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A Steampunk Aethernet Concentrator

May 27th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

Concentrator500Wide.jpg

Those who tuned in to my March 18, 2011 entry will recall that I spotted a Star-Rite copper parabolic resistance heater at a consignment store, and brought it home thinking it would make a good Wi-Fi antenna. I put a proof-of-concept lashup together last week and found that it worked very well, even though its diameter is on the low side for 13 cm microwaves. I spent half an hour or so digging through my several bins of odd plastic looking for just the right center insert, and stumbled on a pill bottle that ProbeExposed200Wide.jpgactually pressure-fit into the center hole without any modifation of the bottle or the center hole. (This may seem remarkable if you’ve never seen the quanity of pill bottles and other odd plastic (s)crap I keep out in the garage.)

The Wi-Fi element is a Cisco AE1000 USB 2.0 Wi-Fi adapter, connected to the PC through a 3′ USB extension cable. The female end of the extension cable is glued into a rectangular hole I made in the pill bottle’s white lid with a nibbling tool, and the AE1000 plugs into the adapter cable.

Even with the number of pill bottles I have, finding this particular bottle was a huge break. I still have to figure a way to get the probe fastened into the hole by something better than friction, but that’s just engineering. The bottle works extremely well for another simple but fortuitous reason: It puts the long axis of the AE1000 right where the focus of the copper parabola falls.

I tested for this out in the driveway in an interesting way: I pointed the parabola at the Sun as closely as I could, and then stuck a paper towel tube into the center hole to see where the sunlight would be most intense. The strongest part of the focus is about 3″ from the bottom of the bowl. (I didn’t leave the paper towel tube at the focus for very long, trust me.) This is just about where the AE1000’s antennas sit, if its interior construction is anything like the USB Wi-Fi dongle I sacrified some years back to see how it was done.

FocusTest350Wide.jpgFor as lucky as I got, the position of the adapter isn’t especially critical. We’re not trying to create an image or even intense heat. We’re just trying to concentrate a distant microwave signal on the AE1000, and focus the signal that it emits into a narrower steerable beam. Nor am I going for moonbounce–the real mission of the device is to make sure I can get into the resort Wi-Fi access points when I’m at the Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop this summer. That always depends on where your room is relative to the access points, and in the past, I’ve pulled rooms in dead spots about two throws out of five.

Well, not this time.

Jim Strickland suggested calling it an Aethernet Concentrator, and so it is. (The name of the Wi-Fi adapter is peculiarly appropriate.) I’m not entirely finished yet. I need to paint the pill bottle so that it looks less like a pill bottle, and the copper bowl needs cleaning and polishing generally. But I’ve already tested it, and it increases the strength of my access point downstairs radically. Aiming it up and down the street from here at my desk, it detected nine APs that the naked AE1000 didn’t see plugged into the back of my GX620. (I call this “warsitting.”)

I’m going to do a larger article on the project once I tie the ribbons on it, and I’ll let you know where to find it when I do.

Posted in: Daybook, Tutorials.
Tagged: ·

Odd Lots

May 24th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • I’ve just added a book catalog page to my primary WordPress instance of Contra. There’s a link on the title bar at the top. If you’re using LiveJournal, here’s the direct catalog link. From my WordPress instance you can also go direct to an individual title within the catalog by clicking on one of the cover thumbnails in the right sidebar. It’s a little barebones for now, but it’ll do until I finish getting the Copperwood Press site rehabbed.
  • This sounds worse than it probably is: B&N has restricted sideloaded content to only 1 GB of the Nook Color’s internal memory. The NC has become very popular as a somewhat broader device than an ebook reader, and I’m sure B&N is worried that people will fill the little slab up with so much of their own stuff that there’s no room to buy more from B&N. The key is the MicroSD slot, which (for the time being) can hold up to 32GB. If sideloaded content stored on the MicroSD card is completely accessible to the Nook’s machinery, it’s really not a terrible problem. (I don’t have an NC so I don’t know for sure.)
  • B&N’s certainly been busy: There’s a new, inexpensive, smaller, lighter e-ink Nook in the pipe called Nook Simple Touch. 6-inch display and two months on a charge (sheesh!) will appeal hugely to commuters who just want to read books and not do seventeen things at once. $139; mid-June arrival.
  • Then again, if you want a cheap Nook ($99) and don’t mind the orginal model, go to eBay.
  • Here’s an expert’s braindump on ebook creation/formatting, which clearly highlights the appalling nature of ebook formats and ebook creation tools. Mobipocket in particular comes in for some (well-deserved) hard whacks with the baton. None of this crap should be necessary. An epub file is basically a collection of HTML documents with an external TOC, all wrapped up in a ZIP archive. Why is this so hard to do? (My thought: Immature rendering engines, like Web browsers in 1994. We are compensating for bad software.)
  • This is the high road toward SSTO, and I hope to hell they can pull it off. The trick isn’t so much getting to orbit as getting back intact. We’ll see.
  • From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-March-But-Forgot-Until-Yesterday Department: oneiric; meaning of or pertaining to dreams. Also the adjective in the next Ubuntu animal version code: Oneiric Ocelot, due this November. Not new news, but I forgot to mention it in March. Dreams, sure. But having read some of the fights that the discussion of Ubuntu Natty’s Unity desktop has triggered since then, I also picture an ocelot that lost one ear in a bar brawl.
  • Bichons are notoriously hard to housebreak. Carbreak too, evidently.
  • From the Painfully Obvious Research Department: A study (PDF) suggesting that when we see people breaking the rules, we assume that they’re powerful. Duh. (One wonders if a lifetime of watching powerful people be abject shitheads could have anything to do with it.)
  • And a much more interesting study on the role that some airborne bacteria play in acting as seeds for precipitation. Get a look at that hailstone! (Duck!)
  • Amen, brother. (Thanks to John Ridley for the link.)

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · · · · ·

All Thumbs

May 23rd, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Now that I have books to sell in more than one format, I need to erect some machinery to drive sales to more than one retailer. Time was, when all my books were conventionally published print books, a simple link to each book’s Amazon page was enough. Now I have a conventional print book, several POD print books, and ebooks in two formats.

The Copperwood Press catalog page needs a total rewrite, and I’ve been working on that. (It’s one reason I’ve been a little bit scarce here.) One thing I did do today is mount a generic WordPress HTML window in the wide sidebar, and then fill it with thumbnails of all my books. The thumbnails will eventually be clickable links into the catalog, from which you will be able to choose your format and jump to a retailer. (I will not be mounting a cart myself; it’s far too much kafeuther if Amazon and B&N will both give me 70% margins on my $2.99 ebooks.) If you’re reading Contra on my WordPress site, look to your right to see the thumbnails. If you’re reading Contra on LiveJournal, go here.

When you do, you’ll understand the conclusion I came to earlier today: My covers are not very thumbnailable. Some work better than others, and you can only do much with an image that’s 115 pixels high. I’m not an artist but I do know layout. The problem is that I learned it under the assumption that the purchaser would make his or her decision based on a much larger view of the cover, including true face time at bookstores.

With ebooks the cover game changes radically, and it’s all about thumbnails. Here’s an intriguing article on the issues associated with cover design for ebooks. When all you get is 90 pixels, it’s tough to do flourish. The best you can hope for is legibility for the title. (Interestingly, Amazon seems to have bumped search results thumbnails up to 115 pixels in the six months since Joel posted his essay. Cold comfort.)

ColdHandsCover115High.pngAs I explained in my May 19 post, I’ve done well so far because I’ve published the sorts of books that people search for by name, as with Carl & Jerry. But if Cold Hands and Other Stories (now available on Kindle) is being browsed in the very big bin labeled “Hard SF,” the thumbnail cover image has a crucial selling job: getting above the noise represented by everybody else’s 115-pixel search results thumbnails.

Clearly, I have some work to do. What you see to the right are 165-pixel thumbnails, which are one and a half times the size of what the readers see in search results listings. The little Cold Hands cover above is 115 pixels high, and the more pixels you have on your screen, the smaller it looks. I’ve already done some surgery on the cover for Jim’s On Gossamer Wings, and I think I may well just start over with “Whale Meat.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that covers are becoming icons. Alas, the job of an icon is precisely the opposite of the job of a cover thumbnail: An icon stands in for something that we’re already familiar with and see constantly. A cover thumbnail stands in for something that we’ve never seen before. Worse, covers are becoming icons that must contain readable words. Of all the examples shown by Joel Friedlander in his article linked above, only Christopher Smith’s Fifth Avenue really works at 90 pixels. It works because there’s almost no image involved. You get a little color, and a tiny black stick that could be just about anything. (If I didn’t know where “Fifth Avenue” was, I might not have guessed a skyscraper.)

I’m not entirely sure what to think about the problem. If cover images get too small, they carry too little information to be useful. We can read the title in text beside the thumbnail; do we need to be able to read it in the thumbnail too? Will people get so used to minuscule cover thumbnails over time that they’ll basically stop noticing them?

Subtlety and beauty have not always been the domain of book covers. Maybe this is yet another indication that we’re returning to the pulps: Our covers may need to become very small collections of iconic symbols (bug-eyed monsters, V-2 spaceships, traffic-cone breasts, ray guns) to be recognizable as anything at all.

I’m not sure that worked for the pulps. I’m even less sure it will work for us. The real bummer is that I’m not sure what else to suggest.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged: · ·

Cold Hands and CreateSpace

May 19th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

For the last several days I’ve been tinkering with my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories to get it ready for sale as an ebook. The book is now available in epub format on the B&N Nook store ($2.99; no DRM) and should appear in mobi format on Kindle in the next day or so. All of my shorter Drumlins stories are in that book, so if you liked Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings, do please consider it.

Print is a more interesting issue. Cold Hands has been available as a printed paperback on Lulu for some time now, but I haven’t been satisfied with the book’s visibility, especially on Amazon. Lulu is certainly the easiest of all the POD services to learn and use, but to sell books you have to drive customers to the Lulu site, and they have to buy through the Lulu shopping cart. That’s a huge drawback, especially for fiction, where the per-sale earnings are low and you’re not targeting the books at an easily reachable audience; i.e., if you’re not a big name in SF. Also, many people won’t buy a book unless it can be had through Amazon, because online account proliferation is an issue for them. (I understand that hesitation completely.)

I’ve done well with my Carl & Jerry reprint books on Lulu for several years now because people go looking for Carl & Jerry. The audience knows the stories, many having read them in the 1960s. I have a substantial index page, and the page is the top search hit whenever anybody searches for “Carl and Jerry.” My two books on Old Catholic history are almost cult favorites by now, and I sell a couple of copies per month on Lulu without even a detailed summary page. (I do have descriptions on the Lulu storefront.) They sell when people talk about them in the many Old Catholic email groups, which is far oftener than I would have thought. I mention them in a post now and then, and the books keep selling. Word of mouth works well within close-knit enthusiast groups like that who understand what the books are about.

Breaking in to SF is harder. To sell paperback books of my SF I simply have to be on Amazon. That’s Lulu’s #1 issue. My Lulu books are sometimes listed and sometimes not, for reasons I don’t really understand. A search just now for Cold Hands and Other Stories does not show the book, and that’s unacceptable.

So I’ve been giving CreateSpace a look. It’s Amazon’s in-house POD service, and was originally called BookSurge before Amazon broadened it to embrace other kinds of content, like music CDs. I can use my own ISBNs there, and if you publish on CreateSpace, you will be listed on Amazon.

CreateSpace is more complex to use than Lulu, though it has nothing on Lightning Source. If you’re serious about publishing your material and expect to sell more than four or five copies it’s worth studying. The economics are better, and I’ll close out this entry with a quick summary.

First, Lulu: Cold Hands and Other Stories has a cover price of $11.99. Lulu’s per-copy manufacturing cost for the book (232 pages) is $9.14. Lulu’s commission is 57c, leaving my per-sale take as $2.28. That’s as complex as it gets over there.

CreateSpace has a more complex pricing system, and the easiest thing for me to do is just copy out a screenshot of the royalty calculator for Cold Hands:

CreateSpaceRoyaltyTable500Wide.png

They don’t state a fixed unit manufacturing cost, but they tell you how much you’ll make in the various retail channels. The “Pro” option here is a $39, one-time-per-title cost that has to be earned out before you see any profit. (I think of it as a processing fee for the title, while allowing CreateSpace to compete with Lulu on the “free to post” issue. There’s no charge to mount a book, if you’ll take less per copy.) For Cold Hands that would be about twelve copies, depending on the channel mix. The eStore figures are for sales through CreateSpace’s online system. The Expanded Distribution option is for sales made through other online retailers and independent print booksellers. Obviously, if you’re going to drive sales, it pays to drive them to the CreateSpace eStore rather than simply referring them to Amazon.

I had originally intended to mount Cold Hands on Lightning Source, but I wanted to get some real-world experience with CreateSpace. It’s not up there yet (their review process takes a couple of days) but should be there by early next week.

The missing link, of course, is a Web page to drive sales to CreateSpace, and I’m working on that. More as it happens.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged: · · ·

Odd Lots

May 16th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments
  • It’s been a rough week here (hence the current post paucity) and I just got Carol on a plane to Chicago to look after some unexpected family issues. As we left the driveway it was snowing like hell again, this on the morning of May 15. Even today, halfway to lunchtime, it’s still gray-grim and 39 degrees. I guess it’s going to be another indoors week. Much planned for coming days, including the ebook release of Cold Hands and Other Stories. Stay tuned.
  • I stopped in Denver on the way home from the airport to pick up some Elfa parts to expand the shelf system in the back of our garage. It’s an Erector set for storage, and if you don’t know about Elfa I think it would be worth taking a look. I have a hodgepodge closet in my workshop downstairs that desperately needs to be Elfa-whacked, and it’s on the project list for this summer.
  • I used to spend a lot of time poking around in Google Earth, mostly looking for abandoned railroad right-of-ways near where I’ve lived in the past. Since then The Daily Google Earth has appeared, full of interesting things visible from space. Today’s desert triangles post intrigues me, since my parents bought land in that general area in the 1960s and I still own it.
  • Carol and I have moved incrementally to CFLs as our incandscents have died, but the can fixtures we have in our ceilings are too narrow to pass the necks of CFL floods. Alas, this promising new technology won’t fix that (the necks are, if anything, wider) but it’s a promising alternative to incandescents and doesn’t contain mercury. As the author suggests, it won’t be long before the Maker community figures out how to focus the output into a beam and perhaps even scan it across the bulb’s face.
  • I’m not generally one for weird case mods and exotic custom cases, but this Priarie School item engenders a certain amount of lust. I also realize that I could easily make a case of Stickley-style dark-stained quarter-sawn oak–not that I need another thing to do. Would be killer cool, though.
  • As a programmer guy with old roots in embedded systems, I feel a very deep itch to try the Android Open Accessory Kit. Alas, as an SF writer with only so many hours in the day, I may not get to it soon. But I greatly rejoice that it’s even possible.
  • The data caps issue has gotten to the WSJ, which probably means that it’s off geek turf and Really Quite Sincerely Real. What few people are talking about with respect to ISP data caps these days is the perverse incentive they present for video piracy: Why pay an additional “bandwidth tax” on your favoite films each time they’re streamed when you can download them once and watch them any time you want without further payment? This has always been the case, but moving to a metered Internet only makes it worse.
  • From the ‘Bout-Damned-Time Department: Samsung’s Galaxy line of phones and tablets will be getting its Gingerbread update any day now. We hope. Any day now. Guys, really?
  • Bruce Baker sent me a link to sculpture made of books, sculpture as I suspect termites understand it. The last picture made me cringe a little: It’s a carved-up copy of all three volumes of the 1936 New Century Dictionary, which has been my go-to word source now for almost thirty years. What other dictionary (none here!) can show you drawings of a wanderoo and a wanigan on the same page?
  • Not all engineering problems are nice and clean and up on top of a well-lit bench. Especially this one.
  • If ebook readers ever push print books over the edge of the world, it’ll be due to much higher resolution displays. This one, at 458 DPI, is very close to what you see on mass-market four-color interior printing. At 600 DPI (and we’ll be there in a few years) the war will be over.
  • Boy. Here’s a kind-of-a-sort-of-a-thing-a-ma-jigger. A display that hinges in the middle? As a friend of mine once said: “Laugh or lust? Flip a coin.”
  • Inevitable: I Can Has Zeppelin.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · · · ·

Now Available: Copperwood Double #1

May 9th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

Copperwood Double #1: Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings

I am pleased (and you wouldn’t believe how relieved!) to announce the availability of the first Copperwood Double, Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings, in both print and ebook editions. The ebook edition is available from Amazon’s Kindle store in mobi format, and from B&N in epub format, both at $2.99. No DRM in either case. And because there’s no DRM, you can download the free app Calibre and use its excellent conversion utilities to convert mobi or epub to any of several additional ebook formats. The print edition is distributed through Ingram/Lightning Source and is thus available from online retailers who work with Ingram, which would be basically all of them. $11.99. (Note: The print book is not available from Lulu.com. This was a major decision that I’ll talk about in a future entry.)

If the cover image above seems bizarre to you, well, you’re younger than you look. The grayhairs among us know precisely what I was reaching for: The Ace Doubles of the period 1952-1973. Each volume consisted of two short novels from 25,000-50,000 words in length, bound back-to-back and inverted, each with its own cover image. Ace did not invent the physical print/bind arrangement, which is called tete-beche (head-to-tail) and has existed for almost 200 years. They did make it a mainstay of recreational reading for two decades, and most of us back then had a pile of them.

A lot of people thought it was a weird idea (and many made fun of it) but we forget that the short novel as a form essentially vanished from SFF after Ace stopped publishing doubles. The magazines won’t publish something 40,000 words long, and 40,000 words is too short for a conventional print book unless you’re way out there in small and very small press. So there was this huge hole between 20,000-word novellas and 80,000 word novels. I fell into that trap in 1981, when my Firejammer clocked in at just under 30,000 words. I shopped it, but unless you’re Larry Niven no one’s going to seriously look at something that length.

I like the short novel as a distinct literary form. It’s long enough to develop some ideas and a few interesting characters, but short enough to require a certain focus, and a fairly linear plot line. It deserves to have a place in the SFF world, and two recent developments have conspired to give it one: ebooks and print-on-demand publishing. Ebooks have no strong length requirements, and from what I’ve read, the length of original ebook novels is drifting downward. More to the point, a story can be given the length it needs, and authors aren’t under pressure to pad an idea out to print novel length, or compress it to magazine novella length or less.

Print-on-demand publishing allows publishers to try interesting things without betting the house on the outcome. I will always love print books and still buy them in respectable quantities, but in these troubled times print publishers must be conservative to avoid going broke. (Do I know a little bit about that or what?) The beancounters require that a book recoup its capital costs, which means that books hover within certain boundaries set by retailer expectations. (Remember that if retailers won’t stock a book, customers never get the chance to vote on it. Retailers therefore have what amounts to a veto on print publisher publishing programs.) Slightly whacky things like tete-beche double novels fall outside ordinary bricks’n’mortar retail channel expectations, but POD manufacturing and online ordering make a lot of things possible.

So I offer you a book with two covers, and two authors telling two stories in one world, the Drumlins world that I introduced in Asimov’s back in 2002 with “Drumlin Boiler”. There’s much more to say, and I’ll continue the discussion (with specifics on both stories) in days to come.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: · · ·

Victoria Duntemann and Lady Julian

May 8th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

VictoriaDrumMajoretteCropped1940.pngToday is Mother’s Day, and I celebrate it in eternal memory of Victoria Albina Pryes Duntemann 1924-2000. But today is also something else: May 8, the feast day of Lady Julian of Norwich, denied sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church for daring to suggest that God would triumph over Hell. Lady Julian is my personal patron saint, and I have declared her the Patron Saint of Gonzo Optimism: All manner of thing will be well. All. No exceptions. It don’t get much more gonzo than that.

Lady Julian was very careful of what she said, and had to be, lest she be burnt at the stake by her mass-murdering psychopath of a bishop, Henry Despenser, who ordered the Lollard Pits to be dug near Norwich and then gleefully filled them. The message of Lady Julian’s visions, which she hid well and could barely believe herself, was as simple as it was audacious: God will not settle for anything less than the salvation of everyone and everything.

It’s one of those painful ironies that I heard of Lady Julian only a couple of years before my mother’s death. Victoria Duntemann’s religion was an insane Polish peasant amplification of the fringes of Triumphal Catholicism, and basically consisted of Hell plus debris. That said, she took it only a little farther than the grim priests of my childhood parish, who gripped Hell to their hearts like an infernal teddy bear. Whether they understood it that way or not (and I think some did) they defined Catholicism as what you had to do to stay out of Hell, which ultimately cooked down to obeying them without question and having as little to do with sex as possible. My mother and countless other goodhearted and sensitive people swallowed this blasphemy whole, and in far too many cases (my mother’s included) it crushed all hope from them.

Hell haunted my mother her entire life. I was at her bedside when she died, and I am convinced that she died of despair, fearing that sins either wholly imagined or minor and long forgiven would land her in unending torment. (Right: She who was a nurse all her life, comforting countless people and tending to both of her parents and later her husband in their final years, and giving ceaselessly of her time and money to the church that had taken such pains to terrify her–Hell-fodder, of course.) Managing my consequent anger has become one of the great challenges of my life.

Hell has got to go. It no longer frightens the evil, and causes only suffering among the good. It is an emblem of either a sadistic or a defeated God. Do we have the guts to imagine a better God, one who will out-stubborn the worst of us and bring the whole shebang back into divine wholeness before the curtain falls?

LadyJulianCat.pngAlready done: “And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying most comfortingly: I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and I will make all things well; and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.” Julian of Norwich, Showings, Chapter XXXI.

I may. I can. I shall. I will. What does He have to do, hit us over the head with a #7 frying pan?

I’m convinced. Given a few more years, I might have persuaded my mother. She understood me poorly, but she listened to me, and she took me seriously, as all good mothers must of the children they bring into the world. I built telescopes on her front lawn, and she was always willing to give me a dollar for one more damned pipe fitting to twist into the declination axis. She read and approved of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” which was my first published story, written in some respects for her. She didn’t read the pile of my computer books that she kept in a corner of the livingroom, but I think they got the message across that her only son was neither crazy nor stupid. Perhaps more significant than any of that, I think she saw something of herself in me, and recognized the ache for God that she herself felt and had tried to instill in her children. She was ready to hear me out long before I knew enough to begin speaking, but I didn’t begin speaking until she could no longer listen.

I managed to avoid the trap she fell into, and maybe that’s triumph enough. Mothers want the best for their children, and what I got was what she should have had: a religion that celebrates the fundamental goodness of all creation, and the inescapable love of God. She knows the truth now. Could Lady Julian have told her? (Better late than never!)

If not, then what are patron saints for?

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis, Memoir.
Tagged: ·

Dell’s USFF Internal Amplified Speaker

May 7th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
15 comments

DellMiniSpeaker.jpgI bought a Dell Optiplex GX620 USFF (Ultra-Small Form Factor) machine last week, and it came without an internal speaker. I didn’t know the speaker was optional until a machine turned up without one, but a look at my three SX280 USFF machines (built in exactly the same case) showed a very small plastic unit that pulls easily out of the chassis when you lift a plastic tab. It’s wired to the mobo through a conventional 4-pin header. And most interesting of all, it has circuitry on its back.

A look through a loupe showed four solder pads (on the left in the photo above) labeled P5V IN, SPK DET, GND and AUD MONO. These correspond to the red, white, black, and green leads respectively. It took me ten minutes to lash up a test on my Heath ET-3200 breadboard. With 5V on the red lead, common on the black lead, and some sine wave from my audio generator on the green lead, that one tiny little doodad filled the shop with an 800 Hz tone.

I’m pretty sure the SPK DET lead allows the computer to know if there’s a speaker in place; my VOM shows it tied to ground. The IC is almost certainly an LM4871 1.1W audio amp. The National Semi logo is on the chip, and the printed number is RA4871. The Dell part number for the assembly as a whole is Y2298.

I needed to order one for the GX620, so I ordered two, and if I need a subminiature speaker amp for a project, it’ll be in the drawer with my other small speakers, ready to go. $2.69 at the CompuFlea eBay store.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

Lazarus, Stay Where You Are!

May 6th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

…because when you came forth, you stepped on my bootloader.

I’ve tried to like Lazarus. I’ve tried for years. I can only assume that (as also evidenced by its similarly screwy cousin, Kylix) there is something in the Linux platform that makes Pascal compilers go a little bit whacko.

A few days ago I installed the KDE Fedora Spin in a new partition on my Linux box. It’s been a good education in the Plasma desktop. Plasma is all very blue and cold looking (way too blue for me, in fact, though the default wallpaper is striking) but unlike my first taste or two of KDE 4, it actually works.

So I started installing the software I’m familiar with to begin using it, and somewhere down the list was Lazarus, the Delphi-ish GUI front end for FreePascal. The package available from Fedora was V0.9.28.2, which is considerably newer than the one I have installed on Ubuntu Lucid, and only a little older than the one you can get from the project Web site. After it downloaded and installed all of its enormous pile of stuff, it asked me to restart Linux. I did.

And grub failed to run.

All I got was a blinking text cursor in the upper-left corner of the screen. This is the first time I’ve ever seen grub fail, apart from the well-known habit of Windows to overwrite grub with its own bootloader. (This is why Windows goes in first, if you’re going to have it at all.) I booted the Ubuntu 11.04 live CD I’d burned a few days after it was released, just to see if my MBR had been damaged. As best I could tell it had not, but I’m not good enough at grub’s internals to really be able to tell what was wrong with the software itself. Since I had plenty of free space on the 750 GB drive, I just installed Ubuntu on yet another partition, hoping that its update of grub would put things right. And it did.

So why would installing a compiler and an IDE mess up the OS bootloader? (Anybody?) I don’t have a lot of clues. The copy of Lazarus I installed looks like it works as well as Lazarus ever does, so I can’t assume that something in the installer or the package glitched and overwrote something unrelated. None of the other partitions on the disk were affected, as best I can tell. I’m tempted to install Lazarus under Ubuntu, to see if it will stomp on Ubuntu’s copy of grub as well…but that will happen another day, when I’m not as busy and not so grouchy.

Posted in: Daybook, Reviews.
Tagged: · ·

Odd Lots

May 3rd, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · ·

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