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Lepai Tripath TA2020 amplifier I bought off eBay for $20

So, following the death of my ancient FAL Phase 44 amplifier, I found a series of very cheap amplifiers on eBay. They’re all based around something called a “Class-T” amplifier IC which seems to be an all in one IC that just needs hooking up to some inputs, speakers and electricity to work.

Click the image to look at the photos, or hit the “More…” link to continue reading…

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Google Docs failing to save a document

There I was, working away on a Google Docs file, enjoying the whole “cloud computing” idea. I type data into my browser, magic happens and it gets stored somewhere. Using any other PC I can edit the data.

And it’s great until it breaks, then you can lose data and there’s nothing that can be done. For reasons unknown to me the login cookie expired while editing a document on Google Docs. I didn’t notice this until pressing ‘Save’ gave me the error you see in the image.

If you see this error, you’re pretty much screwed since there is no way to save your data locally if the network goes down, your browser has a fit, or something else breaks the delicate link between your PC and the almighty Google. You just sort of have to keep the browser open and hope things fix themselves.

Which is kind of crap if you want to switch your PC off for the night.

Fortunately I tried to load Docs up in a second tab and it asked me to log in again, solving the problem.

They do need some sort of “emergency” backup option though for when the network really does go down. I’ve not lost data due to my PC locking up for years because pressing Ctrl-S is usually guaranteed to work. Google won’t be scaring Microsoft if basic things like printing and saving don’t work properly…

Insides of a 5th Generation iPod Video

Amy has a 5th Generation iPod Video which contains a faulty battery. Due to its age, the battery no longer holds a decent amount of charge. After looking on eBay we found a replacement battery for around $10 including delivery.

By following the guides on iFixit I was successful in taking the iPod apart without damaging anything. It’s not uncommon to bend the metal casing out of shape, but through careful prying using a plastic pry tool the case popped open easily.

The insides of the iPod Video are very compact, with the HDD and screen taking up most of the space. It is important to carefully watch the thin ribbon cables as they are easy to break.

See more pictures from the repair.

How not to make a banner ad

I saw this ad on a popular social networking website, and it just struck me as so wrong. Just because you’ve bought a horizontal banner doesn’t mean you can take a skyscraper ad (it’s not a “vertical” banner, it’s a “skyscraper” one, that’s the correct terminology) and just rotate it.

Unless this is a magical gravity-defying woman.

There’s crap ads, and then there’s stuff like this. Even the photo’s a bit poorly cropped too, the poor woman’s lost part of her right shoulder and a bit of knee and hip. My A-Level photography students could do a better job.

The British Gas EnergySmart energy meter

This box is known as the “British Gas EnergySmart” energy meter, and is available free to British Gas customers who sign up to their EnergySmart pricing plan. It’s called EnergySmart because instead of paying someone to come and read my meter, it’s now my job to crawl behind the telly every month. If I forget I get an estimated bill, which is bad.

See, that’s smart that is.

What’s even smarter is taking one of these things apart Like the nice man on the EEV Blog says – “Don’t turn it on, take it apart!”.

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FAL Phase 44 Amplifier

Sometime last year my old Kenwood hifi amp stopped working due to the speaker cutout relays not working. The speakers would never switch on, making for a fairly useless amplifier.

While my cousin was sorting out his mess before moving to the US he found this old “FAL” brand amplifier. A spot of Googling reveals this was made by a company called “Futuristic Audio Limited” who also seem to make guitar amps. He didn’t want it, I needed an amp, so it came home with me.

Due to its age I noticed quite a lot of noise when trying to adjust the volume so decided today to take it apart and attempt to clean the insides out. I also bought some switch cleaner to spray in the potentiometers.

The insides were very simple. Here is a photo of the main circuitboard which contains nothing but through-hole mounted resistors and capacitors. The most complex electronic components in this are the four transistors bolted to a piece of metal. There are also some large looking capacitors, and an interesting looking network of diodes.

Unfortunately I think cleaning the contacts on the potentiometers and switches might have messed the electrical characteristics of the amp up. Since this isn’t an IC based amp, I have a feeling there’s a fine balance between the components that makes the thing work, and squirting a load of switch cleaner into things has altered this. When I power the amp up, only the left channel works and the volume goes really loud then distorts – all by itself, without me moving the volume knob. I’ll leave it for a few hours to see if the cleaner evaporates off. It’s no great loss if it is broken, the reason I took it apart was because the sound wasn’t correct and the volume kept wandering between left and right speakers, so maybe it’s finally packed in.

Looking at the electronics inside, part of me wonders if it’s repairable.

I will now cross-post this to Twitter

I’ve installed Google Desktop for some useful and fun gadgets to fill my second monitor with. Currently the GMail gadget is indexing five years worth of email which is going to take ages. I had a look through my mail and found my first GMail ever, it was the welcome message, look

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.

A whole gigabyte of space for email! crazy! You know what? Five years and eighteen thousand emails later, I’ve only used 700MB. I now have seven gig of space, it’s going to take a long long time to fill that.

I’ve got one of those Google Wave accounts too, but it’s not that useful. I seem to recall mention of it having the ability to work in businesses, on their own servers. I like cloud computing, but I don’t trust other people with my data. I’d much prefer if I could run my own cloud on my machine here. Some sort of Google Docs server would be great, I’d use that all the time. Something where my server is the main store, but then Google’s system is a mirror, with edits and changes magically propagating throughout the whole system. Local data with remote access and off-site backup, all in one system without any extra steps required. That’d be a killer system.

Right then, here’s a nice challenge… please read carefully because it’s not the usual thing you’re already thinking…

I have a Lenovo S10e netbook running XP. It has a Synaptics touchpad with the touchpad drivers installed. For some highly irritating reason, running my finger down the left hand edge (NOT the right) makes my web browser zoom in and out.

How do I turn it off? It’s driving me crazy.

I have been into the Synaptics touchpad control panel and disabled all scrolling, touch zones and everything except the tap-to-click. The really irritating thing is it only happens in web browsers, and only zooms them in or out. And it’s really useless.

It’s 2009, I am sat in front of a dual core 2.6GHz machine. It contains a graphics card capable of throwing millions of polygons around the screen without breaking a sweat. The HDD is capable of some stupidly fast data transfer rate and my RAM is so large I could copy all my 8 and 16 bit software collection into it and still have room to boot Windows. Oh, I also have a 6Mb ADSL2+ connection which is capable of dragging data off the internet at 6-700K/sec (that’s kilobytes, not kilobits).

So why does Firefox take 30 seconds to grind itself into life? What’s it doing? Typing into the Awesomebar produces confusing pauses too. Surely it’s not that difficult to scan a list of previous URLs looking for likely matches.

It’s not just Firefox though. On my work PC IE8 takes forever to do anything at all. Clicking on the “new tab” button results in a frustrating two second constipated pause while it says “Connecting…”. Connecting to what? I’ve not typed in an address yet!

IE8 did like to tell me I’d just opened a new tab, in that irritating way Microsoft products do until I switched that off.

Chrome is a bit of an improvement, but since it has no plugin system I have to put up with adverts on my webpages (yes, I do run Privoxy, but it’s just not as good) and the odd braindead site saying “uhh you’re not running Internet Explorer, go away please”.

I won’t mention badly coded AJAX-driven sites that just … stop … for no reason at all because the background HTTP request has silently died and nobody thought to check for that. Google copes with this very well, Twitter seem largely clueless, and occasionally my own Wordpress installation likes to get it wrong and double-post things or not post at all.

And what’s with the meaningless progress twirlers that spin around and around? Once upon a time we had a progress bar that’d fill up. Now it’s just a thing that spins until either the page loads with the CSS missing, or “That site failed to load. Here’s a meaningless page of gibberish about why, which if you read it all will tell you at the bottom to either try reloading the page, or to ask your system administrator for help. After you’ve gone and messed around with proxy and encryption settings for no reason at all”.

One day we’ll get information instantly and will wonder what all the fuss was about. Although then we’ll probably be complaining that it takes effort to read the stuff, and why can’t it just be injected directly into our brains as we sleep.

Asahi Pentax S1a SLR camera

I’ve been given one of these cameras along with a zoom lens and 55mm prime lens by Amy. I did some research on the web and discovered the camera was the first SLR camera with a pentaprism and dates back to around 1960. I stripped it down and discovered the clever simplicity of totally manual SLR cameras, there’s nothing inside them!

Really nothing, I took the lens off, opened the back, set the shutter to “Bulb” mode and upon pressing the shutter release ended up with a giant 35mm hole going right through the camera. Nothing on this camera is electronic, and it’s so obvious now looking through the lens and twisting the aperture ring to work out how that affects the image.

It’s been cleaned out and loaded with film. I’ve already shot ten “test” shots and will take it for a ride about on my bike tomorrow if it’s not raining. The Asahi Pentax camera is all metal, with a zoom lens that weighs more than my Nikon DSLR body and lens! The lens also has “Made in USSR” stamped on it This is a camera I’d be quite happy dangling from my neck while walking through town – if anyone tried to steal it  I’d just whack them on the head with it

I took a few photos of it, and a few photos looking through the lens. Meta-photography is sort of amusing.

Once I’ve used up the film and found somewhere that can develop it, and assuming the camera doesn’t leak light like a Lomo I should have some nice photos. It’s quite hard guessing the exposure settings by eye, but since I shoot in manual on my DSLR I’m constantly altering the aperture and shutter speeds anyway and I think my guesses should be good.

So the current tech craze is netbooks. First we had tablet PCs, which never took off. Then it was UMPCs which sort of died off when devices like the Nokia N800 and iPod Touch came out. Then the world finally got a grip, realised the Internet was important, that we liked keyboards and big screens and concentrated its effort on making laptops smaller and netbooks took off big time.

Only, go back to 1989 and you’ll see Atari created the Atari Portfolio, then go forwards a few more years and Amstrad came out with the NC200 notebook (really, that’s what it calls itself). And if you’re a bit daft, you can go into Maplin and come out with a Datawind Pocket Surfer, which uses good old GPRS and a proxy in Canada to render popular websites in several shades of off-blue. Using these ancient devices is like watching history slowly being created, with different companies trying to work out what portable computing should be like.

Amstrad NC200, Atari Portfolio, Datawind Pocket Surfer and a Lenovo S10e netbook

I wonder what future portable computers will be like…

I’ve just ordered a Texas Instruments TI-85 calculator from eBay. I need a real calculator, and I always wanted a TI-85 when doing my GCSEs at school.

I’m sat on the plane to Frankfurt, which has been in the air about four hours. Due to fantastic luck, not only are we on a large, ‘real’ plane, but me and Rob have managed to score front row seats for our section. I have tons of leg room and the toilet is right in front of me. As far as air travel goes, this is pretty good. If I had the right shaped thing, I could also power my laptop from the seat, and if I was loaded I could use the plane’s sat phone to ring an ISP and get online.

The plane has in-flight entertainment in the seats, but predictably, it’s broken. It comes on for a bit, then it crashes and switches off. Last time I tried I was given a Microsoft OLE DB error that looked suspiciously like the type of error you get on a webserver. I think the plane has a Windows server in it somewhere that the in-seat entertainment units stream data from using some crap embedded version of Internet Explorer. I’m sure it works very well in the test labs, but on a plane it just doesn’t work. When it does work it’s so laggy and slow there’s no point in trying to do anything with it.

For entertainment I resorted to trying to phone people using the sat phone in my seat. It sort of almost worked, right up to the point where it went *clang* and disconnected me. I didn’t swipe my VISA card through it because I’m not insane, but it did also let me ring the number directly.

I’m at my cousin’s. We’re all packed and just need to get up at 4am tomorrow.

I’m leaving my macbook behind because, while Rob has a macbook charger, it got very hot and the part where the DC wire joins the brick has definite signs of melting and the internal conductors are visible. So I guess my mac isn’t coming on holiday.

Still, i have my iPod touch, T-mobile G1 and a Gameboy Pocket to use.

Having returned from an overnight stay at Amy’s I took out my laptop and noticed the charger wasn’t in my bag, and then realised with some irritation that I’ve left it plugged in at her house. This wouldn’t normally be a problem since I could just collect it next weekend, but I’m going away to America for two weeks, and was planning on taking my laptop with me.

Fortunately my cousin, who is also going has a Macbook and I can share his charger. His Mac’s battery is dead, so won’t work without being plugged in, but mine lasts a few hours on battery so will be fine. My laptop currently has 40 minutes of charge left, which should be enough to sync it with my network before I leave and update my iPod.

This week will now turn into an experiment to see how well my iPod Touch and T-Mobile G1 cope as laptop replacements. Sure, I have my real PC upstairs in my office, but I can’t sit at that and watch TV. I’ve just installed a few games and apps onto my iPod to keep me amused on the flight too.

My server just locked up. After connecting a screen I saw a kernel panic, so figuring something must have gone wonky I rebooted the machine. While doing this I noticed the computer was rather warm. Warm to the point where, crawling around on the floor next to it, I could feel the heat radiating off the casing on my face. After booting back up I noticed the CPU temp was at 75C and the system temperature was around 45C. I think the system temp is the ambient temperature of the motherboard, so the inside of the computer was probably close to that.

It now has three more fans in it, whirring away and I can feel a definite airflow through the vents now. This is probably a good thing since I burnt myself on the southbridge heatsink.

I’m tempted to move the machine downstairs into my front room, where it is always cold. The problem is where to place it, and the fans are a bit noisy which would be irritating while watching TV. I have space under my stairs where it’s cool, but it also gets damp there.

I’ve got a Google Voice invite…

You are invited to open a free Google Voice account. To accept this invitation and create your account, visit https://www.google.com/voice/

If you haven’t already heard about it, Google Voice is a service that makes using your current phones much better!

Here’s what it offers:

• A personal phone number that rings all of your existing phones when people call
• All of your voicemail in one inbox with unlimited online storage and free voicemail transcripts sent to your phone and email
• Low-priced international calling to over 200 countries and free SMS

Other powerful features like the first phone spam filter to protect you from unwanted callers, the ability to ListenIn^TM on your voicemail messages while they are being left, conference calling and more

Which is great, except…

Google Voice is US only at the moment

So I suppose I have to wait until they make it work in the UK. It sounds like a great idea, having one number for everything that you can divert to any phone you like. I just wonder how reliable and ‘permanent’ it will turn out to be; what if I become reliant on it and then Google decide to discontinue it. I quite liked Google Notebook and Google Browser Sync was a great piece of software, but they’re now discontinued.

Anyway, I’m more interested in what Google Wave will be like. Over the past few days I’ve been arranging a trip to the US with my cousin, we’ve been using Google Talk’s IM feature to arrange things, and then continuing the conversation via email, using GMail’s ability to archive chat logs in the ‘Sent’ items box. I’ve also been able to sit at a friend’s house chatting on my G1 and reading the same emails. My cousin, as it happens, is in Sweden at the moment using someone’s laptop.

It’s really good that I can communicate with people in these mixed ways, without having to install a specific client on my own personal computer. All I need is an Internet connection and a web browser, or a signal on my mobile phone.

I hope someone creates a real standard for this sort of seamless communication and then gets it turned into an official RFC or something. It needs to be ‘The Way’, rather than something Google’s invented, or something Microsoft has copied off Google and then ‘added value’ to by making it incompatible. That way we’re protected against companies going bankrupt, or deciding to discontinue services.

It irritates me that I cannot talk to my MSN friends through my Google Talk account. Why should I have several different logins just to talk to people? This isn’t the 1980s American telephone system, with lots of little companies fighting against each other. The users of these systems don’t care, they just want to chat to their friends. Why can’t I take a FaceBook chat session and continue it via my Google Talk client on my mobile phone, or through Skype?

Why? It’s because everyone tries to create their own little walled garden, separate from everyone else, with their own particular ‘added value’ to make their generic service appear more interesting. It all seems very short sighted since these services are free, so customers have no real loyalty to particular brands. “What, you’re on ICQ? I don’t have an ICQ… oh my multi-protocol chat client can log in though, I’ll just make an account with them”. Not that multi-protocol chat clients are the solution, they’re just a temporary fix, covering over the underlying problem…

The underlying protocols of the Internet should be standard, with everyone agreeing to use them, and everyone agreeing not to tweak their HTML implementation so that only their browsers render pages served from their webservers correctly. There should be a standard chat protocol, and a standard website authentication system so that users can be individuals on the Internet, rather than a collection of hundreds of logins for different sites. I like to buy things from places that understand Google Checkout, and I like to use my LiveJournal openID to log into sites that allow it. Not because I am particularly attached to those companies, it’s just it works, and it’s less hassle.

Your ISP should be an OpenID provider, and your ISP’s login details should be the only ones you need to log into anything.

The rain is messing up both my Internet connection and my digital terrestrial TV. So I have my Internet losing sync every few hours, and the TV goes all blocky. I thought we lived in the future, where’s my vast amounts of high quality TV? (not Internet, mind… just TV, more of).

From Digital Tools

BIRDY NAM NAM – THE PARACHUTE ENDING from Steve Scott on Vimeo.

Just upgraded Wordpress on my blogs to the latest version. It’s really nice to see how their upgrade process has gone from a confusing “unzip all these files, try not to overwrite your config, and then insert this SQL” to a simple “press the upgrade button and wait a bit”.

I did have a problem with this good old irritating error

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.zip

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 30 seconds with 351500 bytes received

Installation Failed

To fix this I found the Wordpress/Plugin Upgrade Timeout Plugin (catchy name ) which lets me alter the timeout for downloading files. Setting it to 120 seconds seems to have fixed everything. Upgrading Wordpress is once again a one-click thing.