Wesley's Tool-Box

The new wearable computing project has now seen the first fruit of labour. The main system module, a completely functioning system that only needs power source, input device, and monitor, is now in working order with its own casing. As you can see, it is only as big as a novel, but houses a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1GB of memory, 100GB hard disk, and a power supply that accepts 8V to 13.6V DC voltage.

I use a Diamondback 'Salamander Red' mouse from Razer. Yes, its something I won in AMD Mania Day 2004 AND 2005. The mouse is quite good, living up to its reputation. The problem is, I use it on my Mac mini. Razer's driver download page sadly tells me to "Download a third party Mac driver at USB Overdrive". I've used USB Overdrive a while back and I didn't quite like it. I've been in 'generic driver' mode since. However, that was about to be changed.

(Continuation of "The $14 MP3 Player")

Curious to find out what made this cheap MP3 player tick, I had to take it apart... carefully, of course, because I wanted to keep using it. You unscrew two tiny metal bolts, then have to unhinge the two plastic hooks that stick the top and bottom pieces together. The plastic hooks were a bit hard to get around, since it looked kind of easy to break. I did manage to do it without breaking anything, and the device revealed its innards.

While Apple iPod is dominant in most of the world's portable MP3 player market, there are always some niche products scattered around. One such class is the MP3 players that are very cheap because they lack any on-board storage. They use the flash memory cards you plug in for the storage instead. If you somehow end up with a flash memory card left over doing nothing useful, these MP3 players may attract you, despite common sense telling you it's money wasted. Here's my story.

This is one of the reasons why I can't take most of the cameras on the cellphones seriously yet. Especially the commonly used CMOS-based ones. The image sensor scanning the landscape has takes certain time, even with sufficient lighting, as this photo I took on a day inside a car travelling around 70km/h shows. The cellphone used was CP-X501.

The image is actually quite crisp, so the shutter speed was quite fast, but the sensor scanning couldn't keep up with the fast-moving objects, resulting in a humourously warped shape for the box and the tree. Normal digital cameras, which use CCD, don't exhibit this problem. To this day I carry a separate digital camera on the belt to take quick photos and videos; my cellphone is mostly used for what it's supposed to do: make/get calls.