of Googling had the answer. There's a bug in the player's firmware that only surfaces when playing 192 Kbs variable-bit-rate MP3s and with the Normal equalization setting selected. Switching to a different equalization setting stops the problem.

I'm glad I don't have a pacemaker.

Labels: hardware

Xerox is working on an inkless printing technology using reusable paper and a a printer that uses ultraviolet light.

In 2003, after a period an extensive market research, Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) began work on a new type of paper, one which can be written on and erased simply by applying light of a certain wavelength to it. The idea behind the development of this technology is the possibility to create paper that can hold information for a short period of time and can easily be reused time and time again.

The erasable paper developed by the Xerox team is still in relatively early stages of development. So far the team was able to write and re-write about 50 times on each sheet of paper using a modified multifunction printer. The printer includes a special ultra-violet (U.V.) light source which is used to write on the special paper. No ink of any kind is used in the process and the resulting printed pages do not smudge or smear when touched. The pages do degrade over time and currently can last between 16-24 hours before returning to their original blank form. The Xerox team is now looking for ways to better control this degradation process. If a new way will be found to impede the process altogether, while still maintaining the ability to manually erase the paper, Xerox can truly claim to have revolutionized printing.

This could be quite a useful technology. Even if the printing had a limited life, there's a lot of stuff that gets printed (meeting handouts, agendas, and so on) that doesn't need to kept for long periods.

Labels: hardware, technology

Here's an interesting article on hard drives, based on a study that looked at over 100,000 hard drives in commercial and academic installations. The previous day's post on the blog is about a similar paper, prepared by a Google researcher -- Google uses hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of hard drives in its data centres.

There are some really interesting results. For example, there's no real "infant mortality" syndrome with hard drives - failure rates rise steadily with age, and manufacturers mean-time-between-failure times are probably about 3 times too high. And there's not a lot of difference in replacement rates between high-end server SCSI drives and consumer grade SATA drives.

These papers are going to be required reading, not only for a lot IT people, but anyone with a lot of data on their home systems.

Labels: hardware

I've been reading The Beatles Chronicles recently, which is a day-by-day look at the carreer of the Beatles. Their early years, before 1963, make for fascinating reading. It's amazing how many artifacts - letters, posters, pictures and so on have survived - though I'd trade all of those for a good quality recording of a couple of Star Club or Cavern Club shows from 1960 or 1961.

Younger fans may have a hard time understanding just how primitive the early Beatles performance and recoding gear was. Any teenage garage band has access to far better recoring gear than the Beatles did even by the end of their carer. If you're interested in the techie side of music and the Beatles in particular, read Fab Four: Analog to Digital in Wired, which is a review of the book Recording the Beatles.

Gazing at all these pictures of beautiful, ancient, analog gear, I felt like a character out of Blade Runner looking at a pictures of real animals after they had gone extinct (nearly) and been replaced by clones. The equipment at Abbey Road and the other studios chronicled in the book has a magical feel to it that's impossible to replicate in a software interface.

It belongs to an opulent, if ramshackle, analog recording age that will never return. With the music industry's shrinking budgets and growing reliance on digital technology, who can afford teams of amp room technicians in white lab coats, or studio attendants in brown ones? For that matter, where do you even buy 2-inch tape anymore?

Labels: hardware, music

I'm eagerly awaiting the start of seaon 3 of the new Dr. Who. In the meantime, here's a couple of Dr. Who items. First, a 4-port USB hub in the shape of a TARDIS. If I ever see one, I'm buying it on sight. Second, here's a video mashup called Dr. Who and the French Dalek - the video is from the Dr. Who story, Dalek - the audio is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's hilarious.

Labels: hardware, SF, video

Don Norman is the author of the popular and influentional books The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design. In his web page, In Praise of Good Design, he features products that he likes. I want the PaperPro Desktop Stapler - I have yet to find a good small stapler.

Labels: hardware

Business Week has an article about the marketplace battle between plasma and LCD TVs. Prices are dropping and LCD sets are now beginning to dominate the market in sizes 40" and smaller. I was in Best Buy the other night and you can now get a 32" LCD set for under $1000. With my vision, I'd probably want a 42" set, but even these are coming down in price. And looking at the sets, it's not easy to see any difference between plasma and LCD, something that wasn't true a couple of years ago.

They also have a short slide show showing how plasma sets are made.

Labels: hardware

As the owner of a (by current standards) stone-age TV set, I am in awe of this guy, who built a home theatre setup in the form of a ship's bridge from Star Trek.

Labels: hardware

Steve Jobs' wannouncement yesterday of the Apple iPhone has been generating quite a bit of buzz in the press, both mainstream and tech. It does look like a tres cool device, with Apples usual attention to detail and a slick user-friendly interface. Some of the best coverage came from David Pogue of the New York Times, who got some hands-on time with the iPhone during his interview with Jobs. Gizmode also had some hands-on time with the phone (here and here), followed up by some second thoughts.

I'm of mixed feelings about this. I like the idea of having a phone, media player, and wireless web browser in one small, handy device. But the touch screen interface may not be practical for some things - would I have to look at the screen to switch MP3s? - something I can do, by touch, with my iRiver player while it's in my pocket. The relatively limited battery life and non-replaceable battery is also a negative factor for me - my phone gets over 100 hours on a charge, and while I don't get anywhere near that on my MP3 player, I can change the battery if it dies while I'm on the way to work (as it did today). Still, a lot of people are going to buy it, and maybe it'll raise the bar for user interfaces on portable devices, which generally suck.

Labels: hardware

VCRs are pretty much a dead technology now. I like our DVD recorder, but if I had the bucks I'd like something with a big hard drive so I wouldn't have to keep swapping disks. Something like the Hannibal Device, which has the Tivo and every other similar device I've seen beat hands down. BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow says:

The Hannibal Deuce Plus is a monster bad-ass set-top box. Built on a Ubuntu Linux box with the incredible Mythtv tivoing software, it does all the things that the other companies lack the courage to try. It'll rip and store your DVDs, it'll Torrent videos off the net and store them, it'll skip commercials and grab your pictures off your camera's memory card and organize them for you. It's got WiFi and Ethernet, and can run multiple tuner-cards if you want to record shows off of more than one channel at a time.

Labels: hardware, movies and television