I love Linux, let's get that straight from the start. My introduction to the Penguin occurred more than six years ago when a newly-bought laptop's pre-installed XP kept crashing. One particularly memorable event occurred just one month after the purchase, the mouse just stopped working, even after repeated reboots. Though Dell made it easy to completely restore the installed OS, I wasn't happy, so decided to check out Linux - which I've been using as my main OS ever since. Though in the interest of full disclosure I should say that I also have a VirtualBox'ed XP setup as well.
Come to think of it, this was not my first look at Linux. I bought Suse Linux in the late-nineties for around £30-£40 at Dixons, and had played with it a bit - but seeing as I went back to Windows, I mustn't have been overly impressed. Enter Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 8.04 surprised me. Here was a Linux that installed really fast (compared to Bill's offerings) and damn-near all hardware was detected and enabled. I was impressed! More so by Wine, the Linux software capable of running quite a few native Windows applications - an incredible achievement. But after the novelty had worn off, it soon became apparent that Wine had problems. Over the years, I have been forced to re-install Wine from scratch dozens of times. Still it continues to be actively supported and the improvements are evident. Kudos to its developers.
Ok, fast-forward to today (and the point of this post). Linux has continued to improve over the years, particularly when it comes to supporting hardware. Although I've tried dozens of flavours of Linux, I must be a creature of habit 'cos I'm still using Ubuntu as my main OS. But not the current offerings, oh no. I, like a huge percentage of Linux-land was appalled by the travesty that was released by the Gnome Developers as the 'future' of the Gnome desktop. So I currently am still using the long-ago EOL'ed (end-of-line) 10.04LTS version. I'm still with it 'cos it works. And also (surprisingly) because there are still security updates being produced for it, as well as kernel updates and its repositories are still online. Incidentally, I also have an interesting China-derived version of Linux called Deepin Linux running on another computer. This is based on Ubuntu 13.04 but with it's own cool custom desktop - definitely worth checking out.
After more than six years of use, with at least one computer having run 24/7 throughout that time, I can say positively that Linux's Achilles's heel is Wireless - putting it bluntly, it sucks! Initially my problems were with a Intel wireless card (IWL3945), but similar problems also occur with two other Atheros cards. These aren't trivial problems either. The feed splutters and stops continuously, before often dying completely, forcing a restart of the computer. Fortunately, removing & restarting wireless via 'modprobe' is often enough to get it going again - but not always. And this usually happens every few hours! Which begs the question, why am I still with Linux?
Well, thanks to an application called 'ndiswrapper', wireless is rendered usable again. What this app does is allow Linux to use native Windows wireless drivers, and which for me works great, but which also sucks - after all, Linux users are trying to get away from using Windows code completely. But without doubt, without Ndiswrapper, I would have stopped using Linux years ago.
What I have never understood is why more people aren't' complaining about this. Granted, there are 1000's of posts on various forums (many mine!) about this, but not to the extent I would expect - again Linux Wireless Sucks, so why aren't people more vocal about this? Maybe most "Linux users" just 'play' with it - ie. their main OS is Windows but will boot-up a tiny Linux partition occasionally and for a few hours just for the novelty. The "few hours" part is important - any wireless problems would usually go unnoticed in these short time-frames. Similarly, maybe most 'real' Linux users just run their computer for a few hours so never experience a dropped wireless connection when they come back to using the computer - as they most surely would if the computer was left running 24/7. This silence has always baffled me.
Not that I'm advocating complaining. I've slowly come to realise that it's generally a pretty thankless task writing software for Linux, and its developers really need to be applauded for the incredible job they have done & continue to do. But it doesn't make it any less frustrating either...
Apart from that, Linux is rock-solid, it never crashes. The one exception to this in six years concerned early versions of VirtualBox. That was the only application I have ever used that could cause Linux to crash completely. Everything after v.3.2 worked perfectly though - the version I still use, even though it is now very old. But it's quite a bit faster than the latest releases, especially on my aging laptop, so does quite nicely.
And I have absolutely no intention of ever going back to Windows. In fact until recently, I had never even used Windows 7, but given that it was being EOL'ed by M$, decided to give it a spin on VirtualBox. Must say I was underwhelmed - given the amount of favourable press I had come across over the years, I had expected more. And with Bill's current offering having been slated by critics & supporters alike, I don't expect to ever try using that.
23 December 2013
5 December 2013
Musings on Georgi Stankov...
I first came across Dr. Georgi Stankov more than 2 years ago, whose web-site was linked to by a poster on a forum called Project Avalon. To be more precise, it was about 1 month before 11-11-2011, a then up-and-coming date that many 'New-Agers' (NA'ers) attached great significance to.
One of the topics most discussed among NA'ers is what is known as Ascension. Now most with a scientific mindset consider the idea absurd, and in general, so do I. Enter Georgi Stankov. Here was a scientist that spoke four languages, had considerable experience in the pharmacological sector, at least one pharmaceutical patent, and judging by his site, was supremely confident that there was something to this Ascension thing. He also has what he claims is a mathematically-rigorous "Universal Law", details of which are freely available and whose implications consign mere theories like Einstein's to the rubbish-bin of history. The more I read the more intrigued I became.
First off, Dr. Stankov informed us that he was an Ascended Master. Second, that he would be the first on earth to ascend, the kick-off date for which would begin on - you guessed it - 11-11-11. Stankov also ruled his site with an iron fist. Since it was his site, the democratic-process was non-existent, even though at first he said he was receptive to critical posts, this rarely proved to be the case in practice. Later on, any post he didn't like were deemed to be from internet-trolls working at the behest of the Archons/CIA/NSA etc. so were never posted. I particularly remember in the beginning a woman named "Ure" who was a prolific poster and as 'like-minded' as Stankov as he could possibly have wished for. They got along great together until there was a disagreement between them over something trivial, and Ure stopped posting. Well for months afterwards, Stankov went out of his way to belittle Ure at every opportunity, even though she had long since stopped posting there. He continued to visit her site though, because many months later I remember another of his condescending posts regarding something she had written, despite him being in complete agreement with it. This childish attitude of his was noted & commented on by several posters on his site. His response - as he was an Ascended Master, he didn't have Ego-issues, so the fault must lie with the posters who perceived his unadulterated honesty in this way! Remember, all of this was in 'The Beginning' from my standpoint. Later on, nobody dared criticise him for anything as he became increasingly less tolerant.
Anyone familiar with NA'ers will no doubt have guessed that much of their info comes from 'Channeled' material, and Georgi Stankov was no exception. He didn't channel himself, at first relying on messages from external sources, while also using his "Higher Self" to separate the wheat from the chaff. Later on, his channeled gems were produced 'in-house' by a couple of lady-channelers attracted to his site.
Having read his site almost daily for 2 years, I can say with some confidence that few people on the planet can have had as many failed predictions to their name as Georgi Stankov - dozens of them! These predictions were made wholly on the basis of channeled material, coupled with the discernment of Georgi's formidable Higher Self! Equally bizarre was Georgi's continued use of the words "proof" and "evidence" throughout regarding this information - this from a scientist! - especially when the passage of time was proving that it was nothing of the sort. Whereas valid predictions were non-existent, excuses were in abundance, as were the channeled messages which continued to roll in. But these failures didn't mollify his scathing comments about practically every other NA'er outside of his little circle in the slightest. In fact his posts towards them seemed to become increasingly vitriolic as time passed. I was fascinated by how someone as intelligent as Stankov could continually rationalise away these failures on the basis of still more of these absurd messages.
Needless to say, 11-11-11 came and went without the promised mystical predictions materialising - financial collapse, pole-shifts, Ascension etc. But the channeled excuses continued to roll in. When the NA'ers D-Day, December 21th 2012 came & went with ne'er an Ascension in sight, cracks were beginning to show. Initially he turned on his channelers. He then decided the "3-world" model that he talked about ad-nausea was wrong. I remember wondering at the time, how his enlightened sources could have gotten something so crucial, so wrong! Towards the end, the 3-world model had morphed into a dimensional-model, with new dimensions being added as stuff failed to materialise - eg. a pole-shift occurs in dimension 3, but since we have somehow ascended to dimension 5, we are not yet aware of it but would become so in time. As more time passed and nothing happened, more dimensions would be added, which resulted in us somehow 'outrunning' these calamities. I think we were finally up to 12 dimensions. He had also by this stage long since decided that rather than be first, he would now be last to Ascend. Hilarious.
Well, it finally seems that the penny has dropped with Georgi Stankov. Despite being a prolific poster - by his own admission, he used to spend 8-12 hours a day on his site - he hasn't posted in well over a week. He had threatened to cease & desist similarly several times over the past 2 years, but always resumed within a day or so. This apparently was brought about after his "twin-soul" Carla, one of his Channelers, and who if memory serves, is Canadian, had been told by her 'source' to join Georgi in Germany prior to the latest predicted 'imminent' date for Ascension/Pole-shift yada-yada - which she proceeded to do. So either Georgi is currently marshaling his forces as an Ascended master and getting ready to return and sort out the Earth for us like he had promised (so much for 'free-will') or he and Carla are sitting somewhere wondering how another prediction has gone awry...
Maybe it's time he finally honoured that promise he made to his wife to forget about this nonsense if by such-and-such a date nothing had happened - a date long since reached - and devote his time & energy to his family (who unsurprisingly are non-believers). That said, should he continue posting, I'll continue reading - if only to see how the next series of failures will be rationalised away. I'd also recommend he read a few books by Jacque Vallee and John Keel. Basically, the answer seems to be that there are no answers. Reality itself is irrational and no amount of rationalising will produce a satisfactory answer - a conclusion both authors also seemed to have arrived at. Personally, the notion that we may have been dreamed into existence by an all-powerful 'God' is as good a theory of reality as any.
PS: I originally came across channeled messages around 2009 but very quickly became disenchanted with the meaningless drivel most of them contained. Their predictive rating must also be close to zero, which is ironic if these are from 'enlightened' beings! I really grew to loathe Mike Quincey's prodigious output - 3 - 4 times a week! His 'Salusa' channel was particularly vile - much ado about nothing sums it up nicely. Normally 'Salusa' was a real fence-sitter - never making predictions. But twice he made predictions on my watch, or rather confirmations of some other channeler's predictions - both of which turned out to be wrong. One was the (in)famous October 14 2010 Landings that originated from Blossom Goodchild. The only 'channeled' information I ever gotten anything from was the Ra teachings that were channeled by Carla Rueckert. I have listened to this information (all 18 hours worth, converted with Natural Reader) at least a dozen times - good stuff!
Edit: Wow, some synchronicity! - 2 days after posting the above about 'Salusa', Mike Quincey is back to spite me! Since he had suffered a stroke, I felt sure it must have been someone else channeling 'Salusa', but no, it's Quincey all right - a link to his site. The fact that most of the NA'ers are joyfully applauding this news leaves me a mite depressed...
Edit: just checked Stankov's site (3 months on). One additional post - his final post it seems - way back in January titled "The Language Of Silence". A re-post as it happens, from sometime in 2012 when all of this nonsense seemed more real to him! It also sums him up perfectly, so if you never read another thing by him, read this. 'Ascended Master' material? I don't think so.
Edit: Georgi Stankov has finally flushed this turd - the web-site has gone!!! I make that about 5 months since his last 'real' post. I must admit, I used to enjoy reading his ravings, if only to pour scorn on them. RIP.
Edit: Haha, the flush failed apparently! - site is up again, but no new material.
Final Edit: OMG Georgi is back!!! He has actually been back for a while, over 3 months in fact, but since I hadn't checked out his site for ages, I only discovered this yesterday. And he's more deluded than ever! He has apparently now 'promoted' himself to the exalted position of "Logos-God" (I kid you not!) - 'cos the channeled sources told him he was one! He has also added another 3 failed Ascension-date predictions to his tally since he recommenced posting, the last of which is laced with the usual certitudes that time has once again proven to be wrong. Hilariously, he vents his frustration of these failures by blaming almost everything from the price of beer to the ineptness of the 'lightworkers' in his charge - yet not a word is said against the absurd channeled messages themselves. Intriguingly, he also seems to have abandoned Germany (and his family!) and is now shacked up with his 'always-wrong' channeler Carla (and "twin-soul" hehe) in Canada. But recently he had had to go back to Germany for a serious operation involving a tumor - which he admitted to having deliberately ignored on account of the then-pending Ascension dates - and got it into his head that this infirmity was actually a physical manifestation of the sins of Mankind itself, which needing to be atoned for, required intercession of a benevolent Logos-God such as himself! Honestly, I'm not making any of this up! Hell, he even invokes the crucifixion scenario when writing about this selfless act of his for us!!! As they say, you couldn't make this shit up! People have been committed to institutions for far less methinks. While first-class entertainment of sorts, there may also be the makings of a PhD thesis here, along the lines of how some people will try to rationalise almost anything to themselves. The fact that Georgi is back posting clearly shows how desperate he is to believe in this stuff, and apparently, part of that involves getting others to suspend reality and believe it too. A bit how religions are formed I suppose - deluded-individual -> ardent-believers -> zealous-cult -> despotic-religion. Way to go Georgi!
Final, final Edit: :) 2.5 years on, since this initial blog entry, it seems like Georgi Stankov has finally admitted defeat (my interpretation) and thrown in the towel. His 'final' post informs us that he is done posting at his site, after having been informed by the 'Elohim' that he has successfully completed his mission! Hmmm, if their definition of a success is making a gazillion predictions over the past 6 years, ALL of which failed to materialise - then yes, Georgi Stankov has been an outstanding success.
His penultimate post is the usual doom & gloom - global economic meltdown, followed by the mandatory Ascension scenario he so craves - but given that he has predicted the same thing so many times already, well, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this one either. After all, as a stopped clock is right twice a day, even Georgi must eventually get something right, or at least, not hopelessly wrong, as all of his other predictions have been. The corrupt global financial system will eventually implode, but that is not so much a prediction as a mathematical certainty - so no kudos go to Georgi on that one, as this has not only been predicted, but shown from past history to have occurred previously, by many others.
I will make a prediction though. I predict that if a financial meltdown, even a little one, does occur this year, Georgi will be back posting again! He even suggests as much in the closing of his final post, leaving the door open for his return should the cravings get too strong. This nonsense is a drug to him.
Final summing-up. Well, that didn't take long - as predicted, Stankov is back posting! He managed a whole 2 months before falling back off the wagon. As of early November 2016, he is back to his usual almost-daily ranting, having given no reason for his return. The guy is hopeless.
One of the topics most discussed among NA'ers is what is known as Ascension. Now most with a scientific mindset consider the idea absurd, and in general, so do I. Enter Georgi Stankov. Here was a scientist that spoke four languages, had considerable experience in the pharmacological sector, at least one pharmaceutical patent, and judging by his site, was supremely confident that there was something to this Ascension thing. He also has what he claims is a mathematically-rigorous "Universal Law", details of which are freely available and whose implications consign mere theories like Einstein's to the rubbish-bin of history. The more I read the more intrigued I became.
First off, Dr. Stankov informed us that he was an Ascended Master. Second, that he would be the first on earth to ascend, the kick-off date for which would begin on - you guessed it - 11-11-11. Stankov also ruled his site with an iron fist. Since it was his site, the democratic-process was non-existent, even though at first he said he was receptive to critical posts, this rarely proved to be the case in practice. Later on, any post he didn't like were deemed to be from internet-trolls working at the behest of the Archons/CIA/NSA etc. so were never posted. I particularly remember in the beginning a woman named "Ure" who was a prolific poster and as 'like-minded' as Stankov as he could possibly have wished for. They got along great together until there was a disagreement between them over something trivial, and Ure stopped posting. Well for months afterwards, Stankov went out of his way to belittle Ure at every opportunity, even though she had long since stopped posting there. He continued to visit her site though, because many months later I remember another of his condescending posts regarding something she had written, despite him being in complete agreement with it. This childish attitude of his was noted & commented on by several posters on his site. His response - as he was an Ascended Master, he didn't have Ego-issues, so the fault must lie with the posters who perceived his unadulterated honesty in this way! Remember, all of this was in 'The Beginning' from my standpoint. Later on, nobody dared criticise him for anything as he became increasingly less tolerant.
Anyone familiar with NA'ers will no doubt have guessed that much of their info comes from 'Channeled' material, and Georgi Stankov was no exception. He didn't channel himself, at first relying on messages from external sources, while also using his "Higher Self" to separate the wheat from the chaff. Later on, his channeled gems were produced 'in-house' by a couple of lady-channelers attracted to his site.
Having read his site almost daily for 2 years, I can say with some confidence that few people on the planet can have had as many failed predictions to their name as Georgi Stankov - dozens of them! These predictions were made wholly on the basis of channeled material, coupled with the discernment of Georgi's formidable Higher Self! Equally bizarre was Georgi's continued use of the words "proof" and "evidence" throughout regarding this information - this from a scientist! - especially when the passage of time was proving that it was nothing of the sort. Whereas valid predictions were non-existent, excuses were in abundance, as were the channeled messages which continued to roll in. But these failures didn't mollify his scathing comments about practically every other NA'er outside of his little circle in the slightest. In fact his posts towards them seemed to become increasingly vitriolic as time passed. I was fascinated by how someone as intelligent as Stankov could continually rationalise away these failures on the basis of still more of these absurd messages.
Needless to say, 11-11-11 came and went without the promised mystical predictions materialising - financial collapse, pole-shifts, Ascension etc. But the channeled excuses continued to roll in. When the NA'ers D-Day, December 21th 2012 came & went with ne'er an Ascension in sight, cracks were beginning to show. Initially he turned on his channelers. He then decided the "3-world" model that he talked about ad-nausea was wrong. I remember wondering at the time, how his enlightened sources could have gotten something so crucial, so wrong! Towards the end, the 3-world model had morphed into a dimensional-model, with new dimensions being added as stuff failed to materialise - eg. a pole-shift occurs in dimension 3, but since we have somehow ascended to dimension 5, we are not yet aware of it but would become so in time. As more time passed and nothing happened, more dimensions would be added, which resulted in us somehow 'outrunning' these calamities. I think we were finally up to 12 dimensions. He had also by this stage long since decided that rather than be first, he would now be last to Ascend. Hilarious.
Well, it finally seems that the penny has dropped with Georgi Stankov. Despite being a prolific poster - by his own admission, he used to spend 8-12 hours a day on his site - he hasn't posted in well over a week. He had threatened to cease & desist similarly several times over the past 2 years, but always resumed within a day or so. This apparently was brought about after his "twin-soul" Carla, one of his Channelers, and who if memory serves, is Canadian, had been told by her 'source' to join Georgi in Germany prior to the latest predicted 'imminent' date for Ascension/Pole-shift yada-yada - which she proceeded to do. So either Georgi is currently marshaling his forces as an Ascended master and getting ready to return and sort out the Earth for us like he had promised (so much for 'free-will') or he and Carla are sitting somewhere wondering how another prediction has gone awry...
Maybe it's time he finally honoured that promise he made to his wife to forget about this nonsense if by such-and-such a date nothing had happened - a date long since reached - and devote his time & energy to his family (who unsurprisingly are non-believers). That said, should he continue posting, I'll continue reading - if only to see how the next series of failures will be rationalised away. I'd also recommend he read a few books by Jacque Vallee and John Keel. Basically, the answer seems to be that there are no answers. Reality itself is irrational and no amount of rationalising will produce a satisfactory answer - a conclusion both authors also seemed to have arrived at. Personally, the notion that we may have been dreamed into existence by an all-powerful 'God' is as good a theory of reality as any.
PS: I originally came across channeled messages around 2009 but very quickly became disenchanted with the meaningless drivel most of them contained. Their predictive rating must also be close to zero, which is ironic if these are from 'enlightened' beings! I really grew to loathe Mike Quincey's prodigious output - 3 - 4 times a week! His 'Salusa' channel was particularly vile - much ado about nothing sums it up nicely. Normally 'Salusa' was a real fence-sitter - never making predictions. But twice he made predictions on my watch, or rather confirmations of some other channeler's predictions - both of which turned out to be wrong. One was the (in)famous October 14 2010 Landings that originated from Blossom Goodchild. The only 'channeled' information I ever gotten anything from was the Ra teachings that were channeled by Carla Rueckert. I have listened to this information (all 18 hours worth, converted with Natural Reader) at least a dozen times - good stuff!
Edit: Wow, some synchronicity! - 2 days after posting the above about 'Salusa', Mike Quincey is back to spite me! Since he had suffered a stroke, I felt sure it must have been someone else channeling 'Salusa', but no, it's Quincey all right - a link to his site. The fact that most of the NA'ers are joyfully applauding this news leaves me a mite depressed...
Edit: just checked Stankov's site (3 months on). One additional post - his final post it seems - way back in January titled "The Language Of Silence". A re-post as it happens, from sometime in 2012 when all of this nonsense seemed more real to him! It also sums him up perfectly, so if you never read another thing by him, read this. 'Ascended Master' material? I don't think so.
Edit: Georgi Stankov has finally flushed this turd - the web-site has gone!!! I make that about 5 months since his last 'real' post. I must admit, I used to enjoy reading his ravings, if only to pour scorn on them. RIP.
Edit: Haha, the flush failed apparently! - site is up again, but no new material.
Final Edit: OMG Georgi is back!!! He has actually been back for a while, over 3 months in fact, but since I hadn't checked out his site for ages, I only discovered this yesterday. And he's more deluded than ever! He has apparently now 'promoted' himself to the exalted position of "Logos-God" (I kid you not!) - 'cos the channeled sources told him he was one! He has also added another 3 failed Ascension-date predictions to his tally since he recommenced posting, the last of which is laced with the usual certitudes that time has once again proven to be wrong. Hilariously, he vents his frustration of these failures by blaming almost everything from the price of beer to the ineptness of the 'lightworkers' in his charge - yet not a word is said against the absurd channeled messages themselves. Intriguingly, he also seems to have abandoned Germany (and his family!) and is now shacked up with his 'always-wrong' channeler Carla (and "twin-soul" hehe) in Canada. But recently he had had to go back to Germany for a serious operation involving a tumor - which he admitted to having deliberately ignored on account of the then-pending Ascension dates - and got it into his head that this infirmity was actually a physical manifestation of the sins of Mankind itself, which needing to be atoned for, required intercession of a benevolent Logos-God such as himself! Honestly, I'm not making any of this up! Hell, he even invokes the crucifixion scenario when writing about this selfless act of his for us!!! As they say, you couldn't make this shit up! People have been committed to institutions for far less methinks. While first-class entertainment of sorts, there may also be the makings of a PhD thesis here, along the lines of how some people will try to rationalise almost anything to themselves. The fact that Georgi is back posting clearly shows how desperate he is to believe in this stuff, and apparently, part of that involves getting others to suspend reality and believe it too. A bit how religions are formed I suppose - deluded-individual -> ardent-believers -> zealous-cult -> despotic-religion. Way to go Georgi!
Final, final Edit: :) 2.5 years on, since this initial blog entry, it seems like Georgi Stankov has finally admitted defeat (my interpretation) and thrown in the towel. His 'final' post informs us that he is done posting at his site, after having been informed by the 'Elohim' that he has successfully completed his mission! Hmmm, if their definition of a success is making a gazillion predictions over the past 6 years, ALL of which failed to materialise - then yes, Georgi Stankov has been an outstanding success.
His penultimate post is the usual doom & gloom - global economic meltdown, followed by the mandatory Ascension scenario he so craves - but given that he has predicted the same thing so many times already, well, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this one either. After all, as a stopped clock is right twice a day, even Georgi must eventually get something right, or at least, not hopelessly wrong, as all of his other predictions have been. The corrupt global financial system will eventually implode, but that is not so much a prediction as a mathematical certainty - so no kudos go to Georgi on that one, as this has not only been predicted, but shown from past history to have occurred previously, by many others.
I will make a prediction though. I predict that if a financial meltdown, even a little one, does occur this year, Georgi will be back posting again! He even suggests as much in the closing of his final post, leaving the door open for his return should the cravings get too strong. This nonsense is a drug to him.
Final summing-up. Well, that didn't take long - as predicted, Stankov is back posting! He managed a whole 2 months before falling back off the wagon. As of early November 2016, he is back to his usual almost-daily ranting, having given no reason for his return. The guy is hopeless.
27 October 2013
Iomega Zip 250 drive.
I bought one of these around 1998-99. It came with four 250meg disks, and I bought one other disk some time later - for a ludicrous £14.99, what was I thinking! I made the mistake of getting the parallel-port model, mainly because I also had an Atari ST (still have!) and figured that someone would eventually produce a Zip driver for it. I figured wrong - turns out that Atari in an effort to save a few pennies engineered a non-standard parallel-port, omitting some crucial signals required by the zip-drive. Anyway, the zip-drive got practically no use.
Recently I dug it out again, having almost forgotten about it. The only real use it had ever been was in getting software/videos I had downloaded at work (so free internet!) onto my home computer - so it had been lying unused for at least 10 years. Hooking it up again, I was disappointed to find that none of the disks were readable. Given that the disks are very robust physically and were practically unused, I reasoned that it was probably dirty heads, so cracked open the drive, as much out of curiosity than any thing else. The 'head' is microscopic and definitely not designed for manual cleaning. Suffice it to say, I eventually managed to get the drive to read all but one of the disks simply by repeatedly trying to read them. Unfortunately I managed to get a single file of a few megs off of them. The rest (mostly Seinfeld episodes) would supply a few megs before throwing up an 'unreadable' error. After that the infamous "click of death" associated with the zip-drive took on a new meaning - it's hugely irritating!
Anyway, the one disk that refused to be read or format (click... click... click... ARGHHH!!) caused me to hit on the idea of trying to wipe it with a very strong neodymium magnet. And it worked, well it certainly put an end to the click-of-death, and... nothing - it refused to format, produce an error, nothing, just silence - I was intrigued, so went investigating.
Undoubtedly the best source of technical information on zip drives is available at the Gibson Research Corporation web-site. I was already familiar with this site as it provides a great free way of checking your firewall. Well this guy also provides non-free drive backup/recovery software, including for the zip-drives when they were in vogue. He also has probably delved deeper into problems associated with zip-drives that anyone on the planet, even providing a software tool to diagnose problems, and which is now free and available here. Note that you will have to temporarily set your computer clock back a couple of years as the software will not run after the year 2010. It also would not work on XP, which was a surprise - maybe SP3 was to blame. It works fine with Win98 though, which I have kept around mainly for formatting double-density (as opposed to high-density) floppy disks, something XP won't even attempt.
This tool is very useful, although very slow in operation. It scans the entire disk, which for 250 meg disks takes about 4 hours! The results are also slightly confusing. The one disk I scanned completely was found to have hundreds of 'read' errors, dozens of 'soft' errors (no 'hard' errors) and diagnosed along the lines of "There is something seriously wrong with this disk". Thing is, files could be read & written to this disk perfectly, its whole 250megs, and before & after running the test, with no errors being produced.
The one thing it provided definite insights into was the disk I had wiped with the magnet. Here it spat it out of the drive almost immediately, saying that the drive had reported that it could find none of the four "Z-tracks", which rendered the drive unusable. Much worse, Mr Gibson said he had also back in the day contacted multiple Iomega engineers about this and was assured that it was impossible to re-create these 'Z-tracks' via the zip-drive.
This really sucks. Why engineer something with obsolescence built-in, that absolutely and positively WILL be rendered unusable in time. When these software-formatted 'Z-tracks' degrade magnetically to the point that they become unreadable, the disks WILL become unusable. Even after 'just' 15 years, my five disks are almost there already given the trouble I have had reading/reformatting them. This must have been a deliberate policy on the part of Iomega, an attempt to insure a regular income stream from new disk sales. They could just as easily have allowed the drive to create these 'Z-tracks'.
And there are still people actively selling zip disks on eBay and elsewhere. Given that most of them were manufactured over 10 years ago, buying them would seem a very risky venture.
One thing is certain, had I known about this back in 1998, I would never have bought a zip-drive. I am pretty disgusted with Iomega.
Recently I dug it out again, having almost forgotten about it. The only real use it had ever been was in getting software/videos I had downloaded at work (so free internet!) onto my home computer - so it had been lying unused for at least 10 years. Hooking it up again, I was disappointed to find that none of the disks were readable. Given that the disks are very robust physically and were practically unused, I reasoned that it was probably dirty heads, so cracked open the drive, as much out of curiosity than any thing else. The 'head' is microscopic and definitely not designed for manual cleaning. Suffice it to say, I eventually managed to get the drive to read all but one of the disks simply by repeatedly trying to read them. Unfortunately I managed to get a single file of a few megs off of them. The rest (mostly Seinfeld episodes) would supply a few megs before throwing up an 'unreadable' error. After that the infamous "click of death" associated with the zip-drive took on a new meaning - it's hugely irritating!
Anyway, the one disk that refused to be read or format (click... click... click... ARGHHH!!) caused me to hit on the idea of trying to wipe it with a very strong neodymium magnet. And it worked, well it certainly put an end to the click-of-death, and... nothing - it refused to format, produce an error, nothing, just silence - I was intrigued, so went investigating.
Undoubtedly the best source of technical information on zip drives is available at the Gibson Research Corporation web-site. I was already familiar with this site as it provides a great free way of checking your firewall. Well this guy also provides non-free drive backup/recovery software, including for the zip-drives when they were in vogue. He also has probably delved deeper into problems associated with zip-drives that anyone on the planet, even providing a software tool to diagnose problems, and which is now free and available here. Note that you will have to temporarily set your computer clock back a couple of years as the software will not run after the year 2010. It also would not work on XP, which was a surprise - maybe SP3 was to blame. It works fine with Win98 though, which I have kept around mainly for formatting double-density (as opposed to high-density) floppy disks, something XP won't even attempt.
This tool is very useful, although very slow in operation. It scans the entire disk, which for 250 meg disks takes about 4 hours! The results are also slightly confusing. The one disk I scanned completely was found to have hundreds of 'read' errors, dozens of 'soft' errors (no 'hard' errors) and diagnosed along the lines of "There is something seriously wrong with this disk". Thing is, files could be read & written to this disk perfectly, its whole 250megs, and before & after running the test, with no errors being produced.
The one thing it provided definite insights into was the disk I had wiped with the magnet. Here it spat it out of the drive almost immediately, saying that the drive had reported that it could find none of the four "Z-tracks", which rendered the drive unusable. Much worse, Mr Gibson said he had also back in the day contacted multiple Iomega engineers about this and was assured that it was impossible to re-create these 'Z-tracks' via the zip-drive.
This really sucks. Why engineer something with obsolescence built-in, that absolutely and positively WILL be rendered unusable in time. When these software-formatted 'Z-tracks' degrade magnetically to the point that they become unreadable, the disks WILL become unusable. Even after 'just' 15 years, my five disks are almost there already given the trouble I have had reading/reformatting them. This must have been a deliberate policy on the part of Iomega, an attempt to insure a regular income stream from new disk sales. They could just as easily have allowed the drive to create these 'Z-tracks'.
And there are still people actively selling zip disks on eBay and elsewhere. Given that most of them were manufactured over 10 years ago, buying them would seem a very risky venture.
One thing is certain, had I known about this back in 1998, I would never have bought a zip-drive. I am pretty disgusted with Iomega.
26 October 2013
CMTech LiveMusic CA-F200 MP3 player.
I bought this little 1gig MP3 player almost 10 years ago and apart from the ear-phones that came with it, (which were absolute crap!) it gets five-of-five stars from me. The quoted 50-hour playback time is a joke by the way - with a 2800mAh rechargeable AA battery and at moderate volume, you are lucky to get 30 hours, never mind 50. With the radio going, you would be even luckier to get 8-10 hours. Much less when recording from the radio.
Before anyone thinks that alkaline batteries would fare better, question - off the top of your head, what is the capacity of say, a Duracell Alkaline AA cell? Most of us have been brainwashed into believing that Alkaline batteries are heavy-duty, longer-lasting etc. Yet not one Alkaline battery maker states the battery capacity on the cell itself - why do you think that is? The reason is that Alkaline battery performance is heavily dependent on the load that they are powering. In fact for heavy load applications, alkaline's seriously under-perform almost any rechargeable-type, even old Nickel-cadmium batteries. They perform much better when powering loads in the 10's of milliamps, a AA delivering around a 4500mAh performance - so not any better than the best NiMH's. Yet all the hype (especially around Christmas) would tend to suggest otherwise! But I digress. [Edit: (2.5 years on) Dunno what I was thinking when I wrote this - I had NiMH batteries down as 4800mAh capacity, instead of 2800mAh. If a new Alkaline can deliver 4500mAh, then in theory, it should last almost twice as long as a high-capacity 2800mAh NiMH battery! Sigh.]
One thing that has been bugging me for years with this MP3 player was the way it would power off unexpectedly when it received a jolt. Recently it had got so bad that I resolved to get to the root of the problem. But opening it proved a bit of a nightmare. Its innards are after-all enclosed in an aluminum tube and I could see no way of removing either of the plastic ends, so in frustration, levered off one, breaking stuff in the process. It turns out that there are 2 tiny screws holding on one of the ends, which are accessible and visible (barely!) when the battery is removed, and with the right screw-driver.
Fixing the powering-off proved simple, just cleaning & re-tensioning a type of leaf-spring contact that it uses. Putting it back together, after having first used Araldite to repair the opening-damage, proved easy enough, but only to discover that one of the buttons no longer worked. Opened again, the reason was obvious - the 'switches' form part of the plastic enclosure case and one of them had cracked off, quickly followed by another as I inspected things. Not new damage as it turned out, both were the 2 most-used switches and their repeated-flexing was the killer, so the others will almost certainly succumb similarly given time and usage. Using more Araldite I managed to at least get them working again but something like Evostik would have been a much more sensible way to go, if I had had any.
Back together again, I next noticed that recording from the built-in 'Mic' no longer worked, it defaulting to the 'line-in' connector instead. Recording from the radio worked fine. Opened it again, but nothing obvious was amiss. In retrospect, I now think that this may have stopped working a long time ago, as it's something I never check, let alone use. But then I wondered if it might be a software problem.
The company (CMtech) itself seems to have gone out of business, with its web-site having vanished. I had bookmarked its software download page, which for posterity may be seen here via the Wayback web-archive, although its software download links are no longer working. Anyway, I still have the software for my device, so updated its firmware, but all for naught. It was while doing this I managed to effectively kill the device completely, with it no longer even being detected by the computer. This was a first, it looked real bad...
Then when I had all but given up hope I accidentally discovered a way of reviving it! Hold the power-button down while you plug it into the computers USB port. Doing this causes the computer to detect a never-before-seen "Sigmatel" device, which XP then diagnoses as being a "Player Recovery" device, and succeeds in installing a driver for it. The "Sigmatel" device then vanishes to be replaced with the MP3 Player device I.D again. Hurray!!!
Since the software is no longer available online, I've uploaded the firmware for my device (CA-F200) which may be downloaded from the below links. There are two applications, the big one installs on the computer and allows customisation of the device from the computer, as well as flashing of the 'old' firmware version. The other was the latest firmware, whose major enhancement was the ability of recording from the radio as an MP3 file.
CA-F200 Firmware
Edit:
The less-than-stellar performance of the Ruizo X06 prompted me to do some battery-endurance tests on the CMTech by way of comparison. I was particularly interested in the radio-side, both while being listen-to and being recorded-from, something I'd never done properly before.
As the power source, I was using Eneloop (2nd gen) 1900mAh AA batteries. These beauties deserve an article in themselves - they are superb batteries! I bought a set of 4 about 5 years ago, along with a set of 4 Varta Power Accu 2800mAh rechargeables. Back then, using an AcuPower IQ-328 charger, I tested both, and was amazed at the stable, reproducable results I got from the Eneloop batteries. Naturally, they all performed to spec, each coming in close, but always greater than the stated "1900mAh minimum". The Varta's also performed close to spec, but from the get-go, their results always varied by a wide margin with the above charger. Sometimes they would only take a fraction of their expected charge, before indicating "Full" on the charger, other times they'd take far more than their capacity, but when tested immediately, the results would vary a lot, and usually to the down-side. Today, after having undergone maybe 50 charge-cycles, and certainly less than 100, the Varta's are already toast, all delivering capacities between 500 - 1000mAh. The Eneloop batteries on the other hand, with at least the same number of charge-cycles, are still coming in at spec - like I said, really excellent batteries!
But I digress. I did three separate runs with the CMTech CA-F200, volume-level set at 12 (of 30). It ran for the following times before powering-off;
Playback only: 32 hours.
Radio only: 21 hours.
Radio being recorded @ mp3 64kbs: 8 hours.
The radio-only time especially surprised me. This comes in at twice the stated radio-time of the Ruizu X06 (or the AGPtek A06 rather - Ruizu's quoted-times are a joke!) which is a proper stereo-signal, and not the pissy mono-signal delivered by the Ruizu! Hell, the radio-record figure of the CMTech is almost as good as the Ruizu's radio-only time. It would be too depressing to go testing the Ruizu's radio-record time. The CMTech's playback-only time of 32 hours is also very impressive. Considering that this is from batteries with a known, measured capacity of 1900mAh, it now seems quite feasable that this little player could indeed achieve a figure close to the 50 hours-playback claimed by the manufacturer - a figure I ridiculed above! Truth is, I have never tested this with alkaline batteries, whose capacities are supposed to be significantly higher than the 1900mAh that the Eneloop's deliver. But, never say never - I might do it yet!
If nothing else, this testing has re-affirmed to me what a great little player the CMTech CA-F200 really is. When compared to the Ruizu X06, its firmware is better in nearly every respect. The one thing missing from it is a 'Bookmark' option, something the Ruizu has, although it's a poor imitation of what a proper bookmarking option ought to be. It's a shame the company behind the CMTech went bust. Sob.
23 October 2013
Text-to-speech Helper...
I convert a LOT of ebooks to audio files with the commercial application Natural Reader. The work involved depends on the ebook, but at a minimum, additional punctuation is essential to stop chapter-headings running into the text following. Very often a lot more needs doing, like removing super/sub-script bookmarks, hypens (which result in a disconcerting pause with NR) page numbers, or even multiple repeated headings themselves.
TTS Helper was originally written (in Delphi) just as a means of removing hyphens & superscript, but has been added to quite a bit over the years, usually when another 'difficult' ebook-conversion was encountered. The one thing it sorely needs is a proper Undo/Redo option. It had one, but the Delphi component used proved to be uber slow, so was removed. I'm awaiting inspiration on that one! It also has quite a few bugs, not all of which are mine! One particularly vexing one involves the M$ rich-text 2 component itself which can lock up when loading text containing 'newer' text features like Unicode. If/when this happens and loading still hasn't completed after a minute or so, a forced-close & restart is the only solution. You have been warned ;)
TTS Helper (v1.9.8)
TTS Helper was originally written (in Delphi) just as a means of removing hyphens & superscript, but has been added to quite a bit over the years, usually when another 'difficult' ebook-conversion was encountered. The one thing it sorely needs is a proper Undo/Redo option. It had one, but the Delphi component used proved to be uber slow, so was removed. I'm awaiting inspiration on that one! It also has quite a few bugs, not all of which are mine! One particularly vexing one involves the M$ rich-text 2 component itself which can lock up when loading text containing 'newer' text features like Unicode. If/when this happens and loading still hasn't completed after a minute or so, a forced-close & restart is the only solution. You have been warned ;)
TTS Helper (v1.9.8)
19 October 2013
A tribute To Limerick's 'Big L Radio'.
A tribute To Limerick's 'Big L' pirate-radio station of the 80's.
My first 'real' job was in De Beers, Shannon Industrial Estate. Given that only the living-dead chose to stay in Shannon itself (hehe!) I had myself a bedsit in Limerick, taking the bus to & from Shannon each day. I still recall being eager to get home from work so I could tune into pirate station Big L's 'Listeners Top 10', catching perhaps the final half-hour (5.30 - 6.00pm) if CIE was doing its job. Yep, I was a big Big L fan back then, thinking "wow,this station is really cool!" when I first discovered it. In fact, I never realised that it was a pirate-station until recently! For the uninformed, Big L broadcasted in Limerick on both AM and FM from 1978 - 1985.
They did things that the likes of RTE, who had a virtual monopoly in broadcasting back then, would (could?) never do - 1.5 hours of back-to-back recordings by the same artist, or a listeners personal Top 10 being the ones I remember most.
Anyway, I liked what I was hearing at the time, and ended up recording a couple of audio cassettes worth of material during my stay in Limerick in 1984 - tapes I still have and listen to occasionally. Given that they're almost 30 years old now and have been played 100's of times, I thought it was about time that I digitised them for posterity. And then thought that there are probably a few people out there that feel nostalgic about this kind of stuff as well and would be interested in hearing some of the DJ's again, not to mention some cool music!
The bad news, although recorded from their FM stereo signal, back then I only had an old single-speaker radio-cassette player that had been discarded by my sister - so it's mono-only I'm afraid. They are encoded in the open-source 'ogg' format, codecs for which are freely available here if your setup doesn't already have them. Each file is about 45 minutes long (C90 cassettes) and close to 25meg in size.
I should add that I came across a site dedicated to Big L here - which was a surprise! - although it considers other pirate Big L's as well, the grand-daddy of them having been an off-shore pirate broadcasting to London which shut down in 1967. These audio files are perhaps more suited to a site like that rather than a blog, but its Contact information field is empty... Anyway, I 'borrowed' the Big L logo above from that site which I hope he won't mind.
Edit:
Finally got the rest of the tapes done. Please note that there's about 10min of non-relevant stuff on Tape 2. I thought about editing it out but decided to leave it as it is.
Big L Radio Tapes (Google Drive folder)
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