Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

I’m currently moving the site, so the content (images, in particular) might not be available for for another 24 hours. Sorry about inconvenience.

I experience serious problems with the webserver load. After a few posts about the routerbot (which is 7+months old!) on a few popular websites the server start suffering from low RAM/CPU power. Last time I remember something like this only during pizza.com times.

I beg my apology for this situation. The server will get upgraded later this week.

At the moment Canon Vixia HF100 is the best consumer HD flash camera. It’s not perfect, I found plenty of glitches and inconveniences like

1. Sometimes it takes up to 15 seconds to switch the mode (Play/Record)
2. The navigation is not very intuitive
3. The official video backup process via Pixela Mixer (i.e. you need to install a piece of commercial software before you will be able to get your video from camera to computer)

Despite all those and many other issues it is still the best. The video quality is just outstanding, it’s like having whole Hollywood in your pocket. While I can do nothing (so far) with #1 and #2 annoyances #3 is easily solvable. You don’t need to install this special piece of software called PixelaMixer. In fact I didn’t even try it after reading couple reviews saying it’s no good at all. You can just connect the camera to the PC or insert the SD card into the card reader and copy .mts files from <drive>\private\avchd\bdmv\stream to your backup device. Then you can process the files with whatever software you prefer.
If you also want to backup the images then get them at <drive>\DCIM, as usually.

I’m moving to another place. Right the next day I submitted the notice to the leasing office my kids, being under great impression of “Blue’s Clues” TV program, started playing clues. Soon they invented that the best clues can be made with marker on walls. I spent about 1 hour trying different substances on the walls, but the wall-marker combination was much stronger then Soap, Magic Eraser, OxiClean, rubbing alcohol and other pretty powerful substances. Only in a few weeks I recalled what I was studying on chemistry at school and solved the problem in seconds.

I’ve got new Archos DVR Station recently. The nice thing about it is a cool remote with tons of different buttons that provide full keyboard+mouse functionality for Archos 605 PMP. Unfortunately the remote appeared to be dead. I was almost ready to pack it and send back to the store when recalled a situation happened a few years ago. Some device I was 100% sure is ok didn’t work with brand new batteries. The problem was too short “+” tip on the battery. Some devices (like this Archos DVR Station) have weird profile of battery holder that prevents the “+” tip from touching the contact spring. The solution is quite simple - use some sharp tool to pop the contact spring out the plastic “niche”. Alternatively you can just buy a different type of battery with longer tip.
BTW, the batteries that have this problem were “batteries.com” brand, but I saw couple other brands with the same problem.

Thanks to N2H Global Translator now you can conveniently translate this blog to couple other languages using free online translation services. Just click the appropriate flag in the top-right corner of the header and get the page in the “language” of your preference.

Unfortunately the quality of translation for many languages is still poor, but at least you can get an idea of what this blog is about. I checked the quality in English->Russian translation, laughed for a few minutes but decided leave it as is. I’m just thinking if the translations are always funny or they can be offensive sometime? Please let me know in comments if this happens, I would really appreciate that.

I’m switching everything to the new look and feel, so pardon this mess. I’ll make the missing parts of the site work really soon.

Ufff… the most critical part of your robot project is done. Now it is time to do basic tests and assemble whatever you have done. Here’s is hwo you do that…

For our robot we will need the following parts and tools:

Somehow my kids became huge fans of different kinds of robots, starting from teleoperated planet explorers and ending with transformers. So I promised them to build a robot, and in a few days I ended up with this result which I’m pretty proud to share. It appeared that for $150 or less you can build pretty cool robot that is way easier to program then most robots out there on the market + its range is way larger then most toys have. Here’s how you can build your own inexpensive yet powerful robot…

As usually there might be a lot of reasons for that. In my case the reason became clear when I checked /var/log/messages:
imapd-ssl: /etc/courier-imap/shared/index: No such file or directory problem. The quick and dirty solution appeared to be really quick.

I started republishing posts from my old website about immigration to Australia. First few posts are available here, more are coming later. All posts are in Russian. All posts are not published on the first page.

For debugging purposes I frequently need to quickly convert ip addresses from one representation to another. Here is quick and dirty (I’ll cleanup the interface when get some free time) converter that does the job.
If you don’t see the form below because of some reason please proceed to this page.
The following formats are supported:

• integer
• unsigned integer
• dot notation
• hex number
• binary number
• octal number
• natural netmask

Please specify one of the following

Recently I’ve got $10 charge from company called “Reservation Rewards” …
I’ve seen this company before in one of those “Use your chance to get $20″ with really long explanation that hides the fact you have to subscribe to “Reservation rewards” for $12/month in order to get those $20. But I was very patient first time I saw this ad, I noticed this hidden subscription, noticed checkbox that was prechecked for me and since then carefully hidden subscriptions like this. So here is the story about Reservation Rewards subscription with happy end.

When your mail is not working it is important to know exactly what part is broken (so you know if you should go blame sysadmin or just check your mail client settings). Let’s simulate basic POP3 client using regular telnet (enter commands without quotes) in order to check if the POP3 is doing fine:

Howdy! This blog is about various technical stuff like coputers, gadgets, photos etc etc. Enjoy