Fujifilm A805 – Close up and Exposed!

A friends misfortune turns into my good fortune.  Allow me to explain. I’ve marvelled at the ingenuity of modern digital cameras, and as an engineer have been curious to see the insides of a modern camera. Well my friend recently had some bad luck and broke one of his compact cameras -  my chance to take a peek inside. Interesting to see how modular the design is in it’s construction.  At a level much simpler than I might have imagined. Still I’m no doubt looking at a fairly mature design, the result of many camera design iterations. A single double sided printed circuit board with fine pitch surface mount components. Note the small motors that control the lens assembly. Please see the attached images (Taken with my Canon G9) :

 

Psion on the Gadget Show 30/3/09

Wall of fame up against the Blackberry.  Sadly Psion didn’t win! But then in usual Gadget show fashion it’s  competitions are purely for fun.  Still great TV, even showed my old boss Colly Myers.

Watch the video here:

http://fwd.five.tv/videos/wall-of-fame-blackberry-vs-psion

 

Patents and Inventions – Talk to the British Library

I’m currently working on  an invention in the mains trailing extension space. I’ve had some useful advice including a free patent search carried out by the IP centre at the British Library. (Be aware that the re-searcher’s time is free but access to the Derwent database is chargeable. There are also constraints on qualification for free searching , so best to check first with the IP centre.)  http://www.bl.uk/bipc/ for more details.

 

A new MIMO router , with built in statistics – Buffalo WHR-HP-G54

I’ve just bought myself another router , as I’ve had some problems with my Zyxel ‘locking up’ after heavy wireless traffic.  This unit apppears to have better wifi performance than the P-336M.  Signal strength is up from about 50% to 70%+ on my Pure –  Evoke Flow which is furthest from the router.

Bought on ebay as new old stock I suppose, but interesting has come with an alternative operating system by a company called dd-wrt i.e. the original Buffalo image has been replashed.  See http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php It’s extremely comprehensive and includes lots of statistics including total WAN traffic. Very useful when Virgin have got very aggressive ‘bandwidth throttling’ in place.  See http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

Other potentially useful tabs include QOS.

 

Spotify – Listen to music on the Web

Sign up at https://www.spotify.com/ Fascinating and free if you’re happy with the commercial breaks. Perhaps there’s a limit too for the free service. Still brilliant for checking out material before buying if nothing else. There’s a radio mode too Just brilliant …

 

NXT – What’s happened to the flat louspeaker?

A good friend keeps reminding  me of NXT loudspeakers and their success stories. Yet when I look at what’s happened they seem to have ‘missed the spot’ at a level! My informed guess/opinion is that for many applications their intrinsic benefits i.e.  ’ being flat just  isn’t enough to win design ins  i.e. for many applications a conventional moving coil loudspeaker does the job presumably as well (if not better?) for less money. Therefore NXT  only ‘win’s when size alone is critical,  say in the case of turning the display of  a mobile phone into a loudpspeaker. But even this application seems to have had limited success? I presume that in absolute fidelity terms the NXT solution doesn’t count for HiFi so has also missed the traditional 2 channel stereo market. Maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Let me know what you think.

 

A bit of jazz music history

Just learnt that the band leader that my late father played with passed away this month.  For those of you with an interest in early big band music check this link: 

http://vzone.virgin.net/davidh.taylor/lewis.htm

My father (Al Ferdman) played guitar. Sadly for me , he’d almost given up playing by the time I came on to to the scene.

 

Psion Wavefinder – It lives , well briefly for me!

Just heard via a colleague that the old Wavefinder works once again with XP ! Evidently it’s been possible since the introduction of service pack 3. In truth I  thought it was permanently broken , but evidently not!   (The Wavefinder  stopped working when SP2 was introduced to Windows  XP) . Well I fired up the old sample on my Shuttle machine, first installing Psion Wavefinder V1.4 software.  Not much joy at first. So had a thought to try the Windab front end. Success, but unfortunately it crashed after about 20 minutes use. This might be hardware issue to be fair as I’m running an old early working sample. Still it proves that there’s a chance of running it. The Windab front end can be found here: http://www.simans.net/

 

Psion Wavefinder DAB Radio

 

Samsung Laser Printer – ML2010R – Refill Advice

Bought one of these mono laser printers from Ebuyer. Works well and does what’s expected. The refill supplied though isn’t good for 300o pages. Their effectively only partly filled. I guess this  is what happens when you buy a complete system for £40! A quick look at the prices for genuine Samsung replacements gave me a bit of a shock.  So I decided to go the refill root.  Found this company to be extremely efficient and helpful:  http://www.refilltoner.com/ They sell starter kits that even include a screwdriver, gloves and face mask. But in practice you may care to buy just the standard kits. They cost about £18 , a lot less than a full replacement. Be aware that you can’t refill these indefinately , perhaps 3- 5 times. Also be aware that when refilling you may need to empty the waste as well. Full instructions provided. Do take care though, the toner dust goes every where so don’t wear good clothes or refill on your best carpet.

 

Nokia E61i – ‘Skyestream’ Improved Search…

Frustrated by the apparent inability to search contacts other than by somebodies name, I’ve recently installed a product called SkyQuikey. Admittedly written by an old colleague  so have to say it’s good  Check out a trial version here:

http://www.skyestream.com/products.htm#Product08

In truth the program does a lot more as it can search everthing. But it’s the ‘contacts’ search that’s key for me.

The program allows me to search my contacts say by ‘company’ something you can’t seem to do with the built in search facility. As I can often remember company names but not necessarily the contact I’ve found this to be invaluable. Don’t really understand why it’s not a feature on the phone?