Keith's Amusing Musings » Tips & Tricks

Public Service Announcement: Please Talk to Your Kids…about Star Wars

Keith — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:56:36 +0000

“It’s never too early to introduce your child to Star Wars.”

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Increasing storage capacity of Samsung Focus by adding a microSD memory card

Keith — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 19:58:41 +0000

If you are reading this post you know what you have (Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 with the default, anemic 8 GB internal storage) and what you want (more storage capacity by adding a microSD card). This is not a detailed how-to. If you do not know how to upgrade your memory and the steps necessary to reset your device to recognize the additional capacity, I suggest finding someone who does rather than going it alone.

There is a lot of confusing information swirling around about Windows Phone 7 certified memory, which cards work and which do not, class 2 vs. class 6, etc. I am writing this because I stumbled across a comment in a forum I frequent that helped me upgrade my Samsung Focus from 8 GB to 24 GB by adding a $40 memory card.

** WARNING: THESE STEPS FACTORY RESET AND ERASE YOUR PHONE **

Step 1: Buy a KOMPUTERBAY 16GB microSD memory card from Amazon for $39. The 32GB card ($89) also works if you need more storage.
Step 2: Turn off the phone
Step 3: Insert the card into the empty slot inside the battery compartment
Step 4: Turn on and reset your phone (Settings->About)
Step 5: Confirm your Total Storage is now 22.12 GB (Settings->About)
Step 6: Redo your settings and configuration and reinstall your apps
Step 7: Fill your new 24 GB Samsung Focus with content

Enjoy!

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New Parent Tip: Baby Cheat Sheet

Keith — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:03:13 +0000

The image below is circulating around the Web and landed in my inbox this week. The funny thing is Owen and I have been playing chess and pumping iron for a few weeks now.

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New Parent Tip: Travel with a night light

Keith — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:09:39 +0000

When traveling with a small child, parents often make due with sub-optimal accommodations relative to what is typically enjoyed in their homes. One case in point is the inadequate lighting often encountered in hotels and guest rooms that make it difficult for late-night/early-morning child care. What is desired is dim, unobtrusive ambient light. What is often provided are bright bedside lamps and harsh ceiling lights with inconveniently-located switches.

One inconsiderate solution involves turning on the ceiling or lamp lights at 3:27 AM to tend to one’s crying child. Babies and significant others love that. Non-green options include leaving the bathroom lights on overnight with the door slightly ajar. Neither of those options appealed to us.

After a quick trip to Target and $5 from the change jar, our travel kit is now equipped with an LED nightlight. After two states, ten days and a couple dozen late-night admittances to the Owen opera, I wholeheartedly recommend a night light when traveling with small kids. A small flashlight also works but remember where you put it and don’t forget the batteries.

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New Parent Tip: Take infant Tylenol to the 2-month exam

Keith — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:59:08 +0000

Owen is two months old today. Hooray! To celebrate, he had his 2-month exam which included two vaccination shots, one in each thigh. Fun times.

Of course the pediatrician waited until just before he got the shots to tell us it would be a good idea to give him a dose of Tylenol Infant’s Drops immediately afterward—and every 3-4 hours for the next 24 hours—since he was not going to be a very happy camper while coping with the discomfort.

Learn from our mistake: Bring the Tylenol with you and give it to your child just before the shots, for everyone’s sake.

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New Parent Tip: Fenugreek

Keith — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:56:39 +0000

While I cannot know first-hand how well it works, I have observed the seemingly magical powers of Fenugreek through TB’s milk production over the past five weeks. As the Wikipedia entry will tell you, Fenugreek is a herb with many common uses. One area of particular interest to nursing moms is its properties as a milk producing agent.

Taken orally in capsule form or as one of several ingredients in the popular Mother’s Milk Tea, Fenugreek greatly improves breast milk production quickly. The capsules can be found in many supplement and drug stores. The tea is not as effective as the capsules due to the lower levels of Fenugreek but TB finds sipping the tea relaxing and combines it with a couple capsules each day.

Before getting all excited you should know there are some drawbacks:

All that milk has to come out which means either lots of feeding, lots of pumping or sore mammary glands.
Storing breast milk safely for long periods requires a deep freezer and expensive containers.

Of course, if things get too abundant, just cut back or stop taking it altogether. Lastly, while Fenugreek is used in many food products, it would be wise to consult your doctor before taking any supplement.

Update: TB loves the bottle labels.

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Axis webcam simplifies remote baby monitoring

Keith — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:32:31 +0000

Say you are a new parent whose relatives live far, far away. What if you could easily allow family to see your child doing basic things babies do without jumping on a plane? After all, grandmothers can never see enough of their grandchildren. Imagine how many cool points you would get if your mother-in-law in Chicago could watch your son sleeping (or sleepless) in Seattle. This post is a walkthrough of how I setup a webcam over Owen’s crib that can be viewed using any popular Web browser from anywhere on the Internet.

Let’s begin with the end in mind. Below is an image showing the final result. This is an actual screenshot from the webcam exactly as it was delivered to my browser. I think Owen knows when he is being watched.

Assumptions

The required equipment turns out to be quite simple if we make the following assumptions about your home network.

You have a high-speed broadband connection (>1 Mbps up). This is true for most cable modem connections. Otherwise, call your ISP and request an upgrade.
You have a wired or wireless router/modem that allows you to connect several computers to the Internet. Otherwise, get the equipment from your ISP or visit Best Buy and tell them you want a wireless router.

Equipment

With the assumptions out of the way, the complete equipment list is as follows:

Axis 207W Wireless Network Camera

Yes, that’s it. No fancy computer or other electronics. No crazy HDMI, DVI, SCSI, IEEE-1394 or other expensive cables.

Before celebrating, you should know this is not your average Instant Messaging, MySpace or eHarmony webcam. This is a commercial-grade network camera often used by businesses and municipalities for asset monitoring and security. That means you get turnkey functionality, high quality and unsurpassed flexibility at a higher price point. What’s the damage? The Axis 207W runs $350 on Amazon. I paid $242.25 after shipping using eBay. Both prices are at the extreme of what one would typically pay for a consumer-grade USB webcam. However, you don’t need a computer or any special software to run an Axis network camera or to allow multiple people to access the camera at the same time. A single Axis camera is is also much cheaper than the roundtrip airfare it will save you and your MIL.

NOTE: Be sure to get the 207W model which supports wireless and wired connections.

Setup

Once you follow the included instructions to get the camera connected to your network, configuration is straightforward.

Connect to the camera using your browser (e.g., http://192.168.0.123)
1. Can you see the video? If not, check your equipment and connections.
2. The Axis IP Utility can help determine your camera’s IP address.
Click the Setup link and login as admin.
Under Basic Configuration –> Video & Image
1. Create user accounts
2. Require passwords for access (optional)
3. Set the date & time.
4. Select the video size and quality. I chose 480×360 with a compression level of 15.
5. Enable the date & timestamp. This step is optional but it lets viewers know what they are seeing is real-time.
Under Live View Config –> Layout
1. Choose ‘Motion JPEG’ for the default video format
2. Chose ‘Java applet’ for the default viewer for IE and other browsers.
Under System Options –> Network –> Basic
1. Register the camera with the AXIS Internet Dynamic DNS Service. This assigns a friendly address like www.lesia.com your visitors can use to access the webcam.

A couple notes regarding the steps above.

I found motion JPEG with the Java applet produces the best quality images. This does mean your visitors will need to first install the free Java runtime to access the webcam. Make sure you have them uncheck the Yahoo/MSN Toolbar installation option.
Remote webcam access requires changes to your firewall to allow visitors outside your network to access the camera sitting in your home. This is beyond the scope of my walkthrough but Axis provides instructions for configuring your home router for an Axis network camera.

Conclusion

Now you have a multi-user webcam that can be moved around as your child grows and needs (NannyCam?) change. How well does it work? In a word: great. Don’t take my word for it. Check out a public Axis camera running in Kiruna, Sweden. Yes, Sweden. You can also check out a list of public Axis cameras throughout the world.

But wait, there’s more. We eliminated the computer on the webcam side, what about for your visitors?

If they own an iPhone or iPod touch they can purchase Axis Cams by EyeSpyFx from Apple’s App Store for $4.99. With that program any Axis webcam can be viewed whenever their device is connected via 3G (iPhone only) or Wi-Fi (iPhone and iPod touch). You should check out TotalControl for your Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Android device.

Leave a comment if you have questions or encounter problems.

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New Parent Tip: Baby Bottle Labels

Keith — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:54:20 +0000

Tired of using masking or Scotch tape to label that burgeoning collection of breast milk storage containers in your refrigerator/freezer? Check out Baby Bottle Labels.

For $6.50 you get one pack that contains 96 3” x 1” waterproof labels. Also, unlike office tape or address labels, these baby bottle labels are easy to apply and remove. You can save even more by taking advantage of the “Special Offer” pricing which includes three packs (288 labels total) for $15, which would normally set you back $21. The “Special Offer” works out to about $0.05/label.

Breastfeeding, pumping and storing is already a ton of work and stress for new moms. In my limited experience, the more simplifiers you can put in place to keep things organized the better. Do the math: For $15 you can label three containers per day for over 3 months. By then, both mom and baby will be settled, freeing you to explore less expensive alternatives.

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Building a fast Windows Vista machine for video processing

Keith — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:42:14 +0000

About six months before embarking on my quest to build a top-of-the-line Vista Media Center from off-the-shelf parts, I researched, purchased and assembled all the components to build my home workstation. My goal was to create a moderately fast machine capable of running 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate. The machine needed to have sufficient processing power, memory and storage for editing and rendering video—one of the most computationally intensive tasks that can bring a machine to its knees.

With the following hardware I was able to obtain a Vista Windows Experience Index (WEI) of 4.8:

3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU (overclocked to 3.83 GHz)
4 GB G.SKILL DDR2 800 RAM
EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS 512 MB Graphics Adapter
320 GB Samsung HD321KJ SATA-2 7,200 RPM Hard Drive

The Vista WEI ranges from 1.0 to 5.9 so a score of 4.8 is respectable. Furthermore, as you can see in the image above, the processor, memory and hard drive contributed individual scores of 5.7 or greater. Since overall WEI reflects the weakest link, the 4.8 graphics adapter score pulled down my system rating. At that time, it was not a big deal. I am not much of a gamer and the graphics adapter was fast enough for standard definition video editing and periodic movie conversions. That was May 2007.

Fast-forward about 18 months to when I first learned of NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and the novel way a few software companies were using it to significantly accelerate video processing in their products. I had been using TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress by Pegasys for a few years for converting videos for portable devices, my media center and the Web. Also, Elemental Technologies was getting amazing results and stellar reviews for its Badaboom Media Converter. Both companies had incorporated CUDA into the processing pipelines of their respective products resulting in 5-10x speed improvements. The only problem: Only the GeForce 8000 series and later NVIDIA graphics adapters support CUDA. I had an older 7600 series.

A faster graphics adapter would surely increase my system’s WEI but I would also need to do something about my hard drive. The difference between 5.7 and 5.9 seems minor but for a hard drive it turns out it is fairly significant. It is particularly noticeable when it comes to reading and writing files several gigabytes in size, typical of video processing. For example, a 2 1/2 hour HD broadcast can consume over 30 GB of disk space.

After several weeks of research including reviews, benchmarks and price comparisons, I was ready to take the plunge and upgrade my hard drive and graphics adapter.

With the upgraded hardware, my system currently is as follows (only the last two items have changed):

3.00 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU (overclocked to 3.83 GHz)
4 GB G.SKILL DDR2 800 RAM
ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896 MB Graphics Adapter
300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor SATA-2 10,000 RPM Hard Drive

This upgrade increased my system’s WEI from 4.8 to 5.8. As you can see in the image above, every element in my system (except the CPU) now achieves the Vista maximum of 5.9. The upgrades together set me back $510—$240 for the drive, $270 for the graphics adapter.

Was it worth it? If converting a 2-hour DVD movie for playback on your iPhone/iPod/Zune/etc. in 10-15 minutes is important to you, or you edit and render a lot of video and don’t want your machine slowing to a crawl, absolutely. Otherwise, use the $510 and buy your videos on iTunes or Amazon Unbox.

I have been running this new system configuration for a couple months now and the performance improvement is very noticeable. I figure I will be happy with my system for another 12 months or so at which point Microsoft Windows 7, Intel Core i7 processors and plunging prices of Intel X25-M SSD drives will make a new round of upgrades hard to resist.

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Control your Sonos system with the iPhone

Keith — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:41:31 +0000

If you are relatively new to my blog, you may have to dig through the archives to discover I like the Sonos music distribution system. Since I wrote that post lots has changed that makes me like it even more.

First, with the recent v2.7 software update, Sonos owners now have free access to Pandora and Last.fm music streaming services. I have subscribed to Pandora in the past and both services are excellent alternatives to normal FM radio broadcasts because they are commercial-free and play songs based on your musical tastes. Now that they are free to Sonos owners, users of XM/Sirius radio might also want to take notice.

Second, Sonos provides a first-party application through the Apple App Store for controlling Sonos Zone Players using an iPhone or iPod touch. All you need is a Wi-Fi connection and you can control all your zones and access your entire music library anywhere in your home using the intuitive iPhone touch interface. This is great because Sonos charges $399 for a CR100 controller that does the same thing using a smaller screen and more complicated series of buttons and a circa-iPod-Generation-2 jog dial.

Check out the pictures below that I grabbed from my iPhone while playing around with our Sonos setup.

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