Akom's Tech Ruminations - Reviews

Motorola Droid X Battery Life woes may not mean a defective battery

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:54:43 -0400

Last week my wife replaced her Blackberry Storm2 (9550) with a shiny Droid X, and was relieved to find that the Droid kept up with her insane usage load just fine - whereas the Storm2 would lock up every few minutes (probably memory or garbage collection issues). That's the good news. Unfortunately, the X introduced a new problem - battery life. With her usage, it lasts 4 hours. The Storm2 lasted 24 or more. Granted it's a bigger display, but the specs promised ... well, a lot more than 4 hours.

We theorized that it may be runaway processes and excessive number of apps, or defective battery, but as it turns out it's neither. This is what I did:
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The Valor ITS-301D DVD/CD/MP3/MP4/etc car head unit

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:50:36 -0400

I recently bought a truck to replace the conversion van as a tow vehicle, and decided not to move the Innovatek head unit from the van to save myself some hassle. This gave me an opportunity to try out a new device as I was somewhat frustrated with the Innovatek (see review). I was looking for basically the same exact thing, but one that worked, well, better. Oh and of course having a TV tuner is no longer of any value.

I can spoil the suspense by saying that the Valor ITS-301D proved to be an improvement and I have only positive things to say about it. Some details:
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Aliph Jawbone 2 overheats and nearly burns fingers, melts internally

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:24:23 -0500

Got a shiny new Jawbone 2 from Buy.com the other day, and this is my experience with it over 2 weeks, ending in its eventual return. This also details my experience with Aliph Customer Service.

Initial pairing: I missed the "I am in pairing mode the first time I'm turned on" window, apparently - and getting it to go into pairing mode by holding the two buttons down took at least 20 tries. (seriously) In retrospect, I'm glad that it isn't so easy to put into pairing mode - I might do that inadvertently... But it worked, and boy did it work well. We tested it with a Shark cordless vacuum in hand, and the other person could only vaguely tell that there may be something making noise in the background. With NoiseAssasin disabled, you could hear the vacuum cleaner clearly instead of the person.

All was well, until...
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Vimeo vs Youtube for flight video

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:24:13 -0500

A few months ago I posted my successful flight video recorded with on-board camcorder on my RC plane. I posted in youtube, because, well, that's what everyone does.

The video was an 160MB two-pass Xvid AVI, and once it made it through the youtube hamster wheels, it didn't look so good, especially while flying high over the tree-tops - they all meshed together into a mess of pixels. I complained, but resigned to my low-quality destiny.

Some time passed and it occurred to me to look into Vimeo. Here are the results
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The Mystery B6 balancing LiPo/LiFE/NiCd/NiMh/Pb charger (review, sort of)

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:39:25 -0400

The Mystery B6

I got this charger because the little unit that was included with my R/C plane just did not inspire a lot of confidence. It did charge, just took hours, and gave no hints about why. So I figured I'd go and buy something that gives me a little more information. And I found it. In Hong Kong. But now it's on my desk.

For being able to charge anything, the $50 and two weeks of waiting simply doesn't seem excessive.

As far as I can tell, the Mystery B6 gets a fair amount of negative commentary on the forums. People seem to question its voltage precision and balancing accuracy. So I thought I'd run a very simple test.
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Gentoo Linux on D945GCLF with Atom 230

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:57:31 -0400

I decided to downscale my asterisk server (currently Athlon XP2000) to something that's not quite as power hungry. The server barely does anything most of the time, but consumes just over 100 watts.

The Atom 230 on the D945GCLF

$70 later I was staring at this very cute little green square, complete with a chipset fat/heatsink and a very naked CPU (needs no cooling at 5 watts). It looks hilarious in my small tower case, hides entirely behind the vertical ATX power supply (I realize I can run this off a Pico PSU)
Power improvement? (Same case, power supply, hard drive) A7N8X-VM with Athlon XP 2000+ : about 100-110watts at idle. D945GCLF with Atom 230: About 45 watts at idle. (At this rate, the power savings will pay for my expenses in 10 months, roughly - including the $30 for the 2GB DDR2 RAM)

The following is a small list of issues and solutions I've come across while migrating my Gentoo server over to this thing.
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My Review of the Innovatek 362 DTM Head unit with DVD,TV,MP3,Rear View Camera

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:03:48 -0400

I got this thing for our Conversion-Conversion Van. I wanted it to do everything for me. (Also take a look at our Wanna-B-RV(ers) blog entry on this)

The innovatek box

Overall I can't say that I'd recommend this unit, but for some specific applications (such as ours) it seemed to work out.

The breakdown:
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