All posts by Kris

About Kris

Hardware hacker, technology integrator, and maker. He enjoys staring blankly at code and voiding the warranty.

A cheaper NiMH battery for your gear that lasts longer?

ham radio, rant, rave

Eneloop AA battery for Yaesu FT-60What’s next Kris? – A car that runs on NO GAS? :p *chortle

In the picture we have a standard 1400mAh Yaesu FT-60 battery (FNB-83 on right) that lists for $65, next to an FT-60 AA pack (FBA-25 on left) with 6 Sanyo Eneloop AA’s which total out to $50 and that price is for the 8-pack, so you have 2 more rechargeable AA’s for your walkman. ;) I’m sure you could find the stock battery for cheaper, but even if they were the same price this new Eneloop pack lasts a third longer with 2000mAh of power.

Tech stuff: I numbered the batteries thinking that I may have to take them out and put them back in. This keeps them in the same order in the pack and I won’t mix in other batteries of various age and charge states. You also may notice the small piece of foil wrapped around the negative terminal of battery #6. This is done in order to mimic the factory battery pack. It may be part of its charging circuit, or simply may connect to the external charging pads found on the FNB-83. Either way – I want the FT-60 to recognize this as a rechargeable NiNH battery pack… because… that’s what it is. :| If you look closely, you’ll notice that the stock battery is just 6 AA sized cells sealed in the case. Now – This is actually a somewhat controversial modification that Yaesu won’t warrant, but it means that you can charge your new batteries in the unit. Controversial because if you are a moron – you can try to charge non-NiMH batteries and you will start a fire. A chemical / metal fire. Don’t bother reaching for the ABC class extinguisher. :eek: They also say something about about missing a temperature charging circuit in the AA case (thermistor maybe), but I can’t find one in the FNB-83, so I think this is part of the ‘cover your ass’ portion of their battery charging guide.

The Sanyo Eneloop is finally a good rechargeable battery worthy of your attention and their super flash marketing. I’m done buying ‘rechargeable’ batteries from companies that make the bulk of their money on disposables. I’ve had particularly horrible luck with bunny batteries. We got a charger and 4 of their batteries for Christine’s digital camera. After maybe 5 recharge cycles the battery life was down to 1/5th alkaline AA’s, and I’ll explain how charging them wrong was most of the problem.

Your super speedy rapid fast $9 plug in battery charger is crap. I discovered that keeping your batteries topped up and on the charger until use, is what’s killing them. I learned this too late to save a pile of NiMH Motorola TalkAbout batteries… sorry Earth. It’s A charging BASE. It’s where you keep your TalkAbout when not in use. It’s also plugged in and overcharging your batteries constantly. :mad:

The secret to making rechargeable batteries last? Effort. I know you don’t want an Excel sheet of your battery packs, voltage, and temp – so I’ll make this easy. Charge them up for no longer then 12 hours (overnight) and take them off the charger. I know the little green light comes on. I know the red light stops blinking. Take them off the charger! They’re ready to go! When they die, charge them! Don’t throw them in a drawer. Get them on the charger as soon as you can. After they have been charged up and sat in a drawer for 6 months – you’ll need to charge them again. Although with these new batteries that’s becoming less of an issue.

10 ECHO “Charge for 12 hours and stop.”
20 ECHO “Use Whenever.”
30 IF BATTERY = DEAD THEN 10
40 ELSE GOTO 20
50 END

Summary:
You can buy these off the shelf and they are ready to run.
You can get a better then stock NiMH battery for your gear.
They stay charged and ready for an emergency.
Check out the data.
Check out what the digital camera guys had to say.

Friendship Economics

personal

The friend penny jarHere’s a little something that I’d like to share with the world. It will make you a better friend and you’ll stop wasting your time on people that don’t value your friendship. I call it “The Friend Jar.” This idea has evolved over my years and I wish I employed it back when I was in High School.

The idea is: You view every friendship – male, female, romantic, platonic, employee, boss, couple, etc. as a jar of pennies. So you meet someone and the jar is created *poof. You make a gesture of friendship and your money goes into the jar. They make a return gesture and their money goes in. Now you don’t have to assign some actual number – just that some intrinsic value has been invested in the friendship. If they don’t take you up on your offer you lose your change (as in: the amount of time you have invested in the friendship is gone forever). Time is money after all. The jar can only grow when both friends are contributing. Some friendships, like future spouses, take gobs of effort and lots of change. Some friendships, like neighbors, only take a few pennies now and then and grow stronger over time.

You are invited for an event and you go and have a great time – their money in the jar, you reciprocate. You invite them to an event and they show up and have a great time – your money in the jar, they reciprocate. You probably already know when a friendship isn’t working or is one sided, but this will help you spot it a lot sooner. I usually give the jar 3 turns before I stop putting money in.

For example: You call up your friends and mention going out. They are too busy and can’t set a date. That’s okay, it happens. You run into them and suggest a movie night or other activity and they don’t show or forget and don’t call. People forget stuff. Now you are on your third round of putting some change in the jar without a return on investment. The jar is empty and you are about to lose more change. At this point you may want to make a big final effort. “What day should we go to that pastry shop that you love? Any day this week would be great!” Something that I know (from being friends) that they and I enjoy – that we could enjoy (as friends) together. :D

So, you go to the pastry shop, or play laser tag, or meet up in a brothel – whatever… :p You have a great time and as friends always say. “We should do that again!” Now is their turn. You are out of cash, my friend, and you’re not going to call them or email them until they call you. Nor should you try to arrange another meeting, get-together, gathering, etc. The ball is in their court. Time to ante up.

I will tell you that I can actually remember some of the final efforts I have made. Clearly my friendship was not that important – otherwise I would have got something in return. As I’ve only invested a small amount into the friendship, I’m not pissed when they never call and I run into them. Until they make some effort, they are wasting my time. When a friend does reciprocate, it’s even more special. That – “Hey we haven’t talked in a while. Why don’t we get together?” phone call or email is sweet and something I like to call “Money in the jar.” This concept works great with ‘couple friends’ and has weeded out and built some great friendships in the time we’ve been in California.

Getting holiday media through my disappointing TiVo.

rant

TivoFirst off: Happy New Year people!
Now let’s get down to business.
TiVo, what the hell is up with your downloadable internet content? What the hell is up with the complete lack of applications that take ‘real’ advantage of network media? I spent the holidays longing for random Christmas songs, a podcast from my buddies, and some sort of new entertainment from my Series 2 on those long winter nights. Let’s break it down.

Shared Music: “OMG My TiVo plays MP3’s off my computer!” (BTW that statement would not have been sarcastic 5 years ago… :| ) So you load TiVo ToGo on your PC, share your music, and you’re good to go right? Well, no. Buried 4 menus down is now “[name]’s music”. You can then page up and down through your hundreds of artists to play a song… or a folder… you can shuffle too. All amazing things for three years ago. :p Put like 10,000 songs in that folder and it chokes. Spend your life hitting the channel down button to play an album lucky enough to be under ‘V’ for Various. No sort or play by genre, no album art, no screen info other then a time index and the name of the track. The interface is simple but lacking compared to any cell phone released in 2007.

Shared Video: So I guess that ‘TiVoCast’ falls under this. You probably didn’t even know this option was in there did you. The idea is you can get: “Great, innovative video content that doesn’t fit the traditional format or time constraints of broadcast television.” (*pfft) I think it’s crap – maybe I haven’t spent 2 days sorting through it. I downloaded a handful of programs. Included in that random sample of 22 minutes of video that took 2 hours to download (*sigh) was a piece from GeekBrief TV. It was a somewhat cute girl in a tight Simpson’s Tee, setting up a Gateway PC. Seriously… She said OMGHI2U and proceeded to setup and turn on a new Gateway PC. My brain was like: Advertisement Tee for a movie – CHECK. Ad for a new PC – CHECK. Content = 0. DELETED.

TiVo Podcast App: “Enter the entire URL of the RSS feed for your podcast and I’ll be glad to sorta’ stream it and not let you skip through it, nor pause, nor start from where you left off. Isn’t this AWESOME! Isn’t this way better then right click playing it in WinAmp on your PC? Dude it’s an audio PODCAST on your TV!” /sarcasm

The TiVo is no sling box and even though I could re-formu-i-tunes-ulate my movies to play on my TiVo. It’s not happening automatically. It’s not even happening with some sort of background script. So video content from the web or my network (that I haven’t downloaded from the TiVo in the first place) is zero. “But wait Kris! There’s that One True Media thing that lets me share videos – right?” Yes… For $3.99 a month you get a ‘picture video montage maker.’ I am shocked that the niche for this is big enough to support this company. So if you don’t have kids and you AND your parents don’t have a networked TiVo, you’ll probably skip this one. You’ll have to store your pir8′ted movies and pr0n elsewhere…

Honorable Mention: Galleon TV – If you have already toyed with the HME applications for the TiVo, you have already played with this. The music player is fantastic but I can’t configure the 30 minute time-out to stop… The weather and traffic apps are great but I don’t care about either… Lots of other features that I just didn’t have time to get working before the presents and the drinking. Apparently this application has been out for a WHILE – and in the mean time TiVo has pretty much dropped support / stopped developing for it. :| I’ll be toying with this in 2008.

How did I ever survive the holidays? Well, I took all my ID3 tagged Christmas music in Media Monkey and copied it to a single folder called ‘Christmas.’ Click – Shuffle – Play. Christine created a ‘holiday’ & ‘christmas’ list of shows that got a little out of control. I saw two Rankin & Bass movies I didn’t even know existed and a never ending stream of made for TV Christmas movies starring Kathy Ireland. Plus a handful of badly animated classics. Why did they make “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” INTO a cartoon movie? :eek:

So Cal Fire Perspective

personal, rant

Fire on the I-5 Camp Pendelton
The headlines on the East coast newspapers read something like: ‘California Coast ON FIRE’ & ‘SoCal Burns!’ :| You can imagine the 1.2 million phone calls this generated as opposite coast families call in a panic.

California is a big ass state. ;) If you were in Malibu and drove to the city of San Diego – it’s about 150 miles. That’s a trip from Boston, MA to Bridgeport, CT. Orange County (where 1 major fire is burning) is only 200 square miles smaller then the state of Rhode Island. San Diego County (where several major fires are burning) is 20% smaller then Connecticut. San Bernardino County (I-15 fires and still in ‘So-Cal’) is as large as the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. That’s 20,000 square miles, or 12,800,000 acres. The so cal fires are roughly 200,000 acres burned so-far. Yes, that is a lot – but the whole coast is far from ‘ON FIRE!’

Contrary to this argument is the above picture that we took from the I-5 heading down into San Diego on Tuesday night. They shut the highway down shortly after to start a back-burn. Camp Pendleton is just miles of wild desert brush. Because no homes, property, or military personnel were in danger they just let this fire burn itself out. Here it certainly looked as if the coast was on fire. Three miles of it anyway.

The DV capture problem no one could solve.

creativity

I’m posting this mostly as a Public Service Announcement. Yesterday I spent several hours capturing all the DV video from a rally. I didn’t even look at the finished product, I just went on capturing 2 hours of video. After that was done I played the first clip. :eek: Keep in mind that the playback speed was fine. I preview it to a monitor as I capture it and it was normal speed.

SP play with LP tape capture too fastThe saved .avi (DV) clip however was too fast. The audio sounded like chipmunks in an RC car. I changed tapes and found it the same for stuff I had recorded months ago. Fine on playback – too fast after capture. So, let me state this again for those desperately seeking search words. When I captured Digital Video from my Sony Handycam in Windows Movie Maker, the video was too fast. One thing I noticed was that while capturing – the clock telling you how much time has been captured was counting up way too slow. The other thing I noticed was the clip was split by two horizontal lines on the screen (see arrows). When the scene would move fast, you could see the difference in the picture between the top, middle, and bottom of the screen.

I have done NOTHING to my PC lately and I sat dumbfounded as to why it would all of a sudden start doing this. I started an exhausted search on the web for: captured video too fast; DV video speed capture; windows movie maker capture too fast. Thankfully someone, somewhere mentioned LP vs. SP and how problems can occur with their use. I defragmented, I chkdsk’d, I reloaded DV drivers – with no luck. I also absolutely hate when people point to a ‘mysterious codec issue.’ No one had any answers as to why my captured video was too fast.

It was only after I started to poke at the camera itself as the culprit that I found the issue. When I turned on the camera yesterday it was telling me to set the time and date. This was an indication to me later that the settings had been lost. I record to 8mm tape in the car on an older Sony unit in LP, then play it in a newer “dedicated” 8mm TRV-460 to my computer. I was still thinking that the LP and SP change was the issue so I set the clock and set the machine to record in LP mode. It made no difference – :( – until I took THAT tape out and put another one in. I noticed that the picture was less grainy and those horizontal lines were gone. Sure enough, when I plugged the firewire cable in and captured a few seconds of video, I had fixed it.

If you do have to record in LP, make sure your player is also set to LP even when playing it back. After setting it, take out the tape and pop it back in. There is nothing wrong with your computer, please don’t load a codec pack – as this is RAW DV and has yet to be encoded. I hope that solves your issue. :D