Category: How To

How To: Acer AspireOne RAM upgrade

Back in July of 2008 I picked up an Acer AspireOne, one of the first netbooks. Since netbooks have been mostly dropped in favor of tablets, you can pick up a netbook around the $200 price point. Most netbooks seem to take DDR2 laptop RAM, and this can be found on the used market fairly cheap. The 512MB pictured above was $5.

The AspireOne continues to be a useful machine, I’ve recently moved over to the netbook remix for Ubuntu. It does suffer from limited screen real estate, a very slow solid state drive, and prior to the upgrade – only 512MB of RAM. Doubling the RAM for $5 seemed too tempting, especially since it gave me a good excuse to take it apart.

Read on for the gory tear down details..

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Convert DVD for PS3 with 5.1 under Ubuntu

There are many, many questions on how to convert video to be suitable for streaming to the PS3 – and as many solutions. Some of the issues I ran into are due to the configuration of my home theater, and others were because I was trying to accomplish this under Linux.

My setup for playback is a PS3 connected wirelessly (but wired will work fine) to my home network. The PS3 outputs the video over HDMI, and the sound over TOSLink. I run XBMC on my Ubuntu desktop to serve up the video content stored there.

The first, and most obvious path to success is to use HandBrake – it is available across platforms and is simple to use. More recent versions have dumped the specific PS3 encoding options, but the iPod/iPad encoding settings seem to create videos that work just fine in my experience. Where Handbrake fell down for me was that the default encoding settings change the audio into stereo. I’ve got a 5.1 setup and wanted to keep the surround from the DVD.

HandBrake will let you create an AAC 6 channel encoding if you poke around a little in the configuration. Sadly for me, the TOSLink connection does not have enough bandwidth to handle 6 channel PCM, so the PS3 re-encodes the 6 channel mix into a 2 channel mix. This was a bit of a downer after a 2hr encode. If you have your audio going over HDMI, or don’t care about 5.1 then HandBrake may be the perfect solution.

It is also worth mentioning that ps3mediaserver can handily deal with .iso files (and lots more) and re-encode on the fly. I specifically didn’t want to go this route, for no reason other than I didn’t want to be bothered to set it up as I already had XMBC handy. I’ll assume there are others out there as stubborn as I am and they may find this useful.

My path to success turned out to be using k9copy to create an .avi file from the DVD that contained only the movie and the AC3 5.1 sound track. Then I used ffmpeg to convert that .avi file into a VOB format file that the PS3 would accept for streaming.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -acodec copy -vcodec copy -r 23.976 -f vob video.mpg

Once done (and it was fast as there is no actual re-encoding happening in the ffmpeg step) the resulting file streamed just fine from XMBC to my PS3 over wireless. As with most solutions, I spent plenty of time banging my head on more complicated paths until arriving at this very simple solution. I do have to give credit to a blog post that helped me reach the ah-hah moment. What I really like about this solution is the video and audio are exactly what appears on the DVD, only the wrapper they are stored in has changed: k9copy extracted the bits from the DVD that I wanted to have, and ffmpeg fiddled the container around to make the PS3 happy.

I’m still a huge fan of HandBrake and will continue to use this for converting video for portability (Android phone, iPhone, etc). However, k9copy has earned a place in my video conversion toolbox.

How to: Cleaning a Nokia 5310

While the Nokia 5310 hasn’t been my daily phone in over a year, it remains one of my favorites. It is very small, the voice quality is good, a nice loud speaker phone, and the battery lasts week. It’s not a smart phone, but it has some nice features like mp3 playback and MIDP application support. Unfortunately being carted everywhere in my pocket meant it picked up some lint / dust that managed to get between the LCD screen and the external cover / faceplate. Mostly when the screen was on, this wasn’t a big deal – but in certain lighting conditions it was very obvious.

Nearly a year ago I set out to figure out how to take the phone apart and clean it. It wasn’t hard to find a site describing replacement of the keypad that gave enough instructions to strip the phone down. Of course, it took me nearly a year to get around to doing this. I was somewhat motivated by wanting to put it up for sale on eBay, figuring a clean phone might be worth more. I ended up following some slightly different instructions, but both sites are accurate and should work for anyone wanting to disassemble a Nokia 5310.

Here is the phone in mid-disassembly. This is just after the front cover has been removed. I was surprised how full of lint / dust the phone had gotten. There is almost an organic quality to a well loved gadget (ok, maybe that much dust is just gross).

At this point I’ve managed to get the phone stripped down to the point where the LCD is separated from the outer cover. On the left you can see the faceplate (face down) and the LCD on the right along with the circuit board. Both the inside of the faceplate needed to be cleaned, as well as the LCD (which is a bit more obvious in the picture). Looking carefully you can see the foam that surrounds the faceplate, this presses up against the LCD and is intended to keep dust and stuff out. The dust seemed to mostly get in from the bottom corners of the screen. I suspect that due to button (opening) placement there just was more opportunity for dust to get in there – it is possible this is a minor defect but I doubt it.

One last shot of the phone, fully reassembled. You can see how big a difference there is when compared to the 1st photo at the top of this post. Overall I was very pleased with the results, and I did sell it on eBay just the other day.

The whole process took me about 40 minutes, maybe a bit less. Very few tools were required – I will recommend the LeeValley micro-tip screwdriver as it was very handy. Some patience is needed when removing the front cover, as well the removal of the back of the phone from the main body needed care. Work slowly and don’t force things. It really is quite impressive how compact the whole unit is. I think there was a total of 6 screws holding it all together, sort of like a high tech jigsaw puzzle.