Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

iPhone with all its user interface bells and whistles, great functionality and stylish design is a great device, I have very little doubt about that. Unfortunately for a few days I was experiencing a problem with it that made me think being the best organizer ever it is one of the worst phone ever. You see, on a regular phone you always have this little red button that would immediately hang up when you press it. In iPhone everything is done via touch screen and software and there is no guarantee this software won’t fail you. All my long experience with conventional phones only twice lead me to a situation when I was unable to hang up the tube. A few days with iPhone brought me a dozen of such accidents. The problem was simple: once I make a call the screen randomly goes black. Sometimes this was happening a few seconds after the start of the call, sometimes only when I move it to my ear. I checked my wife’s phone and it appeared it does the same and this is actually a battery-saving feature. But her phone was returning to normal state once you move the phone from ear and mine wasn’t. It just stayed in this strange state when you can hear and talk to someone, but can’t do anything that could only be done via the touchscreen including hanging up. Here is the solution …

I like this photo frame alot! Samsung SPF-83V not only does have excellent 800×600 resolution, but it also supports content retrieval from other computers and directly from the Internet RSS channels via WiFi. Of course it is not perfect, it is not the easiest photo frame to set up, all content retrieval technologies are Microsoft-oriented, but the most frustrating feature is that for some reason Left and Right buttons are reversed!! Why would anyone do that I have no clue. Here is how to fix the problem.

If you decided to mod your wrt54gl router and turn it into one of the most capable routers for soho network, probably the first mod you should start with is adding serial interface to it. Why? Because when you do the other mods (like adding SD reader, turning into robot, adding leds etc) you definitely send the router into the brick state. And the best way to unbrick it is to look at the router’s console output. The entire operation is very easy and should not take longer then 1 hour. Here is how to do this:

Pleo is a wonderful dinosaur, way more charming then roboraptor and other sapiences. It is the most advanced toy robot currently available on the market in the <$700 price range (Pleo price is around $330 shipped). It has a huge potential which is limited by the fact it is completely standalone. I tried to fix this by adding bluetooth interface to it. This mod allows issuing commands to Pleo from virtually any bluetooth-enabled device, including many cell phones, communicators and generic computers. It also allows retrieving information from Pleo on-the-fly, like sounds it hears, pictures it sees etc.

Before you continue reading this post please acknowledge that this mod is not approved by Ugobe and most probably will void the warranty. Also there is always a chance that something will go wrong and you might damage your robopet. If you're going to implement this mod you are the only one responsible for damaging this very expensive toy. I'm providing the information below only as a personal experience for educational purposes.

And here is how to make it:

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.