[Evildave]

Incremental 'software agreements'. You buy something like a PS3, and over the years, they change the 'agreement' to use it. If you don't agree, the patch won't install, and if the patch doesn't install, you can't play new games, which effectively turns your console into a brick.
http://video.adultsw...l-the-time.html
http://www.southpark...1-humancentipad

[crazy4laptops]

LiveBrianD, on 18 January 2012 - 12:46 PM, said:

coastie65, on 18 January 2012 - 12:13 PM, said:

Yeah. Quit using them as they don't last for squat. Spend more time in the charger than in my mouse.

Hmm... I have some NiMH batteries (I forget the brand) in my camera and they last long enough.

I have NUON (by batteries plus) NiMH 2500mah AA's, they last an incredibly long time! I use 6 of them in my Pentax K-7 battery grip, extends the shooting time significantly. Or I borrow 3 of them for my pocket shortwave radio, the runtime can be measured best in weeks. These batteries are the $40 i ever spent! Plus, they recharge quickly!

I'll be back on what things about technology bug me

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 19 January 2012 - 02:01 PM, said:

If it's just a file server, why would it need much power? A Pentium 4 machine can work just fine for that. I do wonder about an AMD E350 server though - it's reasonably powerful (better than atom) and doesn't use much power (my E350 netbook uses about 12W idle).

@mjd: My camera uses AAs (a canon powershot A1000IS, reasonable budget model) and I use rechargeable ones in it. Who needs a stupid proprietary rechargeable? When my old camera got damaged, I simply took the recharegable AAs and the SD cards from it and put them in the new one. If it was proprietary, I'd probably have to get rid of it.

I believe the discussion was for both a media and file server. As it stands, my media server also re-compresses video on the fly to any device I chose to use, on the internal network, or external. That requires much more power than an ARM chip is realistically capable of.

[waldojim]

Evildave, on 19 January 2012 - 10:45 PM, said:

Incremental 'software agreements'. You buy something like a PS3, and over the years, they change the 'agreement' to use it. If you don't agree, the patch won't install, and if the patch doesn't install, you can't play new games, which effectively turns your console into a brick.
http://video.adultsw...l-the-time.html
http://www.southpark...1-humancentipad

And amazingly, they can strip out the features you paid to have. I want to know how that is even legal? This would be like selling me a car with ABS, and then 3 years later tell me that they are going to 'update it' and remove my ABS - or I have to quit using it on the road. Absolutely insane.

[Evildave]

Actually, they did that to a friend's Diesel Ford pickup. They had a recall and deleted about 10% of the available power to keep the turbocharger/whatever from blowing out. Of course, she tows a big horse trailer, so it was super annoying. Most people who just bought the 'super' truck and used it to go on errands and whatnot would never notice.

[Evildave]

But as it turns out, I have been reminded that I have an 'eee box' buried under a stack of tech-trash. I couldn't even give it away to my nephew. They kept it for a while... then gave it back.

The perfect little server with its little atom cpu.

So I wiped the XP and 'recovery' partitions off the drive and put Ubuntu 11.04 on it and got it configured up with 'rygel' out of the software repository, and then ended up lazily updating to 11.10 when that didn't initially behave after a little tinkering. Nice to have certified Linux compatible hardware for that.

Now not only are the files serving up off that same hard drive at over 3x the speed of that router (from 6~7MB/s to 18~22+MB/s - rsync is nice about telling you these things), the media server works... WITH PREVIEW PICTURES! And behaves much the same as before, otherwise. And there's no arbitrary limit on the number of hard drives I can plug in, and the menus are snappier on the PS3/XBOX, too.

Yeegawds, the Unity UI in Gnome 3 is just horrible! The Gnome people must have gone absolutely psycho. But I don't care, since it's a toaster, and all I ever want in it is 'Terminal' and vim. I only need to see it to change settings, and I'm not changing much on it, now that it's sharing the same folders and spewing the same video as before, like I wanted it to. When idle, it eats relatively little (15 watts or so).

So I guess I'll return that 'new' router and go back to using the old one.

I might tinker more with another DLNA project (there are half a dozen of them), and maybe a lighter Linux distro, too. But I have the basic solution working. I'm even down one box+wall wart.

[LiveBrianD]

Darn... my mouse batteries just died (of course, WHILE I was using it - it suddenly started moving in an extremely choppy fashion, and a moment later died)! I thought I had a 3rd pair of rechargable AAs somewhere around here... (one set in my camera, now one in my mouse, and I thought I had another...) I'm using ravonic NiMH batteries right now.

@crazy4laptops: Hey, this is supposed to be about things that annoy you, not things that you like about tech!

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 19 January 2012 - 11:53 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 19 January 2012 - 02:01 PM, said:

If it's just a file server, why would it need much power? A Pentium 4 machine can work just fine for that. I do wonder about an AMD E350 server though - it's reasonably powerful (better than atom) and doesn't use much power (my E350 netbook uses about 12W idle).

@mjd: My camera uses AAs (a canon powershot A1000IS, reasonable budget model) and I use rechargeable ones in it. Who needs a stupid proprietary rechargeable? When my old camera got damaged, I simply took the recharegable AAs and the SD cards from it and put them in the new one. If it was proprietary, I'd probably have to get rid of it.

I believe the discussion was for both a media and file server. As it stands, my media server also re-compresses video on the fly to any device I chose to use, on the internal network, or external. That requires much more power than an ARM chip is realistically capable of.

Oops, missed that part.

[Evildave]

Even a 'media server' shouldn't need much horsepower... IF it isn't re-encoding anything on the fly. Which, serving up m4v and mp3 files, it isn't. It's just a network copy from hard disk, with whatever ugliness is in that 'streaming' protocol slapped on top, which may indeed be crazy, which by all accounts of the DLNA standard, it is. The craziest, stupidest things everyone could think of, all wrapped up in a 'standard' that is buggered.

Don't see why an embedded media device (mostly based on Linux or some derivation thereof) can't just mount an SMB share from common NAS, and play that over the network. Wouldn't that be nice and simple? And everything already does that, without any bugs. No need to make a separate, specialized 'feature' to do it.

Returned the router.

Maybe I'll track down a 'linux for time capsule' distro of some sort, seeing as the performance from the Time Capsule is at least on a par with the eee box + USB hard drive. Then I could winnow this mess back down to one plug again.

Doubtless someone has a project for it, if only I can think up the right words to separate that result from the chaff created by a million 'helpful' people all telling me the same help about connecting to a time capsule with Linux.

[waldojim]

Evildave, on 20 January 2012 - 03:09 PM, said:

Even a 'media server' shouldn't need much horsepower... IF it isn't re-encoding anything on the fly. Which, serving up m4v and mp3 files, it isn't. It's just a network copy from hard disk, with whatever ugliness is in that 'streaming' protocol slapped on top, which may indeed be crazy, which by all accounts of the DLNA standard, it is. The craziest, stupidest things everyone could think of, all wrapped up in a 'standard' that is buggered.

The problem comes in two forms. One - most of my media is not stored in m4v, or MP3. I don't like either standard. I use X.264 and AC3 audio in an MKV wrapper, and either FLAC or OGG-Vorbis for my music. Thus, streaming to many devices requires on-the-fly transcoding.

Secondly, 99% of the streaming that requires transcoding, is also being done to devices off-network. It is hard to predict my mobile bandwidth, and thus I prefer to compress on the fly to meet network needs.

So I think the majority of our difference in viewpoint lies in different usage patterns.

[LiveBrianD]

Another annoyance: all the dust that gets in your keyboard. I just went through the trouble of pulling all the keys off so I could clean dust out, and man, there were quite a few bits of dust in there, plus a little lining the lower edges of each key.

[Evildave]

Air compressor. Go to one of those car parts chains that sells $30 electric compressors with a little tank and pressure gauges. Good for the tires. Good for the peripherals and computers.

Just be sure to put a pin or pen or whatever into fans before blowing them out. The 'wheeeee' noise is funny, but it can damage the bearings.

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 20 January 2012 - 12:52 PM, said:

Darn... my mouse batteries just died (of course, WHILE I was using it - it suddenly started moving in an extremely choppy fashion, and a moment later died)! I thought I had a 3rd pair of rechargable AAs somewhere around here... (one set in my camera, now one in my mouse, and I thought I had another...) I'm using ravonic NiMH batteries right now.

@crazy4laptops: Hey, this is supposed to be about things that annoy you, not things that you like about tech!

I'm using Energizer Industrial batteries in my mouse. They seem to hold up quite well. I hate it when they die at a critical point in a game i am playing.

[LiveBrianD]

Evildave, on 21 January 2012 - 01:00 AM, said:

Air compressor. Go to one of those car parts chains that sells $30 electric compressors with a little tank and pressure gauges. Good for the tires. Good for the peripherals and computers.

Just be sure to put a pin or pen or whatever into fans before blowing them out. The 'wheeeee' noise is funny, but it can damage the bearings.

Just wondering - how can they be damaged that way? By being forced the opposite way? After all, the one thing fans do is move around in circles to blow air.

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 21 January 2012 - 06:55 AM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 20 January 2012 - 12:52 PM, said:

Darn... my mouse batteries just died (of course, WHILE I was using it - it suddenly started moving in an extremely choppy fashion, and a moment later died)! I thought I had a 3rd pair of rechargable AAs somewhere around here... (one set in my camera, now one in my mouse, and I thought I had another...) I'm using ravonic NiMH batteries right now.

@crazy4laptops: Hey, this is supposed to be about things that annoy you, not things that you like about tech!

I'm using Energizer Industrial batteries in my mouse. They seem to hold up quite well. I hate it when they die at a critical point in a game i am playing.

I notice that my mouse and/or keyboard batteries always die WHEN I'm using it. For instance, the last time my keyboard batteries died, I was typing a forum post and was in the middle of a sentence.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 21 January 2012 - 11:27 AM, said:

Evildave, on 21 January 2012 - 01:00 AM, said:

Air compressor. Go to one of those car parts chains that sells $30 electric compressors with a little tank and pressure gauges. Good for the tires. Good for the peripherals and computers.

Just be sure to put a pin or pen or whatever into fans before blowing them out. The 'wheeeee' noise is funny, but it can damage the bearings.

Just wondering - how can they be damaged that way? By being forced the opposite way? After all, the one thing fans do is move around in circles to blow air.

As he said, there are bearings in the fans, and cheap fans have cheap bearings that get torn up when you do that. The high speed, quality fans (like the ThermakTake 80mm 5000rpm fans) will take considerably more abuse, those it still isn't good for them.

[LiveBrianD]

But how is it that doing that to a fan is bad for it, when it normally moves around at 1000-2500RPM?

[Evildave]

Because normally the little fan goes 300~600RPM under its own power. Blow compressed air through it, it goes 6,000+RPM, and the pressure ends up torquing it in an unbalanced way, as it spins.

Instead of a nice, gentle 'fffffff', like it makes its self, you get a loud ZZZREEEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEE!

Just don't, K? I mean, on a fan you want to keep using afterwards and rely on, anyway.

Oh, and another big hint: If you open up your PC (or other fan equipped things that trap dust) to blow the dust out, do it outside, and be up-wind of it. You'll really feel kinda stupid if you absentmindedly do it inside.

BTW, for cleaning vehicle interiors: Leaf Blower. Open all the doors. Take out all the 'stuff' you leave in the car. Blast away. Especially old, used cars you're initially taking possession of. You'll get out dust and crud and trash that you never thought was possibly there. Just don't, you know, point it directly at the console, radio, etc. Once again, way higher speed and quantities of air than anything was made for. Can potentially make small tears in upholstery into huge ones.


Be responsible with your mighty compressed air powers.

[LiveBrianD]

I use a cheap balloon pump for cleaning out air vents, not an turbo air compressor.

[Evildave]

Well, the 'real thing' isn't very big, or expensive, and it has the added bonus of keeping your car's tires (and other tires) safely and conveniently inflated, too. So do it at least monthly. People get lazy, forget, etc., but you have to check the tire pressure VERY routinely, if you don't want to, you know, DIE.


BTW, I use a wired mouse. A bit cheaper, simpler setup, and no batteries at all.

And if you're playing a game, it won't 'fall asleep' and be briefly unresponsive at some critical moment. Wired mice save lives!

The keyboard's a wired unicomp monster. If the zombies attack, I have a weapon that'll brain 'em right in front of me, at my desk.