I’ve been working on cleaning up my YouTube channel, and adding better descriptions to all of my videos. Now that I have the super battery for my video camera, I hope to add a good number of off-road videos this coming summer.
Recently I linked both my YouTube and AdSense accounts, and can now place ads in the videos. AdSense on this site has been doing fairly well (thanks for reading!), considering how infrequently I post new content.
Not much outside of work has been going on lately, but I finally have a couple neat things to blog about.
First up, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a new extended-time battery for my Canon HF100 HD video camera. I found a decently reviewed clone of the Canon BP-827 on Amazon for a great price, and figured I’d give it a shot. Here’s the battery:
Maxtek 4.5hr rechargeable battery
The most common problem with cloned batteries for stuff like Canon camcorders is the fact the OEM batteries have a chip in them that communicates to the camcorder. The earlier cloned batteries didn’t have this chip, so you couldn’t get an idea of how much time you really had left to record. You would also see warnings about a non-compatible battery every time you started the camera.
The newer battery clones have started to incorporate one of these chips, and work with the onboard charger in the camera, as well as the OEM external wall chargers. I’ve already tried both charging the battery from the camera and the Canon CG-800 wall charger, and had no issues with either charging method.
Now I will have to buy some 32GB SDHC cards so I can actually film as long as the battery can last! What an exciting prospect.
While on the subject of batteries, I managed to successfully replace the worn out SLA battery in my GE Simon III home security system. That was kinda interesting, since I had to call the monitoring company and put the system in test mode to prevent any false alarms.
Once that was done, it wasn’t too difficult to get into the guts of the system, and replace the small SLA battery. After making sure I didn’t have any wires pinched, I had to call the monitoring company, and verify the system was able to communicate with them. This required tripping the alarm, and letting the thing scream bloody murder for about a minute.
Now I won’t get any more annoying status updates about the “low battery” in the alarm system! If you have one of these alarm systems, they aren’t too difficult to service yourself.
Yup, that’s about it. The most exciting thing to happen at home in a couple months was all battery related. 
I received a Kindle Fire for Christmas this year! Very neat device, with a sleek form factor, in my opinion.
The awesomeness of receiving a gift like this wore off quickly, after I unboxed it and powered it up for the first time. I had one of the units that displayed symptoms of having a defective touch screen! The screen was non-responsive to touch at times, and using the on-screen keyboard was next to impossible.
Every time I’d try to use the on-screen keyboard, I would get “extra” characters, like an “ñ” instead of a regular “n”, or instead of an “e” I would get a “3″. It was as if I was holding down the key, to bring up the extra characters, and selecting the first character in that list, even though I was attempting to type as fast as I could.
Searching around on the internet, I found Amazon had released a firmware update for the Kindle Fire, so I figured out how to get that downloaded to the device, and rebooted. The 6.2 firmware did nothing to fix my problems with the keyboard.
In the middle of trying to fix the keyboard, I did manage to get the Kindle Fire online, and downloaded a couple apps, and some free books. I also did a device reset, and for the life of me could not figure out how to get the books I just downloaded to the Kindle Fire back onto the Kindle Fire!
Fast forward a few days, and I’m searching for anything new about these Kindle Fire problems, and if any solutions exist. I manage to locate a post in the Amazon support forums about how to force power-off the Kindle Fire, which consists of holding the power button for 20 seconds. Sure enough, that put the Kindle Fire into a coma-like state, which took a few minutes for it to come out of after I plugged the charger in and held the power button for 5 seconds to bring it back to life.
After the forced power-off procedure, and bringing the Kindle Fire back to life, the keyboard problems are gone! The screen is perfectly responsive, and all the apps seem to work just fine. Woo!
As for getting my previously purchased books back to the Kindle Fire, you have to log into your Amazon account through a browser, click on “Your Account”, then click on “View Your Kindle Orders” under “Order History”.
At this point, you should see a list of all the items you have purchased for your Kindle Fire. Find the book you want to load onto your Kindle Fire, and click on the “Actions” button. Select “Deliver to my…”, pick your Kindle Fire from the device list, and then click “Deliver” (you can do this for more than one book).
Once you have all the books you wish to download to your Kindle selected, go to the Kindle Fire and perform a “Sync”. Your Kindle will pull down the content you selected on the Amazon web site.
I’ve had the Kindle Fire for about a week now, with it functioning perfectly for less than one hour. I like the form factor, I like the screen, and the audio is good as well. Now that the touch screen is working like it should, I can use the device with a much lower level of frustration, and get the most out of it. More reviews to follow! :-)
PuTTY is a lightweight suite of utilities for Windows machines that can perform SSH, SCP, and SFTP functions. I’ve used these utilities quite a bit over the years, so I figured I’d give this project a little press after I learned there was a new version out.
Last Saturday, a new version was released, containing some security and bug fixes: http://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/putty-announce/2011/000017.html
It’s recommended that all current users of PuTTY upgrade to the latest version.
Just updated the site to WordPress 3.3. I really like the toolbar changes so far.
I’ll have to get some photos and mess around with the new media tools as well.
For more info on the latest and greatest WordPress, check out this link: http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/
ServerUnderground had a bit of downtime over this last weekend due to a fried power supply. We’re back online after dropping in a replacement power supply, and checking the disks for sanity.
EDIT: Looks like the motherboard may have been affected as well. Moved the hard drive over to a different (newer) chassis, and things seem to be working much better. Time to add another pile of circuitry to the recycling pile. :-(
I took a look at Google Analytics for this site today, and decided I needed to make a few changes. One thing led to another, and now the site is running with an updated theme (Twentyeleven, from WordPress), some tweaked W3 Total Cache settings, and some new header graphics that I shot this evening in the basement.
The Google ads have been temporarily removed, while I rework that whole mess. Sadly, the ads slow down the site quite a bit, so I don’t know if I want to keep them or not. I think I may try to only show ads when you view individual stories/posts. Removing ads from the front page will keep things looking sharp, and running fast.
In tech related news, I finally got around to installing NetBSD (hpcmips) 5.1 on a 4GB CF card on an IBM Workpad z/50 system. It’s a little netbook-ish type laptop that ran Windows CE years before netbooks got popular. Yes, it’s the “hipster-book”. While a fun project, it is very limited by the 16MB of RAM, so there’s not a lot I can do with it at the moment.
This evening also saw the i-Opener go under the knife to get a hard drive upgrade, and NetBSD (i386) 5.1 loaded as well. I need to find a USB network adapter to make this system useable. This i-Opener has been upgraded to 128MB of RAM, a 30GB internal 2.5″ IDE drive, and an IDT WinChip 200Mhz processor (passively cooled). The only moving part on this machine is the hard drive’s internals.
That’s all for now. More updates to come as I upgrade another machine this week in preparation for Windows 7 and some new games. :-)
EDIT: Well, the Google Ads are back after screwing around with some of the AdSense plugins for WordPress. We’re back in business!
Tonight I swapped out the trusty Linksys WRT54G that was flashed with DD-WRT with a new Routerboard RB751U-2HnD (wow, that’s one hell of a model number) router running the fabulous Mikrotik OS, version 5.7! My home network has never has it so good. :-)
Personally, I prefer to deal with routers that have a serial console port of some type, so I can wipe the default config completely and build a config up from the bare metal. These smaller SOHO units don’t have that luxury, so it took a bit of jumping around on different ports to get the “clean” configuration I wanted this evening.
If you deal with routers for a living, and haven’t heard of Mikrotik, check out the two links above. These routers and associated hardware have a lot of features and flexibility, and pack a lot of power into some pretty impressive form factors. You can also get a license for X86 hardware, and build your own power-house router!