March 2009 – Page 2

iPod earbuds disassembled

The other day my iPod ‘stock’ earbuds stopped working correctly. At first I thought it might be something wrong with my ear, since the volume on the right side was so much lower than the left. I swapped the buds around and the low volume followed – so it wasn’t my ears. Next worry was that my iPod had gotten sick, but a quick check with another set of headphones and I knew I was ok.

While the stock iPod headphones aren’t anything special, I’ve grown to like them. They are actually well matched to the iPod itself which I find to have background hiss when used with better headphones. Most of my listening is done at about 1/3 volume anyways – I did enough damage to my hearing as a teenager, I like to pretend I’m smarter now.

Of course I had to take them apart to fix them. Initially I had no idea how to open them up, searching around found me this posting on taking the older style apart. It wasn’t until today that I found this video – but I had already figured it out myself. In the picture above, you can see the two parts. A little pressure with your thumb nail on the joint and it will pop apart nicely.

Once I had them apart – I tested them to see if the problem was still there, so I could poke at the wires to see what was wrong. They worked fine – no fiddling required. So I simply popped the earbud back together and its been working normally since. I suspect that the two wires had gotten twisted and were rubbing causing a short, but who knows.

Sometimes things just need to be taken apart and put back together.

Time to upgrade the server

The server that hosts lowtek.ca sits in a dusty corner of my furnace room. There are lots of good reasons to not host your own web presence, but if you are stubborn like I am you might find this interesting.

The current hardware is an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ that I bought back in 2001 – I remember it cost me a bit more than $1700 at the time. This used to be my desktop until I upgraded to a much quieter (and slightly faster) refurbished machine a couple of years ago. For the most part I’ve been avoiding buying new hardware to avoid the steep price depreciation.

Last week the server machine shut itself off, two days in a row. There wasn’t much data in the logs, but poking around I’m fairly convinced that the CPU was overheating. The sensor data claims a 23C swing in reported temperatures (55C-78C). Either way, the machine is now unreliable in my mind and I need the server to be reliable.

While I was tempted to go the refurbished route, as I can pick up a reasonably capable system for about $100 – I really wanted to avoid getting in the same mess in a few years. So after some amount of searching, I settled on the following components:

Total works out to under $200. I can reuse a case (or steal one from a friend) and the drives I have already. I do plan to measure the power consumption of my new system vs. the existing one, I’m hopeful I will get results similar to this claim of 41watts.

My thinking here is that by buying new, I’m going to have a more reliable system for longer. The energy savings are a sensible investment over a few years, thus both the Atom CPU and 80Plus power supply make sense. Less heat (again the Atom) should mean easier cooling, and again hopefully longer life.

Exit Review: Nokia 6585

This post is inspired by Bunnie’s Exit Review of his Blackberry, he also did one for his Thinkpad T60. The concept is a good one, often our new gadget purchases are based on our personal past experiences as much as they are influenced by our friends and “the latest new thing”.

From the picture above, you can see that its had a hard life. The paint is rubbing off on the corners, the keypad is starting to show black plastic under the chipped keys and the screen is held on with some scotch tape. This phone has survived countless high impact falls to the floor, a few to pavement- and a handful that resulted in a yard sale style disassembly upon impact.

This was my 3rd Nokia phone. When I purchased the 6585 in late 2004 I was switching from a GSM based carrier onto a CDMA carrier, my reasoning here was for improved coverage. At the time, GSM coverage at my home was spotty (it has improved since). I was attracted to the form factor (4.17” x 1.77” x 0.80”), and battery life (standby time 6 days).

Via eBay I did pick up the headset (with integrated radio antenna) which served me well. Both the speaker phone and headset voice quality were such that I could be on a business conference call and people couldn’t tell that I wasn’t on my office phone. As for extras, there wasn’t much to rave about. The web browser would quickly drain your battery. The screen 128×128 resolution and 4096 colours was poor. The embedded java was only MIDP1.0. The radio was a neat addition, but I never used it.

This phone does have an IRDA port on it. This let me synchronize my contacts with a PC with the Nokia PC Suite. I could also store pictures (low quality due to the display) on the phone to customize it. This was also the first phone which I did any amount of text messaging with, and found the predictive T9 input to be fairly usable. I also found the alarm clock to be invaluable when traveling – hotel alarm clocks can be challenging when you’re jet lagged.

I probably would still be using this phone had the battery life not degraded to the point where it needed charging daily to be reliable at all. It was far too common to hear the sad ‘dee doop’ Nokia low battery sound from my pocket.

While the 6585 didn’t offer a lot of whiz bang features, it did work well as a phone. The PC connectivity is something I can’t imagine not having now. My new phone is another Nokia, more on that in a future post.