Crimping without a crimp gun video tells how to install a 0.1″ crimp connection with pliers if you don’t have a crimping tool. If you don’t have many connections to make this method works OK. I have used similar methods myself. When you need to make many connections, it is a good idea to invest on a proper crimping tool because it makes the work a lot easier.
Archive for May, 2010
Crimping without a crimp gun
Monday, May 17th, 2010Movie industry breaks TV in USA
Monday, May 17th, 2010FCC lets movie industry selectively break your TV article says that the Federal Communications Commission decided that the movie industry can remotely disable analog video outputs on your home theater equipment to prevent you from recording certain programs. First-run movies would be to be directly sent to consumers over secure TV lines. This does not sound too good to me.
The FCC ruled that it’s “in the public interest” (PDF) to give the Motion Picture Association of America so-called
selectable output controls, and that it will help enable the “new business model” of delivering on-demand movies closer to the theatrical release date. FCC has now effectively private entities the right to disable consumers’ products in their homes. SOC turns off the analog outputs, and only lets you use plugs with copy protection.
Image source: http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/soc
When motion picture studios want to create a new business model, does that mean that functioning products should be disabled by them. The problem for consumers is that millions of HDTVs have no digital inputs, and owners of those televisions wouldn’t be able to watch any of these early-release movies at all without buying all new TVs. I think shutting off the composite video output solves nothing on movie industry business model, but will for sure annoy many consumers. Very many.
The previous examples in Internet have shown that if an industry makes a digital product available at a fair price, people buy it. If industry does not do that people will not buy. Trying to break consumer’s equipment or decreasing usability does not help in sales. Music industry tried this route with their CD protection system and failed in that big time some years ago.
Given all the ways pirates have to find and distribute movies illegally (like the actual DVDs), I find it hard to believe that releasing movies on demand earlier without technology-crippling restrictions could possibly result in a measurable increase in piracy.
There has been slippery-slope arguments that if you give the movie industry an inch, it will take a mile. Actually the movie industry already tried to take a mile and was only granted an inch. I encourage you all to read the FCC ruling(PDF) in its entirety so you can savor the breathtaking boldness of what the MPAA originally asked for. You know, in case you had any doubts about whether they really have the interests of the consumer in mind.
Hopefully European markets will not try to follow this route…
RAM was born
Friday, May 14th, 2010May 11, 1951: RAM Is Born article tells Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory that day. A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology led Jay Forrester developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. In short, magnetic core memory was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.
BNC connector installing
Thursday, May 13th, 2010How to put a BNC on RG59 coaxial cable properly is a nice instructional video how to properly crimp a connector to coaxial cable.
Eurovision Diary 2010
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010Production Manager Design of Eurovision 2010 Song Contest is keeping on on-line diary of the production. If you are interested in show technology and work behind big TV production, read Eurovision Diary 2010.
Around one year ago I write about Eurovision 2009 diary, so if you have not read that article artier, it is now a good time to read it.
State of Web Development
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010The State of Web Development 2010 report is about survey of professional web designers and developers. It includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ. Start reading from viewing the PDF infographic overview.Note how unpopular Microsoft IE browser is here in this survey.
Another well worth to read article for everybody interested in web site design is The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010. The article we presents some observations on the current state of Web design. The article describes existing and upcoming trends and tries to explain how Web design might evolve in the coming months and years. Once a playground for enthusiasts, it has now become a mature rich medium with strong aesthetic and functional appeal.
LED car lights
Monday, May 10th, 2010LED car headlights are a promising technology. They have many advantages over filament bulbs (longer life, faster on/off times, lower power consumption) but the technology has still limitations. LEDs can be used as car headlight when the lighting system is specifically designed for LEDs. There are even some DIY projects for this.
The current LED products do not not seem to be ready for drop-on replacement of normal light bulbs used on card headlight. Generally LED bulbs are generally not as bright as standard incandescent bulbs. This is a common problems on many LED products: they consume less power and have higher efficiency, but majority of the LED bulb replacement products have considerably less brightness than the original bulb they try to replace. Also the light is distributed differently so they can appear brighter in some applications and not as bright in others, it depends on the size and shape of the bulb housing and reflector. LED bulbs may cause some newer vehicles to indicate a bulb is burnt out (because of their low power consumption).
H1 68 x 1210 3.4W White Light Bulb (DC 12V) bulb promises a lot: Increased more visibility when driving at night. Easy installation, plug and play with no modification needed. Too bad the beam focus will be a floodlight! The reason for that is that H1 filament is about 1/32″ by 1/4″ and the light reflector optics are designed to produce the intended light beam from that kind of light source. If you replace the small filament type light source with a rod covered with LED’s the resulting light beam be a mess: light everywhere, but not focused. Not what was intended by the original car light designer. And not what the car lamp approval bodies expect the get out from the lamp.
Also the total light output would not be what is needed. most probably “not enough”. A 55w halogen should typically be putting out 500-1000 lumens (maybe more), whereas a good 3.4w led would be about 250 lumens or maybe even less. So you would get considerably less light out output that you would get with the original light bulb and the light beam would be a mess.
H7 6W 190-Lumen 18×5050 SMD LED Car White Light Bulb (DC 12V) is another bulb replacement product. It seems to have also same problems as the previous product. An ordinary halogen reaches an excess of 1000 lumen, as you can see, this led is only 190 lumens. This could maybe used for decorative “day lights” but cannot replace the main lights. The light output would probably be also mess. So the end result would be that installing such bulb to your car would get you very dim lights that would probably not meet the regulations covering the car headlight performance.
Maybe it is not so good idea to replace the car light bulb with LED yet. LED replacement product promise a lot but usually do not live up to their promises. If anyone knows any real LED alternatives to card bulbs, feel free to post comments on them.
ARM and Flash vs HTML5
Friday, May 7th, 2010ARM dominates the mobile phone chip design market now and has done that for some time. Since 2008 ARM has been trying to get into the subnotebook market as well with Linux-based, ARM-powered “smartbooks” that would provide an instant-on, longer-life alternative to x86-based Netbooks. Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM. There has been things like Adobe slip time to release a well working ARM version of Flash.
It seems that Adobe is stifling innovation of the web with Flash. Apple has realized it, now Microsoft, people are starting to wake up except for Adobe they are the only ones trying to hold onto their power. They need to get their software to work or they will start losing markets fast.
Apple is avoiding Flash on their product probably because it would give iPod/iPad/iPhone users access to games and tools which the user didn’t pay for at the App Store. And avoiding Flash also makes it easier for them to control video. Read Apple vs. the Web: The Case for Staying Out of Steve Jobs’s Walled Garden article on more details on Apple applications business model. All runs round of magical thinking, with a three-step process.
Opera joins in Jobs v Flash argument article says that Opera has joined in the argument over Flash, with the company telling TechRadar that they will support Flash for the time being, but that the company needs to start embracing web standards if it doesn’t want to come under constant attack. Opera’s product analyst Phillip Grønvold believes that support for Flash is critical at the current time, but that times are changing fast as HTML5 moves closer.
Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″. Scribd was using Flash code for page layout but now they are happy with HTML5. It absolutely makes sense for Scribd to switch to HTML5. Check their own introduction.
Quite a few video sites also offer HTML5 video support in addition to Flash video. Youtube started this HTML5 video support trend and the popularity of iPhone/iPad has made many other sites to follow. I found the following list on some blog comments (I can’t find the URL now): YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, CNN, Reuters, New York Times, Vimeo, Time, ESPN, Major League Baseball, NPR, National Hockey League, The White House, Virgin America, Sports Illustrated, Flickr, People, TED, Nike, CBS, Spin, National Geographic, CNN Money, MSNBC, Fox News, CNET TV, TV Guide, CW Network, ABC, Wall Street Journal, EXTRA, Ellen, InStyle, Rouxbe Cooking School, LIFE, The Onion… According it Flash isn’t needed on any of those sites.. and those were available in the first few weeks after the iPad was launched. If HTML5 was the best option, why would they continue to put out content in flash, seeing as all the major browsers are already HTML5 compliant? It doesn’t make sense. The fact is that HTML5 video has still issues like codec war between patent minefield H.264 vs free Ogg Theora and possibly soon also VP8 competing on the same field. Some people already see H.264 as a winner, but the only thing that’s “clear” is that h.264 has hardly won anything yet in web. The round has not yet really begun.
In spite of years of development, there are no products out today (at least I have not seen any) that can run Flash properly on any mobile platform. Also Flash on Windows is still bug-ridden. ARM is not delaying anything, it was ARM who said that they expected vendors to have ARM based devices out by now and that it could be because of delays in Adobe Flash. Users expects Adobe to make it’s plugin run just as fast on a much slower CPU. Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 are expected to be available for Android devices in this summer says the headlines. Adobe has had a lot of headlines for mobile Flash support. It means that over the years Adobe has promised a lot but delivered quite little…
For comparison VLC uses little-to-no horsepower playing a movie, Quicktime and WMP are somewhat more demanding, but Flash is downright evil when it comes to demanding CPU cycles. It takes CPU power to process objects and scripts the way Flash requires it to be processed and it is hard to use hardware acceleration with Flash.
“Every single time something new comes out and people wonder what’s the killer app, the answer is the same. It’s the Web every time.The boring old Web,” Denton says at Apple vs. the Web: The Case for Staying Out of Steve Jobs’s Walled Garden article. I think that the new web with HTML5 technologies can be less boring than the old one with proprietary multimedia technologies. HTML5 and the Web article has some interesting points on HTML5 to read.
3-D is coming soon
Thursday, May 6th, 2010The fact that 3-D is a hot ticket in tech may not surprise you. The booming recent interest in 3-D video and film content are driving this. Avatar and other 3-D movies have capture the attention. The speed 3-D is headed soon to consumers’ homes may surprise. Cinema owners might not like this development, because they just started to like the 3D movie boost for their business.
Coming soon: 3-D TV article from EDN magzine tells that about 3-D video market change and technologies used for 3D displays.
3-D TV: An IC Opportunity? blog posting tells that it is inevitable that Hollywood’s going to repurpose its existing 2-D content library for the burgeoning 3-D era (analogous to what Hollywood did when it ‘colorized’ black-and-white material). The desired outcome is to motivate consumers to re-purchase 3-D versions of titles that they already own in 2-D. As the to-date largely failed DVD-to-Blu-ray re-selling experiment has shown, consumers are reluctant to follow Hollywood’s wishes. Because many existing aren’t inherently 3-D capable and consumers expect to see more and more 3D, this market need requires 2-D to 3-D transformation in real time. It’s a thorny problem to solve, but don’t underestimate the cleverness of smart engineers to make that dynamic 2-D to pseudo 3-D conversion process.
From 3D to the next bicycle article the the latest brainwaves from Gadget Show 2010. Sony and Panasonic demonstrating systems on massive screens. According the article NVidia showed a PC-based 3D system that is much more affordable that these high-end consumer systems. Supported software was Avatar game and virtual-reality car-racing system.
Restore a gadget
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010Usually after a few months of use, our gorgeous new gadgets incur a fair share of scratches. In most case those can be polished up to look look like brand new. How to Restore an Abused iPhone (or any gadget) tells you how to do restore an iPhone. Same ideas can be applied to other gadgets.
