Category Archives: Technology

Leap Motion should learn to better manage customers

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Leap Motion has presented a very intriguing device and made a great marketing of it.

I’ve tried in the past a number of relatively unusual pointing devices (the white and blue original Logitech trackman, the trackman wheel, a Wacom Bamboo, a 3DConnexion serial 3D mouse and a serial SpaceBall 3003) and so far I settled with the trackman as the device that serves me the better way.
But Leap Motion device really looks great so I decide to preorder it.
$97.68 on January 10, 2013

Then I’ve sent it in the back of brain where things get forgotten.
On March 5th I get a remainder of the fact that I have this preorder ongoing and that it will begin shipping on May 13th: some fuel to restart the excitement.

The excitement goes down big time a month and a half later, April 25th: shipping target date is delayed by over 3 months.
From May 13th to July 22nd.
Leap Motion’s email states “We’ve manufactured over six hundred thousand devices and delivered twelve thousand to amazing developers”
“The reality is we very likely could have hit the original ship date. But it wouldn’t have left time for comprehensive testing”
“We will also invite some people who are not developers to join the beta test”

But there it is hope.
I’m told that I can write to them.
Even better: to Michael Buckwald directly.
“If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact our support team at support@leapmotion.com or my personal email (buckwald@leapmotion.com).”

So I went that route a couple of day later: after two weeks no answer, but a new generic email of update sent to all the people.
I should have read better the email and Leap Motion should have written it more carefully because the expectation generated is that someone will actually answer the email that was elicited.
This is a bad way of managing the customer relation.

At the end of the day what I read is that they are sitting on a pile of over half a million devices that supposedly work fine and that they are not giving to the people who preordered.
In the meanwhile they are getting “great apps coming to Airspace”.

Looks like sometime in the future instead of simply a great new pointing device I’ll get a software ecosystem to get me entangled.
Not what I wanted.
Maybe I’m better canceling the preorder and get a proven device like the Spacenavigator?

The figth against noise on long flights

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I do spend quite a bit of time on airplanes (2012 is a good example) and there are mainly 2 things that are very fatiguing once in the air: sub-optimal seat ergonomics and background noise.

The first one is hard to overcome without a recurring increase in expenses (using business class or premium economy class) while the second one is a bit easier and I’ve made a few experiments in this area.

7 years ago I bought Creative Labs’ HN-700 noise canceling headphones for about 50€ new on sale. On an airplane sound quality is acceptable (way better than what is offered by the ones offered in economy by the airline) and noise reduction (both active and passive) is there to a degree.
Active noise canceling with this headphone is not an option in a normal home/office environment due to the high level of white noise that is generated even in a silent environment.
Sleeping while wearing them is really not an option due to the size.
Also long use is not comfortable due to the weight and to the fact that the ear is completely inside: sweat builds up.
The bulky construction is a bit of an annoyance too.

The last 3 reasons led me to the purchase of an in-ear alternative, again with active noise canceling.

About 9 months ago I picked up Philips’ SHN4600. On sale I paid 49.90€
They are light, sweat-free, occupy a small volume, and again the sound quality is better than the one from the airline: potentially perfect on the paper.
Unfortunately the reality is different: there it is a very noticeable cable noise and repeated insertions and removal of the tip bruises a bit the ear canal with the remaining of the moulding process on the silicone; compensation of pressure while climbing and descending is a bit difficult
The passive noise isolation is in a different frequency range compared to the NH 700 and the same is true for active canceling. They can be kept on while sleeping.
The “talk mode” button works but it’s not really as good as simply removing the earphones.
Production and quality control can be improved: the left ear bud has problems of major distortion as soon as the volume moves up and bass tones are played and this was from day 1.
Overall I’d not buy this model again even at an even lower sale price.

When sleeping the best option so far has been to use earing preserving devices commonly used in the construction business and made by 3M.
I usually pickup either the orange ones or the yellow ones
Fitting is very good as is the noise dampening: it’s necessary to remove them to have a conversation with the cabin crew.
In some cases I’ve used the earplugs in combination with the HN 700 (with the volume way up) to get rid of as much as possible of the external noise while listening to music or watching movies during a flight.

The HN 700 recently broke (I made it somewhat useable again by securing the left can in a fixed position with the help of a fair amount of electric insulating tape) and the SHR4600 is not a satisfactory either.
Sooner or later I’ll have to go shopping again for a noise canceling solution.

I’ve tried the latest generation of Bose and the difference in performance is impressive, but I’m not sure that’s worth 300€.
If anyone has a suggestion based on personal experience please comment.
Thanks in advance!

Synology DS411slim: getting slower with time?

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I’ve written in the past a few posts about this small nice NAS: here, here, here and here.

Yesterday I did another test after updating the complete local copy of my gmail messages on Thunderbird.
It took 4 hours 33 minutes to compress 11,548,610,909 bytes (578 Files, 61 Folders) to a single 7zip file of 7,108,652,903 bytes: it is a lot of time.
16.380 seconds of runtime means an average read/write speed of 1.139.027 bytes per second.

Both the NAS and the computer I used are connected with 1Gbit copper ethernet to the same switch: during the process the usage stats on the windows 7 (64 bit) machine indicated almost no load and the same was true for the NAS according to the web interface.

The DS411slim is running version 4.2-3202 with 3 HDDs in a single disk group using SHR (Synology Hibrid RAID)

This is really puzzling. And a bit upsetting.
Any suggestion to recover from this bad performance is welcome.

Delle 6430U and airport IONSCAN system did not played nicely together

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From time to time happens to each frequent flyer that the hand luggage gets tested for various substances.
It happened to me a number of time and until recently it was always a minor slow down: a piece of white fabric (or fablic-like material) is rubbed against the luggage, but in the machine and then after a few seconds I moved head.

Until I got my luggage including the 6430U tested one week ago.
The IONSCAN machine turned the writings on the screen to red and I suddenly gained a lot of attention.
All of my personal belongings then got scanned a few more times in the x-ray machine and with the IONSCAN system, I got carefully checked with and hand-held metal detector and then by hand.
The personnel was very rigorous in the checks but professional and always kind.

After the process was completed and I had answered a lot of questions about what I had done during my trip I was told that everything was fine with the sole exception of the notebook.
This meant that it had to be shipped and I could not keep it with me until my arrival at home.

The notebook got packaged in a box and shipped.
After about 3+2 hours of flight the box was completely destroyed: the people handling it was not really paying any attention to the clearly visible red labels stating “FRAGILE” and I was very happy that I have no mechanical drive inside the system.

Finger crossed for the next airport control!

Cleaning my mother’s apartment: Techno-fossils found

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10 years after I’ve left my mother’s home she decided to make some renewal.
In order to proceed it was necessary to clean some (a lot) of my stuff still there: I got a sunday call and lost my opportunity to make a nice nap.

In exchange I had the opportunity to find some vintage technology that included:
OS/2 2.0 (original)
OS/2 2.1 (original)
OS/2 3.0 (beta, original and paid for!)
OS/2 3.0 Warp (original: any doubt about the fact that I liked OS/2?)
AT&T Unix system V 3.2 (original, a bunch of 5¼” floppy disks)
Borland Paradox 4.5 (original)
Populous (original, the first one, 5¼” floppy disk)
A bunch of other games on 5¼” floppy disks
An SGI 02 motherboard (without CPU)
An SGI Indy XL video card

This was all sent to the trashcan

But I could not force myself into a complete cleanup and I’ve kept some of the stuff that moved into my garage:
1MB memory expansion for apple II GS
Compaq Deskpro EN (Pentium 3, disk missing)
A lot of original games on 3½ disks that likely are not working anymore
A lot of games on CDROM that will need a VMware machine to run in freedos
A trustmaster joystick that connects to an analog gameport

Oven trick and GeForce Go 7900GS: worked fine for me

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The internet is full of reports about succesful DIY fixes of Nvidia graphics cards using the technique: this is one more such report.

The basic recipe is to bake the card after removing all the stickers, heat spreaders, thermal pads and thermal grease and then put the card for 8 minutes in the oven already heated to 200C/385F.
I did it and I transformed the paperweight that my cousin kindly gave me (artifacts at low resolution and no display at all when going over 800×600) into a running notebook.

Until the fix works I’m a happy owner of an Inspiron 9400: Intel T2500 (2Ghz dual core 32bit), 2GB of ram, 160 GB of HDD, 17″ 1920×1200, DVD burner, 2.1 built in audio, ABG wifi, BT 2.0+EDR.

Dell 6430U doesn’t play nice with Nokia E7

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From time to time I check if my devices have a newer firmware available and then I make a round of updates.
While the un-branded Lumia 800 is still waiting for the availability of WP 7.8 I’ve found that finally the 3-branded E7 had belle refresh available so I started the upgrade process using the 6430u.

The full backup worked perfectly, but the update process failed a couple of time with errors pointing to the USB connection.
I believed this was because the cable (Nokia original) was connected using a hub so I connected directly to the notebook port only to find out that it was not working even this way.
As in the recent past I already had a major issue with the USB connector of the E7 I started to worry.

Having more than one computer at home I went to another one (an Acer 7750G that I use as a desktop replacement) and tried again with success.

I can’t tell if the problem is with the 6430U (drivers and bios are updated) or with the E7, but sure enough this is not something I liked.

Dell 6430u: second run on battery and BIOS upgrade

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I’ve just made a second trip with the 6430u with me.
As it was a bit longer than the previous one I had the opportunity to upgrade the bios (that was just released) and then continue to use it mainly in battery mode.

It looks like the version A04 has improved the fan management reducing the use while on battery while when connected to the power supply it’s still up fairly often even in powersave mode.
In the previous test I had a very long run of McAfee security endpoint: it’s not happening anymore, likely it completed the massive first encryption.
Unless improvements for the power management come with future releases of the BIOS the machine (as configured) is not able to run from dawn to dusk on a single charge.
On the positive side is the fact that the power supply is a bit smaller and lighter than the older ones from Dell. Why apparently only Apple makes really small power bricks for the notebooks remains a mistery for me.

Here is the chronicle.

5.40, 100%, put to sleep, disconnected power
8.10, 98%, turned on, 3G key inserted
8.29, 92%, 3g key removed, put to sleep
10.55, resumed from sleep
11.05, 88%, put to sleep again
11.15, 87%, quick received email and calendar check
11.25, 86%, put to sleep, estimated runtime 5h07m
11.50, 86%, resume from sleep and turned on wifi
12.33, 73%, wifi off, fan running
13.22, 60%, only light use (chrome, outlook 2010 in bacground)
13.34, 57%, only light use, some screen backlight off due to inactivity
13.42, 55%, 3h30m estimated runtime
14.15, put to sleep
14.56, 46%, resumed from sleep, 2h42m estimated runtime, wifi on
15.08, 42%, 2h12m estimated runtime
16.11, 24%, 1h21m estimated runtime
16.18, 21%, 1h13m estimated runtime. Connected charger.

20+10+145+22=297m runtime + 345m on sleep with 79% battery

17.59, 98%, disconnected power
18.06, 96%, put to sleep estimated 6h28′
23.43, 91%, resume from sleep, light internet navigation
00.39, 77%, estimated runtime 4h46m
00.50, 74%, went to high performance for some gaming, fan went crazy
01.07, 66%, game over, back to power saving, put system (and owner) to sleep
08.29, 60%, resume from sleep
08.49, 54%, put in charge

7+67+17+20=111m runtime + 879m on sleep with 44% battery

10.08, 100%, put to sleep
10.40, 98%, resume from sleep, wifi off
11.57, 81%, put to sleep
12.30, resumed from sleep, wifi on
13.51, 55%, started charging

77+81=158m runtime + 65m on sleep with 45% battery

13.54, I felt lucky and upgraded to bios A04 (february 26th). Funny enough it says that it’s including ACPI support 0.0.0.1, I’d have expected this to be in from day 1 of the release
16.03, 100%, disconnect power
16.08, put to sleep
16.34, 99%, resume from sleep, wifi off, light excel activity
16.59, 93%, 7h32m expected runtime, put to sleep
17.56, 91%, turned on, expected runtime 6h4m (strange math)
17.57, turned on wifi
18.12, 88%, put to sleep
18.36, 87%, resumed from sleep, wifi off
18.46, put to sleep
22.18, 83%, resume from sleep, wifi on, light navigation and email
23.49, 60%, estimated runtime 4h21m, wifi off, put to sleep, looks like the bios update has changed the fan behaviour when running on battery.
07.43, 53%, resume from sleep
07.54, 50%, set to sleep
08.56, 48%, resume from sleep, plug power in

5+25+15+10+31+11=97m runtime + 916m sleep with 52% battery

The first day of mobility with the 6430u

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Ina a recent post I shared my impressions after a week with the 6430u.
Today I share the diary of my first day-long use tentatively on battery during a trip in the UK.

The summary is:
the 6-cell battery is unlikely to provide a full day of work, the total use time on battery in the 24h I had was: 44+78+97+9+39+38=305 minutes with a total of 91% battery (55 before recharge + 36 afterward)
Caveats:
1) the intermediate recharge makes the test not directly comparable with a run to depletion, but I need to work with the notebook, so I could not take the risk of running out of battery in the middle of an activity.
2) the use of the 3G key increases significantly the consumption compared to the most common tests, but is representative of a real mobile use. Phone tethering would have saved some notebook power at the expense of the battery charge of the phone.
3) the McAfee activity may not be representative of the standard usage pattern once the notebook break-in is over.

Here is the detail:
7.50 put to sleep, 100%, disconnected power
9.08 powered up, 97%, 3G USB key, no wi-fi
9.15 went to power saver mode (max 30% CPU frequency, minimum screen backlight) from balanced, no change in estimated life: 4h41′.
9.52 85%, 41 minutes of 3G connection for a total of about 30MB, estimated life 4h39′, sent to sleep.
11.36 powered up, 83%, disabled the keyboard backlight that was on at minimum level before, started a VMware image. Most of the chrome tabs were dead citing memory issues: according to performance monitor 1.5GB are available and a spool file does exist.
11.54 78%, sent to sleep, estimate 4h23′
14.02 powered on, powered on wi-fi, 75%
14.40 McAfee security endpoint running on the disk like crazy for a while, fan spinning
15.05 McAfee still going crazy, customer noticed the noise, 56%
15.32 McAfee still going crazy, 47%, 2h43′ left according to windows
15.39 plugged in power, 45%, set to high performance in an attempt to help the MacAffee processing.
17.04 McAfee craziness is over, I don’t know exactly when it stopped 99% charged
17.36 100% charged, disconnected power
17.45 put to sleep
18.56 powererd on, turned off wi-fi, 95%
19.35 put to sleep, 85%
23.57 powered on, 81%, turned on wi-fi
00.12 fan spinning like mad even with a simple browsing use (20 tabs in chrome), Skype and outlook in background
00.16 end of fan craziness, 76%
00.22 fan back in action for no apparent reason, I’ve reduced the number of tabs in chrome since the previous event, 74%
00.27: fan stopped
00.35, putting to sleep, 71%, estimated runtime 5h16′
8.45, turned pc on. It went to hibernate during the night (I should check the setting) and I was greeted by a message telling me that it was not able to save all the memory content. So the restore from hibernate did not work and I had to restart losing unsaved work (nothing in my case). Turned wi-fi off, 64%

First week with the Dell Latitude 6430u

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After over 4 years I got my notebook refreshed and moved from a Latitude D630 (core2duo 2ghz, 3GB of ram, 80Gb disk) to a Latitude 6430u (core i7 2Ghz, 8GB of ram, 256GB SSD) Good luck hunting for the detailed specs of the 6430u on Dell’s site as depending on the way you enter you may or may not find it (but the accessories yes!)
It took me a while to move all the relevant data from the old machine to the new but it’s now a couple of days that I’m using exclusively the new system.

On the positive side is:
1) the good expansion options; most ultrabooks don’t have any so it’s an easy win and for a system that should last 4 years a relevant thing
2) the decrease in weight; it is not a champion when compared with the other ultrabooks on the market or my old personal ultra-portable (Acre 3810T) but for the business category is a nice improvement
3) a comfortable backlit keyboard

On the negative side is the temperature and, closely related to this, is the fan noise.
I’ve read reviews on the network that praise the low-level of noise, but this is not my case: it’s most of the time on and fairly audible in an home-office environment even when setting the max CPU speed to the minimum possible (30%) and the cooling strategy to passive.
The standard feet are very thin (likely to keep the total height under the design limit) so the underside space to get the air flowing is very limited, raising it on the back (where all the electronic lies) is not helping.
When running heavy workloads (I have to often times) the fan noise gets absolutely nerve-breaking.

I’ve made already two BIOS updates (the system arrived with A01 and now I have A03) hoping to get this more under control as happened with other notebooks in the past, but this did not happen.

In short: if you plan to use it in a place with a low noise floor look somewhere else or wait until the fan issue is under control. Maybe a core i3 will generate less heat, even if the TDP on the paper is the same, and make the fan kick in infrequently.
If you’re always using it in a noisy place (open space with other people, airports, etc) fan is less of an annoyance.

I have a single day trip planned soon and will share my experience with the battery life afterwards.

Anyone with a success story on managing the heat and noise of this notebook is welcome to comment with advises.