Last week, my trusty Sony Ericsson T610 became a bit awkward to use. The “down” function of the joystick finally gave up on me, after intermitting failures the past month. The only way to select the next menu item was to go “up” through all menu items. It became a pain to use, so I needed a new one.
Category: Hardware
OSX 10.5.2 Solved SMB problems (for me)
In a previous post on this blog, I indicated that the 10.5.1. update of Apple’s OSX did not fix my network and SMB problems with my Iomega drive. In the comments underneath, some readers kindly pointed out that Iomega’s K104w11 Firmware update is available for the Iomega drive I have. Now that 10.5.2 is out, I reconnected the Iomega drive to my network. And suddenly the world changed…
Philips Wake-up Light review
With the “Wake-up Light”, Philips has taken the “dawn simulator” from “alternative/hippie” to “trendy”. Cleverly marketing it as simply a pleasant way to wake up, making it available in many stores and adding “trendy” pricing, Philips has a lot of people looking into one of these. But is it worth the money?
Philips Wake-up Light HF3461/01 Manual
For some strange reason, Philips doesn’t provide you with a manual when you buy a Wake-up light. For those of you who want to download the full manual, you can do so by browsing through the directory at:
http://www.p4c.philips.com/files/h/hf3461_01/
The filenames are a bit strange, but looking at the last three letters in the filename will generaly give you a manual containing the language you can read. (“fra” for France, “nld” for the Netherlands, etc.). The Manuals describe the models HF3451, HF3461 and HF3462.
Funny detail: After downloading the manual and opening it, it says “Read this manual carefully before using this device”.
Macworld 2008 thin as air
Hi, I’ve read the writeups on Steve’s keynote this year, and listened to some podcasts of people who were in the audience. Personally I’m a bit dissapointed by the features introduced at this Macworld. Surely it’s hard to live up to the ever rising expectations every year, but I do have some comments to make on the introduced products.
Irritating “Features”: Philips Matchline TV
Okay, I have to get this out of my system. It is something I’ve been complaining about for months, and it is really an example of the utter dumbness of some product designers. What am I talking about? Simply turning on my TV.
I have this very nice big heavy 100Hz 4:3 Phillips Matchline TV, which I bought 8 or so years ago. For that time, it was a feature-rich TV which could store all kinds of user settings through on-screen menus, and keep them stored even when the power went out. A few weeks ago I noticed a new TV at a friends house has the same “feature” as my old Matchline. You can’t turn it on!
What happens? Monday evening, you are done watching TV and use the remote to switch it to “Stand By” mode. Before you go to bed, you walk by the TV and hit the power button to completely turn it off. Now on Tuesday, after dinner, you decide to watch TV. You walk to the TV, hit the power button, and what happens? The TV goes from “off” to “Standby”. What complete and utter IDIOT designs a TV which goes to “standby” after turning it on with the power button? It wouldn’t surprise me that a junior programmer was showing off his l33t skills by remembering the state of the TV before it was turned off.
So, after 8 years of introducing the wierdest features to TV’s, the usability labs in this world have still not found the most obvious feature to a TV: Turning it on.
Real guitar game: Guitar Wizzard
No, I’m not a guitar player, but I noticed this cool post on TUAW where the “Guitar Hero” game has been taken a notch up. TUAW reports that the guys at www.musicwizard.com have built “Guitar Wizzard”, a game with which you can learn to play popular songs on a real guitar. From what I can see in the video, this looks way less frustrating than doing the same excersizes over and over to learn to play the guitar.
Okay, you might not turn in to Mark Knopfler in a week, but isn’t it a much better feeling to hold a real guitar in your hand, in stead of that plasticky, toy-like mini quitar with the bright colored buttons? And the price is about right for a game including hardware aswell.
Tips for European Apple customers
For me as a european consumer, the low Dollar (or: high Euro) is a good thing. Particularly when travelling to the U.S., or buying American consumer electronics.
For Apple, as a big company with complete control over it’s retail prices, the low Dollar (or: high Euro) is a good thing. Particularly when the conversion rates sneak up on the consumers and you “forget” to adjust your 1-to-1 Euro-to-Dollar conversion in your stores. Time to wake up the European Apple consumers.
Headphone search
Last week I’ve been complaining about the capped volume on the iPod nano and the inability to circumvent it. At the end of that very week, the iPod earbuds solved the problem for me by breaking down. The rubber rings started comming off, and the right speaker produced only 10% of the sound the left speaker was producing.
I decided that this was enough reason to go looking for a nice set of in-ear headphones (earbuds) which would sound nice, and also improve on produced volume.
No Such Thing: Harddisk Warranty
A while ago the drives in my fileserver (PPC Mac Mini) began dying on me, one after one. The disks were somewhat old (approx. 4 years) so I replaced them with 2 new Maxtor 500GB USB drives, and restored all data from my backups. The server came up and looked and worked like it had never died, but now had more diskspace.
After a few months of trouble free operation, one of the Maxtor disks seemed to have died this morning. I had kept the receipt, so I thought I’d get the drive and bring it in for repairs, because after all, this is well within the warranty period. While disconnecting the drive, it occured to me that I could never bring that harddisk in for repairs, particularly if I was not able to access it.