Recently in Technology Category

You may notice that the BrainDrain is running a little slow today, and that's because I've installed the Ampache media server on the box so's that I can get to my audio collection from anywhere. There's even a Pre app for Ampache (a couple of them, in fact) which means that once I get it setup I should have access to my music collection via my phone. And that means that my Pre will have just taken one step closer to being that "all-in-one" media device that I keep talking about because I can leave the iPod in the car or at home more often - so long as I can get to my music collection via wi-fi or EVDO on the Pre, that is.

The only bugaboo here is that whole network availability thing - I'm not sure if my signal will be strong enough to stream the files while I'm driving or if I happen to be in a cell-blocking building. I don't know where I'm going to land on the IBM campus next week, and there's a good possibility that I'll be in a location that has poor cell reception. The Pre defaults to the old Sprint network - which I call "1x" due to the icon on the phone - when the cell signal is weak and it cannot connect to the EVDO "Sprint Speed" network, and I'm not sure that the old data network can stream the music fast enough to make Ampache useful. Plus, the more I use my phone as an iPod, the more often I have to charge it up, although I suppose that if I just keep it on the Touchstone or plugged in I won't really have to worry about that.

Anyway, if I can get this thing setup like I believe I should be able to, I am hoping that this will make the Pre my One Device to Rule Them All (to borrow from Mr. Tolkien) and may relegate my iPod to the center console of the G35 for roadtrips and Pre backup. With this 1-2 combo, coupled with the coming of Flash to the Pre later this year, I think that Apple is starting to look a little rotten if all works as I envision that it will.

I'll keep you posted.

I awoke this morning to find my tv totally dead. It wouldn't turn on at all, neither by remote nor power button. I unplugged it and let it sit for a while and even plugged it into the wall and...nothing. I'm not sure what happened, but the tv was finished. Hey, I got it for free, so I'm amazed that it lasted this long. It's been having some trouble lately and I've kind of been waiting for it to fail so that I could replace it with an LG LCD that I had my eye on.

However, I wasn't really planning on doing that today. I guess it's good that I have the new job starting next week, but I did have to defer the payment until I can get the money coming into the coffers on a regular basis to pay for it. I didn't go crazy - I got a 32" LG LCD HDTV (the same size as the one that cratered) that runs at 1080p and 120Hz. Turns out that that combination of size and feature set are kind of odd and hard to find, but Best Buy had the one that I was looking for. Normally I probably would have welcomed the forced television blockage but since I had to trade in my TWC cable box last week for one that actually works, I've lost all my DVR season passes and didn't want to miss anything of the new season tonight.

Plus, I needed to check my Xbox one last time and it appears that my GPU is well and truly fried. I ran it without the housing and the chip is just incapable of any sort of decent display and only ran for about 5 mintues before overheating. Looks like my repair was short-lived at best, and that also means that it looks like I'm going to have to locate a replacement console for any long-term gaming. Right now I'm borrowing an Xbox from Foxshark so I can attempt to finish Batman: Arkham Asylum before I have to go back to work, but I'll have to return it on Friday and the clock is tickin'...

I'm just glad that the tv made it until I had a job before crapping out.

It seems that my exhilaration over fixing my Xbox myself was to be short-lived, and perhaps I was just fooling myself. The Xbox crashed again tonight, this time with something known as the E74 error. Starting Friday, the graphics on the XBox would get all wonky after a short time of gameplay - like all of a sudden the anti-aliasing was turned off. Everything I was reading indicated that this was a precursor to another type of failure, and late tonight the error occurred. My last attempt to resurrect the machine will be to disassemble it once again and perhaps play it with the housing off, just to get maximum airflow over the heatsinks. I'll also tighten down the heatsink screws just to make sure that there's no more flexin' happening. But if that doesn't work, then I'm pretty much out of luck. At least I got some Batman Arkham Asylum out of it before it rolled over and died.

And just like that, I'm back in to the Big Blue Borg Collective. This time, however, I think things are going to be different. I'll be doing strictly development work and will finally be able to hone some skills and really learn a lot about some of the technical things that I didn't really get to concentrate on in my previous position. This is a bit of a junior position as well which will provide me a little leeway to flex my skills. While I have a lot of experience, a good chunk of it is in post-release sustainment, which tends to make the new development skills a little rusty. So, I'm kind of excited about this new opportunity and I could be back to work as early as next week.

When I was informed that they wanted me for the position, I will admit that I did sort of hesitate out of a question of pride - is agreeing to come back to a company at a lower pay rate AND who was the one that laid you off to begin with akin to failure? Kind of like a kid who leaves home for college only to return after a couple of years to move back in with the parents? I thought about it, and I really think that was personal hubris and a whole lot of pride.

Instead, I have chosen to view it as God giving me the sabbatical that I wanted and also having IBM foot the bill for a good portion of it rather than me having to do it all myself. Plus, I'll be able to do what I wanted to do and will also be able to learn more of my craft. In the time that I was unemployed, I didn't receive any clear indication of a different call on my life - I do know that engineering is somewhat contrary to my innate skillset, but I also know that I can do well at it and I enjoy it when it is challenging. I do not think that it is a coincidence that after all this time, the one position that would move quickly and decisively (also contrary to it's nature) would be one at IBM, and that has a huge God stamp of approval on it in my mind.

Honey, I'm home. At least I don't have to plan out a whole new route to a new place of work. ;)

Well, thanks to a combination of 3RedLightFix.com and Llamma's Xbox 360 RROD X-Clamp Fix, my XBox 360 is now back up and running again. I did end up ordering parts from Llamma - some bolts and washers to anchor the heatsinks (and replace the faulty X-Clamps) and a new GPU heatsink that is supposedly the one that Microsoft is now putting in the 360 Elite units as a solution to this problem. The new heatsink has a cooling pipe which the old one doesn't have, and it bleeds heat right in line with the CPU heatsink now, so hopefully that will keep the GPU cool enough to not overheat again.

So far, my two repair projects have gone pretty well - the XBox is back in commission and the hole in the crash cymbal seems to have stopped the crack without changing the tone noticeably. This whole "repair before you replace" thing is quite the novel idea...funny what you can do when you get the idea that just because something is broken doesn't mean it can't be fixed and must automatically be replaced.

Now I guess I need to get on and finish my F-14 model so's I can finally check that little project off of my list as well. It's not exactly a repair, but it is sort of a building project...a handcraft, if you will. Plus it'll be good to reclaim my desk space from the encroachment of paints, plastic, and newspaper that is the airplane construction zone.

Being jobless, I've been compelled to try and salvage things that break rather than just indiscriminately replacing them and around here lately, there have been several things to fix. A couple of weeks ago my XBox crashed with the Red Ring Of Death (RROD), my most expensive crash cymbal cracked significantly, and of course, there's my shoulder which is still healing up.

Let's start with the cymbal - it's an 18" Zildjian K Custom fast crash, and it's the most valuable platter I own. I had two cymbals that got cracked at the same time, indicating that the case got dropped at a gig or something got dropped on it. I replaced the one because it was kind of basic and I got an A Custom instead. But the K is expensive...like $300 to replace, and right now I ain't got that kind of cash. Guitar Center won't take cracked cymbals in trade, Zildjian doesn't repair them, and so I was left with an option to use epoxy and try to bake it back together or I could try to drill a hole at the head of the crack, try to stop it from continuing, and hope that the sound didn't become too trashy. So, on Tuesday I drilled a 1/4" hole in my beautiful cymbal in an effort to help it limp along until I can come into some fundage to replace it. It sounds okay, but I don't think I'm going to record with it; it should stand up okay for a live show, though, at least for a little while longer.

On to the XBox. If you've been following my tweets, you'll know that my 360 is pretty much gutted and laying on my kitchen table. I'm currently waiting on some parts to fix it (odd sized screws, nylon washers, and a new heat sink to help keep it from happening again) and so my 360 is pretty much out of commission. It's still cheaper than either sending it back to Microsoft to have them fix or buying a new one. It's been interesting to take apart, though, and this might come in handy in case some friends happen to have a 360 RROD on them - at least I'll know what to do. And, if this doesn't work, I can buy just a refurbed console without all the extras for cheap to replace the broken bits. All this could have been avoided if I had the receipt, but alas - I bought the console from a third party and don't have it. So, DIY salvation is my aim here. I should have the parts first part of next week and should hopefully have it up and running by Wednesday or so.

And finally, I started on physical therapy for the shoulder today. No strength exercises yet, just range of motion...once a week for now, but probably twice a week once the strength training starts (they have to get their copays out of me somehow, I guess). But, the rebuilding has started and hopefully soon it will be back to normal. Just so long as I can drum what I gotta drum for the EP recording, I'm good.

So, lots of rebuilding and salvaging going on over here at casa de Drew. Now if I could just salvage my career or a steady source of income that doesn't involve sponging off of the state, I'll be totally in bidness!

The 'Drain has been upgraded to MovableType 4.31, which is supposed to be faster than previous versions and also has some interesting new features that I will begin exploring (like the community plugins and such). Please let me know if you experience any problems with the site or pages won't come up and such. Hopefully this update will serve to improve the user experience for BrainDrain, and I'll let you know when I get some of the new plugins up and running.

For the record, I'm posting this because I believe that Palm (and perhaps Sprint) are doing things all wrong and are hobbling the Pre due to dragging their feet on getting a plethora of apps available in Palm's App Store. Apple's "there's an app for that" has already become ubiquitous and for the Pre to succeed (in spite of Sprint's continued hemorrhaging of customers due to terrible service), Palm needs to quit trying to promote quality over quantity when it comes to available applications and allow people to post apps. Palm's current catalog sits at 34 official apps, whereas the homebrew app community - applications that have not been officially sanctioned (and are therefore free) - sits at somewhere around 137!

Granted, a lot of those apps range from the very useful to the downright silly which I just won't use. But being beholden to Palm while they put a stranglehold on the app community and just dole out new apps in a trickle doesn't work for me. I believe that this kind of activity will only serve to confirm the Pre as an also-ran when it's two main competitors (the iPhone and the G1/G2) already have dozens if not hundreds of apps available - whether they're useful or not.

To tantalize any Pre owners out there as to why they might want to do this, let me ask one question: do you wish you could have a different sound for system alerts, or change the sound for the calendar alerts? Right now, Palm doesn't offer you a way to do that, but the homebrew community does. Both precentral.net and pimpmypre.com have applications that will allow you to do this. Within the homebrew community you can find ports of old favorite apps as well as new apps that are done specifically for the new WebOS.

So, if you want to know how to open up your Pre and allow installation of homebrew apps in 15 minutes or less, hit the jump and see the procedure I followed.

Coolest contest idea ever: Author Evan Ratliff is on the lam - locate him and win $5,000. Ratliff is a contributing author to WIRED magazine, and so he's going to disappear for a while and the first person to find him within the time limit and according to the rules of the contest walks away with a cool $5,000.

I dunno about you, but I sure could use that money. I think I just found my new day job. Look out, Ratliff! I'm comin' fer ya!

I've been gushing about the Pre for a couple of months now and this blog has become a casualty of my infatuation with it. The killer confluence of having no job but having a phone capable of web browsing and twittering has led to heavy use of the phone rather than the laptop (which, sadly, is also brand new but doesn't quite fit in my pocket as well as the Pre does). This got me thinking about my habits and why I'm quick to pick up first iterations of some things and yet so reticent to switch for others. Let me explain.

When it comes to phones, I will get the first iteration of a handset without waiting to see the initial reviews as long as I perceive the device being capable of inching me ever closer to my idealized version of the "one device to rule them all", Hitchhiker's Guide-like pocket media device. Software is a whole different matter: I jumped on the BumpTop bandwagon to try it out even though it is in beta, but only went to Windows Vista from XP because my new machines came with it preinstalled and putting XP back on them would be more pain than it was worth. You'd think that a technophile like myself would have the latest and greatest everything, but that's really not the case. If something works and it ain't broke, there's really no need to go replacing it and potentially setting myself up for the frustrations and quirks that new things generally possess the first time around until the early adopters help work out the kinks.

I think that it really boils down to the sexy factor of the device (yes, gadgets can be sexy). If a device fits into my idea of how I want to live and/or be perceived, then I tend to be more willing to accept potential design issues, irritations, and potentially high cost in order to have it; if the thing has some neat bells and whistles but doesn't really have any compelling features or reasons to switch (e.g. Vista vs. XP), then I am much more likely to keep the old and only switch to the new when forced. For example, if I internally see myself as some sort of hacker or coder where a laptop is the tool of the trade (as often happens after reading a William Gibson novel or watching Hackers), a new laptop or a new operating system that comes closer to matching my internal visualization is going to grab my attention. On the other hand, if I see myself as one of the digerati that wants to have access to information anytime, anywhere, the specific device itself fades into the woodwork and the dimensions of a device that will allow that always-on connectivity comes to the fore - hence, my current fascination with the Pre. My current persona is more interested in consuming information and communicating in short text bursts, quick photos with snarky commentary, or old-fashioned vocal conversation than in typing out long, well-constructed trains of thought about single subjects. This perception then results in a laptop sitting at home gathering dust and a smartphone on or about my person at all times which needs to be charged twice a day.

I'm generally not a patient person and when I am confronted with my own idiosyncratic behavior - a willingness to accept a half-baked device as "good" because it has some new functions that I desire greatly, in this case - it causes me to pause and take a look around. Perhaps that explains why I can get tired of new things so quickly; it probably explains why others get bored so easily too. My internal persona of who I perceive myself to be changes often enough that it impacts my spending habits for gadgetry and paraphernalia to support my current perception and when something new catches my attention, the previous acoutrements fall by the wayside to make room for something new. I fully expect that once I get another job, my laptop will surge back to prominence and my Pre will be relegated to my pocket for the majority of the day, to be used only in the short bursts of time that I'm away from my computer rather than to be the focal point of my online communications and information gathering activities.

Then it will become the search for the next latest thing and the cycle will start all over again. Which leads me to the point of this thought process: how does one become content with what one has and not get caught up in this lifetime battle to become the ever-changing persona they perceive themselves to be on any given day by constantly desiring to get the latest and greatest material goods to support that persona? That's the question I'm currently pondering these days.

What do y'all have to say about that?