Category: Electronics

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Replace UPS Batteries

If you have computers or electronics that you don’t want to be killed by power fluctuations, it’s a good idea to have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). The battery in the UPS keeps your equipment running through blackouts our brownouts (reduced power).

Dead Battery

The main problem with a UPS is that its battery might only last a couple of years. A dead battery is often announced by a UPS through regular beeping. Because a UPS is expensive, consider just replacing the battery instead of the whole UPS when the battery dies.

You can buy a replacement from the UPS company or for significantly less money from a third party such as Battery Mart. Just be sure to get a battery that is designed for your specific UPS. I have had good luck with with Battery Mart, but there are some third party batteries which are of poor quality, possibly having a short life, acid leakage, or even causing a fire.

I replaced the battery for the APC Back-UPS 500 ES for $26.39 from Battery Mart instead of $48.99 from APC (prices include shipping).

Battery Mart Replacement Battery

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RIP original Palm OS

The original Palm OS is dead. The company did not make a big deal about it, but they just recently stopped production of all older Palm devices that run the original Palm operating system (OS).  Instead, they are focusing on their completely new WebOS used in the Palm Pre and upcoming Palm Pixi. While this is no surprise given how the company needs to stop hemorrhaging cash, it is still sad to see this venerable operating system gone with such little fanfare.

Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein said:

We’re launching more great Pam WebOS products with more carriers, and turning our sights toward growth.

What Made Palm OS Special

Born in 1996, the Palm OS had three main things that made it special in my view:

Graffiti1) Graffiti: The Palm OS had a modified version of handwriting character recognition called Graffiti. Unlike Apple’s earlier ambitious attempt at full handwriting character recognition in the Apple Newton, the Palm worked simply and reliably.

2) Applications: The Palm could load applications and games that you downloaded and installed yourself. This was before the concept of a closed-off Application Store, such as the for the iPhone or Palm Pre.  Palm OS’s approach was less elegant than the modern app store, as many apps crashed and there was no single location to buy apps. Still, there were over 50,000 applications available online, more than any other PDA had at the time.

3) Synchronization: Unlike the Sharp Wizard or other pocket organizers, the Palm had sync software called HotSync which could deal appropriately with updates from the computer (using Palm Desktop) and the Palm. Although it wasn’t fancy, the synchronization worked great.

Corporate Fun

The corporate maze that Palm and the Palm OS went through was amazing.

Before the Palm OS’s development in 1996, Palm Computing Inc. was bought by US Robotics in 1995. US Robotics was in tern bought by 3Com in 1997. Palm was then spun off to its own company in 2000. In 2002, the Palm OS part of the company was made a subsidiary company to Palm named PalmSource. PalmSource (makers of the OS) then spun off to a completely independent company and licensed back the OS to PalmOne (hardware maker). In 2005, PalmSource was acquired by a company named ACCESS who then licensed it back to Palm, Inc (hardware maker, formerly PalmOne) in perpetuity.

As if that weren’t enough confusion, the original inventors of the Palm Pilot were frustrated and started their own company called Handspring in 1998. They made a competing device running the Palm OS called the Handspring Visor. In 2002 they started the successful Treo line, which weren’t yet phones.  In 2003, they merged back with Palm (hardware maker) and formed PalmOne.

Sony also sold Palm OS devices until 2004.

OS Development

All this craziness hampered the development of the OS, but there were updates to the OS over the years. The last released version, 5.4 (Garnet), supported WiFi, Bluetooth, and multiple screen resolutions. However, the Palm OS was still not scalable or modular compared to Windows Mobile or the current Apple iPhone OS which competed recently with the Palm OS in Palm Treo phones.

Palm OS 6.0 (Cobalt) was announced in 2004 and was actually a completely new OS based on the acquired assets of BeOS. This was an attempt to truly evolve the OS. It provided modern features: multitasking, memory protection, and better graphics. This iteration of the OS never saw the light of day, however, as it did not get any interest from manufacturers and was never used in any devices.

Because the Palm OS was antiquated, Palm started selling both Palm OS and Windows Mobile versions of their Treos in 2005. Along with recently stopping production of Palm OS devices, Palm has just stopped production of all their Windows Mobile devices.

WebOS was announced in January 2009 and has now replaced Palm OS. If you need to run some old Palm OS applications, there is a third-party emulator called MotionApps Classic that runs the original Palm OS within WebOS. With the rapid adoption of WebOS and the Palm App Store, most people won’t need this.

Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein said on their August 28 2009 earnings call:

We had a really unique opportunity in being able to develop Web OS.. and the old Palm OS lasted us for 16 years, which is really amazing when you think about it. We are designing Web OS to last us for the next 10 or 15 years.

Off to OS Heaven

Although Palm OS has had a difficult life, it’s been the most dependable pocketable operating system for me until a few years ago. From my first US Robotics Palm Pilot 5000 to my Palm Vx (my personal favorite) to my Palm Tungsten 5 with color and WiFi, the Palm OS has been a great companion. It is now part of OS history, off to join other notables such as IBM’s OS/2 and the AmigaOS.

Palm Pilot 5000 Palm VPalm Tungsten T5

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Wireless Video Sent to a Second Room

It is common for a household to have their DVR in their living room.  But how can you watch your recorded shows in another room?  If you’ve got Tivo, you can transfer some allowed shows between tivos but that requires paying for a second tivo and hence a second monthly fee.  A cheaper alternative is to send the video wirelessly to another room. The RF-Link AVS-5811 Audio and Video Transmission System is a cheap one time purchase alternative to having to pay for an extra tivo, cable box, or satellite box.

wireless videoThere have been wireless video systems in the past similar to this that just never worked very well.  This system improves upon those in 2 ways.  It has an IR repeater so you can bring your tivo remote in the other room and this catches the signal and sends it back to the tivo so it is like you have the box in the room.  Without that, you’d have to run back and forth changing shows.  The second improvement is that it operates at the currently less crowded 5.8GHz.  That gives it more of a chance to have less interference and hence a clearer picture.

There are a few downsides.  This is not HD.  It uses old standard RCA connections.  However, if you send a widescreen picture over it and then set your TV to display in wide mode, the aspect ratio will look correct.  The end result can be a good looking picture that just looks a little fuzzier than HD.  If picture quality is less important in your secondary room, then this is the ideal option.  The biggest possible downside is if you can actually get it to work or not.

The Amazon reviews show that plenty of people can get it to work but there are definitely situations that it won’t perform well.  The biggest factors are how many walls it has to go through and how far away it is.  Generally speaking, the further it has to go wirelessly, the less likely it will be to work well.  When it starts to underperform, you’ll see lines over the video as well as audio distortions or pops.  I recently set this up for a customer sending the signal about 20 feet through 3 walls.  It took about 15 minutes to adjust the directional antennas just right but we eventually got to a point with no audio or video distortions.  Now this customer simply brings their tivo remote into the second room and they’ve got access to the same shows they would in their living room.

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EA Sports Active for the Wii Review

Everyone has probably heard of the Wii Fit because it was the first fitness product for the Wii and had that balance board.  The problem is, I never thought it was a good workout.  EA Sports has recently released a new product called Active which is meant to be more like a personal trainer.
Ea Sports Active
EA Sports Active is a different approach to Wii fitness.  Instead of doing more game-like activities like the Wii Fit, you spend most of your time doing what feels more like real exercise.  Included is a resistance band and leg strap.  The resistance band is used to give you an upper body workout though it may not be resistant enough for some.  There are a very wide variety of activities such as squats, lunges, all kinds of resistance band activities and running.  There are still a few game activities like basketball and tennis but they are not game-like.  Simply repetitive exercise hitting a tennis ball or shooting a basketball.

Getting Started

It took me a little time to figure out how to put together the resistance band.  It is just a long rubber band with some straps that you actually have to wrap around each end.  You can use a Wii Fit balance board if you have one but I find it is not only not necessary but not my preference.  Some of the activities  just change a bit with the wii board.  For example, there is an inline skating activity where you have to jump at appropriate times.  Instead, if you have a wii  board, you have to lean to one side or the other.  It is a personal preference but you definitely do not need to own a wii fit board to use this.

30 Day Challenge

The game wants you do a 30 day challenge.  The goal is to do 20 exercises in 30 days where you do 2 days of exercise to every 1 day of rest.  On a given day, there is only about 15-25 minutes of actual workout on the medium setting which is what I chose.  It takes longer than that to do a days workout depending on if you watch the demo videos (which you should the first time) and how much you rest in between exercise.  One day may focus on lower body and the next upper and others mixed.  I’m sure it has some logic to the schedule.  As a result, one day you might feel quite tired afterwards and the next day you felt was easy.  If you skip a workout day, that’s ok, just try to pick back up the next.  Don’t try to make up the day, just get back on schedule and the game is happy.  Once you’ve done 20 days of workout, you are done the challenge.

Problems

Active generally works quite well but it still has some problems.  The most annoying thing is that the sensors don’t always work.  You might make a motion as you are supposed to but it wasn’t detected.  This can be extremely frustrating.  After time though, you learn more of how the game wants you to move.  Some activities are more prone to sensor issues and you have to kind of work around them by moving the controllers a bit more than you would otherwise to make sure your motion is detected.  Another annoyance is the girl yells at you when you mess up (or aren’t sensed).  Fortunately, there is a setting to turn her off during exercise.

Results

After completing the 30 day challenge, I lost about 1.5% of my body weight, but more importantly had clearly gained muscle and lost fat.  I was actually surprised the results were so good.  I worked through the annoyances and got used to them.  After my first week, I wasn’t too optimistic but now I’m planning on doing another 30 day challenge.

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Dish’s DTVPal DVR for Over-The-Air HD TV

Dish, the satellite people, sell the DTVPal DVR, a small box that is a digital video recorder (DVR) similar to TiVo. But this box only works with digital over-the-air TV. It gets its guide information for free digitally over-the-air as well. Therefore, unlike TiVo, it has no monthly fee. It costs $300 but is currently being sold with a $50 instant discount.

DTVPal DVR Box

If you don’t need a cable tuner, this is a great alternative to TiVo. And if you mainly watch over-the-air programming such as NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, then you can consider ditching cable or satellite for the DTVPal.

Dish subscribers will see that the DTVPal DVR’s Program Guide is the same as that in Dish’s satellite boxes:

DTVPal DVR Program Guide

When we purchased this box, it was clear that the Dish company is still setup to only deal with satellite sales. We got an email welcoming us as a Dish subscriber and referencing their satellite offerings. We even got a service bill for $12.95. After calling Dish, we found out that this was actually just the tax due on the purchase of the box. But the bill made it look like we were Dish satellite subscribers.

Despite those annoyances, this is a great box that makes your television viewing more productive by allowing you to time shift your TV shows.