Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Stage Irish in "Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle"
Just watched "Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle", set in Ireland. I've seen worse imitations of Ireland by American films and TV (notably an episode of the old Mission Impossible where people were terrified of a fake banshee and the carriage of death or something, jeeeeez that was pathetic), but still, it seems at least 75% of the 'Irish' cast were not only American, they seemed to have spent less than 10 minutes practicing their Irish accents... the better ones manage to mix some kind of Irish accent in with English, Scottish and a bit of a Russian twinge. The worse ones (e.g. the spiky-haired mechanic modelling his look after Johnny Rotten who sounds more Scandinavian than anything, and the blonde male cop) make a complete bollox of it, or just give up completely. I guess almost all the dialogue scenes were filmed in the States? Otherwise there's really no excuse for hiring Americans with bad stage Irish accents to play Irish characters - if it was filmed in Ireland, why would you ship American actors over to do a crappy job?
Can you imagine an Irish film crew flying to the USA and bringing Irish actors over to play Americans, with horrible cheesy accents that don't convince anyone?
Apart from the actors, there are cars you don't see here (e.g. Chevrolet police cars or the big Ford van which tries to drive someone off the road) and obviously fake number plates (with non-existent county codes)... which is to be expected I guess. Plenty of modern films and TV series simply do without number plates altogether (Fringe, IIRC), which kind of spoils the realism IMO.
Some stupid did not do the research mistakes:
Other than that, it was basically an extra-long episode of Murder She Wrote. It kind of petered out a bit, perhaps because I was getting distracted by the silly errors, or perhaps the 45-minute format worked better for the series?
Can you imagine an Irish film crew flying to the USA and bringing Irish actors over to play Americans, with horrible cheesy accents that don't convince anyone?
Apart from the actors, there are cars you don't see here (e.g. Chevrolet police cars or the big Ford van which tries to drive someone off the road) and obviously fake number plates (with non-existent county codes)... which is to be expected I guess. Plenty of modern films and TV series simply do without number plates altogether (Fringe, IIRC), which kind of spoils the realism IMO.
Some stupid did not do the research mistakes:
- Who... WHO refers to the Irish language as "the Gaelic language"? Christ on a bike, do some research!
- The same supposedly Irish character also failed to recognise Ogham script (which is fairly distinctive) but then later seemed to know about its history... which is it - does she know about it or not? Be consistent, damnit!
- A letterhead addressed to "Dublin BT238479, Ireland" or similar - Ireland is not in the UK and we don't use UK postcodes!! WTF
Other than that, it was basically an extra-long episode of Murder She Wrote. It kind of petered out a bit, perhaps because I was getting distracted by the silly errors, or perhaps the 45-minute format worked better for the series?
Replacing the electromagnetic clutch brushes on a Micra CVT
Soon after buying my first automatic transmission car, a ten year old Nissan Micra (K11) with the CVT gearbox, I found that the carbon brushes which supply power to the electromagnetic clutch tend to wear down.
The clutch operates (as far as my limited understanding goes) by passing a current through some kind of magnetic powder (maybe just iron filings? Anyone know what this is?) which fills the gap between the driving (engine-side) and driven (gearbox/wheels side) plates. When the engine is at idle, no (or very little) current is passed through the powder so the engine spins without transferring force to the driven side.
As you hit the throttle and engine speed increases, the current passed through the powder is raised and the powder becomes magnetised, sticking together more strongly and transferring more of the rotational force from the engine to the wheels.
The electrical current is supplied by a pair of carbon brushes which rest against turning discs (I think they're called slip rings, which just slot onto a splined axle), since you can't just stick a wire into something that's constantly spinning. After a while, both the brushes and the slip rings start to wear down - hopefully the brushes more and the rings less, since the brushes are easy to replace while the slip rings are probably almost impossible (i.e. cheaper to buy a new car than to get the clutch out, open it up, replace a part, put it back together and re-install it in the car, argh). When the brushes wear down, springs in the brush holder push them further out until a certain limit, they either lose contact completely or periodically slip out of contact briefly, triggering the "N-CVT" warning light on the dashboard. As they wear out of reach of the clutch wheel/slip disc arcing can occur which is apparently a bad thing, too.
So anyway, my Micra had started to get sluggish, needing more revs than before, and I figured it might be the clutch brushes. I checked the web for similar problems and solutions and found a LOT of problems and NO solution other than buy a new brush holder/new gearbox/new car.
Nissan refused to talk to me on the phone, telling me to call local dealers instead. Two separate dealers quoted me a laughable €218 for the whole brush holder assembly, which is apparently all they will give you short of an entire new clutch (again, more than the cost of the car).
This seemed a lot of money when it was just the carbon brushes which had worn down. So I took the brush holder assembly out anyway.
Where is it? Here, on the front of the transmission bell housing:
(edit, new pic to help locate it)
You can disconnect the power plug by pressing a tab on the left side of the upper half and pulling it upwards. Blurry closeup of power socket:
The hole down into the clutch after removing the brush holder. Looks... not so great:
And the brush holder after removal:
Knackered. Right down to a stub on the engine-side brush and while not so bad on the driven side, the spring was jammed up with cruddy carbon deposits and failing to push the brush out to maintain contact with the slip ring.
So I disassembled and cleaned it (on the left is another brush from a mk3 Ford Fiesta's broken alternator... similar!):
The brushes looked so similar to what you'd find in an alternator, serving the same purpose anyway, that I went to a shop ("Electro Maintenance" in Baldoyle) to find something suitable. A guy came out of the back room and took the disassembled holder away before coming back with some Delco alternator brushes, for which he charged a pretty reasonable €7. He also suggested that I snip off the old brushes, leaving just the bit of wire that was somehow attached to the metal mount, and then solder the copper wire of the new brush on top of that. Before doing this, we threaded the old black plastic insulation piece onto the wire, fed the spring through and cut off the excess wire (to stop the brush from falling out the end of the holder!).
Soldering the new wire onto the bit of old wire (no idea how the old wire is attached to the metal so nicely but still conducting current):
And reassembled after soldering:
Note the slight slant in the brush faces where they contact the clutch wheel/slip rings - the longer edge is on the bottom and the shorter edge on the top (where the power socket is pointing). This is what the wear pattern in the old brushes looked like, so I oriented the new ones in the same way (if I'd bought brushes without a slanted edge, I might have used sandpaper or emery cloth to file one in, since it probably helps them fit into the clutch properly).
Also, if you have a multimeter, check the continuity from pin to brush for both pairs. Each pin should form a circuit to the brush on the same side.
After installing the brush holder (much easier than removing it, bizarrely - it took about 5 minutes of gently sliding it around and twisting to get it out, after removing the battery and its tray* and moving a relay box out of the way), I sat in the car and gingerly started the engine. It fired up, and I listened for any horrible scraping noises and watched the N-CVT lamp on the dashboard, which didn't light up. Knocked off the engine and did a self-test of the gearbox (put it in D, ignition on but don't start engine, brake on, accelerator on, cycle Ds-D-N-R-P, accelerator off, brake off, start engine) which reported okayness (N-CVT indicator flashes one long, then seven short and repeats).
* Note: I recently checked the brushes again and was able to get the holder out without removing the battery or its tray. If you have the right screwdriver or a ratchet with screwdriver bit, you can get it out in less than 10 mins! I did have to lie under the car and ask my SO to hold the ratchet end in place though.
I carefully reversed and turned from the cramped shed into the cramped laneway and drove home. Feels a bit more responsive so far but I was literally a 2 minute drive from my house so no chance to get it up to speed.
Hopefully the fix is ok and won't trash the clutch or wear down within 2 weeks - time will tell. (It'd be pretty funny if it completely failed within a couple of days :/)
Replacement from Nissan: €218
DIY hack job with alternator brushes: €7 + time (one hour if you're smart, 4 hours messing about if you're me).
Hope this helps anyone in the same boat!
Update 26/10/2011: it worked fine for over a year and a half, until...
...Until I stupidly drove through at least a foot of water in a flood on Monday (yeah, who'd have thought it might rain in Ireland). This seemed to short out the coil and some kind of safety interlock started switching it off despite my repeated attempts to stop and restart it. Eventually after an hour or so hanging around near where I'd parked the dying car, it managed to get going again, albeit warning me that the clutch's coil circuit was shorting (IIRC, the fourth flash during the self-test mentioned above).
If I'm lucky, either the brushes have simply worn down, or a bit of trapped water is occasionally making a short in the connector. If not, water may have leaked into the clutch and contaminated the powder or something, I don't know. That hole is near the bottom of the engine, so for all I know the bell housing has a pool of water in it, bathing the clutch and promising rust or some other disaster.
I wonder if it's the same type of clutch used in the older Subaru Justy - it looks like they can lose their powder, which would not be good.
30/10/2011
Finally got round to removing it, which just took a couple of minutes this time - amazing how much easier some jobs are in direct sunlight rather than in a dark garage. Last time I removed the battery and its tray and pulled a bunch of stuff out of the way, needlessly.
Turned out the brushes were hardly worn at all, but they were very wet. When I replaced them last year, the generic alternator brushes may have been slightly too long for the available space, and I was afraid to break something so didn't tighten the brush holder's bolts nearly enough, leaving a gap large enough for water to pour in as I foolishly rammed the car through floodwater.
Might be a good idea to file down the brushes a tad before installing them, enough to push the brush holder absolutely flush in its socket and screw it in tight enough to prevent water entering the clutch housing.
The clutch operates (as far as my limited understanding goes) by passing a current through some kind of magnetic powder (maybe just iron filings? Anyone know what this is?) which fills the gap between the driving (engine-side) and driven (gearbox/wheels side) plates. When the engine is at idle, no (or very little) current is passed through the powder so the engine spins without transferring force to the driven side.
As you hit the throttle and engine speed increases, the current passed through the powder is raised and the powder becomes magnetised, sticking together more strongly and transferring more of the rotational force from the engine to the wheels.
The electrical current is supplied by a pair of carbon brushes which rest against turning discs (I think they're called slip rings, which just slot onto a splined axle), since you can't just stick a wire into something that's constantly spinning. After a while, both the brushes and the slip rings start to wear down - hopefully the brushes more and the rings less, since the brushes are easy to replace while the slip rings are probably almost impossible (i.e. cheaper to buy a new car than to get the clutch out, open it up, replace a part, put it back together and re-install it in the car, argh). When the brushes wear down, springs in the brush holder push them further out until a certain limit, they either lose contact completely or periodically slip out of contact briefly, triggering the "N-CVT" warning light on the dashboard. As they wear out of reach of the clutch wheel/slip disc arcing can occur which is apparently a bad thing, too.
So anyway, my Micra had started to get sluggish, needing more revs than before, and I figured it might be the clutch brushes. I checked the web for similar problems and solutions and found a LOT of problems and NO solution other than buy a new brush holder/new gearbox/new car.
Nissan refused to talk to me on the phone, telling me to call local dealers instead. Two separate dealers quoted me a laughable €218 for the whole brush holder assembly, which is apparently all they will give you short of an entire new clutch (again, more than the cost of the car).
This seemed a lot of money when it was just the carbon brushes which had worn down. So I took the brush holder assembly out anyway.
Where is it? Here, on the front of the transmission bell housing:
(edit, new pic to help locate it)
You can disconnect the power plug by pressing a tab on the left side of the upper half and pulling it upwards. Blurry closeup of power socket:
The hole down into the clutch after removing the brush holder. Looks... not so great:
And the brush holder after removal:
Knackered. Right down to a stub on the engine-side brush and while not so bad on the driven side, the spring was jammed up with cruddy carbon deposits and failing to push the brush out to maintain contact with the slip ring.
So I disassembled and cleaned it (on the left is another brush from a mk3 Ford Fiesta's broken alternator... similar!):
The brushes looked so similar to what you'd find in an alternator, serving the same purpose anyway, that I went to a shop ("Electro Maintenance" in Baldoyle) to find something suitable. A guy came out of the back room and took the disassembled holder away before coming back with some Delco alternator brushes, for which he charged a pretty reasonable €7. He also suggested that I snip off the old brushes, leaving just the bit of wire that was somehow attached to the metal mount, and then solder the copper wire of the new brush on top of that. Before doing this, we threaded the old black plastic insulation piece onto the wire, fed the spring through and cut off the excess wire (to stop the brush from falling out the end of the holder!).
Soldering the new wire onto the bit of old wire (no idea how the old wire is attached to the metal so nicely but still conducting current):
And reassembled after soldering:
Note the slight slant in the brush faces where they contact the clutch wheel/slip rings - the longer edge is on the bottom and the shorter edge on the top (where the power socket is pointing). This is what the wear pattern in the old brushes looked like, so I oriented the new ones in the same way (if I'd bought brushes without a slanted edge, I might have used sandpaper or emery cloth to file one in, since it probably helps them fit into the clutch properly).
Also, if you have a multimeter, check the continuity from pin to brush for both pairs. Each pin should form a circuit to the brush on the same side.
After installing the brush holder (much easier than removing it, bizarrely - it took about 5 minutes of gently sliding it around and twisting to get it out, after removing the battery and its tray* and moving a relay box out of the way), I sat in the car and gingerly started the engine. It fired up, and I listened for any horrible scraping noises and watched the N-CVT lamp on the dashboard, which didn't light up. Knocked off the engine and did a self-test of the gearbox (put it in D, ignition on but don't start engine, brake on, accelerator on, cycle Ds-D-N-R-P, accelerator off, brake off, start engine) which reported okayness (N-CVT indicator flashes one long, then seven short and repeats).
* Note: I recently checked the brushes again and was able to get the holder out without removing the battery or its tray. If you have the right screwdriver or a ratchet with screwdriver bit, you can get it out in less than 10 mins! I did have to lie under the car and ask my SO to hold the ratchet end in place though.
I carefully reversed and turned from the cramped shed into the cramped laneway and drove home. Feels a bit more responsive so far but I was literally a 2 minute drive from my house so no chance to get it up to speed.
Hopefully the fix is ok and won't trash the clutch or wear down within 2 weeks - time will tell. (It'd be pretty funny if it completely failed within a couple of days :/)
Replacement from Nissan: €218
DIY hack job with alternator brushes: €7 + time (one hour if you're smart, 4 hours messing about if you're me).
Hope this helps anyone in the same boat!
Update 26/10/2011: it worked fine for over a year and a half, until...
...Until I stupidly drove through at least a foot of water in a flood on Monday (yeah, who'd have thought it might rain in Ireland). This seemed to short out the coil and some kind of safety interlock started switching it off despite my repeated attempts to stop and restart it. Eventually after an hour or so hanging around near where I'd parked the dying car, it managed to get going again, albeit warning me that the clutch's coil circuit was shorting (IIRC, the fourth flash during the self-test mentioned above).
If I'm lucky, either the brushes have simply worn down, or a bit of trapped water is occasionally making a short in the connector. If not, water may have leaked into the clutch and contaminated the powder or something, I don't know. That hole is near the bottom of the engine, so for all I know the bell housing has a pool of water in it, bathing the clutch and promising rust or some other disaster.
I wonder if it's the same type of clutch used in the older Subaru Justy - it looks like they can lose their powder, which would not be good.
30/10/2011
Finally got round to removing it, which just took a couple of minutes this time - amazing how much easier some jobs are in direct sunlight rather than in a dark garage. Last time I removed the battery and its tray and pulled a bunch of stuff out of the way, needlessly.
Turned out the brushes were hardly worn at all, but they were very wet. When I replaced them last year, the generic alternator brushes may have been slightly too long for the available space, and I was afraid to break something so didn't tighten the brush holder's bolts nearly enough, leaving a gap large enough for water to pour in as I foolishly rammed the car through floodwater.
Might be a good idea to file down the brushes a tad before installing them, enough to push the brush holder absolutely flush in its socket and screw it in tight enough to prevent water entering the clutch housing.
Friday, February 12, 2010
What is the proposer's occupation?
Looking up insurance quotes on a few different sites, I found a funny form on Britton Insurance's website, which asks among other things, "What is the proposer's occupation?".
The choice available is quite amazing - here are some examples:
I'd like to put down balloonist, but it would be a wishful lie.
The choice available is quite amazing - here are some examples:
Bacon Curer, Baggage Handler, Bailiff, Baker, Bakery Assistant, Bakery Manager, Bakery Operative, Balloonist, ... Skipper, Slater, Smallholder, ... Stock Controller, Stock Manager, Stockman, Stocktaker, Stockbroker, Stone Cutter, Stone Sawyer, Stonemason, ... Sub-postmistress, ... Tachograph Analyst, Tacker, Tailor, Tank Farm Operative (WTF?), Tanker Driver, Tanner, Tarmaccer, Tarot Reader/Palmistry Expert
I'd like to put down balloonist, but it would be a wishful lie.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Sign language on kids' TV
There's an episode on CBBC of "Lazytown", a kids' show from Iceland of the "eating fruit and getting enough sleep gives me the energy to be a muscular annoying man!" variety. BBC have a woman (uncredited) overlayed like a subtitles track, only she's conveying the speech and sounds with sign language.
The interesting thing is it appears to have been done entirely in one take - I haven't been watching all the time, but had my eye on it for about half the programme and didn't notice any fadeouts/cuts. Signing a whole episode of a somewhat hyperactive children's show in one go, conveying the tone of voice with body language and doing a couple of songs on the way - that is damn impressive!
The interesting thing is it appears to have been done entirely in one take - I haven't been watching all the time, but had my eye on it for about half the programme and didn't notice any fadeouts/cuts. Signing a whole episode of a somewhat hyperactive children's show in one go, conveying the tone of voice with body language and doing a couple of songs on the way - that is damn impressive!
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Toyota/Lexus stuck accelerator crash
Saw this article about an extremely dangerous suddenly-stuck-on-accelerator problem in the Lexus ES 350. The awful headlined crash in the USA involved a driver realising his accelerator was stuck on and the car speeding out of control toward a busy intersection, so he called 911 and prayed that they would be ok, which they weren't.
This is tragic, but surely in this situation, you would try the following things:
1. Knock it into neutral/reverse
2. Handbrake
3. Stamp on the footbrake anyway, maybe it actually does work
4. TURN THE ENGINE OFF so it doesn't keep accelerating at least
Rather than these things:
1. Call the police and expect them to somehow help
2. Pray
3. Nothing else
Certainly, Toyota/Lexus is at fault for allowing a car out to market with a severe and dangerous problem which was reported and dismissed many times, but that doesn't help this guy and the other three people who died in the crash - surely there was a better option to avert or mitigate a high-speed collision than dialling 911 and praying that everything would be ok. The fact that the driver was an off-duty highway patrol officer just makes the outcome even more incomprehensible.
Why didn't they knock it out of gear and/or turn off the engine? How is calling 911 going to help avert a crash that is seconds away?
This is tragic, but surely in this situation, you would try the following things:
1. Knock it into neutral/reverse
2. Handbrake
3. Stamp on the footbrake anyway, maybe it actually does work
4. TURN THE ENGINE OFF so it doesn't keep accelerating at least
Rather than these things:
1. Call the police and expect them to somehow help
2. Pray
3. Nothing else
Certainly, Toyota/Lexus is at fault for allowing a car out to market with a severe and dangerous problem which was reported and dismissed many times, but that doesn't help this guy and the other three people who died in the crash - surely there was a better option to avert or mitigate a high-speed collision than dialling 911 and praying that everything would be ok. The fact that the driver was an off-duty highway patrol officer just makes the outcome even more incomprehensible.
Why didn't they knock it out of gear and/or turn off the engine? How is calling 911 going to help avert a crash that is seconds away?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
installing rsdl on OS X i386 via rubygems
I was getting this problem trying to install rsdl, a wrapper program for ruby which initialises SDL/Cocoa:
The solution was to add an ARCHFLAGS environment variable which stops it trying to build a ppc version:
The "File not found" message at the end doesn't seem to matter.
It's handy that SDL, SDL_image and SDL_gfx seem to build and install the UNIX way (./configure && make && sudo make install) with no problems - at first I was worried by the lack of a .pkg installer for SDL but it seems to work fine so far. Cool!
Jehannum:SDL-1.2.14 oisin$ sudo gem install rsdl
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing rsdl:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for ruby_sysinit()... no
checking for ruby_run_node()... no
creating Makefile
creating rsdl.c
make
gcc -arch ppc -arch i386 -Os -pipe -fno-common -I"/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin9.0" -I/usr/local/include/SDL -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_THREAD_SAFE -c rsdl.c
gcc rsdl.o -L. -L/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib -L. -arch ppc -arch i386 -lruby -lpthread -ldl -lm -L/usr/local/lib -lSDLmain -lSDL -Wl,-framework,Cocoa -o rsdl
ld: warning in /usr/local/lib/libSDLmain.a, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning in /usr/local/lib/libSDL.dylib, file is not of required architecture
Undefined symbols for architecture ppc:
"_main", referenced from:
start in crt1.10.5.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture ppc
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
lipo: can't open input file: /var/tmp//ccEkUyfQ.out (No such file or directory)
make: *** [rsdl] Error 1
The solution was to add an ARCHFLAGS environment variable which stops it trying to build a ppc version:
Jehannum:SDL-1.2.14 oisin$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS='-arch i386' gem install rsdl
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed rsdl-0.1.2
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rsdl-0.1.2...
File not found: lib
The "File not found" message at the end doesn't seem to matter.
It's handy that SDL, SDL_image and SDL_gfx seem to build and install the UNIX way (./configure && make && sudo make install) with no problems - at first I was worried by the lack of a .pkg installer for SDL but it seems to work fine so far. Cool!
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Schneier: "Stop the Panic on Air Security"
A good article by Bruce Schneier on the tendency for overreaction to dramatic and rare events, such as hijackings and attempted underwear bombings, while ignoring far more common dangers which don't make the news headlines.
Nothing he hasn't really said before, but well stated and all the more significant these days, given the hilarious ban on liquids and the ridiculous fiasco of Newark Airport being temporarily shut down and causing hours of delays because an innocent Chinese student crossed a laughable rope barrier to give his girlfriend a goodbye kiss.
Of course, instead of admitting that security was basically a joke (on the one hand, you're made to take off your shoes, be frisked, have your luggage X-rayed and possibly have someone examine your bits in a full-body scanner, then you enter the 'secure' area which is separated from the 'insecure' area by a cinema-waiting-line rope) and that they overreacted badly, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg stated that "what he did was a terrible injustice" to the thousands of people who were inconvenienced. Even though it was what airport security did that caused the inconvenience...
Let's stop the panic!
We're doing these things even though this particular plot was chosen precisely because we weren't screening for it; future al Qaeda attacks rarely look like past attacks; and the terrorist threat is far broader than attacks against airplanes.
We're doing these things even though airplane terrorism is incredibly rare, the risk is no greater today than it was in previous decades, the taxi to the airport is still more dangerous than the flight, and ten times as many Americans are killed by lightning as by terrorists.
...
We can see the effects of this all the time. We fear being murdered, kidnapped, raped and assaulted by strangers, when it's far more likely that the perpetrator of such offenses is a relative or a friend. We fear school shootings, even though a school is almost always the safest place a child can be. We worry about shark attacks instead of fatal dog or pig attacks -- both far more common. In the U.S., over 38,000 people die each year in car crashes; that's as many deaths as 9/11 each and every month, year after year.
Nothing he hasn't really said before, but well stated and all the more significant these days, given the hilarious ban on liquids and the ridiculous fiasco of Newark Airport being temporarily shut down and causing hours of delays because an innocent Chinese student crossed a laughable rope barrier to give his girlfriend a goodbye kiss.
Of course, instead of admitting that security was basically a joke (on the one hand, you're made to take off your shoes, be frisked, have your luggage X-rayed and possibly have someone examine your bits in a full-body scanner, then you enter the 'secure' area which is separated from the 'insecure' area by a cinema-waiting-line rope) and that they overreacted badly, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg stated that "what he did was a terrible injustice" to the thousands of people who were inconvenienced. Even though it was what airport security did that caused the inconvenience...
Let's stop the panic!
Thursday, January 07, 2010
No Nokia PC Suite on the Mac? Try Gammu!
With almost every mobile device I've had, the amount of freedom to run arbitrary software (especially software you've written yourself) has been low. Obviously needlessly low, too.
I once bought a USB datacable for my old Sagem X-5 to upload ringtones and Java programs without having to upload them to a webserver and download them with the Sagem over WAP/GPRS. I got ringtones working, but it turned out that it was impossible to upload Java programs over the cable.
Why? Well, there's no apparent technical reason for it - but it works out in the operator's favour, forcing you to download (from yourself) over their very expensive data service - at that time, it cost €0.02 per kilobyte with Meteor, which works out at €20.48 per megabyte, a shocking waste of money!
Similarly, when I bought my Nokia 6230i back in 2006, I soon discovered that while it could download Java applications with no problem, it was impossible to install them via its MMC card. The JAR/JAD would appear in its filesystem browser, but it would declare it an "unrecognised format".
Nokia did, however, release a package called the Nokia PC Suite, which was a reasonably comprehensive tool for doing lots of different things with the phone, including the installing of Java programs. And it worked via data cable and Bluetooth. Great!
Except that now, I don't have a Windows PC (at least, one with Bluetooth or a data cable). And it only runs on Windows (surprise!). My Macbook has built-in Bluetooth and can send files via the built in utilities, but the same "unrecognised format" issue pops up.
So that was the end of my frustrating search, until yesterday... enter Gammu!
This open-source program comes with a host of features for working with different types of phones, including my 6230i, and I was able to upload and install a Java application to the phone with Gammu over Bluetooth, finally!
What's the catch? Well... Gammu itself is a command-line tool so installing a program looks like:
And Gammu uses a textual configuration file - mine looks something like:
The port value can be found in Apple's "Bluetooth Explorer" in Devices->Show Device Discovery (cmd-D), under your phone's name (but replace the hyphens with colons).
Also you have to build the program from source which requires installing CMake and MySQL, but these have automated installers which caused no brainache. Getting Bluetooth to work required a small fix to one of the build scripts, but this has since been fixed so the latest version should work out-of-box.
So, if you have a Mac and a phone which requires Windows-only software to install applications, try Gammu.
. o O ( Now if I could only find a simple way to upload programs of my choosing to my iPod Touch without having to jailbreak the thing or pay Apple, again :/)
I once bought a USB datacable for my old Sagem X-5 to upload ringtones and Java programs without having to upload them to a webserver and download them with the Sagem over WAP/GPRS. I got ringtones working, but it turned out that it was impossible to upload Java programs over the cable.
Why? Well, there's no apparent technical reason for it - but it works out in the operator's favour, forcing you to download (from yourself) over their very expensive data service - at that time, it cost €0.02 per kilobyte with Meteor, which works out at €20.48 per megabyte, a shocking waste of money!
Similarly, when I bought my Nokia 6230i back in 2006, I soon discovered that while it could download Java applications with no problem, it was impossible to install them via its MMC card. The JAR/JAD would appear in its filesystem browser, but it would declare it an "unrecognised format".
Nokia did, however, release a package called the Nokia PC Suite, which was a reasonably comprehensive tool for doing lots of different things with the phone, including the installing of Java programs. And it worked via data cable and Bluetooth. Great!
Except that now, I don't have a Windows PC (at least, one with Bluetooth or a data cable). And it only runs on Windows (surprise!). My Macbook has built-in Bluetooth and can send files via the built in utilities, but the same "unrecognised format" issue pops up.
So that was the end of my frustrating search, until yesterday... enter Gammu!
This open-source program comes with a host of features for working with different types of phones, including my 6230i, and I was able to upload and install a Java application to the phone with Gammu over Bluetooth, finally!
What's the catch? Well... Gammu itself is a command-line tool so installing a program looks like:
Jehannum:Downloads oisin$ gammu nokiaaddfile Application Bart1.4
[snip debug warnings]
Searching for phone folder: *********
Information: Declared JAR file size is different than real. Fixed by Gammu.
Adding "Bart" version created by Bart
Writing JAD file: 100 percent
Writing JAR file: 100 percent
And Gammu uses a textual configuration file - mine looks something like:
Jehannum:~ oisin$ cat .gammurc
[gammu]
port = 00:16:BC:xx:xx:xx
model = 6230i
connection = bluerfphonet
synchronizetime = no
logfile = /Users/oisin/gammu.log
logformat = textall
use_locking = no
The port value can be found in Apple's "Bluetooth Explorer" in Devices->Show Device Discovery (cmd-D), under your phone's name (but replace the hyphens with colons).
Also you have to build the program from source which requires installing CMake and MySQL, but these have automated installers which caused no brainache. Getting Bluetooth to work required a small fix to one of the build scripts, but this has since been fixed so the latest version should work out-of-box.
So, if you have a Mac and a phone which requires Windows-only software to install applications, try Gammu.
. o O ( Now if I could only find a simple way to upload programs of my choosing to my iPod Touch without having to jailbreak the thing or pay Apple, again :/)
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Re: "China Blames Online Games for Drugs, Murder, Teen Pregnancy"
Reposting for posterity here a comment I made on this article in response to some guy asking "When did your children were listening to Chaikovskiy or Shopen LAST TIME?" - implying that it's a positive and appropriate step for China to dictate how the people should entertain themselves because of some cultural degeneration that has taken place in the Western world due to our poor choice in music, computer games or whatever else:
@Kolyan:
There would be no Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Scriabin, Dave Brubeck, Debussy, Yoko Kanno, Freddie Mercury or other clever and creative composers if governments decided and enforced what everybody should enjoy or create.
People DID commit murders, take drugs, get pregnant as teens and of course, piss their lives away, long before the age of digital computers. There were stupid, psychotic and unwise people among us throughout history - if you want to improve that then improve the education system (rather than making it a soulless rat-race) and improve social conditions (not least, healthy freedom of speech).
And re: family life being damaged - are you kidding? The internet has served to bring people closer together that may have otherwise grown apart. I chat to cousins, aunts and uncles on Facebook who live in other countries and who I might not otherwise see for years.
Sure, people get sucked into rubbish games and waste their lives, but this is a fault of the person, not the games (or pornography or whatever you want to blame). Perhaps without the social outlet of gaming, some of these people would end up addicted to heroin or committing suicide - what good could banning online gaming really do? At least these people have some sense of community and friendship.
China, stop micromanaging the people and trying to tell them how they should (or should not) entertain themselves. It's absolutely none of your business, and a very inappropriate step into personal liberties.
Monday, December 07, 2009
PicArt
This video forced me to leave the room and crouch in the kitchen, doubled up and crying with laughter, for about 3 minutes. Even thinking about it is threatening to set me off again...
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Desk Topography
The general arrangement of my desk:
- The z-axis (which passes through the gravitational centre of the earth) is ordered such that, on average, higher items are more recent. Papers at the bottom of the z-axis are sometimes partially chemically bonded with the desk. (That is to say, new shit is randomly piled upon old shit which is stuck to an eight month-old coffee stain)
- Although the x-/y-axis positions of items are extremely noisy, there is a tendency for locality to correspond with the degree to which papers are topically related. (This means that everything is scattered all over the place, except for things that I had piled together for some unknown reason some months ago)
- Rubbish follows a Gaussian distribution from the central boundary of a disc 10cm from the keyboard and ending at arm's reach... (This implies that the rubbish bin is slightly out of arm's reach and is thus underutilised)
Monday, November 23, 2009
IDLE & Python 2.6 escaping mishap
Here's an odd one that can catch out a newbie (well, me, at least):
Do that in the interpreter and it'll tell you "ValueError: invalid \x escape"... put it in a source file and execute it with F5 and nothing will happen, other than focus switching to the interpreter window. No message, no nothing. Had to do a binary(ish) search, commenting out the whole program minus one print statement and checking that it runs, then commenting out about half the file and homing in on the buggy line that way - I was writing a unit test which checked that the output of a particular function was a zero byte (the most trivial case of about 12 tests).
When you do it in the IDLE/Python 3.1 bundle, you get a notification as expected, but not in the 2.6 version for the Mac. Pity pygame doesn't work in Python 3 yet.
x = '\x0'
Do that in the interpreter and it'll tell you "ValueError: invalid \x escape"... put it in a source file and execute it with F5 and nothing will happen, other than focus switching to the interpreter window. No message, no nothing. Had to do a binary(ish) search, commenting out the whole program minus one print statement and checking that it runs, then commenting out about half the file and homing in on the buggy line that way - I was writing a unit test which checked that the output of a particular function was a zero byte (the most trivial case of about 12 tests).
When you do it in the IDLE/Python 3.1 bundle, you get a notification as expected, but not in the 2.6 version for the Mac. Pity pygame doesn't work in Python 3 yet.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Children as a hardware stress test
Phoned Medion because their data CD for this el cheapo car GPS system was just ejecting after ~10 seconds when I put it in my Macbook. The guy says "well it's not designed to run on Apple computers, we can't support them. You'll need to use a Windows machine."
So I says "wtf do you mean? All the computer is for, is to transfer map files from the CD onto an SD card which goes in the device. If it's not running any software on the computer then why would it matter what operating system I had?" and that was pretty much where I lost him. Figured it was some kind of completely braindead and needless copy protection that failed on OS X machines and went looking for torrents... unsuccessfully.
Then stuck in a DVD today and the same thing happened - doh! - just the disk getting pulled in, faint clicking for 10 seconds then the disk ejects. I tilt the laptop and hear something sliding about in the drive. Shit! Did some belt or mounting snap off?
Checking prices on eBay for a new 'superdrive' - cheapest is about €45 with postage, not bad but ouch, and opening the machine to swap DVD drives is a slog.
Maybe I can at least shake the broken object out of the drive and see if it's really screwed or maybe a fragment of a broken CD or something...
Hold the laptop with the DVD slot facing the floor, tap gently for 20 seconds, poke around in the slot with a playing card and what comes out?
A poxy 2c coin. Children FTWTF. Works now tho!
So I says "wtf do you mean? All the computer is for, is to transfer map files from the CD onto an SD card which goes in the device. If it's not running any software on the computer then why would it matter what operating system I had?" and that was pretty much where I lost him. Figured it was some kind of completely braindead and needless copy protection that failed on OS X machines and went looking for torrents... unsuccessfully.
Then stuck in a DVD today and the same thing happened - doh! - just the disk getting pulled in, faint clicking for 10 seconds then the disk ejects. I tilt the laptop and hear something sliding about in the drive. Shit! Did some belt or mounting snap off?
Checking prices on eBay for a new 'superdrive' - cheapest is about €45 with postage, not bad but ouch, and opening the machine to swap DVD drives is a slog.
Maybe I can at least shake the broken object out of the drive and see if it's really screwed or maybe a fragment of a broken CD or something...
Hold the laptop with the DVD slot facing the floor, tap gently for 20 seconds, poke around in the slot with a playing card and what comes out?
A poxy 2c coin. Children FTWTF. Works now tho!
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Funny Chinese expression of the [arbitrary time period]
显怀 (xiǎnhuái): To look pregnant / Obviously pregnant
Thursday, October 29, 2009
An entertaining exchange between Irish Youtubers
In a video of a Garda car apparently being burnt out while the Gardaí were busy raiding a house in Limerick (I guess?), a heated and very entertaining exchange on the subject of dole spongers and caviar developed. This is the kind of ridiculous but witty banter that I'd miss if I left Ireland:
chris2009xx (2 weeks ago) +3
sound like traveller dole skangers, we have to pay for your dole which you use to buy hash then you have loads of children for the child benefit and retire at 15 and go into fas centres then when 18 comes you sponge the dole then have children and the trend continues. you scum get council houses and wreck them we pay for them to be done up then. then you claim footwear allowance and use the money to buy more hash, then we pay to feed you in prison, you even get free runners/trainer shoes there
eiregc09 (2 days ago) +1
and you know all about it dont ye while your sitting at home drinkin your glass of champaigne and eating your caviar you sound like a right fuckin guard thinkin your all posh ye fuckin ignorant stuck up cunt im not even from limerick and its none of your business anyway proctor do ye know who proctor is remember that fool out of police academy the film
richieobrien1 (2 weeks ago)
u wouldnt want to be talking bout me..im working full time since i left school at 18..ive a good job too..
gobsiter (1 week ago) +1
dealing is not a job
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Nice latency
Tracing route to www.l.google.com [66.102.9.147]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 136.206.48.254
2 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 136.206.13.254
3 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 193.1.244.37
4 1 ms 10 ms 1 ms inex.google.com [193.242.111.57]
5 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 72.14.239.132
6 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 72.14.232.235
7 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms 64.233.174.18
8 1 ms 2 ms 2 ms lm-in-f147.1e100.net [66.102.9.147]
Trace complete.
Pinging boards.ie [89.234.66.107] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=60
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=60
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=60
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=60
...Ok, it makes no noticeable difference that latency is 20ms lower here than at home, but it looks cool!
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Speed reading: can we significantly increase reading rate without losing comprehension?
No.
There is no quick fix, according to current scientific evidence. The popular techniques suggested by speed reading books (e.g. elimination of subvocalisation, avoiding regressions or "back-skipping" by force of will or by hiding "already read" words with card, trying to take in more words per fixation and reducing the number of fixations) all do more harm than good, either reducing comprehension, reading rate or both.
Important tip: look for peer-reviewed scientific studies on the subject before accepting the claims of commercial pseudo-scientific books. Also, study skills websites often don't do this, and can publish suggestions which are actually harmful.
There is no quick fix, according to current scientific evidence. The popular techniques suggested by speed reading books (e.g. elimination of subvocalisation, avoiding regressions or "back-skipping" by force of will or by hiding "already read" words with card, trying to take in more words per fixation and reducing the number of fixations) all do more harm than good, either reducing comprehension, reading rate or both.
Important tip: look for peer-reviewed scientific studies on the subject before accepting the claims of commercial pseudo-scientific books. Also, study skills websites often don't do this, and can publish suggestions which are actually harmful.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Three annoying things
1. TV advertisements that say things like "eliminates up to 100% of dandruff flakes" or "up to 100% grey coverage" - typically ads for shampoo and the like.
Like, I can defeat up to 100% of ninjas by doing nothing, since "up to 100% of ninjas" means "x ninjas, where 0 <= x <= the total number of ninjas". A building could be up to 100% demolished by throwing a large rock at it, which is to say that it will be only very slightly damaged. Saying that a shampoo removes "up to" 100% of dandruff is saying nothing.
Stupid wishy-washy meaningless-statement-making assholes.
2. People who stand at a pedestrian crossing but don't hit the button, presumably on the assumption that they will automatically get a green light and the button does nothing but tell them to wait for the scheduled light change which would have happened anyway (which is only sometimes the case).
There are some crossroads where the pattern is like:
(A) west turning south cars only (and pedestrians crossing between NW/NE or NE/SE if the button was hit in the previous A, B or C),
(B) east and west cars only,
(C) north and south cars only.
If a pedestrian hits the light switch on the northwest, northeast or southeast corner, then they can cross at the next A.
What happens about 20% of the time, is that one or two plonkers stand at one of the lights and wait until A, upon which they still don't get a signal to cross because they never hit the button. Then they frown in confusion and eventually jaywalk at the next opportunity, cursing the system. Or you arrive at the crossing, mash the button and grimace at them, having watched them stand there like a muppet for about 30 seconds and miss the crossing timeslot.
Dumb. If you're standing in front of the button, just fucking hit it.
3. People who cross a road and casually hit the button as they walk past, even though they're not going to wait for a crossing signal. Instead, cars and cyclists have to stop and wait uselessly for nobody to cross, since the guy who hit the button is already out of sight, back on the pavement.
If you're going to just cross the road anyway, DON'T hit the fucking button!
Like, I can defeat up to 100% of ninjas by doing nothing, since "up to 100% of ninjas" means "x ninjas, where 0 <= x <= the total number of ninjas". A building could be up to 100% demolished by throwing a large rock at it, which is to say that it will be only very slightly damaged. Saying that a shampoo removes "up to" 100% of dandruff is saying nothing.
Stupid wishy-washy meaningless-statement-making assholes.
2. People who stand at a pedestrian crossing but don't hit the button, presumably on the assumption that they will automatically get a green light and the button does nothing but tell them to wait for the scheduled light change which would have happened anyway (which is only sometimes the case).
There are some crossroads where the pattern is like:
(A) west turning south cars only (and pedestrians crossing between NW/NE or NE/SE if the button was hit in the previous A, B or C),
(B) east and west cars only,
(C) north and south cars only.
If a pedestrian hits the light switch on the northwest, northeast or southeast corner, then they can cross at the next A.
What happens about 20% of the time, is that one or two plonkers stand at one of the lights and wait until A, upon which they still don't get a signal to cross because they never hit the button. Then they frown in confusion and eventually jaywalk at the next opportunity, cursing the system. Or you arrive at the crossing, mash the button and grimace at them, having watched them stand there like a muppet for about 30 seconds and miss the crossing timeslot.
Dumb. If you're standing in front of the button, just fucking hit it.
3. People who cross a road and casually hit the button as they walk past, even though they're not going to wait for a crossing signal. Instead, cars and cyclists have to stop and wait uselessly for nobody to cross, since the guy who hit the button is already out of sight, back on the pavement.
If you're going to just cross the road anyway, DON'T hit the fucking button!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Software patents: broad, stifling and unfair
(posted comment on ZDNet article "Examine the patent that made selling Microsoft Word a crime")
The problem with patenting processes or algorithms - not necessarily even in computer software - is that we end up with extremely broad or obvious patents whose sole purpose is to allow the patent holder to eventually sue large companies and get (obscenely) rich, and not to safeguard investment in new inventions and products as was originally intended.
If you write a program using simple common sense and happen to "re-invent" something that's patented, that's a strong hint that the patent is too general or obvious.
This is why we have ridiculous patents on "not having to click on a control for it to display dynamic content in a web browser" (Eolas), or "method of swinging on a swing" (United States Patent 6368227, which in itself should be evidence that the US patent system needs to be destroyed and rebuilt by people with an IQ above 30).
What's next? "A method of lifting heavy objects by using one's legs, not one's back"? Or, following Eolas's lead, "not having to say 'abracadabra' and turn around three times before turning on a computer"?
And how is $280m a reasonable amount of "damages", when i4i has produced nothing that could be damaged? Where is their competing product which is suffering in the marketplace due to competition with the patent-infringing Office?
And to those arguing that Microsoft/everyone should do their "due diligence" by researching patents, have you ever written a computer program? Can you really imagine searching for patents that might cover every single aspect of the code you're writing?
Programmers produce code that solves the problems at hand. They do not think "hmm, maybe what we need is to store some text separately to where the formatting information for that text is stored. That makes sense. Better check if that is software-patented!"
Imagine trying to speak to someone while having to look up every individual word you use to check that it's not in some arbitrary blacklist. It would be an unproductive nightmare.
And on top of that, patent search is extremely difficult because they're often worded in an inconsistent, generic or confusing way.
Software patents do nothing good for anybody other than patent trolls and lawyers. For everyone else in the world, they only hold back science and progress. Get rid of software patents in the US now, and keep them out of the EU too.
The problem with patenting processes or algorithms - not necessarily even in computer software - is that we end up with extremely broad or obvious patents whose sole purpose is to allow the patent holder to eventually sue large companies and get (obscenely) rich, and not to safeguard investment in new inventions and products as was originally intended.
If you write a program using simple common sense and happen to "re-invent" something that's patented, that's a strong hint that the patent is too general or obvious.
This is why we have ridiculous patents on "not having to click on a control for it to display dynamic content in a web browser" (Eolas), or "method of swinging on a swing" (United States Patent 6368227, which in itself should be evidence that the US patent system needs to be destroyed and rebuilt by people with an IQ above 30).
What's next? "A method of lifting heavy objects by using one's legs, not one's back"? Or, following Eolas's lead, "not having to say 'abracadabra' and turn around three times before turning on a computer"?
And how is $280m a reasonable amount of "damages", when i4i has produced nothing that could be damaged? Where is their competing product which is suffering in the marketplace due to competition with the patent-infringing Office?
And to those arguing that Microsoft/everyone should do their "due diligence" by researching patents, have you ever written a computer program? Can you really imagine searching for patents that might cover every single aspect of the code you're writing?
Programmers produce code that solves the problems at hand. They do not think "hmm, maybe what we need is to store some text separately to where the formatting information for that text is stored. That makes sense. Better check if that is software-patented!"
Imagine trying to speak to someone while having to look up every individual word you use to check that it's not in some arbitrary blacklist. It would be an unproductive nightmare.
And on top of that, patent search is extremely difficult because they're often worded in an inconsistent, generic or confusing way.
Software patents do nothing good for anybody other than patent trolls and lawyers. For everyone else in the world, they only hold back science and progress. Get rid of software patents in the US now, and keep them out of the EU too.
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