dreamshark, posts by tag: electronica - LiveJournal

Thanks so much to quility and Terry (not on DW/LJ?) for their help with my degenerating phone charging cases. Terry kindly brought along an impressive box of soldering equipment to last Friday's game party and swapped the new battery from the defective case into the old case with the dead or dying battery. When I slipped my phone into the rehabilitated case the phone took a charge. Yay!  That's the first step.

The next question - would the case recharge when plugged into a USB cable? Early attempts were not successful - the light on the charging button just kept blinking red for hours. Having nothing else to lose, I got aggressive -- grinding my finger down on the charging button, bending the case in various ways. My hope was that I was somehow improving the connection between internal components.

Unlikely as it may seem, this seemed to work. After a brief interval of steady red light, the LED went back to blinking red. But the next morning it was green! Unexpectedly, the poor old case had started charging again. Still remains to be seen if it will take a charge a second time, but right now it is charging up my phone. Thanks, Terry! This entry was originally posted at http://dreamshark.dreamwidth.org/4…. Please comment there using OpenID.

I have a broken iPhone charging case with a good battery in it, and an identical (but not broken) case with a worn out battery. I took both cases apart, hoping I could swap the practically new battery into the old case. Unfortunately, the battery doesn't just plug in: it needs two itsy-bitsy little wires to be soldered. It looks like something that would take about 5 minutes for someone who has a soldering iron handy and knows how to do it properly, but that's not me. Any volunteers?

This entry was originally posted at http://dreamshark.dreamwidth.org/4…. Please comment there using OpenID.

Even without the rest of the features, it really is a hell of a watch. It works fine right out of the box, but it is definitely worth taking the time to customize the available watch faces. Besides the time, widgets include date, calendar, moon phase, sunrise/sunset, weather, fitness summary, alarm, timer, stopwatch, battery life, world clock and stocks. You can also customize colors and in some cases the graphics. So I managed to spend at least 3 hours yesterday customizing the 10 watch faces currently available (you can switch between them fairly easily).

MOST USEFUL:  Modular, Simple, Utility.  With these 3 I have every "complexity" (a technical watch term) I am likely to want.


CUTEST. That has to be one of the animated faces. Mickey is not only cute, but usable. The Motion faces are visually impressive, giving you a choice of wobbling jellyfish, blooming flowers, or flapping butterflies, but thoroughly impractical. Not only are there no extra widgets available here, too many of the animations are basically white, making it hard to read the time (which often overlaps the animations). Mickey is pretty cool, though. In lieu of a second hand, he taps his foot once per second.
 

MOST PERPLEXING. The Astronomy face is lovely, and you can play with it. But I'm not sure what the point of it is. The lower left corner shows an animation of the moon changing phases. It does not, however, show you what the current phase is. If you click on the icon in the lower right corner you get a top down view of current planetary positions in the solar system. This might be useful to some people, but not to very many. Oh, I see. Once you select the moon or planet view you can turn the watch stem to see the phases change or the planets move, with a popup telling you how many days you have progressed. Okay, that's pretty cool. But not something I'll need very often. The second face below is called "Solar" and is even weirder. It shows the sun's current position in the sky. Turning the stem moves the sun backwards towards dawn or forwards towards sunset, with a popup telling you how many hours you have moved. Oooookay. The 3rd one, "Chronograph" is so impossibly complex that I have yet to figure out what all the little dials are for. It kind of makes my head hurt just to look at it. I may just delete that one from the progression.
 

After 6 months trash-talking Apple Maps while I waited for the upgraded Google Maps, I finally upgraded my iPhone to IOS 6.  So when we headed out to Alexandria for "Tatge Christmas" I had TWO maps programs to choose from to help find the inlaws' house.  Naturally I tried good old reliable Google Maps first. It was a failure, insisting that Doug and Pat lived in the unmanned gatehouse of their gated community. So I gave up and tried Apple Maps, which flawlessly led us 1/2 mile through suburban cul-de-sacs and right to their door. 

So Apple Maps will be my first choice going forward. Unless I need to find Dulles Airport, or the Washington Monument. 

Somehow this took all day, but on the plus side, patches of office and attic are cleaner than they were before. I've actually had that sound system for 4 years, so it's a little hazy what I was using before it.  I hauled an old Sanyo stereo set out of the attic, since it had speaker connectors that matched the 2 unused speakers that were still hanging on the office wall (suggesting that I have used this setup before, eh?).  It took me a while to find a cable that could be used to connect my relatively new computer to the old Red/White CD ports on the back of the stereo, but I finally did.  The correct cable seems to be a Y-splitter with one of those long gold plugs on the computer end splitting out to 2 R/W cables.  I was a little surprised to discover that the single cable somehow manages to carry both stereo channels.  It sounds surprisingly good. 

So this will do for now. But if anybody has an old subwoofer with 5 speaker connections to get rid of, I might be interested.

I had this speaker system I bought from a guy at work maybe 3 years ago - a big old subwoofer that sits under the desk and 5 little speakers scattered around the room. Last week the subwoofer went dead (possibly following a short power outage. Or maybe it just gave up the ghost on its own).  I turn it on, but nothing happens - no lights, no sound, nothing.

I didn't really need such a fancy system, but I do listen to music on the 'puter, so I'd like something better than the tinny little speakers that come with computers.  I used to just put an old stereo amp on my desk, plug the computer into the aux port (I think) and plug in a pair of old stereo speakers. But all my old amps have gotten crackly and been thrown out. 

1) Does anybody have an old stereo amplifier lying around that they want to get rid of?  I still have a pair of stereo speakers hanging on the wall, so that would be the easiest (and cheapest) fix.

2) What can I do with the 5 little 5.1 speakers?  Are they just normal speakers that can be plugged into anything?  Or do they need a replacement subwoofer system like the old ones?

After several months of waiting, we're finally up on the screaming fast fiber to the home USI service!  According to the Qwest online bandwidth meter, we've got 27MBPS download and an amazing 30.3MB upload. The PS3 that serves as the hub of our home entertainment system reports about 15MB/sec.  So there's a 50% drop in bandwidth in the wireless trip from my router to the attic. This is about what I saw with Qwest, so no surprise.  I quickly connected to Netflix and started up a show. It loaded like lightning and looked great. Better than before?  I really couldn't say.

Now I have to call Qwest and drop their service. I certainly hope I didn't sign some kind of contract when I negotiated my current ISP arrangement. 

I traded the nasty new Gen4 iPod to Thorin for the old Gen2 I had given him a year or two ago. He doesn't listen to podcasts, so the loss of functionality in that arena shouldn't bother him. He might even like the stupid VoiceOver feature. I must admit that I did actually use that feature a couple of times today while bike riding. Usually I know perfectly well what I am listening to, but in this case I had used an algorithm to create the day's playlist so I didn't actually know what was in it.

Anyway, I've renamed Thorin's Shuffle to Baby Blue, loaded it up with my usual mix of music and podcasts, and I'm ready to go. I also ordered a couple of Gen2's online: one used and one refurbished. I don't usually buy used electronics but this device is practically indestructible so I'm not too worried about it.

In 2005, I was seduced back into the Apple world after a long hiatus when my employer, in an unexpected burst of generosity, gave everybody an iPod Shuffle. The first generation shuffle had a few issues, but I liked it well enough to keep buying new ones when the headphone jack wore out. Then came the Gen2 Shuffle, which is one of those rare product designs that is absolutely perfect. It's tiny enough to clip to your shirt lapel and completely indestructible. Like the original shuffle, the controls are elegantly minimalist: pause/play in the middle, volume up/down and forward/back around the circle rim. There's a toggle button that allows you to shift easily between shuffle and straight-ahead mode. Gen2 added the one necessary function that was missing from the original: a triple click that takes you to the beginning of your playlist.

People who started out with full-blown iPods are confused about how you use a device with no LCD screen. Well, I've tried iPods with screens, and I don't like them. I listen to my iPod while I'm walking, doing chores, biking, etc, and I don't WANT to have to look at it. With a Shuffle, you load on new playlists every couple of days, so you don't need help figuring out what you want to listen to. The trickiest thing for me was figuring out how to switch back and forth between podcasts and music playlists. The triple-click was all I needed to take care of that problem.

Every day or two I load about a dozen podcasts at the beginning of my playlist. Then I load an hour or two of music after the podcasts. When I want to listen to podcasts, I triple-click to get to the beginning and quickly skip ahead past the ones I've listened to. When I want to switch to music, I click the button into shuffle mode. For some reasons, podcasts are never selected in shuffle mode, so this quickly takes me to my music. When I want to go back to podcasts, I switch to straight-ahead mode and triple-click. Bingo, back at the podcast section. All these buttons are so easy to use that I can do them by touch while wearing my shuffle clipped into my Monster iFreeplay headset. It is wonderful. Or it was.

Sadly, the iFreePlay headsets are flimsy and wear out in 6-12 months, and they only work with the Gen 2. I had bought several sets, but was down to my last one. Then I lost the headset along with Little Blue, my last remaining shuffle. I decided to bite the bullet and buy the latest shuffle (now up to Gen4) and a different type of headset. My pretty pink shuffle arrived, and then I discovered that it had been effectively ruined for me by the latest "improvements." A completely unnecessary VoiceOver button has been added, that allows you to hear a computer-generated voice trying to pronounce the name of your song. If you hold it long enough, this bot-voice slowly lists all the songs on your playlist so you can choose one. Seemed unnecessary, but harmless. But then I discovered that the addition of this feature had DISABLED the skip-ahead button, at least for podcasts! They have also removed the triple-click to take you to the beginning of the playlist. So there is now no way to progress from podcast to podcast without using the inane and clumsy Voiceover function. Sometimes the podcast will move on to the next one if you suffer through the credits at the end, but once you have used the Voiceover function once, it won't even do that!!!

I think it is still possible to order Gen2 shuffles online. I'm going to buy a bunch of them before it's too late and send this piece of garbage back. Fooey on you, Apple. You created something absolutely perfect, and then you ruined it.

Is the built-in Photo app on the iPhone/iPad/iTouch as stupid as it seems, or am I doing something wrong?

All I'm trying to do is manage the photos on my device in the most primitive way. I'm not trying to retouch them, share them, or photoshop them. All I want to do is manage albums or folders, including photos taken with the iPhone and photos downloaded from my computer. Here's all I'm trying to do:

1) Rotate pictures that were taken with a camera held in a sideways position (pictures downloaded from my computer, not taken on the iPhone).
2) Reorder the pictures in an "album"
3) Delete pictures (other than the ones I took with the iPhone).
4) Create new folders or albums and move or copy pictures from one to another.


All the pictures I take with the iPhone camera go into a default album called Camera Roll. I can delete these, but cannot reorder them or move them into a different album.
Pictures downloaded from my computer are totally unmanageable. They cannot be deleted, moved, reordered or even rotated!

Am I missing something here? My last two phones, which weren't even considered smart phones, offered the ability to do all of the things I listed above.

If this is really all there is in the iPhone Photo app - is there an app that I can download that will let me do these things?