Prosperous Poverty

How to download files from www.adobe.com without using Akamai download manager

2011-03-09T08:17:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I tried to download a theme pack for Adobe Premiere Elements only to be greeted with this window:

This happens in all browsers that I tested (Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer). You can find many posts complaining about the same problem.

But I found out how to download files without that cursed manager. You simply need to edit the download link this way. Lets say this is the link you are after:

http://esd.adobe.com/dlm.html?files=http://esd.adobe.com/AdobeProducts/PRE/9/win32/PremiereElements_9_Content_HD3_LS15.exe|http://esd.adobe.com/AdobeProducts/PRE/9/win32/PremiereElements_9_Content_HD3_LS15.7z&windowfeatures=height=500,width=550

There are two links hidden in the link. First one is:

http://esd.adobe.com/AdobeProducts/PRE/9/win32/PremiereElements_9_Content_HD3_LS15.exe

and the second one is:

http://esd.adobe.com/AdobeProducts/PRE/9/win32/PremiereElements_9_Content_HD3_LS15.7z

Just download those two files and run the .exe file afterwards. And that's it. No download managers, no hassle. I still don't understand why do they use download managers at all.

Ubuntu Linux 10.10 Annoyances and Solutions

2011-01-10T22:39:00.003+01:00

I'm seriously testing Ubuntu 10.10 on my MSI Wind U100 and I came with some solutions to the obvious annoyances which a lot of users would come by.

1. Can't connect to shared internet connection with wifi which has WEP password. I have my Mac Mini serving as a wireless hotspot. The only problem with it is that it uses WEP password. I know that the WEP and password shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence, but that is the best I can get. And as the coverage is almost non-existent outside the house that is a non-problem.

But the real problem is that I couldn't connect with Ubuntu on it. But the solution is to go to Network Connections -> Wireless tab -> Edit your wifi connection -> Wireless Security tab -> Authentication -> Shared Key (instead of Open system)

2. You are trying to extract a file from usb flash drive (4GB+) and the extracting program tells you the following message: "Need PK compat." -something.

Solution: Open terminal (Ctrl+alt+t) and write this:
sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

This article will be updated as soon as I find more problems and solutions.

There are only three types of people who want Adobe Flash on the iPhone’s browser

2010-11-06T21:42:00.002+01:00

As you probably know there are people who always cry about Adobe Flash technology on the iPhone. As you can probably guess I hate flash. Not that I don’t have it installed on my computer browsers but I just don’t see a reason for anyone to bother implementing flash on the iPhone.

Three types of people who want flash on the iPhone:

1. group: reviewers on sites overpopulated with flash ads.

2. group: children who think that “half of the internet is on flash”

3. group: first group’s fanbois and those one who like to measure phone’s feature list heights.

Explanation:

Members of the the first group have explicit (conflict of) interest in users seeing their site’s flash adds. There are examples everywhere, reviewers from gizmodo, engadget etc all complain about lack of flash on the iphone. Visit any of those sites without adblock and get ready to be visually assaulted and raped.

Second group consists of children who think that internet consists of facebook, sites with flash games (oops, I’m repeating myself) and youtube (and sometimes justinbeibermusic.com. For those uninformed, youtube videos work flawlessly on the iPhone).

No unnecessary words should be spend on the third, mixed group. In any case, those are kind of persons who walk around with a brick with the longest feature list, and at the same time buy prepaid phone cards of lowest value and occasionally throw a call or a text message. They scowl when they see an iphone, they are prone to generalizations, ad hominems, quick phrases like “yes but you can’t send a file using bluetooth on the iphone”), they are judgmental, self-righteous, like to point out that their Nokia N95/N97 was “cheap” (even though they mostly bought them in cash etc.) even though here in my country, those mobile phones were much more expensive than an iPhone etc.

Have any other group to add? Feel free to contribute and/or spread the word.

Solution to the missing TWAIN driver on your scanner

2010-10-26T20:18:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I had a big problem with my Canon CanoScan 8800F scanner. I just couldn’t start TWAIN driver in Photoshop or any other program (I tested Paint, and you can obviously see the false inductive conclusion I made). Photoshop/Paint would just start the WIA driver and that was it. I installed all versions of all drivers but without success. But after couple of hours of fruitless agony (I just can’t stand when I can’t fix things) I found the solution on some page (and believe me, I did my homework on google.com).

The solution is simple: there are no problems with the drivers, you only need to install Photoshop Optional Plugins. That solved my problem in Photoshop (Paint can use WIA only as I found out). I probably missed optional plugins check box when installing Photoshop. Or maybe I even unchecked it. I just couldn’t believe that you have option not to install TWAIN support for Photoshop. Adobe installer installs everything and the kitchen sink but this crucial module for 80% of users is left out.

In any case I now know that I won’t have problem installing TWAIN drivers next time round.

Very advanced stuff indeed…

2010-09-21T22:55:00.001+02:00

by Toad for SQL Server.

Mac mouse acceleration and other curiosities

2010-09-16T22:37:00.001+02:00

Couple of months ago I bought a mac mini (the previous, non-aluminium version) and I was a happy man, right until the point I connected all the peripherals and tried to setup my mouse speed and acceleration. The mouse was Logitech M705 Marathon Mouse. I immediately noticed that I couldn’t adjust the speed and acceleration to my liking using the OS X 10.6. My own preferences in Windows are very simple: no acceleration and somewhat high cursor speed. I did manage to get speed somewhat right but I still couldn’t adjust the acceleration which was horrible frankly. At medium/low speeds the cursor would hardly move, and when you move the mouse faster the cursor would just fly away.

I was quite intrigued and I went to download and install Logitech own Mouse Control Center which only slightly solved the problem. But then again, I was quite cross at the time because I just can’t stand mouse cursor which doesn’t move with pixel perfect accuracy. You don’t see much doctors using ancient tools to operate do you? In any case, I was looking for some other solution, because, surely there must me some solution to the problem in the computer world because usually, there is one. But I was quite astonished to find out that there wasn’t. Well, there is one solution and that is to buy Microsoft’s mouse and use their drivers which have flat acceleration curve and as users say, it works perfectly. As I had my new Logitech I didn’t want to buy a new mouse.

I installed and uninstalled Steermouse, some additional mouse preferences, terminal hacks, USB Overdrive and some other stuff, but *none* gave me the simplicity and usability of no mouse acceleration. Eventually I returned to Logitech Mouse Control Center, which for me gives the least worst results.

But I’m writing this because I accidentally found a way how to somewhat solve the problem and get exactly the same mouse acceleration and speed settings as you may have in Windows. Yes, you read that right, somewhat ;)

First you have to enable VNC on Mac and and then you have to connect with a VNC program (I use RealVNC). Then you get absolutely identical mouse cursor settings on a Mac, and at the same time you don’t need to use extra keyboard or mouse.

- “But hey Prosperous Poverty, we all know that doing anything remotely is slower that doing it locally. “

That is true but if you look at the screen of your mac, you will see that there is absolutely no slowdown caused by the remote control from the “remote” computer. But here comes the good part, if you connect mac to your windows monitor you can switch desktops with a press of a button (switch different source) and gain normal acceleration curve and a bigger pixel count on your mac (if your primary monitor was larger than mac one). Another thing you gain is that you can always control your Mac with VNC and that works quite well by itself.

Of course you can see the hole the size of a supertanker and that is the need for another computer for control and there is some unwieldiness with the monitor. By latter I mean that you must switch inputs on your main monitor or you can use the mac’s monitor which is probably a bit dislocated to your main computer’s keyboard + mouse.

In any case, I’m quite disappointed with the whole mouse acceleration issue on the mac, and I’m just hoping (probably in vain) for the problem to be solved. Trouble is, very few mac users consider it a problem, and that is because majority of new users probably have mac laptops (trackpads have ok curves) and the other users just don’t complain enough, or “they get used to it”. Yes, you can get used to take someone’s tooth out using a sledgehammer, but that’s not the point. If I ever knew about this problem I probably wouldn’t buy a trackpad-less mac.

Probably the best feature of Firefox 4.0 beta

2010-08-08T00:06:00.001+02:00

Resizable text boxes. You don’t notice it until you really need it. Thanks FF developers for finally making notepad and copy/paste obsolete.

Unconventional ideas are unconventional

2010-07-12T00:13:00.001+02:00

In our office we have a multifunctional fax machine which is there for years. And of course the same machine has the same number since the dawn of time. One day the boss was gesturing around during a phone call for the n-th for someone to tell him the fax number so he can pass it on to somebody else at the another side of the line.

I can understand that; the number is somewhat hard to memorize, and many times you can’t recall something when you really need to and vice versa. After that call I made a modest suggestion: put a sticker (or whatever) on the fax so anybody can just look at the machine and read the number when needed. That would make sense because the fax is visible from all parts of the office so some nice big numbers would help a lot.

Something like this:

It doesn’t even had to be a sticker, a felt tip marker would do great. But no, the guy just smiled and continued with his work.

This is what happens when you are so much involved in your usual stuff that you discard everything which doesn’t fit in someone’s habit, workflow or whatever. I can bet that if the guy thought about this idea for just 3 seconds it would make at least some sense. But anyways the loss is at his end unfortunately.

One pixel of horror in Windows Explorer

2010-05-23T23:04:00.001+02:00

I’ve probably never seen a more glaring bug introduced in a Windows OS version. The bug was noticeable since the beta and (of course) it was introduced to RTM version as well.

When you click the picture below you will get an animated gif (gasp!) which will demonstrate what the bug. Just watch the placement of icons on the right side and the height of “organize” bar (or whatever it’s name is).

Good morning

2010-05-17T00:07:00.001+02:00

Hi, good day, hello…

These are usually the most common subject lines I get in my email account. I just can’t stand them. Ever wanted to quickly glance through your mail and get to the message you wanted just by looking at the subject field? No can’t do.

Subject lines were invented for a sender to put a subject in the line, not a bloody greeting! So if your are writing a mail about a meeting tomorrow, don’t put “hello” in the subject line. The subject is “meeting tomorrow” for christ’s sake. If you can’t think of a passable subject line, then your message doesn’t have a subject at all so don’t bother sending it.

That is all.

Tip: Gmail not opening mail links?

2010-03-28T21:53:00.001+02:00

Can’t open e-mail links inside Gmail using Firefox? Not to worry, I found the culprit: it is Tabs Open Relative (modified).

Disable that add-on and you won’t have any more problems.

Don’t panic!

2010-03-26T22:18:00.001+01:00

I’m just trying out new blogger templates. The old one was booooring.

Starcraft 2 closed beta

2010-02-25T23:01:00.001+01:00

Yes, I was invited to Starcraft II closed beta.

I won’t bore you with stuff you can read on other websites but here are some observations of mine.

Battle.net

The battle.net system of screens/windows is a mess. Navigating them is awkward and sometimes you don’t know the difference between buttons and some design elements. You can only find out if something is a button (or what the button does) if you hover over it. Next, the colors are very shallow so you can see gradient bands all over the place which looks very ugly. Then the layout (with regards to resolution) just doesn’t feel right at all. Elements are just thrown all over the place. The only good thing I saw was integrated chat and an easy way to add players/AI when creating a game.

Gameplay

It has a real Starcraft 1 feel. It is fast and mostly responsive. Everything is very similar but this time you can select as many units as you wish;)

But there are some serious downsides too. There is just too much of micromanagement. There are a lot of units which have use/spell mechanic and none of those can be selected for autocasting. Just terran’s medivac can heal other units automatically. Then some relatively simple actions require too much clicking and/or targeting. It is just clicking hell. Build trees are a mess too.

There are a lot of units. It is a rock-scissors-paper2-rock2-scissors2-paper2-… game. So you have unit x which is better than enemies unit y etc. In other words you have to spy all the time what the enemy is doing and building counter units. This was always the way with starcraft 1 but now it is even more slanted in that direction. My general complaint is that there are too many of those units like “can only attack other ground units” or “can only attack air units” etc.

Graphics and sound

Graphics are quite good and unit animations are excellent. Explosions are excellent and everything has superbly fluid feel. Of course that there are some bugs here and there, but I’m confident they will be solved later. One substantial criticism is that the game has about the same scale as the original game. That means you have about the same view of the playing field, the UI is about the same size etc. Just the resolution is much better. I would have hoped for smaller UI and larger playing field though.

If something really disappointed me, that must be music and voice acting. Music is a rehash of original starcraft music, but that wouldn’t be bad in itself (as sc1 music was absolutely fantastic and memorable), but this version was done badly. I’m no music expert but I can recognize good music from bad one. The title music is bad, the terran music is some country music without vocals (original music was just fantastic), and I just forgot what protoss and zerg have. Yes, it was that memorable. Voice acting is, well, bad. A lot of voices just sound awkward and are rotated around the units when comparing them to sc1 so at least now they sound a little out of place. Sound effects are good as you might expect.

Closing remarks

The thing that is bothering me is that you can’t play offline (aside from missing LAN mode). I mean, even if you play against AI players, if you get disconnected from the internet, you will be kicked from your game too. That is DRM at its worst. Of course, if you get disconnected in the middle of any other type of game you will get kicked too.

I’m confident that the game will sell in droves but when looking into the future I’m not quite certain what will expansions bring. Of course they will bring more units and more single player content, but even with this count of units and absolute horror that is micromanagement now the gap between a causal and a pro player is absolutely huge. I just hope that the matchmaking system will be better than SC or W3 had (they were completely broken). I’ll post some screenshots and videos as soon as I get some good ones.

Windows Phone 7 Series

2010-02-16T22:06:00.001+01:00

Aside from completely ridiculous name and completely unnecessary long screen transitions (which you can’t turn off), just take a look at this picture.

Why have a giant high resolution display if you can’t use it? That wasted space is just too noticeable as you can clearly see that the home screen is offset to the left and bottom.

Real estate agency:

2010-02-15T00:15:00.002+01:00

Just a quick explanation: Dr. House is a Croatian translation for the House M.D. TV series.

My experience with iPhone 3GS [Updated]x3

2009-10-09T12:00:00.002+02:00

Month and a half ago I bought white 32GB iPhone 3GS (fw 3.0.1) at t-mobile here in Croatia. Since day one there was a problem with battery life. It just drains too fast with all services and 3G turned off (and even faster when on of course).

For example: Fully charged in the midnight, by the 8AM the indicator still reads 100%. Then after two one minute phone calls and one sent e-mail it drops to 97%. Took couple of photos it is at 94% and one pixel column from the battery indicator is already missing. When you use safari over edge you can literally see that the battery percentage is dropping like 1% in two minutes of use.

This could probably considered normal to some users who don’t have other iphones to compare. Fortunately I have, and my iPhone 2G lasts at least 3x more and the battery indicator will stay full for a whole day with average use. My friend have iPhone 3G and their battery life is completely normal.

After couple of days using it normally I concluded that I need to charge it like 2 times a day which is completely unacceptable. Moreover I still maintain that with mine light usage I shouldn’t be forced to charge it daily.

Then I decided to test the phone against apple’s specifications. So browsing over wifi should last around 9 hours, and movie playback should last around 10 hours. So I’ve turned autolock to off, and navigated Safari to a page which reloads itself every minute. Left it that way for whole night and to my great surprise after 9 hours it still had like 25% charge left. Same with video playback. I’ve put Wrath of Khan and the battery life easily exceeded specifications. That was what puzzled me the most. Then I wanted to test it in real Safari use (just normal browsing) over wifi. 10% lasted barely more than half an hour. That means that the battery would last no more than 5 hours.

Then after couple more days of testing (and restoring as new, restarting, setting up on other computers etc) I returned to the t-com center and filed warranty claim. That was 2 weeks after purchase. A month(!) later they called me to pick up the phone. It was the same one accompanied with a letter that the battery was OK when tested and the software was updated to 3.1. I wasn’t hopeful at all and returned home and the problem was the same. Next day I called customer support and demanded to know what are my options of repair. The operator said to return it twice more (!) for warranty claim because after three times they will give you a new one. I of course refused because I didn’t want to be without iPhone for 3+ months (and I have to pay for it anyway) and demanded to know what other options there are. The only other option was to write a complaint to t-mobile. Which I did and sent it by e-mail and normal post office, but certified way. That was 4 days ago so I’m still waiting for the official reply. As advised on the Croatian consumer protection web page I demanded a brand new iPhone or servicing the defective one (I know that you get refurbished one) but on the condition that I get replacement 3G or 3GS (which I didn’t get when filing a warranty claim, only some htc/mda/WM crap which I refused). As the final option I requested an immediate termination of contract without paying early termination fee.

So what to conclude from this experience? This just affirms my suspicions that Apple doesn’t test iPhones after production or in other words their QA falls on the backs of users which is a huge problem for consumers in a country like Croatia where warranty claims are always a nightmare to go through.

Other resources:

Huge thread about the issue at Apple support forums (dunno why it is called “support” because Apple doesn’t read it).

Big thread at mackorisnik.com (in croatian language only) about almost non-existent, evasive, and blame-the-user servicing support at t-mobile croatia.

You can see my previous posts like this here, here, here and here.

Update 24/10/2009:

Received a response to my complaint: t-mobile will sent my (short) claims of battery life to Apple to probably decide what to do. This doesn’t spell too good of a news, because Apple can simply say that the battery life is ok (and they are keen to say it judging from the apple support group linked above) and t-mobile will just shrug and basically tell me: “sue us”. Another problem is that the whole process is taking too long a time so I can press on with my demands regardless of the negative outcome. Anyways, we’ll see what will Apple respond.

Update 8/12/2009:

The response I got was to go to the nearest t-mobile center and ask for my phone to be serviced once again if I want to get a new one. Translated that means just another servicing. To be quite honest, that wasn’t the answer I was expecting. So I went there expecting to cancel the contract and demand money-back because they certainly didn’t have replacement iphones. But I was wrong as you might suspect. When I got there it is always the usual stuff. Long tirade of what’s the problem with the phone, and it all ends with the “helpdesk” guys legendary sentence: “we can send your iphone for servicing”. Then I foolishly agreed, but only if they give me iphone as a temporary replacement. (This is the part where I made a mistake. I should have asked for contract termination right away, but no matter, lets continue with what happened next.) They declined of course saying, and I kid you not, that the only phone to get as a replacement is some MDA crap. That was totally expected because I heard the same story (and was foolishly completely convinced by it) two times before. But this time I made a right choice and said that in that case I want contract termination. Believe or not, all of the sudden they somehow did have an iphone as a temporary replacement. Then I made some quick thinking (which in my case never had a good record) and decided to take it and give my iphone to servicing. The guy made a report and even though I clearly described the problem, the only thing the guy wrote on the report was: “Battery is empty in less then 24h under minimal use.” In retrospective, I shouldn’t have signed it and the reason is simple. I bet that those morons at the service center don’t test mobile phones for more than 10 minutes. And in that time you won’t notice the huge battery drain I was experiencing. I should have added a note for those service morons to call me when they get to my iphone. Then I asked if they should attach my mail correspondence with the customer support I had, but no, the guy said that wasn’t needed because those service guys have all the necessary data. Of course they don’t have any of it and they don’t have any interest in those. Then I realized that I was duped so hard by that a$$#ole in customer support because the correspondence lasted more than a month and I got exactly nothing out of it. In any case, I grabbed the replacement iphone 3g and went about my business.

I was a bit anxious about the battery performance with the temporary replacement but that was quickly dispelled. Even though the phone was new, and the battery wasn’t fully formed the battery lasted like 4 times as much then on my iphone 3gs. For example, my 3gs would indicate around 50-60% battery charge left by 5 PM (10h standby – charged overnight). But with replacement 3G, and with around same usage, I would have full battery indicator in the evening (24h standby) and the next day in the morning I would have only 1 pixel row missing from the battery indicator, and by the end of the next day I would still have more than 60% of battery left. Then I would charge it or sometimes I even used it for the third day without problem. I have tested this extensively because I have the replacement for almost two weeks now. So I’m kinda glad that I got this 3G for a replacement because they have almost identical battery lifetime specs (3gs has slightly better though) and I was a little afraid that I would have the same problem as I had with 3gs.

So what to expect when I get a call to from t-mobile?

Case 1: 3GS replaced. Win situation.

Case 2: 3GS not replaced, there is “no problem with the phone”. I’ll print out comparative screenshots (I have those aplenty) and 3G vs 3GS battery specifications and layout them in front of them. If they don’t give me a new 3GS I’ll terminate the contract, and demand my money back. Win situation.

As always, I’ll keep you posted on any news.

Btw, I got myself employed, so I got an extra incentive to post more (no more exams hanging above my head). But the trouble is, when employed, I don’t travel at all, and don’t have much money to spend on new hardware (and consequentially to review) or something else.

http://bayimg.com/JagdGAaCL (I’ll link the same image from another source as soon as I figure out how to bypass bloggers too aggressive image compression)

Notice that the picture is showing phone usage with all services off and 3G off. There are two exceptions though, but those are turned on just before taking the screenshot. On some pictures you may notice some relatively high usage time, but that is due to music playback. That shouldn’t drain battery much so I included those screenshots too.

Update 2/2/2010

Ok, my iPhone 3GS was replaced by a refurbished one a little more than one month ago. For couple of weeks the battery life was the same or even a little worse than my original GS. But around 2 weeks ago things suddenly went better and better which is quite unexpected. Now the phone spends around 20% per day with some use. So I use it for full 3 days and on the evening of the third day I put it to recharge with around 40% battery remaining. I’m not sure what’s the cause because I haven’t changed anything but there is a slight possibility that keeping closed all safari tabs can reduce the battery drain. I haven’t tested with always opened tabs (after I noticed battery life improving), but I’ll try it in the coming days.

Same day update:

Apple released 3.1.3 patch addressing (after 3 moths, no less!) the problem with the “battery indicator” on 3GS models. I hope it will fix my problem (not as much pronounced anymore in the recent weeks anyway) too.

Citizen Eco-Drive Promaster Titanium Diver’s Watch (JV0050-03E) Review

2009-08-02T18:16:00.002+02:00

This review was a long time coming, but better ever than never. I wanted to write this review because I couldn’t find an informative one on the web.

I bought this watch almost 2 years ago to replace (or better to say complement) my Casio G-Shock digital watch. I like that asymmetrical look, the diver’s “sign of recognition (1)”, titanium shell, very visible hands, modern design with lcd, digital watch operation (hands are linked to internal digital timekeeping) and of course, solar power charging. Speaking of design it looks futuristic which I always like. Notice that it may seem that the case is quite large in the proportion to the watch face (which looks small comparably) but this is only the effect on the photos. In reality the watch face looks large and the bezel around it looks much smaller. This is of course supplemented by the fact that the case is painted in dark grey around the watch face and unpainted at the edges as you can see clearly from the images. So this colour combination tries (and succeeds) to mask the fact that the case is not that big.

What is to like about this watch? The watch is somewhat light for its size because it is made of titanium and when you compare it to the non-asymmetrical version which is made from steel you can certainly notice the difference in or on your hand (my friend has the latter one). The strap buckle is also made of titanium. The bad news about the titanium is that it scratches easily. This is very pronounced on the darker part of the shell in a way of noticeable light shaded scratches. You can definitely see the scratches on the pictures i provided. The case is made very nicely with every surface lovingly rounded and dulled so the watch is very easy on the hand and skin. When speaking of casing, the glass is of a mineral sort, not sapphire so it too scratches very easily. Moreover, it scratches even more because the glass is almost at the same level as the casing which is not a good solution to be honest.

The timekeeping is solidly done and as I mentioned, the hands are very clear and highly visible. The minute and hour hands have completely separate movement contrary to the some watches I’ve seen. The little hand shows the solar battery charge level. My only complaint about the hands themselves is that the phosphorous illumination (which is bluish) doesn’t last long in the dark. I must note that the timekeeping is very precise. That means that even after a month it won’t lose or add a second on the time. I measured this by synchronizing my computer time with some atomic time server and then synchronizing the watch. Then after a month or more checked the results with synchronized computer again. I was fascinated by the result (I retested it couple of times) because my casio g-shock would go couple of minutes in advance after a few months of use. This watch, on the contrary is as I said, very precise. The LCD display is big and clearly readable too. It is inversely illuminated by pressing the button which means that the content is illuminated instead of background which is a nice touch. The display doesn’t show any redundant information in non-diving mode so that is a plus too. As you probably read somewhere else, you get world clock (in which you can easily swap local and some other time), three different sounding alarms, deep and dive-time alarm, diving log (date, time, max depth, sea temperature and dive-time) and finally watch hands calibration. All the functions are very easy to adjust and almost completely logical. One of the serious downsides of this watch is that there is no timer and stopwatch function in normal mode. This unfortunately is a great downside for me because I so got used to timing my parking time, cooking procedures, etc. On every screen aside from the calibration one, the display and hands return to regular timekeeping after two minutes of inactivity.

This watch gets in the diving mode automatically when two things happen. Firstly the sensor on the right side needs to get wet (or slightly moist, but I will talk about this later), and to indicate this, the lcd displays a diver, then when you start to submerge (left sensor detects higher pressure) below the surface the watch rearranges the hands in the way described below:

Hour hand goes to 6 o’clock (red DIVE label) and stays there for the full duration of the dive.
Minute and the little left hand move to position 12 o’clock and 0 respectably.

The minute hand indicates the dive time, the little left hand displays max depth reached. The LCD displays current depth and time (not to be confused with dive time) and a diver (in three rows). In the first 15min of diving the diver is at the first row and afterwards it is on the bottom row. This is made so the minute hand doesn’t obstruct the depth display at any time which is a great touch. At the press of the upper left button you get sea temperature and dive time. The watch even has an alarm for ascending too fast which is audible and visible on the display and the little red LED just below the 12 o’clock mark. You can always cancel the diving mode by pressing and holding the mode button. After a dive you get additional “page” in the normal watch operation which shows info from the last dive and how much time passed since the dive. All in all, diving with this watch is a pleasure.

I just wanted to add some other things I didn’t manage to fit into the previous paragraphs. If you need to see the time in darkness and the hands illumination has faded away, you can set the world time page (usually the first after normal date display) to display your local time and by pressing the mode and light button you can see the exact time. One interesting bit is that the same versions of this watch I found on amazon.co.uk don’t come in titanium shell. You can see that detail because on my watches’ face there is “Titanium” label, and those amazon’s don’t have one. I have already mentioned some of the problems with the watch I just wanted to add another thing which disables this watch from true greatness. Why is that I can’t measure the temperature and use the bloody stopwatch when not diving which are already implemented? But probably the biggest thing that gets on my nerves (but not too much honestly) is the dreaded diver with the ready text pictured below.

As I mentioned before this screen appears when the right sensor detects moisture or water. And during the summer here this happens a lot. So it is quite usual for lcd to display that screen obscuring the other data you may have when riding a bike, just sweating or washing hands. One more thing that really gets in the way is that the hands rearrange themselves in the 12 o’clock position when you want to adjust something or when you are just looking at some screen like log. That wouldn’t be a problem you may answer, but the actual problem is that the hands move somewhat slowly and one by one and you can’t interact with the watch when those hands start to move.

As some of you ~~bots~~ readers may recall I had a true agony with this watch the last summer but ever since it was fully repaired it works great.

The full photo gallery you can find here.

(1) I wanted to buy a truly diver’s watch because you can generally recognize a diver in the crowd by his watch. So when you see a guy with generally big watch with a sensor you can bet that he is a diver. The other guys which have big watches with sensors are some terrain folks with casio protrek watches but those are easily recognized because, in general, diving watches don’t have much plastic parts (as protrek has them) which isn’t a bad thing of course, I’m just stating the difference.

Dive at Ćutin

2009-07-21T17:05:00.000+02:00

I had a great dive at the Mali Ćutin island last weekend. The sea was crystal clear, so you could see the surface from 40 meters. The dive is wall-dive and the scenery is great. There was a great school of fishes, a lot of holes in the walls, deep purple gorgonias etc. The bottom is sandy and the upper flat part (around 7 meters) is covered in posidonia oceanica. The photos below took my dad (I was modeling at the time, I didn’t take my camera with me because of unrelated reasons).

Gacka Eco-Action 18.7.2009

2009-07-19T20:11:00.002+02:00

Majerovo vrilo

Yesterday, our diving club KPA Adria from Kraljevica attended an “action” (in Croatia: where group of people do something for public for free) which consisted of cleaning the riverbed under some bridges near river Gacka’s bridges. So we were 9 divers and some other support staff (friends and family) which was divided in 4 teams. Another friend and fellow diver and me cleaned the riverbed below the bridge which you can see on the photo below. The link to the actual map is here.

General map of the location

Majerovo vrilo was our base point and a great place to dive by the way (huge cavern system, and the biggest of the three exit points of the Gacka river). The place is shown on the first photo. Each team was assigned couple of helpful local people to get the trash out of the water. Our dive lasted around and hour. The water was somewhat clear and not too fast, but the temperature was only 10.8 degrees centigrade. That wouldn’t be a problem if I brought my dry suit but I didn’t (its summer after all;) but still that wasn’t a problem to be honest. The most important thing on a wet suit is to seal properly. Around 5 or 6 large sacks later (around 1h) we were finished with our bridge. My dive buddy found an unexploded mortar shell among other trash which we reported to the authorities immediately. After the dive we meet up at Majerovo vrilo again and we had a great with the rest of the team. Overall, our team took out quite a chunk of discarded trash so I do look forward for the cleaning at the generally the same place in some future time.

Take a look at the photo gallery.

Fireworks Rijeka 30/6/2009

2009-07-08T14:54:00.002+02:00

I was at the opening of the Summer Nights at Rijeka (“otvorenje ljetnih noći”) the previous Tuesday. I was there only because of the announced fireworks. The opening show was to last 50 minutes with fireworks which were “never seen before”.

And I wasn’t disappointed. The fireworks were great. The music in the background was great too. The explosions were colossal, the range was mind boggling. There was even a moment when they launched some into the sea and from the sea there were flying fireworks. Absolutely fantastic. But the fireworks that fascinated me the most was some which burst in yellow glowing dust which slowly descended over a large area with a great sense of 3d space. It seemed like some cgi trick in some fairy movies.

Well, I’m not here going to melt like an ice cream but here are some of the pictures from the event.

You can see the full gallery here.

Canon LBP-5000 “out of paper” problem solved

2009-07-05T22:41:00.002+02:00

Today the mentioned laser printer refused to print because of “out of paper” error. Naturally, the paper tray was full of paper. Printer reset, toner removal didn’t help. After examining the the underside of the printer (the part above the tray) I haven’t seen anything that was malfunctioning either. No mention of this problem on the web too. Then I realized that I could try to print the pages by using manual paper feed (seems obvious now;) and it worked. But still the notification light for missing paper was still on. But luckily, after few printer papers from the manual feed slot the notification went away and everything was fine.

One interesting thing about this printer and the other canon printer I have (cp520) is that they are some strange models canon doesn’t want to display any information. What I mean is that the latter printer I can’t even find on their web page (even in discontinued printers), and the former doesn’t even have 64bit drivers.

Canon selphy cp520: completely erased existence on canon web pages, those print kits (“cassettes” and paper packages) just went up in price by substantial amount

Canon i-sensys LBP-5000: completely discontinued drivers, no 64bit version. Expensive toners (4x500kn when the printer price with new toners is 1500kn)

One could say that I could switch manufacturers but I bet they are even worse. The canon inkjet printer I had before this laser was expensive but was good actually. Died only couple of months ago (had it for around 6 years). The printer before was a HP deskjet 690c. That printer was ok for couple of months but then it mysteriously couldn’t pull the papers in so you had to supply it sheet by sheet. The scanner I bought for my dad 2 years ago was somewhat expensive hp one. I can only say to you this. It takes like 4 minutes to start scanning the first page and the drivers are around 400MB! Unbelievable I know. And they have one of the worst UIs I have ever seen. So I won’t buy any of that HP crap ever again and I advise you do the same.

Accidents do happen

2009-06-17T18:05:00.001+02:00

A car went down from the road straight into a sea in the middle of last night. Interestingly enough, the driver wasn’t hurt at all.

Caska, island of Pag, Croatia archeological excavation 2009

2009-06-03T22:27:00.003+02:00

I know that I haven’t updated in a while so I’ll try to make up somewhat with this post.

I’ve been to archeological underwater excavation/survey at the small town called Caska (latin: Cissa) which is located on the beautiful island of Pag in Croatia. I’ve been as a part of Croatian-lead, French, Italian and Macedonian team of archeologists who were excavating an ancient wooden ship which was found last year. My job there was to photograph both underwater and above water as my knowledge of archeology can be summed up in two words: below basic. Lets first talk about the place itself. Ancient Cissa was a large estate (many villas and probably ships) of some famous roman senator which name escapes me. I did read it, but of course I forgot it. The place now is very interesting. The whole bay is very shallow (few meters at most) and somewhat well protected from wind (except from the Jugo – south wind which can produce big waves). All along the beaches (which are very narrow, only a couple of meters) there are still preserved huge ancient walls, walls of the houses (the other 3 walls collapsed in the sea with time or because of some other reason: earthquake(?) or maybe some plundering), walls from the water reservoirs etc. The reason why the beaches are narrow is that because the soil comes almost to the sea line so the big waves erode it revealing the stone base.

Our ship was around 15m from the beach at the depth of around 1.8m. The good news is that the whole bay has a thick layer of mud and sand (and a stony basis) so the ship was lying on the rock base and was covered in mud/sand. Mud doesn’t let oxygen in so the ship’s wooden construction is well preserved. Well, it is not as well preserved as the one at Pakoštane, but well preserved enough. This one is smaller and the west half (probably starboard) side is not well preserved. The general idea about the ship is that it about 2000 years old and was used by the population called Liburni(ans) which was then under Roman administration.

The ship is roughly facing north-south orientation and only 5 (2x2m) squares were excavated in the two week time the expedition was there. And that is a somewhat unusual thing for someone who is not familiar with archeology. The actually digging (usually removing the sand/mud from the wooden construction) is the fastest part and only lasts for a few days. Afterwards comes the slower part which takes many more days where they put numbers on every excavated bit and piece, take measurements, draw drafts of the ships layout, take exact measurements of the ship frames, take out some of the parts which are not connected to the ship itself and some loose parts, very fine cleaning etc. As our chief archeologist said, and if I remember correctly, the diving part is only 1/10th of the job – documentation in the office is another. Continuing with the ship, the frames and the planks are well preserved. But there is a very interesting finding though. The planks were sawn together to insure the water tightness which is a very rare finding.

So not to bother you more with the text – on to the photos.

You can see much more of them in my gallery at picasa gallery.

Disclaimer: All the history part in the text can be complete BS, I’m no historian, I wrote from memory from the things I heard.

Find Me If You Can

2009-04-23T22:07:00.001+02:00

The picture below is showing a list of files which are various (and unfortunately necessary) drivers for Lenovo N200 laptop which passed through my hands.

Can you identify any of the files by its name? Can you tell me which file will get me wireless drivers?

No, because some moron(s) at Lenovo decided that file names should be completely meaningless to users.

And btw – a short one sentence review, the laptop itself is a piece of crap. In no particular order: cheap plastics, horrible huge size, vacuum cleaner is more silent than this laptop, comes preloaded with crappy and useless Lenovo software, the hinges are just covered with plastic but painted to look like aluminium, the touchpad is coarse and even if your finger slides ok on it, there is just a right amount of friction to heat up your fingertip (I never thought it was possible), the power brick gets very hot, and did I mentioned that it arrived with the battery which refused to charge? So much for the famed Lenovo quality.

Windows 7 beta build 7068 x64 impressions

2009-03-30T12:34:00.001+02:00

I won’t bother you or myself with detailed descriptions of this build (which you can get on other sites anyway) but I am going to share things I did notice.

1. Team Fortress 2 runs like Usain Bolt, that means fast and smooth! Even faster than my Windows XP. I kid you not. On xp when I enabled Multicore Rendering even though I did not get bigger slowdowns, there was a constant choppiness, the game wasn’t smooth at all. But with this build the difference is very tangible and welcomed. (Just for your information I play at 1920x1200). Another problem which vista x64 and previous build had was hl2.exe crash when exiting the game. That was solved by Valve in some recent patch, it wasn’t microsoft’s fault.

2. That file permission bug I was talking about is still present! That bug really showed up much sooner than expected and that means yesterday (same as install day) all the files in my documents folder were locked (at least there is a nice little icon with a lock so you know they are locked) so I couldn’t view or edit them. But I did manage to fix the problem, more precisely, the symptoms, rather then the cause. But as I can treat the symptoms now, I’m not that much worried because I certainly can’t fix the cause (only microsoft can). So enough with the medical claptrap and onto the solution itself.

Solution to the file permissions problem in windows 7 beta 7068 x64:

1. Download the takeownership.zip from blogsdna.com article. The file included two .reg files and one of them adds Take Ownership to the right mouse click as seen below. You can download those two files individually here and here. You need this reg hack because without it you have to take permission for file after file manually which is extremely inconvenient.

2. Select the folder where you have the locked files and Take Ownership.

3. Go into “Advanced Security Setting for $yourfolder” [1]. Add yourself and administrators. Be very careful to absolutely click on the “Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object”. I didn’t click on that checkbox the first few times so it didn’t work for the files in the folder.

4. There is no step 4.

[1] To get there you have to go to folder properties->security->advanced->change permissions.

As you can see, I’m not complaining about anything else at this time, so stay tuned because something will probably come up.

If you need any help with the file permissions or anything else, be free to leave a comment.

What’s going on these times? Gmail mobile app, Drupal, Windows 7 changes…

2009-03-29T12:55:00.004+02:00

Gmail mobile app

The gmail mobile app on my nokia 6500c is great (too bad iphone doesn’t have similar version), but it lacked full screen support for my mobile. The problem was that google didn’t have special version for that mobile too so I always had to download generic app which doesn’t run in fullscreen. Another problem was that I always downloaded finnish or swedish language version so that didn’t work too. The idea that I had was that I had to trick google in giving me a version for nokia 5320 xpress music which has pretty much the same electronic hardware. Or even identical. So that part in guessing the address took me some time, but I finally managed to guess it. The language problem I didn’t solve completely (I wanted english version), but the trick is to set your phone to your own language (croatian in my case) and then it will download that version. The link will probably work with 2.0.7 or whatever other version.

The link is this:

http://www.gmail.com/app/gmail.jad?make=Nokia&model=5310&ver=v2.0.6 (link broken now unfortunately)

Drupal

Wasted two days to install it on my windows xp desktop. Couldn’t manage do the same on my macbook even though the installation is supposed to be simpler. I wanted to write a guide how to do it (the official one is out-of-date), but after a few days I forgot what was os special about my installation. Sorry. It is a CMP (Content Management Platform), so I guess that means it is a superset of CMS. Everyone is talking about it nowadays so I gave it a go. In any way, I didn’t use it that much because in one way it seems too simplistic, and on the other too complex. Adding some “blog posts” is easy enough, but it just seems that I’m doing something wrongly, probably I don’t even know what Drupal is all about. In any way, I’m going to explore it a bit more and report back.

Windows 7 beta build 7068 x64

After a very unpleasant experience concerning file permissions with build 7000 I decided to skip a few builds and go for some newer. This build was released yesterday and I’m just testing it at the moment. The problem with the file permissions bug is that it doesn’t manifest from the start, it can take days or weeks for problems to emerge.

It seems that some Microsoft employee has maybe seen my improved picture from my previous blog about build 6801, as demonstrated here:

My suggestion for this window (build 6801).

New Win+P window (build 7068). I like my solution more though,

same functionality but better looks.

More impressions and talk about performance soon to come as I test this build more closely. Update: see my post after this one.

Eventual disk problems

My Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA hard disk (not a primary disk) started to sound strangely. When I start Norton Ghost it just starts to produce some metallic sound and windows really slow down. The end is near I think. What is strange is that the disk is only few months old because it was swapped under warranty because the old barracuda died as I said in my ~~rant~~ post about lack of quality in modern electronics.

iDeneb 1.4 on msi wind u100

2009-03-29T00:01:00.001+01:00

As you are probably interested in OSX hackint0sh installations as I am, you might have heard about new gen of those distros. iDeneb brings OSX to version 10.5.6 and supports point upgrades.

Still, speedstep isn’t supported very well, because the battery lasts for exactly 1h:30min when almost fully idle (some web pages open, wifi on, display on) versus 2h:40min which Windows 7 beta 7000 managed.

Another problem is that resolution loves to revert to some unstandard and broken one when you restart computer manually.

So to keep things short, even though this “distro” is still unsuitable for a msi wind, I do think that it would be completely okay for desktop use.

Microsoft Sidewinder X6 Gaming Keyboard Review [Updated]

2009-02-14T23:11:00.004+01:00

Bought myself this keyboard. I won’t bother you much with the facts you probably obtained easily in other reviews as I prefer writing my reviews just with the information other reviews missed. So lets get started.

The main reason I bought this keyboard is because of the removable keypad. I just prefer somewhat narrower keyboards (ie numpadless) because I hate having keyboard off-center to the monitor if I want mouse not too far to my body. In reverse case if I want the keyboard centered then I have to move the mouse further to the right so it gets very uncomfortable to do anything serious. The solution is a keyboard without numeric pad because I can have centered keyboard with regards to the monitor and mouse close at hand. The solution this keyboard uses is in my opinion great and should be used on other keyboards as well.

The keyboard itself is sturdy build and not that heavy (as other reviews imply) but heavy and unmoveable enough. It isn’t built as bomb proof as razer’s tarantula (for 2x the price here), but it is not worse either. It has good build and nothing less, you don’t have to worry about it.

Keys have similar feel to the razer’s tarantula which is good, that means that they are softer than microsoft natural multimedia keys and logitech’s diNovo. Good thing is that they have a threshold for tactile feedback so the typing doesn’t feel like typing on a sponge or worse, on pack of wet towels.

One of the main “problems” I read about in the reviews/forums about this keyboard is the famous “ghosting”. This is just a wrong word to describe a problem when you press multiple keys at once. Bad keyboards register just a couple of key presses at once, good ones register more then couple. There is much talk that pressing ctrl+w+r doesn’t work (reloading while moving forwards crouched). I can confirm this. This combination doesn’t work. I got nifty program called KeyScan which can tell which keys are registered when pressed. Using this program I have determined that only ctrl has only a problem with R+something. Every other ctrl+key+key+key+key works. If you’re like me and don’t rely on ctrl that much every other key combination works without problems. So for example if you use shift for crouch (I dunno why would anyone use ctrl to be honest) the keyboard will register this shift+w+e+r+a+s+x or any other similar combination. So if you are really heroin-like dependant on ctrl maybe you can buy some other keyboard. Just as a little sidenote, my msi wind’s keyboard registers up to 12 (yes you read it correctly – 12) key presses at once. Quite remarkable and totally unexpected. I used the same program to determine this fact.

This is the infamous CTRL+R+W which doesn’t register. But ctrl+r+alt+printscrn works though;)

This works easily, even without alt because I was pressing print screen at the same time so you can press q and a or whatever at the same time. If you have three hands this can be very useful.

So my conclusion regarding ghosting is this: this keyboard will put up with pretty much any key combination except ctrl+r+something(1).

There is much talk about placement of the space bar and escape key. I can confirm that the escape key is placed a bit to the left but in this few days time I have completely adjusted, it isn’t a big deal at all. What will take a bit more to adjust is the placement of the alt gr (right alt) key. The space bar is actually very long (14cm vs 11,2cm of a normal logitech keyboard) especially on the right side. There is couple of mentions of smaller ctrl/win/alt keys on the left side but that is not the case or a problem, but the right side is. Alt gr is placed too much to the left. That is a problem when you use (especially in croatia) alt+v (@) or alt-f/g ([]) or alt-q (\). I used to press alt gr with my right thumb, but cannot anymore. I have to use my right pinky which feels awkward and will need a lot of adjustment because I don’t use those keys that much.

Function keys (F1 etc) are quite narrow and somewhat long, and this is not bad at all because the more shorter they are (height doesn’t matter much) it is quite more harder to find exactly the one you need without looking at them.

All keys have tapered(?) edges so they don’t feel sharp and they don’t look rounded. This is always commendable because I hate keyboards with keys with sharp edges. Those kind of keyboards always want to chop off your fingers.

There are multimedia and macro keys which are easy to press and have medium travel. Contrast this to razer tarantula which have too short travel and are too hard to press (and tarantula doesn’t have pause button, wtf). Multimedia keys work from any program so you can be in say firefox and control your playlist in itunes without problems.

There are two large knobs on the right part to the top of the keyboard and one is brightness of the led backlighting and the other one is the volume. Both take 270 degrees from 0-100%, and both turn smoothly. Volume knob can be turned endlessly. Background lightning doesn’t flicker (contrary to razer tarantula on which every led flickered horribly)

Macro buttons are simple to use and configure (as a contrast to tarantula’s which are frankly useless). You don’t even have to use the supplied drivers/software to configure macros. You do have to have that software installed though, but it is lightweight, powerful and easy to use. You can program any key combination, key sequence (including large strings, for example bpush the cart!enter) etc. Memory banks are easily selected with a key etc. There are more on other reviews but I just want to stress that macros work flawlessly and they are very easy to configure and use.

There are some words on the reviews/forums about strong magnets on the sides, and they are somewhat strong but they don’t seem to influence my mouse at all. If they did in the future I’m not reluctant to remove them or isolate them somehow, but I don’t think there will a problem with them at all. Moreover, you can use them as paperclip holders.

There are no audio or usb ports. Razer’s keyboards have usb ports but those ports are ver1.1 which means they are completely unusable (yes, even for usb flash drives). Well someone will miss those ports but I don’t them so much.

Handrest is not “huge”, nor it is uncomfortable or made of cheap plastic. It gets the job done, of course, it isn’t removable but it doesn’t get in the way. Moreover, it is lower than the key so you don’t have problems pressing the keys. I don’t really know what the fuss is all about. One more good thing about the handrest and the keyboard itself is that the back of the keyboard is very clean and as the keyboard is raised couple of millimeters from the desk you can put A4 papers below it (short side first). This is very handy when you have to have paper between your hands while typing on the keyboard.

Just as a curious sidenote: the keyboard does really style well with logitech’s g9 (which is a good thing). They look like they are designed by the same guy. They use same font colour, same visual cues and curves (or lack of them).

To sum up: I have this keyboard for a few days now, but I’ve been using it full time. Aside from the alt key which migrated eastwards.

If you have any questions, suggestions or anything else, please leave a comment below. I will reply as soon as possible (probably the same day).

Here are other images of Sidewinder X6 gaming keyboard. On this site you can find all of this plus more.

btw, Windows Live Writer is great.

(1) just to clarify, ctrl+r works without problems.

By popular demand, ctrl combinations (all w/ print screen):

So just to make this one very clear: All usual ctrl+key+key+… key combinations work. There is only one problem and that is with ctrl+r+any_other_key_on_the_left_side. That means that ctrl+r works, ctrl+c+whatever+whatever works (as shown in the screenshots) etc. The only case this keyboard isn’t suitable is with ctrl+r+some_other_key. For any other key combination it works perfectly.

[Another update] The bottom of the keyboard

[14/6/2009 Update]

I had some problem with the keys numbered 9 and later 8 and 0. They were easy to press (as usual) but didn’t register all the time. For a few days there was only the problem with the key 9 then the problem spread on the previous mentioned keys. The keys are easily removed and I noticed that the rubber layer somehow moved a little in the direction of the handrest. The only way to repair that was to disassemble the keyboard and move the rubber layer. The keyboard is easily opened but be very careful to remove three (3) screws which are underneath the two stickers. I just readjusted the rubber layer and the problem went away. I’m not really sure why the problem occurred anyway.

But to this day, I’m very content with the keyboard aside from this little problem. I would lie though, there is another problem, but not with the keyboard, probably with software (drivers probably). The problem is that the media keys (play, pause, next etc) don’t work from another application in windows 7 RC1 x64. I’m hoping that will change in the near future.

[19/9/2010 Update]

New Microsoft Intellitype drivers fixed the media keys, so now they work on a global level. In other words, you can control iTunes while browsing the web.

Windows 7 beta build 7000 – updated impressions and file permissions bug

2009-01-26T14:10:00.001+01:00

As you may know, I had bought additional 2GB of RAM for my desktop computer so I decided to give a Windows 7 beta x64 a spin.

It all went very smoothly, and I had no problems at all. To my great surprise Team Fortress 2 did run acceptably good, which means it was better than vista/vista x64. So all was well and good for the next 4 days.

So I wouldn’t be writing this if all was well isn’t it?

You are right of course because yesterday I was stunned when I discovered that iTunes wouldn’t play songs. This was very fishy so I immediately copied my 70GB of iTunes managed songs on another backup drive. I cannot recall the exact sequence anymore because I was really upset yesterday so I’m just going to tell you what were the problems yesterday and what I did to solve them.

Problem 1: iTunes couldn’t play music from iTunes folder (70ish GB of music and podcasts)

Solution: Immediately copied the folder to another drive.

Later problem 1a: I couldn’t access iTunes folder at all (after xp reinstall)! Couldn’t unlock the folder (with Unlocker), couldn’t delete it, nothing.

Solution: formatted the partition of the hard disk with the itunes folder. Copied the folder from the backup disk.

Problem 2: Couldn’t read any document from My Documents. I could add new documents in the folder.

Solution/description: File/folder permissions were set up ok. Nor did I change something before so the problem manifested just now. Strange thing was that when I copied some file on to another folder I could read it without problems. I managed to copy some of the more recent documents to another folder for backup but this isn’t really a solution. This isn’t really a small problem, it is a huge one, and I was constantly afraid that the “iTunes problem” wouldn’t happen to My Documents folder as well. So I didn’t want to leave anything to bugs of some programmers, so I reinstalled Windows xp from ghosted image 5 days ago. In xp my documents seems to be intact, which means everything is ok with it. But iTunes folder afterwards was completely unreadable. So I reformatted the partition as described in the previous solution.

But this could be all forgotten as a showstopper beta bug, and I was thinking that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. The following morning (today) the very similar thing happened on my msi wind which is running windows 7 beta 7000 too (but 32bit version). Problem with my documents folder on the Wind I solved quite more easily with taking ownership, and giving myself permissions (didn’t work on my desktop computer as there everything was (re)configured correctly). I thought that was the end of the problem (as I really didn’t want to reinstall xp, as Windows 7 was working pretty much flawlessly (until today). But I realized that the My Documents problem was only a part of the a larger problem. I went to this site’s blogger dashboard and there I was greeted with the note that I need to set my browser to accept cookies (because the site failed to write one to my hard drive). As I never, ever disabled cookies on this computer I immediately figured that this was the same problem with file permissions as the problems I mentioned previously. As I have no intention to hunt down and try to get back permissions on random occasions, I decided to reinstall xp on wind.

This really is a showstopper bug because I’m always ready to accept some rough edges and beta bugs, but when you are actually afraid for the existence your own files/folders, I had no doubt in my mind to reinstall windows xp (which is saying a lot, so to be short yes, I do think that Windows 7 will be a replacement to windows xp worth installing and using). There is even some irony in this too, because I always considered msi wind for experimentation with other operating systems, but I just cannot pass over the security of my own files on my own hard drive(s).

Until they fix this problem, I’m not going back to windows 7 beta.

Finally, I have provided a file and a web page which is generated by the extremely cool Problem Steps Recorder program which is included in Win7 (I’m hoping in all versions). The mht file (compressed as zip) opens only in Internet Explorer and Word but I’ve saved the web page opened in IE as a normal html page so you can see it by following this link. Be warned though that the IE version (mht file) looks much nicer, but if you avoid IE at all costs you can see the (poorly) saved html page. The linked page/mht file is going to demonstrate you in detail one instance of the larger problem with write permissions.

PS: There is ongoing (?) discussion on two forums concerning the problems I mentioned in this post. Seems too me that they are just instances of the large problem, even though on the forums they treat it as separate issues, and some even say it is the problem only with x64 version of Win7 which is not a truth at all.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t720870.html

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=720922&st=0&gopid=590406834&#entry590406834

Microsoft Windows Live Writer quick review [Updated]

2009-01-19T23:45:00.001+01:00

Ok, I’m writing an extremely short review of Windows Live Writer, Microsoft’s new blog post writer/editor. This is to my surprise a windows client (program) so it isn’t like blogger’s web editor. So you can write a post in the (relative) comfort of your Windows (which means greater screen space, easier formatting and object manipulation, and other offline extras) and publish directly to say, your blogger blog. Yeah, you’ve read it right, it works with Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Share Point blog and other blog providers. This is, to be quite honest excellent.

Lets start with the good sides of this application.

Firstly, it lets you format text easier and that feature is more bug free than blogger editor (I’m only familiar with that one, others I know only very superficially). Inserting pictures is very ms word-like. That means you can of course add pictures from files (which can be saved to your blog host or some other site via ftp, all automatically) but you can add pictures (and other objects) from clipboard as well. Besides images, you can easily and directly add tables (which you can easily edit), photo albums (needs Live ID though), MS Virtual Earth maps (as demonstrated below), movies (offline, online, youtube [1])and tags or other objects by downloading plug-ins. Every object which you add is very customizable which is a nice surprise. So you can add shadow effects to your pictures, change sizes, add watermarks, crop, tilt, add standard post processing effects etc.

Blog management is good too. You can have multiple blog accounts and Live Writer (or is it just Writer?) can manage them all very easily and efficiently. That means you have full control about your blog accounts, your blog posts are easy and fast to edit etc. There are other small details which only make your life much more easier. You can always preview your full blog (including the post you were currently editing) so you can always see how it all fits together even before the current post is finished. Of course, you can see the html source too. Too bad you can’t split the window to Edit and Source (like in Dreamweaver) but very few people will won’t sleep because of this.

So what are the the downsides of this program?

To be honest there aren’t many, which may come as a surprise to some. First what you notice when using this program is there seems to be a delay when you hold down your backspace key so you sometimes delete more text than you intended to. I hope this problem will be solved in the future though. It is not that annoying but you can used to it very fast. Next problem what you notice is the interface. Well, it is not bad at all, but I somehow expected a bit more, especially after the Office 2007 interface (which was a step in right direction). This time some of the commands are transplanted to the right part of the screen (which is a good thing in theory anyway, because it uses wide screen monitors more efficiently), but there are left large gaps in the top tool bar as you can see from one of the images below. Moreover, wouldn’t be great if the right sidebar has the same graphical style as Office 2007 ribbon? Then you have some other waste of screen real estate in the lower part of the screen as demonstrated on the screenshot. Finally, there is no quick way of changing fonts like you have in say MS Word. You don’t have a drop down list (even though there is plenty of space in the interface to add it), but you have to click an icon to open a font browser. Hey, 1995 called and they want their font browser back. And yes, publishing mini window could be better integrated in the existing interface too.

This are almost minor criticisms, and the application is very easy to use but not dumbed down and cut in useful features just for the sake of simplicity (I’m looking at you Apple!). This application proves that you can have simple to use program and have somewhat powerful features in it as well. This cannot be said for many os x applications sadly. Obviously there are many different teams in microsoft corporation. Some of them write crap products (or usually parts of the products) like the team which made Windows Network and Sharing Center for Vista/Win7 (or stone age carvers who made Paint.net, but don’t get me started) and then you have some other teams which write programs which are well build, almost perfectly polished, easy to use, tweakable, and most important of all, usable from day to day. This part of Microsoft I have no problem in admitting that I prefer and like.

Update: The program has a nasty habit of reverting the font typeface to Trebuchet even if you set for example Verdana for your post. This is easily corrected when you write the post and ctrl+a – format – font – verdana. It would be even better if font menu has a keyboard shortcut (preferably the same as ms word). Another thing which should be great is saving drafts to the blog site by default. Default is saving a local copy which is admittedly faster but less convenient. And yes, UI should have been done more logically.

[1] You can even upload movies to youtube directly.

Short status update 14/1/2009

2009-01-14T11:57:00.008+01:00

Last month or so was really boring to be honest. Very little happened so I haven't have much to write about.

I installed Windows 7 beta (build 7000) on both my Wind and my desktop pc. Deinstalled beta from desktop probably because the performance wasn't there and couldn't use shared printer on the network. Installed vista 64, deinstalled because of somewhat poor performance in Team Fortess 2. Installed vista x86 (another way to say it is 32bit) slightly better than x64 but still somewhat poor framerate. I did notice something more though. TF2 (or any other game) have a difficult to describe micro stutters when moving mouse. It just isn't silky smooth as in windows xp. Moreover, when I scroll with the mouse wheel in firefox under windows xp, the text and images scroll very, very smoothly, but not so in vista, which isn't smooth like that. This is difficult for me to capture but maybe one day I'll do it for the sake of it. So now I'm on windows xp again. But even windows xp isn't really rock stable (as it was) anymore (vista is though). When surfing on my Wind and I'm connected to desktop's wifi (which is configured to act as an Access Point through driver), desktop will go bsod ("driver irql less then or equal"). This never happened in vista even though the driver is exactly the same. Btw, I can't use ad-hoc networks because they are completely crippled in vista/windows 7 so I can't have a reliable connection with my Wind (who is running windows 7 beta).

To sum up the problems I have with windows releases:

Windows xp: everything is blazingly fast, but bluescreens when I surf the web on my msi wind. And the old age is really starting to show up in these days.
Windows Vista x86 (32bit): bloated, considerable drop in performance in games, doesn't scroll in firefox right, but has no blue screens, has media center (much better software than absolute crap of software I got with my tv tuner)
Windows Vista x64 (64bit): even poorer performance as 32bit version, but not much so though. Supports 3.5GB+ of RAM. Not many programs are written directly for 64bit so they run in 32bit mode with is slightly slower than a native 64bit mode. That means slower games (more noticeably, TF2 is 32bit only) and slower programs (eg. firefox is 32bit only too but you don't notice the difference).
Windows 7 beta x86 (32bit): slightly less bloated than vista, wifi management is better, but it is still in beta, cannot use a printer shared on my other networked computer, homegroup doesn't work for me, network sharing is a mess. Game performance is about as same as Vista, that means not very good.
Windows 7 beta x64: didn't try it yet.

So there you have it. Probably I can't have it all though. There was much of the discussion on slashdot on windows 7 performance which I was very interested in because I tested Windows 7 extensively on my Wind (have it installed since the first pre-beta) and desktop (had it for a few days, but it is the same as on my wind so the problems are the same). I did conclude that the performance isn't there because I actually tested the performance in games. Performance in windows is a bit better than in vista though, but this is very slight performance gain though. But what I'm specially amused about are this "facts":

Ars technica was always very "in-depth" (especially when testing processors and graphics cards), but this "in-depth tour" has the same depth as a dried up lake - no depth at all. There is not a word of mention that you can revert the new, completely unusable, counterintuitive taskbar to (improved) classic one in three mouse clicks, not a word on a new mini windows for selecting wireless networks etc. They tackled the windows 7 performance only by linking to the zdnet's comparison which is rubbish(1) (ie: first test - boot time). So hardly in-depth. I did intentionally mention that zdnet's comparison because those slashdot microsoft fanboys were wetting themselves over that the zdnet's test ultimately shows that windows 7 is faster than xp (which frankly it isn't) and completely disregarding the most obvious rubbish that the vista is even faster than xp.

Lets take a look at some of the comments from the slashdot discussion (even slashdot is going down the drain I'm afraid)

Slashdot continues to moan because the average commenter has neither ran the beta or used Vista for longer than 5 minutes. Its more fun to bitch about Microsoft than to actually use the product.

Its also fun to sit and read some of the bitch comments and see how many Slashdotters overlooked the "beta" part, bitch about missing features, and apparently thought they were downloading the final RTM code.

I've never had a lick of trouble running Vista. Nor have I had a lick of trouble in the two weeks I've been running this beta. But then I made sure to put it on a modern PC built with Vista in mind, not my grandfather's Packard-Bell 486 with 4 meg of ram.

(Score:5, Insightful)

Then we have a reply:

Yes that's nice. It's clear MS didn't finish the OS. Because of things like this [imageshack.us]. They didn't even bother making the Aero UI that they hyped up for so long mesh with the rest of the OS. They took the Desktop Properties window (right click->Properties) in Windows XP, and just separated the tabs and provided a link to each one. Boy that's an improvement.

Or how about having to click 3x more than XP just to get to the network connection status or, Bill Gates forbid, make changes to the TCP/IP settings. Jeez it feels like 15 clicks. I have to STOP doing what I'm doing and concentrating on, and figure out which of the 5 buttons to click, and do that for about 5 more windows that come up before I get there. With WinXP I just double click the little computer on the taskbar and it opens it for me. Or I right click it and can get to the TCP/IP settings with one more click.

(Score:2, Insightful)

Strange he didn't get a troll mod. Now read this:

My experience doesn't match their assessment. I'm running Windows 7 on my Dell Mini and it runs faster than Windows XP Home ran on this exact same machine.

(Score:4, Informative)

And this from another poster:

Likewise I'm finding that Windows 7 feels subjectively more responsive than XP on the same hardware. So far I'm really liking the beta, but as a microsoftie friend of mine pointed out, "the vista betas worked really well too...."

(Score:3, Informative)

This is really getting out of hand. No, Windows 7 doesn't feel any faster than xp, if it actually does, you have spam/virus infested windows xp installation (can hapen to 7 easily too) or you are too stupid to configure windows xp. And no, Vista beta never felt fast, on the contrary it was always slow. Slow in the beta, slow in the RC, slow in RTM. I know, I tested them all.

Then you have a typical fanboy who is talking out of his ass, clearly confused with the ars technica's preview and zdnet's comparison:

TFA has six pages, almost all of which were praise for Windows 7, and yet the "summary" picks out three choice sentences that were negative.

Nevermind the new features (both under the hood and with the UI), nevermind all the annoyances of Vista that this undoes, nevermind the ZDNet tests that show 7 to be faster than XP and Vista.

No, let's scan the entire article and post the most damning phrases we can find and call that a summary.

And no I'm not new here.

(Score:5, Insightful)

He is only a confused kid, maybe not a new, but clearly confused. (very few vista's annoyances were resolved, only some with wifi, and a thing here and there, but nothing serious to be honest).

Then the saga continues with this fanboyism:

Let me start off by saying that Windows Vista is no longer the piece of shit that it once was. Ever since SP1, the many problems that Vista used to have have been gone. I was using Vista Ultimate since July and had absolutely no issues with anything, and it actually runs faster (gasp!) than XP on my machine. (Let me point out that my machine has a Q6600, 4GB of RAM, and an 8800GT)

(Score:3, Interesting)

Yeah, right. And I have even faster computer (and even slower 2) and nothing runs fast as windows xp. Nothing. Period.

Then you have this gem which pretty much sums up my point about windows 7.

1. I was able to work with Excel without a problem. It opened up and ran as fast as a dual core machine running XP. So that's fine.

2. Installation speeds were completely in line with what I'm used to. I installed Firefox, Flash, Adobe Reader and Office 2007. I didn't run into any problems.

3. The OS' installation was seemless. I didn't try to upgrade and just let it go from scratch. Once I finished the basic setup I just let it sit for about an hour and it did it itself. Once it finally booted up I didn't need to install new drivers. I really liked this to be honest given how painful driver installations and downloads can be.

(Score:2, Informative)

There you have it. Even a 10 year old computer will run office 2007, excel or whaterver fine. Vista runs every non gaming app fine. Windows 7 runs every non gaming app fine. But only Windows xp runs all of that + games fine. That is my whole point. Those fanboy tards look at those two mentioned articles and say, wow, windows 7 surely is fast! It runs firefox very fast! The new task bar is surely cool! That means windows 7 is great for gaming! lol

Anyways, doesn't seem to you as well as it seems to me, dear reader, that this the most obvious problem microsoft is facing: if windows ever goes bad in games/gaming (as vista is, whatever the horde of kids says otherwise) and more gamers go to consoles, and lets imagine that very few gamers even play on windows, what would happen really? All those kids who used pc for gaming used it for writing documents, surfing the web etc. But when you remove games, what is actually left in windows which binds a gamer to it? Nothing really. Doesn't it seem to you that when games become more popular on consoles (as they already are as a matter of fact) those kids won't bother with windows at all? Then those kids will push alternative operating systems to their relatives (as they/we did with windows) because those alternatives are as good for writing documents and surfing the web as windows. Food for thought.

Lastly, I'm presenting you a stupid picture I did in a couple of hours of photoshop and night diving.

(1) Why zdnet's comparison is rubbish and has no real world weight? Because it uses Passmark, PCMark vantage, Cinebench r10 which are nothing but rubbish tests. Why, firstly they are sythetic so they are not real-world (it is better to test copy speed of huge directories, launching huge programs, images, run games with this and that graphic settings, mark low/high fps, does windows management feel fast or slow etc) and secondly, when a test like that puts vista ahead of xp then I know that the test is complete and utter bullshit.

Apple OS X 10.5.4 on MSI Wind [Updated]

2008-12-19T14:31:00.004+01:00

As the title (almost) says I managed to install OS X 10.5.4 on my wind. How was this possible? Intel based computers (which includes the wind) has somewhat similar hardware as an apple macbook so people from the hackint0sh community have been working hard to manage to install os x on them. Installing os x on wind was possible some time ago (months really) but it demanded couple of things which weren't that easy to pass over. Firstly you needed a broadcom based wireless card (which you could order from ebay, but for me unfortunately that was out of the question) and an external dvd drive. You needed the wifi card because the default realtek didn't have any drivers for os x so just didn't work, and that was a great roadblock for many wind owners. But few days ago, MSI quite unexpectedly (for me at least) drivers for the integrated wifi card. So I then realized it was time to give os x on wind a go.

I already found two tutorials how to install it.

First is from a guy named Paul at modaco forums. This installation is a bit out of date (but not by much) because I found the second more up-to-date tutorial (25 September 2008) from a guy named Jose Perez at PlanetX64. (btw, you don't need to have dual layer dvd, single layer works too)

His tutorial suggests using a slipstreamed Kalyway "distribution" and he is right about it. The installation is much simpler than Paul's so I recommend it.

But the next problem I had was getting an external dvd drive because my somewhat local shops had some but were dvd readers/writers and not quite cheap as I imagined. So after looking around I realized that I could put my internal dvd drive from my desktop computer into an external enclosing for 3.5in disk (which I already had) and connect it over usb. That worked perfectly. So installing os x was just a matter of installation.

Software installation itself went very easily and smoothly. Additional software installed without problems whatsoever. One problem though are software updates. Well, everything updates without problems, but "point upgrades" ie 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 doesn't work. There are some workarounds to update anyway but I wasted a whole day reinstalling the OS because I didn't manage to get it to work. But those updates are actually pretty minor so I'm not bothered about it very much. In any case some easier methods to update will probably be released.

What works:

webcam
native resolution and color depth
sound
wifi (with realtek drivers)
suspend
fn-hotkeys
touchpad (even better than in windows, you can accelerate it much more)
normal updates
battery indicator is precise

What doesn't work:
speedstep isn't working which is a problem on this subnotebook because the processsor is working at full power all the time so it wastes the battery faster.
point uprades
ethernet? (not really sure about this, didn't work when I was connecting to my router, needs more testing)
some (very rare) windows are clipped at the bottom because of the lack of resolution. Fortunately, this is very rare and all System Preferences can be adjusted without problem.

Haven't tested audio inputs/outputs yet so I'll report later.

[Update]: Deinstalled, couldn't get over the lack of processor throttling (speedstep). I tried some programs kexts (kernel extensions) which amazingly I managed to install, but it seems to me they didn't work. So I'll wait for some other distribution in the future, even though the one I tried (slipstreamed kalyway) isn't bad at all.

Windows 7 pre-beta build 6801

2008-12-11T15:20:00.001+01:00

I tried it on my MSI Wind couple of weeks ago. I wanted to publish this post much more sooner but better now then never. I had tested Vista /w sp1 on the same computer but generally uninstalled it the same day. I just couldn't live with all that bloat and 30+ windows in networking.

Windows 7 (build 6801) is completely another animal. I'll concede right away its not windows xp. But it is no worse either.

Firstly, most of the bloat is gone. Networking has at least half of the windows cut down and selecting a wireless network is much more simpler now (almost like os x). Still there are problems which are carried over from vista (not xp, evidence that 7 is based on vista). For example: 60sec lag spike when using wireless connection is still present which makes web browsing less pleasant than on the xp and online gaming impossible which isn't a small deal. I just cannot fathom why still they haven't fixed it. The problem was present at least from Vista RC1 (which I tested too back then), and today it thrives in windows 7 too. There are other issues too (including major ones, like random disconnects from ad-hoc networks etc) but its late and I want to write about other stuff.

Windows explorer has some new features which is nothing but bloat unfortunately. Almost all the new gains in UI are offset with this. Why on earth there is Favorites, Libraries and Homegroup in the folder list (left part of explorer)? They cannot be removed and all of them are placed above (My) Computer and your local disks which are used the most. And every time you open explorer, Libraries are open by default. This is completely unacceptable. And I don't really get what Libraries are all about. It seems that those are links (like favourites) and at the same time they are indexed. The same can be set for favourites folder too so I'm confused. As the guy at windowsteamblog.com writes, Libraries and Homegroup are made to facilitate file sharing between computers (on the same network). I can understand that and I'm a great supporter of better file/folder integration in networks but this solution reeks of infamous microsoft way of doing things. Take a simple idea (better file/folder integration) and combine it with heavily bloated, poorely customizable and impossible to turn off designs and you get Libraries and Homegroup. Normal user will be either completely confused by this or will completely ignore both favourites and librarires. I can predict it will be the latter rather than former. I have trouble explaining to a normal windows user anything in windows which cannot be said in couple of sentences. If you've seen the article I've posted in the link above you'll understand how complicated (even if that blogger says otherwise, he is wrong) this "feature" is. And this tells you exactly how many users will experience this addition in a positive way. Add the fact that the libraries/homework work only with windows 7 (so all your computer have to have winows 7, to fully utilize the concept) and yes, you guessed, very few people will use this feature at all. And oh, did I mentioned that they've changed yet again the name of the default folders? Windows xp->My documents Vista->Documents Windows 7->Personal Documents. Great consistency boys!

Task bar is new and by default it is two rows high and only shows icons. It is a bad decision to have this by default. You can switch to normal windows information display (icon + app title text) and then it looks and handles nicely. Hats off to the guy who designed that cool mouse tracking effect on the taskbar. There are minor aesthetical issues with other taskbar features but this is not a place to expand on it. Yeah, they still haven't come to terms with flip 3d which is a garbage and a blatant feature copy of mac's expose. I wouldn't have anything against that but they copied it badly. It is nice to show off to a friend the first time, but has no practical value whatsoever. They added "aero snap" (or some buzzword like this) and that is one of those little features which are good and forward thinking. This way you can easily have firefox centered (because it a is complete waste of screen space to have it maximized) on your 1920x1200 desktop, which is the picture below showing (on win xp though, just to illustrate my point). This is the a feature you can put on rather small list titled: "Windows does it better than OS X". I just hate all the windows micromanagement when you are using a mac. Add to that a pretty slow and high friction touchpad on my mac and you'll know what I'm talking about.

They added some new features like character editor, keyboard shortcut to connect a projector or an external display (pretty slick and useful actually, win-p), new calculator (I like xp power toy one better though), power shell (finally) etc. Still I find mac os x more feature complete though.

Other than that, stability is great in the days I have tested it. Haven't had one single problem. All hardware devices were recognized and drivers automatically installed once you connected to the internet (which can be a tricky one on a msi wind;). Battery lasts at least as long on the xp, maybe even more because the indicator says that at full charge battery will last for 2:20 (vs 2:00 with xp). And yes, power management was streamlined, but that could be done even further though. And finally, yes, it runs very well on Wind, just as xp. Contrary to Vista which feels very slow most of the time, and extremely slow some of the time.

Just to conclude the post. Win 7 is windows on the right track (if you give a blind eye to libraries/homegroup). Vista definitely was like Me, but 7 is not to Vista as xp was to 98. It is something in between. It is not bad at all (even this early, but as a sidenote, I don't think they will change much after this pre-beta), but it is not game changing like xp was to 98. At the same time one could say that 7 will be a good replacement for aged xp. It will be what vista should have been from day one. But I still long for a real desktop mac, more customizable os x, and lower prices in europe at least...

Underwater statue

2008-12-10T19:29:00.002+01:00

First of all, sorry for not posting in a while, I was very busy in the last days so no updates. Anyways, last weekend we've installed a statue of Saint Nicholas on 15m of depth near our diving club. The statue is 70cm tall and made of bronze. The same statue but 4m tall is in front of our church in the town center. This saturday I'm going to have a proper dive there so to see how the statue is faring concerning the sea weed and take some proper photos with 12-24mm lens. I hope this time the current will be much more weaker. Last time the current was around 2mph which is was a hell for taking photos.

You can see the photos here:

http://photo.adriasub.com

the movies are there too but you can watch them on youtube too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Rfe53a1NA

Apple headphones suck build quality wise - part 2, final conclusions

2008-11-29T20:13:00.007+01:00

Note: This is a followup to my previous post about the low quality of the apple iphone and/or ipod headphones.

Just look at those awful headphones (why yes, I know that photo suck, but you can thank nokia for crappy ccds). These are iphone's and they are almost 1 year old. They completely disintegrated few days ago. Trouble started when the rubber rings around the the earpieces fell apart. Then around two months later, the rubber around male connector fell apart too because the iphone's female connector is a hair smaller than the headphone's male piece. At the same time the wire at the connector was chipped. I had to fix it with carefully applied electrical tape, but that worked only for a short while - right earbud stopped working. The wire snapped inside the microphone piece.

So with this day, I threw away two apple earphones, which were around 1 year old. The third pair lost the rubber around the earpieces months ago even though it was in the drawer all the time and never used! I have to stress that the headphones were always handled appropriately so the last one to blame about the quality of the earphones is me.

Croatian National Geographic Magazine's special edition book

2008-11-28T00:43:00.005+01:00

Today I got a book in my inbox and boy was it a surprise. It is a book made and released to mark first five years of Croatian edition of National Geographic Magazine. In it you can find 12 best croatian stories that were published in NGM over this 5 years (so it is a selection of 11*5=55 stories). The special reason to be content is that in the story about Lastovo island there are my photos as well. In other words, the story that was published in NGM more than a year ago was featured now again this special edition book, and that includes my photos. Dad has even greater satisfaction to be content because his photos are in Lastovo story, and in island of Vis story too.

I'll try to get a scan of those photos and upload it here for you to see what I'm rambling about.

Shorter posts, more frequent updates

2008-11-28T00:30:00.000+01:00

I'm not really satisfied with rare updates I'm doing on this blog so this is going to change. Twitter's tweets are way too short to even update someone about something, let alone to give a short comment to supplement it.

Canon selphy cp520 short review

2008-11-26T01:44:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I threw a half full printing cassette of canon cp520. It jammed inside the printer and snapped when I tried to get it out. $10 just went in a typical tape snapping sound (a cassette lasts for 30 printouts). The tape inside is a bit funny though. Firstly it is extremely thin, it is very long, and then lastly it has different colours (CMY). It looks like a scarf from future. This is the only funny thing about yesterday's incident.

The printer itself is small, compact but a bit heavy and transformer is jut too big. Of course it has other cons too like ~~missing USB host port~~, card reader, no on/off switch, and the bright blue light on top is always activated. In the package you get paper and a printing cassette for only couple of prints (3 or 5 can't remember) which results in a huge anticlimax when you buy that printer, come home to print some photos but alas, you can print just a few of them. So when you buy printer like this always take a pack of cassettes and paper (as I did). Word of caution though, 103 page printing pack costs 2/3 of the printer price which is not cheap up front but it is certainly cheaper than classic inkjet printers.

On the positive side, the quality of printouts is great for normal photographs. Underwater ones are too dark though. I'm still experimenting how to adjust them in advance. The problem is that some pictures turn out medium dark and others turn too dark with no apparent pattern (my sample rate is probably too small).

The price per page is somewhat low, certainly lower than inkjet printers and lower than the printing shops. To be honest, you pay up front for the printer when you compare it with the printing shop where you don't have up front payments. But in my opinion it balances out because in my case it is very inconvenient to go to a printing shop because the nearest to me is 30km away.

Another problem I have with this printer is dust. I had 2 photos now who had a dust "straw" (which looks ugly and unnatural so you have to throw it away) visible on the printout even though I always keep the printer closed when not in use. Moreover, the printer as you can see from the (low quality) pictures it is placed on the desk, not the floor.

So this concludes my shorter and (hopefully) more frequent posts. For any clarification or explanation, feel free to use comments.

Minor update: it is interesting how this printer has a an extremely small driver. It weights just a few megabytes which is pretty extraordinary because all modern drivers tend to be extremely bloated and in a range of 60+MB, sometimes even more than 100MB. Consider that the drivers and app for watching TV with my pinnacle usb hybrid tv tuner weigh more than 350MB+ (and this is only installation) which is completely unacceptable.

Nokia 6500 classic review

2008-11-09T15:19:00.004+01:00

I bought this phone with a 1-year plan from Tele2. It was considerably less expensive than the normal vendor price and Tele2 has the least bad plans in this country. You may wondering what I did with my wifi-less iphone? I've put a data card in it so I use it as an ipod touch with always available web. Not bad a deal at all I can assure you. The problem is, that you can't get a decent call/sms plan and a data plan together at the same carrier. So you have to take call/sms from say tele2, data from vipnet (vodafone). That requires two phones. So the phone used for calls/sms (the iphone is better for everything else without a doubt) should be as light and small as possible and from tele2. There wasn't much choice so I got myself a Nokia 6500 classic.

I'm not going to write a long review, to read a very detailed review of this phone just take a look at Eldar Murtazin's review. I just wanted to share a bit more insight as he unintentionally left out from his review.

The phone is eastetically pleasing and very well designed (which is unusal for nokia, at least design-wise). This is impressive because it is a great rarity that nokia made a completely metal shell on a phone. The only plastic part aside from the keyboard is the plastic at the top which is really small. Now, don't get me wrong, I do like plastics actually, but as I said, it it very rare from nokia to make a almost completely metal phone. Great number of nokia's E series is metal, but they have large visible plastic parts too.

Display is not brilliant and has some color shifting when you change the viewing angle. But overall, for a mobile phone display it is not bad at all. Can't be compared to iphone's though, which is much much better than any other mobile phone's display I ever had the pleasure to use. But I'm a little concerned about lack of display protection. There is no protection at all which is very unusual for nokia. Pretty much every nokia phone has additional hard plastic covering the phone but this one has none. I'll report if I manage to crack it some day. It won't be from flex/torsion, mind you, because this phone is very solid in its metal case.

Keypad looks at least ok from the pictures but it is another thing entirely when you actually use it. They keypad only has two or three problems. They buttons are much too stiff, they are plastic and the key travel is extremely short. First problem somewhat goes away with the time because your thumb adjusts, but less stiff buttons would be a plus. Keys are plastic and they sometimes squeak when pressed. They should be made from metal as the whole body is made from it. When you handle the keypad for the first time it gives a bit too much of a cost savings feeling. Finally, key travel is a bit too short. When you have too short key travel and combined with very stiff keys you get generally unpleasant keypad. Well, I adjusted with time but there are mobile phones with considerably better keypads. There are worse keypads too (dad's w910i which has soft key, short travel but no feel at all so it is a pain to write anything on that phone) so I can consider this keypad in the mid range. It is not bad at all, but as I said, there are better keypads.

When talking about the phone size, judging from the pictures, one can conclude that the phone is not really small. But you would be wrong here. True, the phone is not really super small (there are such mobile phones though) but it is really thin. So you can grasp the phone and hold it in one hand when you send text messages without problem. With its thinness they got smaller volume but same "front face functionality" as on the larger/fatter phones. Even though the phone has metal shell it is very light and if you add the thinnes of it you don't even notice you have it in your pocket. True again, there are very light phones but few of them are thin as well. You always feel the fat phones in your pocket. Even worse if it is heavy because you call it a brick then. Why an iphone isn't called a brick? (except when you call it an ibrick, but that is another story;) Because it is relatively thin. But even if its thin, you really notice it in your pocket because of the weight (130g).

I was negatively surprised with the sound quality of the phone. No, I'm not talking about the external speaker which is very loud (like 3x louder than the iphone's) which is a great comparing it to almost silent iphone (now thinking about it, they really did screw up with the loudness on the iphone v.1). The problem is the normal speaker. Probably not the speaker itself, but somehow the sound coming from it is metallic. It is difficult to explain, but almost as the sample rate is bad. I found the "voice clarity" in the menu and activated it (should be on by default) and it did make considerable difference. But it is still way behind the iphone's quality. Somehow I expected more because I had mobile phones (yes, even nokia's) which were like 8 years old now with excellent sound quality. The quality was almost at the quality of the fixed landline. Sometimes it was even at that level.

The only connector the phone has is the micro usb. Finally they got rid of all proprietary connector formats and replaced it with a micro usb (A version?) connector[1]. This way you can charge the phone when you connect it to a computer (just like the ipod/iphone) with data cable and by using a standalone charger with the micro usb connector (both are included in the box). The only port lacking is the 3.5mm audio-out but I can understand that this is ~~fashion~~ showoff phone so there is no place for and ugly hole.

So what's more to say? Ah, software, nothing much to say really. Eldar said about that software everything there is. It is not bad at all, but I cry when I see my iphone. S40 (and S60 too!) look from stone age compared to iphone's os x mobile. Not only looks, but usability is better on iphone. I'm not going to be pulled into a debate about s40 vs os x mobile but they are hardly comparable. But I will say only this. I hate those near monopolies. Manufacturers just become lazy and do the same things over and over again. Just look at those s40 or even some s60 phones. They are pretty much the same all the time. They just change the shell and call it all new series for young and metro people. I hate this practice and I cannot describe the joy when I saw the iphone demo when it was first time demonstrated. I just knew that other manufacturers would have to do something in the near future. Cheers about the google's android, I just love the competition. But honestly, have you ever seen people waiting in a line to buy a phone? I mean, have you ever seen a line of people wanting to buy an nokia phone? Of course not. Noka lauch days don't even exist really. Alot of phones they produce in the last months, even years, are just rehashed crap. But I must stop here, firstly, I'm repeating myself, secondly, I don't want to open a chapter on useless rambling. Ah, yes now I remember, what really bugs me about the software. When you go to write a sms and start to write in "To:" field, you can enter only the number with the keypad. To select the name you have to navigate the menu and find it in your address book etc. I all want is in the To: field is to default to text so then I enter "Jill" the sms message is sent to Jill. _I don't want to remember her bloody phone number!._Symbian 60 does support the feature I was talking about. But none of this is new. S40 phones from 4 years at least back didn't have this feature but S60 did! This is not a hardware/software limitation. It is deliberate obstacle by those nokia tards. I hope those managers rot in hell and their company faces liquidation. But one can only wish I suppose.

Update: To set your phone to normally vibrate when you receive a message in “Discreet” or similar mode you have to put the “Message alert tone” to Off.

Lets now compare this phone to nokia 5310 xpress music (but only what one has and the other hasn't)

Nokia 5310 xm:
+ micro sd slot
+ 3.5mm audio-out jack
+ better keypad (tried it out)
+ lighter
+ screen has a plastic protection
+ has a fm radio
+ considerable cheaper

Nokia 6500 classic:
+ considerable better design
+ metal casing (just for the looks)
+ camera has leds which act as strobes (can't be used as flashlights though, another deliberate design decision)
+ integrated 1GB of memory

So what to do about this? I would have bought the 5310 but tele2 doesn't stock them unfortunately. But if you really prefer the design, go for 6500 classic. Yes, people sometimes ask you about the phone (6500c is not really common here), which is always a great thing;)

[1] to enter the chinese market you have to have usb connector on your phone. That makes sense because I have 3 tons of different transformers and such for every different electrical device. As the market is too big not to compete in it, nokia naturally gave way and introduced usb connectors.

Edit: I should really work more on writing shorter articles. Took me 2 hours at least to write this and it is just too long.

Lenovo L220x review

2008-11-04T09:48:00.005+01:00

I know, this review was long overdue and the monitor isn't really that new either. But still, people still buy it so I wanted to give first hand experience on it.

The monitor has a very wide gamut, and great reproduction of colours. One thing I dont' really fancy is that reds are too strong in my opinion. In lack of a monitor calibrator I settled on the sRGB setting in the OSD as suggested on various forums. Another thing I don't like is that the text (and vector grapics) is not really sharp as on any other screen I had before. I'm not really sure what is the problem. They seem blurry/bleeding at the edge of the pixel when bordering with white pixels. I came to conclusion that maybe the problem is that PVA panel technology is like that. So if you need sharp text (and who doesn't frankly?) stay away from this monitor.

Other things of note is that the monitor is generally stable on the stand, the controls are intuitive and easy to deal with. Monitor lacks dual dvi input badly as is the case with missing hdmi. When I was buying this monitor I thought that hdmi is used for pretty much nothing and dual dvi ports are useless. Boy was I wrong. Second dvi port could be easily be used to connect my macbook so I can watch things on the big display or it could be used with a hdmi->dvi adapter so you can play console games on the monitor withot the need to disconnect the computer dvi cable. The same goes with hdmi. Every console/set top box ships with hdmi so you can hook it up with the monitor effortlessly. I mean really, who needs a huge TV just to play console games when you have this great monitor sitting on your desk and begging to be used?

Samsung 731BF

Lenovo L220x

If anyone can explain the difference between the two pictures above, please contact me in the comments.

Razer Tarantula gaming keyboard is a piece of shit.

2008-11-04T09:09:00.008+01:00

I'm going to conclude my saga with the Razer Tarantula keyboard. I got mine finally replaced some time ago and it had the same problem as the previous one.

This isn't even the same batch of keyboards because firstly, the first keyboard was bought almost a year ago. The new one has a german layout and key lettering's so it cannot be the same batch. My only conclusion is that whole series of Razer Tarantula gaming keyboards is defective. And you read it here first folks.

So what did I do with the new keyboard? I'll tell you the truth. In all the rage about the repeating characters I wanted to narrow it down buy cutting the numeric pad off (like I did on the MS natural multimedia keyboard). That wasn't smartest thing to do and after the surgery some keys wouldn't work. Nah, I'm not bitter at all because the keyboard was a junk anyway. I do admit it was build very well and the keys had a good feel, but everything else was crap. The drivers sucked, macros sucked (can't press a macro key and any other key at the same time which is bullshit), that glowing logo which cannot be turned off sucked, usb sucked (ninetees called and they want ther usb 1.1 back), the price sucked, multimedia keys sucked (no pause button, only stop wtf) the widness sucked, and the most annoying off all which I never couldn't pass over was the problem of repeating characters when the keys are pressed.

So why nobody says a word about this problem? I think the problem number one is that people who buy this keyboard use it for gaming most or only for gaming. What I mean is that a teen kid who likes to play some game usually don't type much on the keyboard so he doesn't notice the defect the keyboard has.

So anyone wanting to buy a razer tarantula gaming keyboard (yes, I know I'm fishing for page rank) review the points I made in this text and the previous ones. I'll be short here. Don't buy that piece of garbage and go for some other keyboard. Preferably any other which isn't made by razer. I will never buy anything from razer again after this painful experience. If you need a gaming keyboard take a look at microsoft's sidewinder x6. What is good about this keyboard? Firstly it has a removable numeric pad so you can make the keyboard much shorter (on both or right side) which in an enormous plus in my book. Secondly it has good tactile feel (or so they say in the reviews, I need to test it first hand*). Thirdly, the chances are that it has the same problem as the razer are extremely small. The design is good, the knobs and extra buttons are good, dunno about the drivers but they seem better than razer's, and the price is the half of tarantula's etc.

*Funny how reviews can be deceptive. I read about a dozen of logitech's wave keyboard reviews and all of them said that the tactile feel was great. I almost bought that keyboard but I wanted to try it in store first. Let me be clear about it. The feel is horrible. You never know when you pressed the key because the keys have small resistance and no point when you can feel that your press was registered. So a quick tip about reviews: generally trust the reviews when they describe objective things, and generally distrust the reviews when then talk about subjective things like feel, looks etc. I know that this is pretty obvious but sometimes people just get carried away when shopping for item. To sum up: trust sentences like: X has object/feature Y. Distrust sentences like. Y feels great. You'll save a ton of cash just by following this simple and intuitive rules.

Why "instant-on" boot modes are a wrong design philosophy?

2008-10-19T11:36:00.008+02:00

There was much of a stir amongst our interwebs how next generation of windows (windows 7) will have a boot mode which will start in under 8 seconds. In this mode you can do only some very basic stuff. So if you want to do anything else, you'll need to boot the full OS. At first glance that sounds great. But if you have any dose of common sense left, you'll understand how that is nothing but marketing hype and propaganda.

Lets first consider why microsoft even considered adding a special mode to it's next windows. This is just a marketing move in my opinion. Operating systems of my past were somewhat fast to boot up. Dos was fast, windows 3.1 was necessary slower because it needed to load dos first, then windows 95-98 were starting to get really slow to boot up. Windows xp is fast to boot on modern machines, but give it a few months after installation and install some programs (even very light ones) and even by keeping startup programs very minimal startup takes a very long time. Add windows vista to the fray which is very bloated and you can almost take a lunch before OS is ready to be used, even on relatively fast computers. People in the very recent past and present started to complain about the boot times. Linux community responded with Splashtop, a very basic Linux OS which boots in just a few seconds. Dell and some other manufacturer (Toshiba?) already have their specially cut down windows versions for very basic things (music, movies, internet etc). But this time Microsoft responded (probably pressed by the Vista flop) by testing the market with a survey in which one of the possible features of the Windows 7 would be a special "instant-on" boot mode.

So after I created the setting, and introduced you with the past and present let me present you with my own view on this matter. It may seem that my view on this matter is trivial and common knowledge, but this certainly isn't the case when I first suggested it. I will now just copy/paste my post from slashdot discussion because there is no point in retyping it again. You can see the croatian version here.

Let me get this as simple as possible:

1. Having a fast booting OS is good in any case.

2. Having a special fast-boot mode is useless.

Let me give you an example.

Take a normal mobile phone. I can press two buttons and the phone is ready to be used. Does anyone on this planet cares how fast a mobile phone boots its OS? Pretty much nobody cares if the phone boots in 15, 30, or 60 seconds. They boot it once a day at most. I can't even remember when was the last time I rebooted mine.

Can you already see where I'm going with this? I got only few words:

Suspend/hibernation/hybrid sleep.

I already wrote a post similar to this. Take my macbook (or pretty much any other computer) for example. I can't even remember when was the last time I (re)booted it. Consequentially, I don't even care how fast it boots. I just close the lid when I'm done with my work and the computer goes to hybrid sleep. When I want to resume with my work, I just open the lid and the computer is *instantly* ready to accept my input.

This is just like a mobile phone. But even better! As the mobile phone does drain the battery slowly, computer actually doesn't (if it is hibernated).

So to finish with my post. Of course it is good for a OS to boot fast. But in my view this isn't one of it's main features. Instead they should really be working on improving suspend/resume mechanic on desktop and laptop computers. Too many brand new laptops dont' resume when I open their lids. I usually have to press their power button to resume. And sometimes, they don't resume at all. So instead of doing a whole another windows mode, they should instead focusing on better suspend/resume support.

I still can see like 98% of windows users and 90% of mac users regularly shut down their laptops/desktops. One can consider this a bad habit from the "good old times". Modern computer architecture really should be making great suspend/resume architecture.

Have something to comment, expand, criticize, feel free to use the comments. That means a lot to me.

PS: If something boots in 8 seconds it cannot be called instant-on, it should be called fast-on.

MSI Wind U100 review

2008-10-02T19:21:00.007+02:00

As I quite obviously announced a review of msi wind in my previous post but not to bother the reader, I'll just make a quick one.

Hardware

When you hold it in your hand it really is light and when you compare it with a macbook it is much more lighter. Coincidentally, macbook is considerable lighter and smaller than standard 15'' laptops.
It feels well built and the lid is exceptionally sturdy and doesn't flex. This has something with endurance testing which they do at MSI. You get a paper stating that every notebook they make can endure 25kg on any single point of a notebook (and yes that includes the lid), the lid can be closed 3 trillion times, keys can be pressed 25 googol times etc. Ok the last two I exaggerated slightly but you get the point. So the laptop feels generally sturdy and well built. I actually prefer the macbooks plastic because it feels/looks much more expensive though. Hinges are ok, they don't look flimsy like on the acer aspire one. One more good thing about them is that they allow the screen to be opened very wide so you don't have the problem just like on a macbook which lacks the wide screen opening angle. On wind you can open the screen to almost 180deg which is great. Display is ok. To be honest I do miss 1280x800 resolution of a macbook (which could be greater) even though the colours and viewing angles are good. The latter characteristic is even better than on a macbook. They could put before mentioned resolution without problems on a screen like this (and increasing the pixel density greatly). Maybe the next generation will get something like this but I'm not optimistic. If subnotebooks ever get that resolution there wouldn't be any good reason to buy a 15'' entry level laptop anymore. Screen backlight is LED but I really need to compare those two screens more carefully to determine any gain/loss in quality.

Keyboard is tiny but you can touch type without problems. It takes a little getting used to it but it's not a problem. I have a feeling that if the keys were any smaller (like on asus 901) I would have problems with typing though. But this is only just a feeling of course.

One important feature of the latest subnotebooks is Intel's Atom processor. On the wiki page you can see that even on full power this processor will waste only 4W of power which in theory is almost nothing. But in practice it is a completely another story. True enough, its not the problem with the processor (which is relatively fast) but with the chipset and integrated intel's graphics. Those two waste alot of power which has two things as a consequence: fan is working all the time and the battery life is poor (2h at most). Compare this with the macbook which is completely silent 95% of the time (you can hear the fan only after prolonged 100% processor use) and its battery lasts more than 5hours with same usage patterns. And those 2 hours are really pathethic in real world use. The problem is that the subnotebooks are built to be used on the go. In the park, in the bus, train, car, maybe in a school etc. Those little less than 2 hours pass very fast so you almost always need to haul the transformer (which thankfully is small) and the power cable (which is bulky). Additionaly you always have to be on the lookout for power outlets. When 6cell batteries come to croatian's "market" I'll probably buy one if it won't be too expensive. That way you can have that larger battery and a smaller one in your jacket pocket which will get you combined power for 6 hours of work which is enough. I sincerely hope that the next generation will get updated chipsets and less power hungry graphics.

Just a sidenote and an update about my fan problems. Few days after I bought it, fan developed some noise which occurs when you start the computer (probably at full power) but goes away after a few seconds. I tried everything with the fan, even disconnecting it completely. But I still haven't managed to repair it. I have a feeling that with little aluminium the could solve the cooling problem without the need of a fan. They should have made (at least) the bottom of the laptop of aluminium and connect it directly to the processor, chipset and graphics. Without the ventilator temperatures are 75+degrees which is alot really. Your fingers get sweaty under the heat and you can almost smell the electronics melting. That is not good.

Touchpad is tiny and this version has the worser sentelic one which lacks normal scrolling and this is one of the bigger gripes I have with this subnotebook. Control of the mouse pointer is good, and I would even say that the surface is relatively more responsive than then macbook's one. But I really miss the scrolling I have on the macbook (two finger scrolling is great) or the synaptic's type of scrolling. Moreover I hate the touchpad button (one button, two points of pressure) which is extremely stiff, wedged and your thumb starts to hurt immediately if you use it. They blew it with this "solution". Its not a comfort that touchpads suck on other subnotebooks.

I miss the dvi port but that's Intel's stupid decision to blackmail subnotebook manufacturers not to include them (to protect laptop market).

Hard disk is reasonably fast but have a clicking noise when it parks the head. This is a pitty because macbooks hard drive is dead silent all the time.

Software

Nothing to say much about windows xp sp3. True enough its not osx but it is good enough. I miss the "close the lid for standby, open the lid for resume" from the macbook. Wind only does the first part ok. Programs run fast, and I never noticed that I worked on the subnotebook when working with generally used programs like ms office, firefox etc.

You can view the full gallery full here.

Am I Just Unlucky Or There Is No QA These Days? [Status update]

2008-09-14T14:45:00.016+02:00

What is common to my Razer Tarantula keyboard, Citizen Aqualand Eco-Drive Titanium, Apple iPhone, Sony-Ericsson W910i, Lenovo L220x, and finally MSI Wind u100?

Firstly they are expensive and secondly and most importantly they all have manufacturing problems.

So what what's the problem with each and any of them?

1. Razer Tarantula: from day one some of the keys, some of the time, when pressed produce two characters. Eg. pressing M key once, you can get "mm". I didn't pay much attention first few days to that, I thought that as this was a pretty "special" keyboard, I had to "run in" the keys. Problem was, the problem was getting even worse with time. Then I made a mistake. I didn't return the keyboard straight away, but I just took out my previous keyboard and continued to type on it. Few months have passed until I returned the keyboard, and as I expected, trying to get something repaired/replaced under warranty in Croatia is extremely difficult and unpleasant experience. Ok so I returned it, guy there said that he never heard about that problem and that he is going to send it to their larger center to service it. At least two weeks passed and the same guy gave me a call to get my keyboard in the shop. He told me over the phone that the keyboard was found to be "working normally" and I had to pay for their working hours from my pocket. I almost exploded over the phone, but kept my calms. Returned to the shop, and some other guy told me to come back 4 hours later because their repair man hasn't come yet. Great, returned 4 hours later and told the guy that I cannot accept the keyboard back because I still claim that the keyboard is not functioning properly. You wouldn't believe how far those "repair" guys go to try to persuade you that it is your problem, and the keyboard is working fine. So lets see his line of argument and my responses.

Repairman: As the keyboard was tested by their professionals and deemed "working normally", I have to pay for their fees and take the keyboard back.
Me: The keyboard is still not working properly and I can prove it by plugging it to a nearest computer and testing it.
R: Very well, but I tested it this morning and it was "ok".
(the keyboard was installed in windows, guy runs a notepad and starts to mash buttons)
R: See, its ok.
Me: Not really, when I press for example M and Q lightly I get two chars like this.
R: I can't reproduce it. You have to press keys like this (guy pressed really hard every key), not lightly. When you type you have to press keys hard. It is a difference when typing. [and your typing style is wrong and keyboard is ok]
Me: I'm typing for the last 20 years, I typed on like 10 personal and hundreds of other keyboards and I never seen this problem. So it is not a matter of a "typing style".
R: Ah, but I now remembered you have to turn down the the keyboard delay in control panel. [guy turns repeat delay all the way down]. See, now you try!
Me: The problem is still the same. (this is even more pronounced now because on a normal keyboard this should be impossible)
R: [guy tries another you-are-doing-it-wrong-routine]
Me: It is not a "typing style" problem.
R: Ok, ok, I'll send it again to our tech guys.
Me: And what will happen if they don't find anything (as they didn't found it before)?
R: Ok ok. I'll order a new razer tarantula keyboard to the shop and we'll (him and me) compare the new one and the old one. If the new one doesn't have the mentioned problem you can keep it. I'll just give you a call when we get it in a few days.
Me: Fair enough. See you in a few days.

Aftermath: more than 2.5 weeks now passed, and I still didn't get a call. The dialog above was considerably more complicated and included many more "traps". It is an art how to avoid those pitfalls. I'll check the paper which I got first time I went there because after 45 days if they didn't manage to repair my item they have to give me new one. Update: they have less then 15 days not to repair the keyboard or give me the new one (by law). I'm afraid that they probably have some software which reminds them when warranty claims are due to close.

[status update]: Actually, the last sentence didn't came true. In fact more than 45 days passed from the day I returned the keyboard. So according to the Croatian law, I had to be issued a replacement. Let me just get a quick sidenote here. The very same day I went to replace the keyboard and a seagate hard disk (but at a different vendor) which died after 3.5 years of use (god bless 5y warranties). So after 45 days nobody contacted me nor fixed/replaced the hard disk so I went there to get the new one. The guy there just looked at paper I got when I deposited the disk, and without a word started to search for new equivalent disk. As he couldn't find one guy told me that he'll order another one and contact me in 2-3 days. Fair enough, I was done in 5 minutes. And this is hg-spot, probably the worst IT vendor by reputation, so I was really surprized. Then I went to the other shop where which was responsible with servicing my razer tarantula. But as I said 45 days was up and I went there demanding a replacement. Guy there called their servicing department in another city asking about the keyboard. I didn't hear the conversation but he told me that I have to call their servicing department myself. I was starting to get pissed but I called them immediately from the shop.

Let's see how the conversation went:
Guy: Your keyboard is at the razer importer company and I should call that company to see what's with it.
Me: Its not my problem where the keyboard is right now, I bought the keyboard from them, not the importer. I would ask you to issue me a new keyboard according to the 45 day clause (which is even written on the receipt)
Guy: But there is a problem because 45 days are still not up because you gave the keyboard for servicing 2 weeks later again (after the keyboard was deemed "ok" the first time).
Me: 45 days passed because when they tried to return the keyboard to me I didn't accept it because I claimed it was still defective (the problem wasn't corrected).
Guy: This is most unusual, I'll call you back when I get some additional info (as in soon-ish).

Guy didn't call for a whole day and the next day I called back. Then he caved in and told me that I'll get a new one. This was all I wanted to hear. I officially "won" then. Then the guy told me that he'll order a new keyboard from the importer and call back when he get any news. Day and a half passed and still no call but I got them now though. So I wasted so much energy with a warranty service claim which I hope I wouldn't need to repeat it in the near future. And finally would you believe this company was famous for their service support.

2. Citizen Aqualand Titanium EcoDrive diver's watch [UPDATED]: Bought it last winter. It seemed all ok, but on this summer it displayed its true colours. When your hand gets moist from sweat (as it happens all the time in the summer), the watch would go into the diving mode, register around 2.5m, return to 0.0m, sound the alarm (for ascending too fast) and do this all the time. Truth be told, the problem was a bit more complicated but I won't bore you with it. Returned it to the citizen dealer in Italy, guy there sent it to Milano for repair.

Update: The watch was returned from the milano factory to the trieste watch dealer. They concluded that watch is working normally (which as we know is load of rubbish). I'm waiting for a friend to pick it up in trieste and bring it back. I'm going to write a letter to Citizen about this problem and demand they repair it. This is completely unacceptable behavior. Having a watch which doesn't work 1/4 of the year is unacceptable. Screwing with a diver who co-owns a diving center is never a good reference because divers like to spread information by word of mouth. And telling all those divers that citizen sucks because they didn't repair a clearly defective watch can get some people turned away from buying another citizen watch.

Another update: I left the watch to the salesman (friend of a friend) in the shop where we bought it to try it out himself (this is the second time) and he promised that he will test it now more thoroughly. Couple of weeks later, guy called and said that the watch was repaired at the factory. Everything inside the watch was being replaced. I got the watch back two days ago (9/12/2008). I'm not sure how shipping+repair+shipping again "less than" giving a new watch though.

3. Apple iPhone: all of this was said in my older blog posts. Just to recap: managed to get two brand new 1st gen 1.1.4 fw iphones, one was ok, the other one had a dead wifi. Apple in *USA* didn't want to service it because it wasn't activated with at&t(wtf?). (I'm especially bitter about this one because I had to involve two people I didn't even know to return the phone to apple in US).

4. Sony Ericsson W910i: Actually this isn't my phone, but my dad's. After a few months of heavy use (phone and sms) the phone developed a problem. When you slide open the phone a bit faster than really slow it turns off. The phone is going to be returned this week.

Update: phone was repaired in a matter of 2 weeks. Quite speedy for Croatia. Working fine.

5. Lenovo L220x lcd display: 22'' 1920x1200px, great reproduction of colours. What more do you need? Sharp characters. All characters and objects are blurry on the bordering pixel with white. Looked on the web in panic, but alas people report that this is "normal". I was thinking of returning it but what would I gain? Nothing really, all panels have this problem. But what did get me angry was that people who tested the first batch of monitors all said that the text was sharp etc. As I bough this monitor around month ago, this surely isn't from the first batch. Then I realized the truth. First batch was good, and then they started to put lower quality parts on later batches. I can't remember what is the name for such a nasty practice unfortunately. There are many reports of other manufacturers doing the same which doesn't surprise me even a bit. They should make this illegal really. I'll review this monitor one boring day and take a macro photo of the pixels to demonstrate the problem.

Sidenote: Previously I had 17'' LG lcd which died 3 months after a 3 year warranty period (talk about planned obsolescence). Then I had (still have) samsung 731BF. Ok monitor, not really good colours though. Then I had samsung 226bw (was borrowed for like a year). Ok monitor, not really good colours unfortunately. But all this monitors (and couple of laptops I had) had extremely clear characters.

Update: I'm not certain that there was a problem with this monitor at all. I turned off ClearType and forced myself to use the monitor for couple of days. After that, probably my brain accustomed to the text I was reading so now characters don't appear blurry or anything else. I'm quite baffled by this though. At first my eyes were literally full of tears when I was looking at this monitor without Cleartype (I prefer it that way).

6. MSI Wind u100: As you may guess from this blog post I updated it to include this subnotebook (not a netbook you twats, every (sub)notebook works "offline" too). So whats the problem? After a few days of use ventilator started to get very noisy. I could clearly hear those winglets rubbing against other plastic (which is very noisy and iritating). So I searched the web for the resolution of the problem and I found that the screws on the back panel aren't screwed good enough so the fan inside is a bit lower than it should be so it starts to scratch (because it is hanging upside down). So the simple method is just to tighten the screws. This is the simplest solution I have ever heard to solve some hardware problem, but it probably was the most potentially expensive one. One of the two screws which are directly responsible for the fan is covered by the "warranty void if removed sticker". I mean great. So I had to make a choice between this options:

1. Tighten the screws voiding the warranty.
2. Send the computer to the dealer (only one in croatia!) and wait for a month to get it back.

Naturally, I did 1. And seconds later the whirring and irritating sound was gone. I was thinking though, as the sticker is very low quality (not a fancy one as you can see on some other general computer components) I might be able to duplicate it if I ever would need a warranty service. I would need to do that if the MSI would have done their part of the bargain in the first place!

Update: It wasn't the problem with the screws. I still haven't discovered what the real problem is (it sounds like those winglets brushing the ventilator case, but upon direct eye observation that doesn't happen) but I did discover how to aleviate the problem. Few small drops of machine oil in the center shaft of the ventilator seems to do the trick. First time I've put only one drop and a week and a half later the sound came back. A month ago at least I've put a few drops more and now it seems like it is working normally. But I'm afraid that it will require some additional oiling in the future.

Update (30/1/2009). The second oiling I did fixed the problem. The ventilator doesn’t scream as it used to, and it is as quiet (but again, not nearly as quiet as a macbook) as the day I bought it.

So what to conclude from all this. I know, plural of anecdote isn't data and maybe I was just "unlucky". But I call BS on this. All things considered, all this items I mentioned before are bought in the last year. So almost everything (computer related) I bought in the last year was defective. Luckely, MSI Wind on which I'm typing this is ok for now (review coming soon). I'm just sick of it all. Manufacturers in the past actually tested the equipment before they shipped it to dealers. Now to cut costs (and maximize the profits) they skipped this step. You and I are testers/consumers. Why would manufacturer waste their resources on testing when they have morons^Hconsumers to do that for them for free? Now that apple's of 0-15 day return policy actually makes sense. Your iphone's wifi isn't working? Here is a new one. And off they send the DOA one to the factory. Screw them all.

update: sony-ericsson mobile changed to 910 from 890. It was a typing mistake.

Gaming keyboards: Part 2

2008-09-04T19:12:00.006+02:00

Upon further examination, I noticed that some "gaming" keyboards have their own displays too (Logitech G15 for example). So whats the problem with them? One can only consider them as a benefit. They can always display your health/mana values, ammo etc. They are even practical even outside games (ie showing your unread mail count).

But when I say a benefit, I mean waste. A "gamer" who "needs" a display on his keyboard(!) cannot answer me this:

Why would I need a stupid lcd display with a jurassic resolution of whooping 160x43 pixels for displaying anything? Why would I need an additional display even though I'm just right now looking at at 22in 1920x1200 display? So my display has 2304000 pixels. The keyboard one has 6880. So that is a gain of 0.298611111%.

There are at least two problems with this kind of displays:

1. As I mentioned before, they have extremely low resolution and size. Just to demonstrate the resolution look at the picture below:

It is pathetic.

2. They are just faaaar away from the action. Do you know why combat pilots have Heads-Up Displays? It is because they can focus on combat - not on looking at the gauges all over the cockpit. Human vision has a soft focus. That means when you are looking at this sentence you can't see clearly characters on your keyboard. So when you want to see them you will move your eyeballs down, and when you are done, you will move them up again. The problem is two-fold. At the one hand you will lose precious time looking up, down and up again. On the other hand, you will probably lose in any game you are playing. The only conclusion you can get is this: you are not a gamer.

I did the math and science, and I could find only one conclusion:

Dot matrix displays on keyboards are waste of money. (Pretty obvious now huh? Of course it is, now that you have a proof before your eyes)

Backlit Gaming Keyboards: Part 1

2008-08-13T11:12:00.018+02:00

What is common to these keyboards?

1. They are led backlit,
2. they are gaming, and
3. they are teenagers wet dream.

I'll keep this post very short, because probably the first time in my blogtime I have something original to write. Look at this logical argument.

(1) No gamer looks at their keys while playing games.
(2) All "gamers" look at their keys while playing games.
(3) Therefore, "gamers" are not gamers.

If you find this sound logic confusing, I'll simplify it even more for you:

If you need a backlit keyboard for your gaming needs, then, not only you are not a gamer, it would be even better to sell your games and get back to web surfing.

iPhone 2.0.1 firmware

2008-08-11T16:42:00.006+02:00

iPhone firmware 2.0.1. was finally cracked so what does it mean for me?

~~Finally, the network selection is finally working as usual. So you can always select the mobile network without any problems.~~ Other people reported better performance when typing etc, but I didn't have any problems in the first place, nor did I notice some improvements after 2.0.1.

In any case, my procedure for the 2.0.1 upgrade was this:

1. Upgrade to 2.0.1 in itunes. (after this step everything worked as some people reported, the phone remained unlocked and activated, contrary to my first experience with 2.0.1 upgrade when the firmware was released. I would just have stopped at this step [as I don't need a jailbroken phone], but then I noticed that the english auto correct dictionary was restored, so I needed to jailbreak the phone to be able to connect to with a program called disk aid which enables me to delete/rename the english dictionary).

2. Use pwnage tool to build custom 2.0.1. firmware. As usual, I only selected the necessary bits (jailbreak, unlock, activate)

3. Restore with the new custom built firmware.

And that was it. 2.0.1. I'm waiting now for 2.1.0 or something;)

Leatherman skeletool review

2008-08-10T17:44:00.007+02:00

I couldn't find any decent review of this tool on the web so I decided to write one myself.

Leatherman made great multitools but nearly all of them were a bit on the heavy and bulky side. So with the skeletool they made a niche product for people who prefer light, basic, but powerful tools. So when you compare skeletool and e.g. wave, skeletool only has pliers, a straight bladed knife, belt clip, a bottle opener and finally a bit driver. Wave on the other hand has all of that and almost everything else including the kitchen sink on top of that. The problem is, wave is bulkier and most importantly at least twice as heavier. You probably won't even use/need half of the tools it has. It just comes down to a difference between a: "I'll take him with me on this trip" or " it's just too heavy, I'll leave it at home".

The difference between skeletool and pricier skeletool cx is in my opinion purely based on the looks. Just more important difference is a jagged+straight blade of a cx version and straight blade of normal skeletool.I prefer the latter because it is easier to cut ropes with it.

So how does skeletool feel in one's hand? It's great. The tool is sturdy and easy to handle. The knife is sharp and sturdy too, not wobbly at all. It as easily opened with one hand as pliers are with both. It's funny to notice that many owners of the skeletool (or even wave) don't realize that the knife has a hole just for the opening with the thumb. They rather think the hole is a weight saving measure as the others. I haven't tested the bit driver much so I can't write much about it.

Conclusion:

+ lightness
+ relatively small size
+ sturdy, solid and great construction

- price
- lacks scissors (generally even more usable than a knife)

Batman: The Dark Knight movie review

2008-07-30T11:39:00.005+02:00

First a full disclosure.

I watched first Batman (with Michal Keaton) movie and I enjoyed immensely. It was somewhat realistic, had ok script, excellent acting (from every major actor, and that includes Michael Keaton), and was a great movie at the time. Things went very downhill from that movie, and I'm thinking here about Batman 2, 3 , 4 (Batman & Robin). Batman movies had a restart with a Batman Begins in 2005. Even though that movie was better than 3 and 4 it was stil bad. I admit it wasn't a disaster but it was bad nevertheless. The acting was horrible (more wooden then woods of Siberia), the plot was a disaster, and everything else was just junk. But even with these negative sides it was still better than 3 and 4. Which says alot about 3 and 4. So it is easy to understand why was I cautious about reviews when this new movie hit the cinemas and movie reviewers.

I rarely go to the cinemas to watch movies and I was pleasantly surprised how good the movie was. The movie has great beggining and a large part was very dramatic and, in a lack of other words, pumped-up. Music plays a lot in these kind of scenes and it was generally great. Acting was ok, even Christian Bale (batman/bruce wayne) plays ok even though ASIMO could act better. Even though the movie is long it never gets boring (which is great, because even great movies can be boring at the end). The downside of this is that story is somewhat overloaded and a bit confusing. Heath Ledger plays the Joker great, even though his acting is a bit overrated and his character downright chaotic. I know it is supposed to be chaotic but completely crazy people can't do nothing complicated. Harvey Dent/Twoface (played skillfully by Aaron Eckhart) role was in my opionion a bit forced and his transition was too fast and too lets-make-this-character-bad-now-so-we'll-invent-some-completely-ridiculous-reason-to-convert-law-abiding-attorney-to-crazy-serial-killer. Some reviewers said the movie was actually about Joker but they are wrong as usual. The movie was about Batman-Joker-Harvey Dent/Twoface.

I was going to write about this movie a lot more but I just got bored with writing about pointless stuff. So to conclude: the movie is good and you should go and watch it.

[Update] I came to a conclusion: I suck writing movie reviews.

iPhone 2.0 firmware

2008-07-24T17:02:00.005+02:00

Dev-team released pwnage tool 2.0 (and 2.0.1) to unlock, activate, jailbreak and preload your iphone with firmware 2.0. I didn't follow any guide on how to install 2.0 and use pwnage tool because it was very easy anyway. The process went smooth and I had 2.0 in a matter of minutes.

But I did spent hours trying to get back to 1.1.4. So what went wrong?

There are two methods for using pwnage tool 2.0 (what a horrible name btw). One is to use default contents to preload them to iphone (cydia installer, and some other things) and the other one was advanced mode where you could choose what to put on the iphone and what not. When jailbreaking the first time I decided to use default values. What I got though, was Cydia with like 26 packages already installed. That was unacceptable. On top of that Cydia (as a installer.app replacement) has many rough corners still. So next time I customized the package to be preloaded on the iphone. I just removed everything and wanted just a normal unlock. That was possible and it worked. But I still had the most annoying problem with autocorrect fuction when writing pretty much anyting on the iphone. There was just no reasonable way to turn it off. I saw few suggestions to connect by wifi to the phone and delete it. But that was naturally impossible because as you can remember I was working on the wifi-less iphone. Then there was the issue with network carrier selection screen. I just couldn't manually select my carrier. 90% of the time it just didn't work.

So I decided to put back 1.1.4. and found a guide to do it. The problem was, the guide wasn't of much use. So I didn't actually managed to put it back. To aleviate my problems with the autocorrect function I used polish keyboard which was working almost ok. Then I had an idea. Why don't I connect to the iphone by cable using iphone browser program and just delete the dictionary file. The bad news was that the iphone browser crashed when started. Then I found another program called disk aid (completely wrong name for a iphone browsing program), and did it with it. I just renamed the file and it worked perfectly. I still have problems with carrier selection but I hope it will be fixed in the next firmware version.

So what about the 2.0 features?

Push mail: I didn't test it much to be honest. It somewhat worked with mail2web but I have to test it much more because I'm not sure it is working ok. But in anycase push mail should be a great feature. UPDATE: after testing it a bit more I concluded that the T-mobile in croatia is blocking exchange push mail for "normal" phones. We'll see what happnes when iphone finally arrives here.

App store: easy to use, didn't try any of the programs because I don't have money to waste around. And I read somewhere pretty much almost all programs are junk.

Scientific calculator is ok, but I was hoping for a more computer-like calculator (ie power toys calculator, mathematica)

You can geotag photo you had taken but in my opinion that works best with a gps of an iphone 3g.

MobileMe: I don't give a crap about a service which cost a whooping $100. Next please.

Screen capture is a useful trick (press home and power button briefly) but it is generally used to brag about your gps location.

There are couple of more things in this firmware but I won't mention them because they are not of great importance to me.

What are the firmware 2.0 lowdowns?

Well for a start people reported shorter battery time. I haven't noticed that to be honest but I need to test it a bit more now.

There is a nasty bug in the software by which changing your carrier is extremely difficult.

There are already rumors about 2.0.1 update so I'll keep you informed about it.

[UPDATE]

I manage to make the iphone change the carriers. The procedure goes like this:

1. Put it in the airplane mode, turn wifi off
2. Start safari, it will complain that it needs edge to connect.
3. From that screen, shut down the phone.
4. Wait at least 10 minutes (this is important), and then turn it on.
5. Turn off airplane mode, enter pin
6. Immediately afterwards go to the carrier selection screen.
7. You should get only "Automatic" selection, but when you see that, return to the previous screen, and enter again. Do this until phone starts to search for networks.
8. Wait until you get multiple options of network operators.

If the search goes and goes and never stops, you should have waited with your turned off iphone a bit more.

The second news is that iphone firmware 2.0.1. was released. I heard reports of smooth upgrading of iphone 2G (unlock and jailbreak were preserved) and I gave it a go. Upgrade went fine but the phone was locked. So it was a no go. I then just put the phone to restore mode, and then restored it using my custom 2.0.0 firmware (made with pwnage tool). So I'll have to wait for pwnage tool made for 2.0.1.

Rab Dive off 2008

2008-07-23T13:47:00.004+02:00

I was kindly invited to a be an underwater photographer for AIDA competition at Lopar (Island of Rab), Croatia. I gladly accepted because it was first time I had a chance to shoot apnea divers.

Divers were competing in three Aida disciplines: free immersion, constant weight (with fins) and constant weight without fins. First discipline was on the first day, the second and third on the second day. What amazed me was the timing of the dives. All the divers are given in advance all exactly the time of their dive and they were very strict about it. Around 10 minutes before their dive they had to relax/prepare for their dive. They only get one chance so they obviously took it seriously. Couple of minutes before their dive time they were literally towed by another (safety) diver to the pontoon with the judges and the rope. At exactly 0:00 they had to dive.

I was a bit impressed how fast those divers go down and up. That presented a bit of a problem though. But this problem wasn't the only one. The other problem was that when shooting the diver from below you have excess of light coming from the surface, and when shooting from above there was substantially less light because the sea isn't very bright. You can see the problem on the next image.

As there was such a big difference in lightning it was impossible to adjust the camera to shoot divers passing by (the first problem). I figured at the end of first day to adjust the camera to P (also known as automatic mode). The results were okay, but I had to manually compensate for like -2 stops. That way I shot pretty much all the pictures the next day. I couldn't adjust the camera just for shooting from above and shoot only from above and vice versa because every diver was separated by 10 minutes. So I would only get a handful of photos to play with later which wasn't my intention. I wanted to have as much photos as possible at the end to see what photos were good (and why) and which ones were bad (and why).

So in the end I did some ok photos as you can check out at photo.adriasub.com.

Archeological excavation at Pakoštane, Croatia

2008-07-07T13:28:00.009+02:00

Month and a half ago (13.5) I went to en archeological excavation of an ancient ship found near the town of Pakostane in Croatia. Naturally, I went there as a photographer.

The team was part Croatian, part French and another archeologist from Greece. We stayed there for a bit more than two weeks.

The ship itself is from around 300AD iirc and was very old in that time because she has many lead patches and couple of relatively new wood frames. One of the more interesting things about this ship is the fact that the whole keel is missing which is odd. I heard couple of theories on to what happened to the ship. The most convincing one tells that the ship was probably burned in a ceremony (of good fortune) similar to the one still practiced on one of our islands. What is the evidence for that?

1. the ship was very old so it was probably leaking all the time and economically not really feasible.

2. archeologists found many pieces of tree branches which were carbonised and also they found parts of the ship which are carbonised too.

3. the water line was much lower, probably 4-6m. As one geologist there said that the average water level in 2000 years rised for around 2 meters. But on this part of the Adriatic (or at least Pakostane) the water level was even lower because there was large tectonic disturbances approximately every 200 years. So we can conclude that the ship was probably on the shore line because now it is on the depth of 2.5m.

4. small lead spheres were found which indicates that part of the lead patches melted.

5. grass seeds were found in the soil indicating that the ship was on or near the grass at the time.

The excavation and documentation was to me (first timer on an archeological excavation) very slow and I found out there that the ship was found in 2004 and this was, I think, third excavation to date. In this 3 weeks they uncovered the last parts of the wreck.

The team itself was great. I actually never worked with french people before, and I had some reservations which were quickly dispelled at the moment I met the team. Croatian part was good and was much boosted with the help of archeologists from the university of Zadar. French team was great, very friendly, helpful and hardworking.

My job there was to photograph every find archeologists found at the site, all the phases of work (both below and above the sea level) and to do some photographs of the surroundings (the town etc). At first at home, I thought it would be relatively easy because after a dive I would just delete the bad pictures, copy the rest to an official computer and my working day is finished. Boy was I wrong! The dives itself lasted for around 2 hours. Then after the dive I was regulary assigned to be a security person (aka the loser who is baked on the sun laying on the rubber boat and transferring people off the site to the shore and vice versa) for at least 2 hours. Wasted, when you came to the apartment, I had to wash and dry the camera housing and flashes (actually I did this between the dive and the security role), transfer all the photos to the laptop (there were around 200+ of them), and then all the fun started. First I had to delete bad photos, then put each of the new finding in each separate folder, then pick photos which represent the phases of work, then, all the best photos go in the third folder, then some additional photos in this folder and some other photos in that folder... It was plenty of work to occupy me for the whole evening until I wasted and went to sleep. Things complicated a bit when I found out I could make great "panorama" photos of the site. But it was hard work in photoshop and to render single panorama, photoshop needed at least 15minutes. And after 15min. I could find out that images I provided to the photoshop were no good for making panorama... So I had to do all thing all over again. In the morning just before the briefing I copied all the pictures to the official computer.

I could write a book about this excavation but I won't bore you or myself with doing it so. Just enjoy the photo gallery.

Apple headphones suck build quality wise

2008-06-25T17:52:00.006+02:00

Believe it or not but I have already seen one headphones completely disintegrate (from my classic hd ipod - 30GB), and my iphone's earbuds are going the same way, unfortunately. I thought that first set of headphones was just unlucky (and I borrowed them to my brother), but now the next set is going the same way.

I figured they should be handled carefully, and so I did. And I even used them very moderately. I have those iphone earbuds for 6 months now and now they are nearing their end.

The rubber rim which connects earphone speaker and the outside case just starts to crack after some time. When the rubber gets completely destroyed (couple of uses after it cracks) internal speaker just falls out of the case and that is generally the end of the headphones.

All this considered, I'm dissappointed by the quality of the headphones. Now, I do have a strange feeling that other apple hardware might not have long life after all. Now macbook's power cord suddenly doesn't feel sturdy at all (never was truth be told) etc.

On the pictures you can see how the rubber rim just starts to crack. I applied some loctite glue on it but it is very uncomfortable in the ear so I'll have to polish it a bit.

Cognitive dissonance of 21. century's retar^H consumers

2008-06-16T16:28:00.006+02:00

Just look at this abomination of reasoning:

To follow the modern trends I'm giving away my two iphones for free*. Just give me your real name and address and I'll ship to the first two who e-mail me.

What is wrong with these people? A phone (or whatever) can't be free or be called as one if you are paying 90 euros (if that isn't a lot to you, this is one more reason to have extremely high inheritance tax) every friggin' month in subscription plan. That is whooping 2136 euros my dear readers. But lets just watch all the morons signing those contracts at July, 11th. I'll still be here laughing my ass off.

And yes, I can laugh for two years.

*includes €30000 subscription cost over two decades.

So far, so good. [Update]

2008-06-09T10:58:00.003+02:00

20 hours has past on standby, 7 hours of usage and the battery symbol still is full. That is good news.

A bit more confusing news is that "Usage - 7 Hours, 5 Minutes" in settings screen. Before I went to bed the phone had no more than 49 minutes of use. I didn't use it till this morning so I'm a bit confused about that indicator. Nevertheless, full battery is a good sign, and I'll keep you posted on when the battery finally dies.

[Update]: 15/6/2008

Few days have passed, and iphone's battery is great. So finally, I mean, really finally I can say that I managed to fix fast battery drain the iPhone had because of wifi chip.

I celebrated a bit too early.

2008-06-08T16:57:00.008+02:00

Even after the "lobotomy" of the iphone, I noticed that the battery is still draining relatively fast. That means it doesn't drain in a few hours (like it did before) but in a day (around 12h) with moderate use. So I decided to additionally destroy wifi chip a bit more (as I didn't quite finished it the last time, thought it was enough). But that didn't quite work as intended when I reassembled the phone. Battery was draining very fast, and I disassembled it again, almost drilled a hole on the place where wifi chip once stood and tested the phone again. It wasn't getting warm so I decided to go to bed and leave iphone unplugged so I can see if the battery lasts more than few hours. In the morning, battery was dead. Great, so I had to open it once again. Its funny how those one-time use only casings (as is iphone's and ipod's) open ever more easly every single time. Upon closer inspection of the wifi chip, I noticed a very small (I guess) resistor stuck between his leads and comm board's protective metal casing. So i removed it and removed probably every last memory of a wifi chip from the board. Now, there are three hours past since the full charge; there is no heat and battery indicator is still full. This is a good sign. I'll keep you posted whatever happens.

I just hope the battery will now last as a normal iphone's. I'm not really sure it will, because those fast battery drains surely damaged the battery. But one can only hope.

Oh, almost forgot, keep fingers crossed because my other friend is going to san fran on a business meeting and to buy me another iphone. I'm not really sure he'll get one because as I read on the web, there is a shortage of iphones as iphone gen 2 is probably going to be presented at monday's wwdc (9/6/2008).

Photos of the iPhone's comm board with partially destroyed wifi chip.

all photos by prosperouspoverty.blogspot.com

iPhone #2, finally solved the problem

2008-06-04T15:04:00.008+02:00

Remember the wifi-less iPhone that I have? Well, of course you do. Today I made history (or almost;) for every people who has a broken DOA wifi. As you probably know, my iphone had DOA wifi (greyed out) and as a consequence a fast draining battery (dead in a matter of hours, even faster if you use other functions). I got sick of this all, I tried every possible software hack to somehow enable wifi but to no avail (almost bricked it couple of times). There was just no wifi, and a dead battery in a matter of hours. I just got sick of this all and I decided to remove the wifi chip/IC from the iphone's comm board. Why I wanted to just remove the chip? Probably it was causing some short circuit or low resistance so the battery drained extremely fast. So my logic was: no wifi chip == no short circuit == no battery drain == no extra heat.

There is a guide how to replace comm board on ifixit but I "just" wanted to get to comm board and remove the wifi chip.

photo by ifixit.com, edited by prosperouspoverty.blogspot.com

So I followed the guide how to disassemble the iphone and followed it almost to the letter. On the guide they are using some special tools like thin metal spudger and iphone opening tool. None of this I had but actually there were not necessary. What tools did I use then instead? Victorinox's swiss army knife (small blade and can opener, tweezers, and plastic toothpick), paper clip, small pointed pliers and finally some really small philips screwdriver. I tried no to completely destroy the lower plastic part but I managed somehow to open the case. I read couple of use experiences not to accidentally short circuit the battery because it has exposed leads. Well, truth be told, I disassembled quite a few electronic devices so I wasn't really a noob when opening the iphone. I had a small problem with disconnecting the antenna wires because the connector as you can see on the picture are really small, fragile and under a rubberish glue.

photo by ifixit.com

They used the plastic tool to remove them but this is not the best way to remove it. First you need to remove the rubberish glue (thankfully it isn't plastic glue) with tweezers, small knife and then you very gently pull up the connector with pointed pliers. Doing the way it is shown on the picture you will probably get bent connectors (which are, again, very fragile) and that could mean you cannot reattach them when you are finished.

But what am I saying? If you are going to remove the wifi chip you dont' need to remove those wires. Anyways I just got carried away with the guide so I kept disassembling. Removing those wires wasn't necessary and after I realized that I took out the upper part of the metal casing which is protecting the comm board chips. I was afraid of this step more than any because frequently those cases are made very solid and no to be opened again. But I was pleasantly surprised because this one opened easily. I located the wifi chip (much in advance though because I was staring at those pictures months ago) and found out that it was glued (hmm, not a right word, and I don't know the technical term here) to the board. It is just a minuscule block of silicone and without any visible connections. All of the connections are on the "inside" part of the chip. So in an adrenaline rush I destroyed the wifi chip with the can opener. I was very careful not to leave any part of the silicone debris which formed on the board. Afterwards, I reassembled everything and to my horror, the phone wouldn't turn on. I connected it to pc and it booted. Everything after that was ok.

I was kinda nervous to see if the battery is still draining (and the phone case was mildly warm, which wasn't a good sign) but 3 hours passed and battery indicator was full. So it was all fine finally. I polished the lower plastic part of the case with a fine sand paper so it almost looks as a new phone. All in all, I took a gamble and it payed off.

Quick sidenote:

As I finally seen the interior of a iphone I can draw some conclusions concerning battery replacement.

As it is, battery is relatively easy to replace if you know how to hold a small knife in your hands and solder 3 joints. One problem is slight disfiguration of the plastic back bottom of the case. This can be remedied in part with some sanding.

There was a lot of talk how iphone's battery is so squeezed it cannot be user replaceable. This is just bullshit. I've seen mobile phones who had batteries placed so precisely it was a matter of microns. Another argument it crops out here and there is that for a user replacement battery, to be replaceable, it need to be in plastic case. That is rubbish, because in that argument it was secretly presumed that plastic casings are huge. Which isn't more further from the truth. At least they could do tight plastic "bag" which some home cordless phones had. One thing I'm pretty irritated about is connection between battery and comm board. Those wires are soldered directly to the board and it seems somewhat clumsily. All over the phone there are very delicate and miniature connectors and they could do a small connector to connect the battery and the board. They did it this way just to make sure that if even if you can open the phone (as pretty much anyone can do) you can't resolder the wires because not many people even have soldering equipment, and even less would like to resolder their phone.

Small edit: I just wanted to link this post to my other posts with regard to the same problem:

The part before this (with much better photos).

This is the last part of the wifi agony.

Macbook, final conclusions

2008-06-01T20:31:00.007+02:00

I was using macbook for 3 weeks intensely and I came to some final conclusions after the first impressions subsided.

Hardware

As I said many times, display is not that great but it is acceptable for editing photographs on the go which for me is the most important thing. It would be great if the screen could be tilted more to the back though.

Keyboard is good and comfortable, but lacks useful keys like page down/up, home/end, delete etc. I'm still not comfortable with using fn modifier key and I still can't understand why there is a command key on the right side of space bar.

Laptop itself proved to be light enough so you can carry it around effortlessly which is important and that is even more pronounced with the long lasting battery which really is a highlight of this laptop. When asked how much the battery lasts, and to my answer it is almost 5 hours with semi-light usage people generally look astonished. «But, but, my laptop lasts only for a hour and a half when I write mails».

Touchpad is good enough, but still have occasional problem with sudden activation when typing.

Software

Lets talk about Leopard. I'm still not used to «enter renames the file» , «command-d to hide all windows, click on the desktop, and finally command-n for new finder window». Everyone boasts how os x is easy and fast to use but I just find it completely opposite. There are still problems with getting some windows to be displayed. For example, you command-q a program who has unsaved data, switch to another virtual desktop and when you return to the first program, you'll have a hard time finding that message box which asks you if you want to save the document or not. Everything will be disabled (because there is an active message box but not displayed) and you have to use expose and other techniques to get the message box in front of other windows. That never happens in windows. I could understand that the message box could go to the background but why would the main window still be disabled?

No window maximization button still bothers me to no end. Why does apple hate maximized windows so much? I can understand that maximizing a firefox window on a 32'' screen doesn't make much sense, but for the love of god, it does make much more sense when you have a 13'' screen. No, I don't want to look at my pretty background picture which takes 1/3 of the screen while firefox window is open. I want it all used for browsing. My iphone has bigger screen when surfing than firefox default window size (and that's not firefox's fault). They could make that maximize button to truly maximize the window by default and add command-maximize button for "apple" functionality.

Still that command-q to quit the program is bothering me to no end. That red X button in the top left corner of the windows should close the window, but it's the last instance/window of the program, it should quit the program at the same time. Using mouse to do close programs and do other window management is really unwieldy. For example, if you want to close the window in windows, you can just flick the mouse in the corner of the screen and just click (in top right corner) or double click (in top left corner). Or you can alt-f4 or in most of the cases just ctrl-q. Then, I'm still bothered because a lot of the key shortcuts can't be reconfigured. I can't reassign command-tab to ctrl-tab and vice versa. Function keys are pathetic to use (they are used for copy/paste etc.) and nope, I can't reassign them either. There are just tons of things which are carved in stone and can't be modified which is just a shame because everyone is boasting how advanced and user-friendly mac os x is.

Finder window is rubbish. Just lacks basic functionality and some of it looks like it was hastily hacked together (breadcrumb "navigation", or a weak attempt at it). No buttons to go up a directory, back/forward buttons are sometimes are sometimes disabled. To little information in general about directories, files etc. Why there isn't a quick info when mouse overing a file? That is just bad design. There is just no proper tree view of folders. Hello?! What is this, DOS? Even windows 3.1 had it.

Dock still sucks and it is almost useless because you can launch every program using keyboard/spotlight and it just to large screen-wise. It is just a windows start menu positioned horizontally instead of vertically. But this one takes more screen space.

Spotlight is ok and well integrated. But it still has problems. For example, as you can see on the next image, I have Opera browser installed somewhere on the disk. As they say for os x, you can just drag the application straight to the trash to uninstall it. So I tried to find Opera using spotlight, but judging from the search results opera isn't in the index (or for that matter installed). That problem could be easily rectified if you could be allowed to manually add additional folders to index. But you can't. You can only remove some folders, but you cannot add them. Which leads one to conclusion that spotlight indexes all the folders on the disk. Which just isn't the case. All of spotlight’s functionality a windows user can have is with windows desktop search or some other indexed search. I do admit that wds is not that tightly integrated in the os, but it has same functionality and it is much more configurable.

Spotlight can't find installed opera.

I almost forgot the the dock which as I said earlier is a crap. And I can only affirm that. I still haven't found some decent replacement for it. Disk Copy is clone of a norton commander -> windows commander -> total commander but has almost all keyboard shortcuts wrong and lacks many shortcuts anyway.

There just isn't a photo quick view program as fast stone viewer or irfanview (and both are excellent and free) on windows. You can use that preview or quick view which are just a load of crap. Even an awful windows picture and fax viewer is better. And this is saying much.

Office:mac 2008 is generally ok, but has some seriously unpolished edges. For example, you can't remove elements gallery bar (or whatever it is called) from the screen which just eats your already cramped screen space. Toolbox is just awful to use as a current (windows) office user. It is just to bloated, has tools on wrong places etc. As I started to write this document in word, I could choose the document theme, but now as this document is complete, I cannot find that tool anymore even it is set to appear there. Word lacks that quick styles or whatever they are called which are easy to use and can get your document to look attractive. Excel is ok, but those hardcoded keybinding really kill it. Ctrl-u for editing a cell. What the fuck is this? emacs?

Gallery toolbar just gets in the way. No way to remove it.

General conclusion

If you are long time windows user, I just cannot recommend a mac. It is just a pain to readjust to all the keyboard shortcuts and it is difficult to use both systems at the same time. Mac OS X doesn't get in the way most of the time which is a good thing. But still, OS itself doesn't bring food to the table. Those are the tools you are using. Also known as program or applications. Windows user has much more applications at his disposal and many of the most powerful applications are made for windows too. For example Photoshop, Office, Lightroom, Dreamweaver, Firefox etc. I'm not talking here about programs which only 0.1% of computer users use. I'm talking about tools which 90% of people use. I do recognise that windows xp is designed by a committee and has many flaws. For whatever its flaws I'm just more comfortable with windows. There is a less number of general key shortcuts but they are more powerful. And keyboards don't lack extremely useful keys. True, there are much more viruses, spyware, crapware on windows, but unless you are just completely naïve retard who clicks on every porn link and downloads trojans, you won't have much sympathy from me.

Completely another thing is hardware. As they advertise, you can run windows xp on a mac but I still have to try it though. I have tons of photos on this laptop which aren’t copied to another disk yet. So I don’t want to experiment just yet. But I will though. Macbook itself is attractive because of its lightness, and small footprint so some people might want to buy apple hardware and run windows on it. But I’m not really sure about that anymore though. You can get comparative Dell XPS for same money as a macbook and that laptop looks at least as attractive and it is even more lighter. As a macbook pro replacement you have plenty to choose from though. Lenovo Thinkpad T61p series is probably even better than macbook pros because you can get higher resolution screens – 1920*1200 (at 15’’ models) and they are build more robust and I’m sure can take much more rough handling.

But contrary to many people reading this would believe that I hate my macbook, they just are so wrong. I do love working on it and most especially, I like it because it is has a small footprint. I just don’t like those os x problems which just slow me down and make doing stuff at macbook just more difficult. Ah, did I mentioned that this laptop is the only one which could find and connect to a free wi-fi internet connection in the office of 10 laptops? 2 of those are latest macbook pros and other were random windows laptops. Sometimes plastic cases do have advantages it seems.

Update on the iPhone #2 aka wifi-less paperweight

2008-05-11T17:43:00.004+02:00

As many readers of this blog probably already know, my second iphone had disabled, dead on arrival wifi and a as a consequence fast draining battery. As the phone was under warranty I had a friend take it to the apple store when he was going to the 'states on a business trip.

Firstly, lets talk about what I thought I needed to get the iphone serviced.

Original packaging, all contents in perfect order. Check.
Original receipt. Check.
Completely virginized iphone. Check.
Researched the internet (apple's own pages), warranty paper for any sign of activation. Check. No activation needed. Only registration.
Registration done. Check.
Printed out all my info about registration etc, even a photocopy of my ID. Better safe than sorry. Check.

So with all this my friend went to apple store firstly making an appointment with those retards called geniuses (what a moronic pretense of a name, but probably in a line with moronic business-like overstating the importance of a low level employee). I can't fathom how they can force people to make appointments for a simple phone replacement or repair. This would be a nice place to start a rant, but I'll refrain from doing that. To make long story short; my friend had 45min of hassling with those tards and no he received nothing. No new iphone, not a service on the doa one nothing. Why? They took the phone, checked the serial number in the computer and found out that the phone wasn't activated. As I previously said, the phone doesn't need to be activated, but here we are. Apple doesn't even give a rat's ass about their own policies. So why doesn't anyone sue them (class action suit)?

Here is my theory. As Dumbledore's, my theorys always come as right so suck it up. The big majority of unactivated phones are actually outside 'states (millions of them) so those guys can't sue them. Only a small percentage of those phones are doa. Non american buyers are then screwed but american buyers can return the phone in first 3 days for a full refund or 60 days for 10% of restocking fee. So when an american iphone buyer finds out that his wifi is doa he can just replace it no questions asked. All others are just screwed. This is the reason why one will never see a class action lawsuit about activation and warranties.

What are my options now? I can't replace it even if I had a horde of friends going to a trip to 'states, and there is always option of buying a new one. I won't probably buy a new one unless I became rich in near future which has zero probability of happening. Other option is to buy the comm board (or logic+comm board) and replace it myself. I've seen the tutorial how to replace it but it doesn't seem easy. I'm no stranger in disassembly of electronics so if I find somewhere a dead comm board I'll do this way. There are already cropping out broken iphones on the selling forums so I'll probably buy one there. Another option is to have it installed in the car and use it as video and music player. Maybe the most satisfying thing to do is to shoot it with at gun and record it with a high speed camera. But alas, I got no camera of that type nor a gun.

Finally a quick tip to potential iphone buyers. Buy from your local "dealer" because you can at least be certain that all things are working fine before you buy it. Another tip if you yourself are going to buy the phone in the apple store. Jailbreak it the very same day (if you don't have computer, do it in apple store itself with ziphone on your usb flash drive) so if something is not working you can return it the next day.

Macbook, first few days.

2008-05-06T16:35:00.012+02:00

This is a separate update to the post below. After spending few days getting to know the laptop, I have few more insights to share with you my dear reader.

I'm learning more about OS X as we speak but let me tell you that I had smooth sailing all this time.

I'll try to sum up what I have done/learned already. So in no particular order:

Finder as I hinted in my previous post is not that good. It is just unwieldy, clunky, almost like trying to tune a watch with a lawn mower. I can't drag & drop Applications to the dock, create shortcut to it. I did found out some roundabout way to do it but I'm amazed how some simple, and obvious operation won't work.

There are other problems as well. There is no easy way to launch finder window by keyboard. This seems odd because there are around 987 different keyboard shortcuts concerning finder/dock/etc but no keyboard shortcut to run finder. I actually do find it convenient to just press win-e and windows explorer shows up. So far I have managed to do launch finder by using two keyboard shortcuts (all of those are custom) and a click: command (in my case control)-D, then click on the desktop (to show finder menu) and then command-E. First command shows the desktop, the other one launches the new finder window. It is a bit inconvenient but I'm searching for a better solution. I could write a book about finder but let me just add some other annoyances. Keyboard navigation in finder is a like walking with one crutch but missing both legs. Opening of the folders and navigation is completely unintuitive, and I have no idea why would anyone think that enter/return key would be best suited for renaming files. I mean, there are like 3 ways to rename a file and there is only one way to launch it (command-down). I'm so used to launching files with enter (when browsing files with keyboard) that I searched the net and found a little program at returnopen.com which assigns enter for launching.

Display as I said in my previous post is not great. And I can only confirm it here. The vertical viewing angle is just horrible, not to mention inverse hinge which limits the movement of display, and have a nasty habit of trying to squeeze any cable you have behind your display. Font smoothing is not as bad as I may suggested at first and generally looks ok. But on some web pages text looks awful. I'll try other settings and report here but I seem to have little luck because I have trouble telling the difference.

Speaking of hardware, I did say that laptop is quiet, and I can only reaffirm it here. It really is extremely quiet, HDD is barely audible if you lean your head against the keyboard and cpu fan can't be heard when normally using the laptop. It can be heard when you play a game (wow for example), but it is anything but loud and comes silent very soon after you close the game. I have never heard it ramp up the speed while doing normal applications (photoshop, web, etc) which is excellent.

One (or is it like 10th?) more thing that bothers me about hardware is no hardware shock protection. Every manufacturer now includes disks on their laptops with sudden acceleration detection to park heads and prevent them from hitting the platters. This would be minor thing if there is some quick standby option. But frankly there isn't. When you close the lid or select stand by from the Apple menu, you have to wait at least 15 seconds (I need to time it though, but seems like ages) for the LED in the corner to start flashing (and the laptop is ready to be moved). I have no windows laptop to compare it to, but it seems that time can be shorter. Also lacking is hibernation as normal standby does waste power, and you can hear components whirring, and buzzing when you crane your neck to the keyboard.

Touchpad is a bit better as I firstly thought, probably as I get used to it though. But there is problem nonetheless. The touchpad is actually rather large and when you are typing my thumbs are touching the touchpad in the upper corners. This I'm afraid cannot be avoided because keyboard is leveled with touch pad. This contact is bad because my cursor then has a habit of running around the screen, and sometimes activating the dock. The option for detection of accidental mouse input is turned off, but I do think it needs a bit more tweaking.

Ctrl-w Ctrl-q shortcuts are somewhat confusing. Why is this that I can close every window in the program with ctrl-w, but I need ctrl-q to actually shut down the application itself? I can understand the inclusion of ctrl-q if say you have multiple open pictures in photoshop and you want to exit the program at once, but what is wrong with closing the program with ctrl-w if I'm closing the last window in the application?. Another "excellent" thing is that you can't close finder with ctrl-q. So you definitely have to use ctrl-w. All in all, you have to pay attention what program are you using, how many windows does it have open to decide to use ctrl-q or ctrl-w. This is just time wasting bullshit.

There is more bullshit when handling applications. Lets say you have firefox window minimized and then you switch focus to ms word by command-tab.Then after you are finished with word, you command-tab to firefox. But firefox won't maximize/restore automatically. You have to do it manually. This was even more confusing at first with that "red x on the window corner doesn't actually close the application" (or CRAP for short) policy. I can already see my old man freaking out when he sees it.

And there is this thing when ctrl-tabing there are occasions when you switch to your application but the main window doesn't have focus. I need to reproduce this problem more and see whats the problem though.

Sharing music with itunes is good, but somewhat disappointing because you can only listen to that shared music, nothing else really. Which is a shame. Even though you own the music it still isn't yours. And too bad I can't remotely sync my ipod.

Keyboard has music control shortcuts but they don't work always unfortunately. Volume shortcuts do work ok but it would be much better to have a different icon when the volume is muted or completely down. I'll do this more graphically if I have more time.

Speaking of keyboard, I'm completely dumbfounded why there are no alt key shortcuts. Something like alt-f to open file menu etc. Or there aren't any underlined menu choices. Is that so fucking hard to do?

I was amazed that apache web server is included by default which is great news and it is activated by literally 3 clicks. PHP is included too, but you have to edit the .conf file by removing a comment from one line. If you don't know how to do it by following instructions on the web, you don't even know what programming is. So don't bother to criticize this.

Two days ago I was amazed by iWeb application. I thought it was just a crap web editor, but even though it is a crap web editor it is still amazing. Why for the name of baby jesus is that? It has great templates for your web site. It is extremely easy to just fill out the template pages and voila, you have professional looking website. There aren't like 10K templates though so I can imagine your site will look like other thousand's sites, but I still have to see a site made in iweb. And yes I have surfed a long time. So this is not really a problem. I think one can go even further and after creating your site with some iweb template, to manually edit/photoshop images associated with the pages so they can look almost completely different than the template. So yes, next time when somebody asks me to make a website about X, I'll just take a template, enter the text, remove or add an element here and there and presto, in 1h time I'll have a great looking web site which would take me like 2 weeks to do in dreamweaver. (and leaning much on csszengarden.com for inspriation). It is just a bit too bad that there aren't like 100 more templates;) There are sites who create templates just for iweb but they are not free unfortunately. Actually they are quite expensive and crappy looking.

I forgot to mention in my first post about this macbook that there is no mini-dvi to dvi (or at least vga) adapter included in the box. This makes me a bit sad because I'll have to order at least dvi adapter because I have external monitors for macbook waiting to be used. I'm not sure I could use (mini-dvi -> dvi) -> (dvi->vga) adapter but if it works I'll make sure to write about it (update: doesn't work).

Images of the laptop are arriving sooner rather than later. (and I have to test out lightroom workflow. God I hate those buzzwords.