Although a dinosaur in the iPod generation, I do like my tunes. By todays standards, my mp3 player is ancient and obsolete. But it does its job, and I like it. In fact, I like it so much, I dread the day that it no longer works.
That day was almost yesterday. I have an RCA Lyra RD1028A. I think I bought it before apple even came out with iPod. At the time there was a lot of competition about mp3 players as they were just becoming a hot market item. My Lyra is really quite rugged and comes with an arm band that can be used for jogging. It only has 128mb internal storage, but has a very useful SD memory card slot. It takes a single AAA battery, and connects to the computer thru a USB slot (in the player). I stress the last point, because it doesn't need a special cable. It can use any USB-mini cable out there.
When it plugs into the computer, it mounts two drives, one for the internal storage, and one for the SD card (if it is in the device). This is especially important to me, as I dont want to be forced to run proprietary software in order to put songs on the device. Its also useful because it is essentially a card reader, and my wife uses it to transfer pictures more easily from the SD card that is in our camera.
The AAA battery (I use rechargeable ones, and charge them in a wall charger) can run the player for about a week with my usual usage. In solid runtime it would probably got for about 8 to 12 hours, but thats a guess.
The audio quality is excellent. Although the interface and audio options are quite basic. I cant store my entire music collection on it, but in reality I dont want to listen to my entire music collection. Most of it is junk. I just want 60 or so songs on it that I know I currently like. I switch out different songs to it on a semi-regular basis. Works well for me, and I think I paid $50 or $60 for it.
In short, it works, and it works good. But yesterday, it stopped working. It starting behaving strangely and when I turned it off and replaced the battery, it wouldn't turn back on. Actually, it turned on, but couldn't get past the 'RCA' screen which normally only lasts about 5 seconds.
I plugged it in to the computer and immediately could see that the partition label was no longer there, but I could see songs. I tried copying some different songs over, and it got thru a couple of them before I started getting IO errors.
I also noticed that the settings.dat file only had 6 bytes in it. I was pretty sure it was at least 200 bytes normally.
I did plenty of googling, searching for a fancy button pressing combination that restores everything to the factory settings, but couldn't find anything except for a lot of people who also had similar problems, with no solution.
So with a beating heart, I formatted the drive (for the device) and then copied some songs over, without getting any errors. I unplugged it from the computer and turned it on. About 10 seconds later, my speakers were once again filled with rich sound.
After finding no good answers on the internet, I was ready to throw it away, but then thought I'd give it one last desperate try, and am ever so grateful that I did.
So to everyone else. If you have an RCA Lyra RD1028A and it gets stuck starting up. Plug it into your computer and format it. It just might work.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Devices that use standard USB ports are awesome
This week, my daughter had severe pain in her stomach, so we took her to the hospital to get checked out. Since we didn't know how long we would be there, I took my usual assortment of gadgets, including my new ASUS EeePC. After an hour or so, I realized that my phone hadn't been charged for a while and the battery indicator was in the red.
Most people, don't tend to carry phone chargers around with them. I did however have my little laptop, and also a standard USB-mini cable. So I simply plugged the phone into the laptop which I was already using. A short time later and the phone is fully charged.
Such a simple thing could have easily been an extreme annoyance if I was without a phone and having to contact family members for news or assistance.
The simple fact that my phone uses a USB port for charging has been extremely useful. This is not the first time this has been handy. I can charge my phone almost anywhere. Even if you dont have a USB-mini cable on you, almost everyone has one, either with a camera or MP3 player.
The ability to also connect to the phone using a standard cable that I can buy anywhere instead of a proprietary cable that may or may not be provided with the phone means that I can leave a cable hooked up at work and at home so I don't have to reach behind a computer to plug the phone into it. So simple, and yet so convenient.
Also, I can still charge the phone with the supplied power adapter, or I can charge the phone from the computer.
I can only hope that this becomes more common, as I dont want a new phone unless it has a USB port, because it has been the most convenient and life-saving aspect of this entire phone.
Oh, and the daughter had her appendix removed the next day, is home now, and doing just fine.
Most people, don't tend to carry phone chargers around with them. I did however have my little laptop, and also a standard USB-mini cable. So I simply plugged the phone into the laptop which I was already using. A short time later and the phone is fully charged.
Such a simple thing could have easily been an extreme annoyance if I was without a phone and having to contact family members for news or assistance.
The simple fact that my phone uses a USB port for charging has been extremely useful. This is not the first time this has been handy. I can charge my phone almost anywhere. Even if you dont have a USB-mini cable on you, almost everyone has one, either with a camera or MP3 player.
The ability to also connect to the phone using a standard cable that I can buy anywhere instead of a proprietary cable that may or may not be provided with the phone means that I can leave a cable hooked up at work and at home so I don't have to reach behind a computer to plug the phone into it. So simple, and yet so convenient.
Also, I can still charge the phone with the supplied power adapter, or I can charge the phone from the computer.
I can only hope that this becomes more common, as I dont want a new phone unless it has a USB port, because it has been the most convenient and life-saving aspect of this entire phone.
Oh, and the daughter had her appendix removed the next day, is home now, and doing just fine.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Ubuntu is great?
I'm a long-time linux user. In fact I've been using linux pretty much exclusively for years. My distro of choice has been ArchLinux. One of the great things about ArchLinux is that it has a very simple yet very powerful package management system and is designed to give you as much freedom as possible on configuring it the way you want to configure it. The down side of this is that it is not a very good distro for the average user. Its perfect for me and my servers, but I hesitate putting it on computers that I wont be directly managing.
So when I needed to do a reinstall on the family computer that the wife and kids use, I thought it was time to actually give Ubuntu a try. All throughout the media and internet I have heard over and over again about how wonderful ubuntu is, and how perfect it is for casual consumers. That sounded pretty good to me. In fact, even though I'd never actually tried it myself, when people asked me what distro they should try, I often recommended Ubuntu, purely on the hype that has surrounded it.
So I downloaded the Ubuntu LiveCD. The idea is that you boot off the CD and get to see a fully functioning version of Ubuntu and then get the opportunity to install it to the computer's hard drive. Thats a cool idea, and I've shown off LiveCD's in the past, but I really would have preferred an actual install CD, assuming that would allow me to avoid the 5 minutes of booting into the LiveCD. Anyway... no big deal.
The Ubuntu LiveCD automatically detected the sound card, and seemed to run ok (but understandably slow as it had to load files from the CD). So I initiated the hard drive installation process. I did this a week ago, and cant remember any specific details or questions asked, but the installation took over an hour. That surprised me. I can get a fully functioning ArchLinux install done in about 10 minutes, but I've done it a few times so I know what I'm doing, but still, it took way longer than I found acceptable. Oh well, maybe it was installing much more stuff than I normally do with ArchLinux, so I was willing to wait for it to complete.
When the initial installation was complete and rebooted I was glad to see that it noticed the Windows2000 installation taht was already on there for dual-booting, and it had added it automatically to the grub boot-up menu.
So I now had a running Ubuntu machine, but we're not finished there. Thats only the beginning. Whenever I do an ArchLinux install, the first thing I normally need to do it update any packages need it. So when Ubuntu started up and logged in, I saw in the top-right corner a text-bubble saying that there are updates available. Excellent. So I start that, and there are a lot of packages with updates.... its gonna take a while to download and install all those.
Two hours later, it finishes updating. It is now telling me the system is up-to-date. Alright, cool!. But wait, whats that little icon with blue arrows in a circle? That wasn't there before. I move the mouse over it, and some text pops up saying that the system needs to be rebooted. Hmm... would have been nice if it had of put something up a little bit more obvious than that. That could have been very confusing for the novice if things didn't work correctly after everything was updated. They might assume that the update failed and messed up their system.
To be fair, ArchLinux doesn't tell you if you need to reboot after updating or installing packages, but then, its not targeted to a consumer user.
So onto the next thing, some pop-up text in the top-right corner is telling me that there are some proprietary packages available for my hardware. I open that and see nVidia listed. Excellent, I had noticed that the graphics were sluggish, maybe installing the proper drivers will improve that.
Installation of the nvidia drivers seemed to be ok, except for that little icon change telling me that I need to reboot. Seriously guys, cant we make that step a bit more obvious for users?
So a quick reboot (not really, ArchLinux booted up in about 35-45 seconds, Ubuntu is more like 2 minutes), and immediately notice a difference. Its not hard to miss because everything is huge, the resolution is wrong. That would suck for joe consumer, but I'm a savy tech guy, I know that all I have to do is set the resolution correctly.
This is where I encounter the ubuntu (and gnome I guess since I've always been more of a KDE user) crazy menu system. Ok, 'System', that makes sence... but what is the difference between Preferences and Administration? In administration, I see something that mentions screens, ok, I'll try that. But it needs the super password. Sheesh, thats a bit stupid, why need that to change resolution. I go in there, and find that with the real nvidia drivers, the highest resolution I have is 800x600... that sucks. Almost unusable. Ok, I know how to roll my own xorg.conf file, but I really dont want to do that. Also, how would joe consumer be able to do that? Maybe he would just assume that it sucks and go back to windows?
So out of curiosity, I look in the Preferences menu, and see 'Screen Resolution' in there. Ahhh, ok. No password this time. Same resolution options available, and I dont want to stick with 800x600, so I revert back to the open nv drivers until I have time to fix the xorg.conf with the real nvidia drivers.
I must say, I'm pretty dissapointed at this stage. I'm a big fan of linux, but fear that if people are trying out ubuntu under the impression that it is heaps better than windows, they might come out of the experience thinking that linux pretty much sucks. I certainly don't want people getting that impression.
So I leave it for a couple of days as I'm pretty busy (we have a newborn baby in the house). My some complains that he cant play any of the flash-based games he normally plays, so I realize that Ubuntu mustn't have flash installed by default. Alright, thats normally a very simple fix. In archlinux, simply taking 5 seconds to install the flash package is all that is necessary. I figure that I will have the same experience here. No, I was wrong.
So, I've heard enough about Ubuntu to know that Synaptics is used to installing software, and find it in the Administration menu. Why did it take so long to load? Anyway, its there now. Hmm... how do I make sure the repository contents are up-to-date? Nothing obvious at all, nothing in the menus. There is a Reload button, but surely its not that. Click. Yep, it was that. Ok, now come on guys, thats just stupid. How is Joe user supposed to know that?
Anyway, back to what I was originally doing. Installing flash. While messing with synaptics I ended up closing the window. When I went to open it again, I this time went to the Applications menu, and noticed the Add/Remove... selection. I was pretty sure that wasnt what I did previously, but figured it might take me to where I wanted to go. It does look different, and it seemed to be synchronising against the repository.
Oh well, I type in 'flash' into the search field, ... no packages. What? How can there be no packages for flash? Hmm... Ok, now I remembered something about the latest firefox integrating better with Ubuntu and flash, so maybe I should try installing flash from firefox itself.
I go back to firefox and load up a page that has flash on it. Click on the download plugins thing when it comes up, and sure enough it asks me which version of flash I want to use. It has a choice for the non-free version, or the gnash version (which, based on the description, looks limited). So I choose the non-free version (joe user might assume that non-free meant that he had to pay for it).
It starts the install process... and tells me everything succeeded. I reload firefox, go to a flash page... wait! its not working. Hmm... Maybe I needed to reboot (no little blue arrow icon though). Reboot didn't fix it. So I try the process again. This time I expand the window and watch it doing the install. The install fails though due to an MD5 mismatch. I know what that means, but Joe user wont. It means that adobe must have updated the flash download, but the Ubuntu installer doesn't recognize it as valid. Joe user wouldn't understand that though, and would likely find it very frustrating.
So how do we get flash to work? We try the second option, the Gnash thing. Load up a site with flash, and it appears to be working at first, but then I noticed some of the fonts are about 100 times too big, and other elements are not drawing properly.... gnash does not work very well. So lets try and remove it and manually put the adobe one in.
Synaptics doesn't know that gnash is installed. In fact, it says that it isn't installed. Firefox must have installed it outside of synaptics even though it really did look like synaptics was installing it.
This is getting frustrating. And compared to ArchLinux, Ubuntu is very sluggish. ArchLinux by nature is a very fast distribution, and this machine really isnt very powerfull, so thats a little bit unfair, but its much slower than the Windows2000 installation that used to be on this machine. That hardly looks good at all.
I'm going to stop writing now, as I'm getting frustrated just re-living this experience. I have a lot of hope for Ubuntu, and if time permits, I might look at finding a forum or mailing list, to pass on these observations to the Ubuntu developers in the hopes that I can contribute to the project in some way.
As of now, I still don't have flash working on this machine, and quite frankly I am thinking about removing Ubuntu and starting it again from scratch just in case installing gnash has messed it up more than I can fix easily, but the prospect of it taking close to 5 hours has me re-considering, and maybe putting ArchLinux back on there.
I think I might re-do my steps, and will publish a retraction if I discover that I was just an idiot and missed a crucial step. Here's hoping...
So when I needed to do a reinstall on the family computer that the wife and kids use, I thought it was time to actually give Ubuntu a try. All throughout the media and internet I have heard over and over again about how wonderful ubuntu is, and how perfect it is for casual consumers. That sounded pretty good to me. In fact, even though I'd never actually tried it myself, when people asked me what distro they should try, I often recommended Ubuntu, purely on the hype that has surrounded it.
So I downloaded the Ubuntu LiveCD. The idea is that you boot off the CD and get to see a fully functioning version of Ubuntu and then get the opportunity to install it to the computer's hard drive. Thats a cool idea, and I've shown off LiveCD's in the past, but I really would have preferred an actual install CD, assuming that would allow me to avoid the 5 minutes of booting into the LiveCD. Anyway... no big deal.
The Ubuntu LiveCD automatically detected the sound card, and seemed to run ok (but understandably slow as it had to load files from the CD). So I initiated the hard drive installation process. I did this a week ago, and cant remember any specific details or questions asked, but the installation took over an hour. That surprised me. I can get a fully functioning ArchLinux install done in about 10 minutes, but I've done it a few times so I know what I'm doing, but still, it took way longer than I found acceptable. Oh well, maybe it was installing much more stuff than I normally do with ArchLinux, so I was willing to wait for it to complete.
When the initial installation was complete and rebooted I was glad to see that it noticed the Windows2000 installation taht was already on there for dual-booting, and it had added it automatically to the grub boot-up menu.
So I now had a running Ubuntu machine, but we're not finished there. Thats only the beginning. Whenever I do an ArchLinux install, the first thing I normally need to do it update any packages need it. So when Ubuntu started up and logged in, I saw in the top-right corner a text-bubble saying that there are updates available. Excellent. So I start that, and there are a lot of packages with updates.... its gonna take a while to download and install all those.
Two hours later, it finishes updating. It is now telling me the system is up-to-date. Alright, cool!. But wait, whats that little icon with blue arrows in a circle? That wasn't there before. I move the mouse over it, and some text pops up saying that the system needs to be rebooted. Hmm... would have been nice if it had of put something up a little bit more obvious than that. That could have been very confusing for the novice if things didn't work correctly after everything was updated. They might assume that the update failed and messed up their system.
To be fair, ArchLinux doesn't tell you if you need to reboot after updating or installing packages, but then, its not targeted to a consumer user.
So onto the next thing, some pop-up text in the top-right corner is telling me that there are some proprietary packages available for my hardware. I open that and see nVidia listed. Excellent, I had noticed that the graphics were sluggish, maybe installing the proper drivers will improve that.
Installation of the nvidia drivers seemed to be ok, except for that little icon change telling me that I need to reboot. Seriously guys, cant we make that step a bit more obvious for users?
So a quick reboot (not really, ArchLinux booted up in about 35-45 seconds, Ubuntu is more like 2 minutes), and immediately notice a difference. Its not hard to miss because everything is huge, the resolution is wrong. That would suck for joe consumer, but I'm a savy tech guy, I know that all I have to do is set the resolution correctly.
This is where I encounter the ubuntu (and gnome I guess since I've always been more of a KDE user) crazy menu system. Ok, 'System', that makes sence... but what is the difference between Preferences and Administration? In administration, I see something that mentions screens, ok, I'll try that. But it needs the super password. Sheesh, thats a bit stupid, why need that to change resolution. I go in there, and find that with the real nvidia drivers, the highest resolution I have is 800x600... that sucks. Almost unusable. Ok, I know how to roll my own xorg.conf file, but I really dont want to do that. Also, how would joe consumer be able to do that? Maybe he would just assume that it sucks and go back to windows?
So out of curiosity, I look in the Preferences menu, and see 'Screen Resolution' in there. Ahhh, ok. No password this time. Same resolution options available, and I dont want to stick with 800x600, so I revert back to the open nv drivers until I have time to fix the xorg.conf with the real nvidia drivers.
I must say, I'm pretty dissapointed at this stage. I'm a big fan of linux, but fear that if people are trying out ubuntu under the impression that it is heaps better than windows, they might come out of the experience thinking that linux pretty much sucks. I certainly don't want people getting that impression.
So I leave it for a couple of days as I'm pretty busy (we have a newborn baby in the house). My some complains that he cant play any of the flash-based games he normally plays, so I realize that Ubuntu mustn't have flash installed by default. Alright, thats normally a very simple fix. In archlinux, simply taking 5 seconds to install the flash package is all that is necessary. I figure that I will have the same experience here. No, I was wrong.
So, I've heard enough about Ubuntu to know that Synaptics is used to installing software, and find it in the Administration menu. Why did it take so long to load? Anyway, its there now. Hmm... how do I make sure the repository contents are up-to-date? Nothing obvious at all, nothing in the menus. There is a Reload button, but surely its not that. Click. Yep, it was that. Ok, now come on guys, thats just stupid. How is Joe user supposed to know that?
Anyway, back to what I was originally doing. Installing flash. While messing with synaptics I ended up closing the window. When I went to open it again, I this time went to the Applications menu, and noticed the Add/Remove... selection. I was pretty sure that wasnt what I did previously, but figured it might take me to where I wanted to go. It does look different, and it seemed to be synchronising against the repository.
Oh well, I type in 'flash' into the search field, ... no packages. What? How can there be no packages for flash? Hmm... Ok, now I remembered something about the latest firefox integrating better with Ubuntu and flash, so maybe I should try installing flash from firefox itself.
I go back to firefox and load up a page that has flash on it. Click on the download plugins thing when it comes up, and sure enough it asks me which version of flash I want to use. It has a choice for the non-free version, or the gnash version (which, based on the description, looks limited). So I choose the non-free version (joe user might assume that non-free meant that he had to pay for it).
It starts the install process... and tells me everything succeeded. I reload firefox, go to a flash page... wait! its not working. Hmm... Maybe I needed to reboot (no little blue arrow icon though). Reboot didn't fix it. So I try the process again. This time I expand the window and watch it doing the install. The install fails though due to an MD5 mismatch. I know what that means, but Joe user wont. It means that adobe must have updated the flash download, but the Ubuntu installer doesn't recognize it as valid. Joe user wouldn't understand that though, and would likely find it very frustrating.
So how do we get flash to work? We try the second option, the Gnash thing. Load up a site with flash, and it appears to be working at first, but then I noticed some of the fonts are about 100 times too big, and other elements are not drawing properly.... gnash does not work very well. So lets try and remove it and manually put the adobe one in.
Synaptics doesn't know that gnash is installed. In fact, it says that it isn't installed. Firefox must have installed it outside of synaptics even though it really did look like synaptics was installing it.
This is getting frustrating. And compared to ArchLinux, Ubuntu is very sluggish. ArchLinux by nature is a very fast distribution, and this machine really isnt very powerfull, so thats a little bit unfair, but its much slower than the Windows2000 installation that used to be on this machine. That hardly looks good at all.
I'm going to stop writing now, as I'm getting frustrated just re-living this experience. I have a lot of hope for Ubuntu, and if time permits, I might look at finding a forum or mailing list, to pass on these observations to the Ubuntu developers in the hopes that I can contribute to the project in some way.
As of now, I still don't have flash working on this machine, and quite frankly I am thinking about removing Ubuntu and starting it again from scratch just in case installing gnash has messed it up more than I can fix easily, but the prospect of it taking close to 5 hours has me re-considering, and maybe putting ArchLinux back on there.
I think I might re-do my steps, and will publish a retraction if I discover that I was just an idiot and missed a crucial step. Here's hoping...
Monday, January 28, 2008
My new EeePC
I had been following the progress of the Nokia N770 (and N800) would probably have bought one, except they dont sell them in Australia. Also, after careful evaluation of my needs, I had come to the conclusion that the Nokia devices weren't quite what I needed.
Then I heard about the ASUS EeePC that was still being developed. At the time there was only a small bit of information released about it, and a whole lot of conjecture, and I expressed to my wife that when they finally make it to the market, I'd like one of them.
When I noticed them being sold, I mentioned it to my wife, and she went and got one for me. The last one actually.
I love it. But first a warning. This kind of device is not for everyone, however, it could be.
It has some incredible advantages:
With the EeePC, I can literally take it anywhere. I throw it into my bacpack and take a train ride into the city. No need for a special bag. No need to carry a heavy bag. The EeePC weighs about the same as a small hardback book.
I use linux for everything, and this device comes with linux. Everything that I can do on my big desktop, I can actually do on this small device, with no limitations (well, mostly).
The keyboard is very small. But after using it for a little while, I discovered that I quickly got used to it. I'm actually typing this blog post on it, at about the same speed I would normally do on a bigger keyboard.
The only critisisms that I have are:
Then I heard about the ASUS EeePC that was still being developed. At the time there was only a small bit of information released about it, and a whole lot of conjecture, and I expressed to my wife that when they finally make it to the market, I'd like one of them.
When I noticed them being sold, I mentioned it to my wife, and she went and got one for me. The last one actually.
I love it. But first a warning. This kind of device is not for everyone, however, it could be.
It has some incredible advantages:
- Low cost ($496 in australian bills)
- Small and quite durable.
- Truly mobile.
- Fully functional.
With the EeePC, I can literally take it anywhere. I throw it into my bacpack and take a train ride into the city. No need for a special bag. No need to carry a heavy bag. The EeePC weighs about the same as a small hardback book.
I use linux for everything, and this device comes with linux. Everything that I can do on my big desktop, I can actually do on this small device, with no limitations (well, mostly).
The keyboard is very small. But after using it for a little while, I discovered that I quickly got used to it. I'm actually typing this blog post on it, at about the same speed I would normally do on a bigger keyboard.
The only critisisms that I have are:
- Need more battery life. Currently getting about 3 hours usage. If we could double battery life, it would allow me to use it in more places without worrying about carrying the (usefully small) AC adapter with me.
- Ability to automatically use low-power mode when not using AC.
- A hardware dial for volume. Due to the way the keys are spaced, you need two hands to change the volume of the device. A bit inconvenient. An actual physical dial would be awesome.
- Bluetooth. I dont currently use bluetooth, but when first looking at the EeePC I was looking forward to getting a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, without having to use USB devices. When I discovered it didnt have bluetooth built in, I was a little dissapointed. I got a new wireless mouse instead and quite happy with that, and probably would never use a wireless keyboard to be honest. Still...
Getting back to work
With the birth of our new baby, Christmas season, and school holidays, development at rhokz.com has been effectively put on hold.
New development will start in February though, and I've got some interesting features to work on.
First off I have some minor interface improvements to make. Mostly to fix some minor irritations I've noticed during my break.
But the next cool big feature will be the ability to add related links to an article. For example, an article about a lost kid is posted to rhokz, a follow-up article about the kid being found can be linked to the first.
I know thats not a very good definitive functionality description, you'll just have to wait and see it in action once I've developed it and made it live.
New development will start in February though, and I've got some interesting features to work on.
First off I have some minor interface improvements to make. Mostly to fix some minor irritations I've noticed during my break.
But the next cool big feature will be the ability to add related links to an article. For example, an article about a lost kid is posted to rhokz, a follow-up article about the kid being found can be linked to the first.
I know thats not a very good definitive functionality description, you'll just have to wait and see it in action once I've developed it and made it live.
Monday, November 26, 2007
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