Cpgeek.org

MacBook Air

WTF – the MacBook Air’s default memory configuration on the highest end model is 4gb, is not user upgradable (soldered to the board, no slots), and even the max custom configuration is only 8gb (and that takes about a week to build and ship!). These machines are super popular and they should have revised the memory spec to 8gb (8gb, 16gb configurable) at least a year ago!

Come on, Apple!

I’ve waited a week. Where is my lollipop!?

Google announced at their last great press conference that we would see Android 5.0 Lollipop on nexus devices on 11/3/2014.  Here it is now a week later, 11/10, and my Nexus 10 is still running 4.4.4.  Nexus 5 and 7 owners have no official builds (the last Android L preview images were updated not long ago), but it still isn’t an official release.  If it’s not ready, fine.  That’s cool, just set a public deadline and stick to it.  if it’s late December, OK whatever, just tell people when to expect it, so we’re not constantly trying to figure out where we’re at.

Nexus Storage Woes

Dear nexus 6 designers,

If you’re going to include 4k video support, people are going to need more than 64gb of storage. With h.264 high encoding, that’s about 350MB/min Then, assuming that the OS and other apps you have installed take up about 4gb, (Which is conservative if you want to use other apps as well), then on a 64gb device, you’re left with 60gb of actual storage (round numbers), which means you’ll get less than 3 hours of record time (assuming you don’t do much else in terms of storage)… that’s horrible.

There are 2 ways to solve this. removable storage (micro sd cards are just fine so long as you get reasonably fast ones), or more in line with the Nexus design philosophy, include a 128gb option! – People WILL buy it, charge another $60ish, give us the 128gb model, and be done. 6 hours of video recording is enough for most folks I’d think. then the only problem you have to solve is how quickly you can transfer it to the computer, but with 802.11ac and usb3 things should be just fine if the flash is fast enough… get on that, Motorola!

P.S. While you’re at it, stop making carrier locks and boot loader locks an option to big cellular (but that’s a harder battle).

Failed Cellular on Galaxy Note 3

While I still believe that this is nothing short of the best phone I’ve ever used (and I’ve played with a ton of them that friends and family have shown me (sometimes for hours at a time if they are really nice), my Samsung Galaxy Note 3, one day a few months ago, just up and decided that it wasn’t going to connect to cellular networks anymore. Read More >>

RTL-SDR

I just picked up a Realtek based DVB-T (European) TV tuner for use as a wide band general coverage receiver of radio stations thanks to the awesomeness of software defined radio.

So far, I’ve been using SDR# for standard radio listening (so far tested successful listening of FM Stereo transmissions (local standard radio stations), a local 2 meter ham radio repeater (at least the ident transponder), CB radio, and some local business band radios.

SDR# also comes with an ADS-B decoder for listening to and decoding the public transponder transmissions from commercial aircraft which include GPS data, registration information, and flight plan number information (all of which can be looked up online to see more information), but the coolest part is there’s another application called ADSBScope which will take that data and plot the vectors for the transponders the radio is actually listening to, in effect giving you a transponder “radar” view of where all the planes are in the area, and their flight information.

I’m just sitting here marveling at what can be done with a software driven USB wide-coverage receiver dongle that cost me $15 shipped and a bunch of free software.

I’m sure I’ll have more to come (maybe I’ll build some guides to how I got it all set up). I’ll certainly be posting as I learn more about various radio modes, how to find and analyse different signals, and any other fun I find along the way. I think my biggest obstacles with this hardware setup are:

1. front end selectivity / gain control / filtering / rejection. When I experimented with picking up the signals from my CB handheld I found that even at only 4 watts, being in the same room with the antenna completely over-drove the inputs to the point where no amount of filtering or gain control that I tried (please note that I’m particularly inexperienced) did any good (though I don’t discount that I very easily could have been doing it wrong).
2. Dinky antenna. it came with a ~7″ mag-mount antenna with an MCX connector and about 3′ of cable, which means that everything I’ve done has been inside, and fairly close to a computer (which tend to be a bit RF noisy). I suspect that with a proper wide-band receive antenna, I should get better quality signals that I can work a bit better with.
3. My own inexperience. This is certainly a huge experience booster. I really don’t know that much about the basis of radio technology (I’m learning), and how it all applies. I’m still learning what all these knobs, switches, buttons, and dials do, and for the most part, I make it worse instead of better, but I’m learning.

New Notebook

Alas my 2008 15″ MacBook pro finally up and died on me (the display stopped displaying things… didn’t dig too far, but i’m pretty sure that the GPU on the motherboard finally died) and I got tired of hauling my workstation to Lan parties, so I decided to pick up a used Dell XPS 15 (Ivory bridge quad-core 2.2ghz i7-3632qm, 16GB ram, with 128gb ssd and 1tb hd originally configured using Intel’s SRT system to make the ssd cache the hard drive but I immediately installed a 256gb MSATA SSD, wiped the hard drive, turned off SRT, and installed stock windows 8.1 directly to the ssd and am using the hard drive for media storage.). Read More >>

New personal NAS / Home Server!

I recently (through work) found a great deal on a sweet NAS array (a Thecus N7700 Pro loaded with hard drives) but being the hacker I am, I didn’t stop there. Read More >>

Updates!

I know, it’s been forever since I’ve posted here and I know I’ve made unmet promises of regular posting, but alas, real life, a new job, family, etc. has kept me from publishing.

Fun things I’ve been up to include:

A new job!: I no longer work Technology Sales at the university bookstore!  I moved on up to a real IT Consultant position with a modest pay increase doing stuff with cool things and cool people that make me much happier.

Moving: I’ve moved in with my girlfriend and children and her sister and her sister’s young one.  A small house with 3 adults and 3 children under 10 is a very busy place.

New car!: When i got the new job, I needed to be able to get there, so after doing lots of research, I picked myself up a brand new 2014 Subaru Impreza Hatchback!  Lots of room for hauling gear, high safety marks, fun to drive… loving it.  Of course the other side of that coin is the newfound income from my aforementioned new employment quickly went directly into car payments, so i’m just slightly better off now than I was before financially, but hey, I’ve got a new ride, I’m doing what I like now with sweet new equipment and people who are totally rad!

Amateur (Ham) Radio: I’ve decided to step up and seriously take a close look at getting my amateur radio license so i can play with radio, meet some new nerd contacts, and get my feet wet.  I’ve been listening (totally legal so long as i don’t transmit) to the local 2 meter band around here for a while, finding repeaters, learning what i can, and it seems like fun.  I just ordered one of those infamous RTL-SDR dongles for use with gnu radio and SDR# which seems like it’ll be pretty fun. (hopefully I’ll be posting a short configuration tutorial and review when that comes in)

Project Gazelle: I’m still in the planning stages, but I’m hoping to use What.CD’s Gazelle Project to set up a sweet torrent tracker for amateur video sharing.  Unfortunately, because there are so many great features and they’ve made it extremely extensible, it’s become an extremely unruly beast (really big and complex) so wrapping my brain around it all before i get started is proving to be a bit of a nuisance.

NAS home server: (I’m going to do a full post about this next so I’ll just leave this here for a bit of a teaser)

New notebook: post to come soon… perhaps tonight…

FUIs meet reality – the need for a unified usable and good looking interface.

Today’s interfaces are floundering. We now have more hardware than we know what to do with, and on top of that hardware we run applications with user interfaces straight out of the early 90’s. innovation is stagnant.

In our entertainment we see amazing looking user interfaces that work very well for the application we see them doing, but we don’t typically see anything of the sort in the real world. we’re stuck with an outdated “desktop” style interfaces that more and more defy their original intention, that they be easy to use. Read More >>

growing pains

You’ll notice lots of changes over the next little bit. I think I’ve finally got this web server business up and running and working good… now it’s time to concentrate on the content.

I did bring over all of the ancient content I wrote for my drupal blog at cpgeek.org waaay back in the day (few years ago). but I will be changing up both the design, layout, and functionality of this site slowly over the next few months to actually, you know, make it look nice and do things.

for now, the blog functionality seems to be working properly, so things should be pretty decent there. feel free to make comments on anything you see here… I’ll be replying now and then. suggestions are *very* welcome.