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.

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.

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)

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)