Wesley's Tool-Box

(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.

MySQL documentation gives some examples of creating users in MySQL. Among the examples are creating users that only have access to a specific database, or 'tied-to-database', as I say. This is preferred from a security standpoint because you can avoid using root to access services like s9y and use this 'limited' user instead. Let's look at one of the examples in there.

GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP ON bankaccount.* TO 'custom'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'obscure';

This is supposed to create a user called 'custom' on the 'localhost' domain that has the password of 'obsecure' and can only access 'bankaccount' database. Now this looks alright, but it poses a bit of problem with s9y.

Here's a minor annoyance that didn't affect the DVD creation process but still merits a mention. If you look at the 'Status' of the DVD being created, the maximum DVD capacity will show up as 8.0GB for double-layer project and 4.0GB for single-layer project.



The unit 'GB' is calculated under 'kilo is 1000', which is used by the storage device manufacturers, not 'kilo is 1024', which the operating system generally uses. Now, the unit itself isn't really a problem since as long as I know exactly how much I'll be using, I'm fine with that. The annoyance arises from the fact that under this unit, a double-layer DVD holds 8.5GB and a single-layer DVD holes 4.7GB. This means that iDVD does not let me choose to add 500 or 700MB worth of more video onto the disc even though the space is available. That's a sad waste of space. The extra space could have been used to either put more footage, or if 4-hour (or 2-hour for single-layer) limit must be kept, used to increase bitrate and thus quality of video.