Micca MPLAY media player

I bought this Media player, primarily for the dual-use in Car as well as Home. It is value for money, can play from SD card and from USB stick/hdd.

It can play the following specs.

	File Type	Video Codec	Audio Codec	Notes
Video	*.AVI	MPEG4, DivX, Xvid	MP3, AAC, PCM	720 x 576 Max
	*.MP4, *.MOV	MPEG4	AAC, OGG
	*.VOB (DVD)	MPEG2	MPEG, PCM
	*.MPG, *.DAT	MPEG1/2	MPEG MP3
	*.RMVB, *.RM	RealVideo	RealVideo, AAC, MP3	1024 x 576 Max
	*.3GP	MPEG4	AAC	640 x 480 Max
Audio	*.MP3		MPEG Layer-3	32kbps-320kbps
	*.WMA		Windows Media Audio	32kbps-192kbps
Photo	*.JPG, *.GIF *.BMP, *.PNG			JPG 7800 x 5280 Max

Here are some quirks.
1. The format selection is based on the extension, so one needs to save the file as correct extension to read the file properly.
2. The player seems to slow down due to some reason, especially with Xvid codecs.

I use a Handbrake to transcode the video files to the right codec the player can play.

Quick reference: Audio and Video Commands in Linux (Ubuntu)

Extract audio from a movie and save as mp3
ffmpeg -i input.avi -vn -acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 256k -ac 2 output.mp3

Extract to wav file:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 output.wav

More info:
http://howto-pages.org/ffmpeg/

Electrolux fridge freezer fan motor replacement

We took a vacation for 10 days and decided to keep our fridge switched off. We were back, switched on the fridge and got a burning smell after a while. Found that the fan in the freezer was not working. Since it was a Saturday late evening and the service call would not happen until Monday, I decided to give it a try to fix myself. I opened up the freezer back plane and found that the fan motor was indeed not working. Took it out and the next day set out in search of a replacement motor. Went to SP road (The place in Bangalore for all electronics/computer spares) and found most shops closed being Sunday. Enquired at a few places and got to know that I need to look at Chikpet for electrical appliance replacement parts. Headed to Chikpet and enquired in a few electrical shops and got to know that one Prakash Electricals stocks the replacement motors. To my dismay, I found the shop closed and was about to leave. After a few strolls, found another Prakash stores and the small shop indeed had the motor. It didn't looked as good as the original one, but the dimensions matched. I was worried about the rotation direction of the motor, the shopkeeper assured me that all Freezer fan motors have standard direction.


Got back home and replaced the motor in no time and was happy that it worked. But something was wrong, the bottom section was not cooling enough. Since the original fan was not working, I did not know which direction the fan should run. After careful looking, it seemed the direction of the motor was reverse. The fan should blow air into the freezer from behind (the cooling coils), but the new fan motor was blowing warm air into the cooling fins. Since it is an AC motor, reversing the terminals won't change the rotor direction. Disappointed, I decided to call in for service and put the old motor back. But later, I thought why don't reverse the rotor, so that it turns opposite direction. The motor assembly was simple and allowed me to change the rotor orientation. Put the motor back and the fan now works correctly. Though the replacement motor is a bit weak and I am not sure how long it would work.
 
Here are some pictures:

Freezer's back plane removed. The fan motor is mounted on the back plane and has channels for air circulation. The square cavity on the top is where the fan draws air from.

Old motor. Had markings MSP63S 10mm Motor.

 New motor in place. The rotor doesn't rotate as smoothly as the old one. The rotor is exposed.

Electrolux 235L (EKL 235FF) wiring diagram

This is the second time our Fridge needed repair, after close to 8 years of purchase. First, it was the defrost timer that failed and had to replace.

Royaltek RBT2300

I had purchased the Royaltek RBT2300 GPS logger sometime in 2008 and have been using it during my driving trips. This performs reliably well and thought of writing something about it.

Basically, this is a GPS receiver with bluetooth module that allows one to pair a Mobile/PDA/PC and get the GPS data in NMEA format. It has a logger function also that stores the GPS data in its internal flash memory at regular (configurable) intervals. The storage is huge and it has never ran out of memory even with 10-12 hours of logging (5s interval).

Issues that i have found.

• When downloading the GPS data from the device on the same day, the last portion of the data would not come out. If I log some seconds on next day and then try again, I would get the whole data for the previous day without any issue.
• If I switch off the device during some breaks in the trip, the logging gets screwed  up. The continuety is lost sometimes.

Some tips for usage.

• While on a trip, connect the device to the car adapter and never switch off till the end of the trip.
• 5 second logging seems to be reliable and anything less can cause issue for long trips.
• Wait for a day and log a few seconds in open sky (GPS lock) and they download the data for previous trip.

Microsoft PowerToys equivalent

I have been using Microsoft PowerToys since Windows 95. Was really surprised to know that Windows 7 doesn't support the old Powertoys. I was missing SendToX  - the most coolest among them. Also the 'Command Prompt Here...' menu. After a few mins of search on the web found a compatible/equivalent software: http://www.gabrieleponti.com/software/#sendtotoys

My new laptop

Trying out Windows 7 on my new Dell Latitude 6410. A few crashes in the beginning, things are stable now. Trying to find what's in for the developers.

PostScript file for cross platform printing?

I had a tough time printing the PCB layout correctly that I designed using EAGLE software. I designed the PCB on my home PC running Ubuntu 10.4 and printed to a PS file. The plan was to print the board to a magazine paper for toner transfer, on my office printer. So I emailed the PS file to my work address and printed from Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.1. Got my first surprise, the print is actually a slightly scaled down replica, may be 90% of the original. I realized this late after going home and verifying with the actual component that I had. But isn't the postscript (or pdf) file supposed to be hardware independent and vendor neutral? That was my assumption.

I tried various experiments - at my home PC, viewed the PS file at 100% scale and it matched the SMD component pads on screen (I placed the SMD IC on the screen to compare). I repeated the same with my office PC and it also matched. So, while printing something is going wrong. Again at office PC, I used PDF Writer software to print to a PDF file and then print to the Xerox printer, but it also was 90% size. Over the weekend I searched some information online and somewhere I read that PDF prints are not reliable across PCs. Suggestion was to install Eagle in Host PC for printing. Not very convincing.
Came to office on Monday and tried to scale up the print to 110% to get a match. To my surprise the image was way too big - may be 125% of the original. Now I am really stumped. Got the feeling that it was the ADOBE that was screwing up. Just to confirm, I sent the ps file directly to the printer job queue, and it came fine - at actual size! So the PS file was fine, so was the printer. But I doubt Adobe being professional cannot commit such error.

More thoughts and I wanted to try out once more. I have a dual monitor setup at office - both screens having different resolutions. I know that many software have difficulty in working with dual mon setup. Maybe Adobe is one. So I disconnected my external monitor and printed from the PC using Adobe. There you go. The print looks fine! So not a good idea to have dual monitor setup while printing from Adobe.
Lastly, it could be the printer driver also. Since the PS file is handled by the printer driver before sending to the printer, may be its trying to fix the resolution.

Now let me get back to etching!

So, back to the point - postscript file is indeed hardware independent and vendor neutral, just that some software in the chain can cause problems.

Cleaning the Creative SBS15 volume control

I had these cute little speakers for my Desktop for years, exactly for the last ten years. These sounds pretty good for its size and is pretty clear over the volume range. Off late, the volume control started behaving odd due to the carbon build up on the potentiometer. I wanted to open the speaker and clean the pot, but could not find any screws at the back. I even thought that the front and back speaker faces are glued together and tried to break it with a screwdriver from the bottom. Suddenly it struck me that there could be some screws on the front, and it was true. Opened the front grill and found four screws. Opened it and voila, cleaned the pot in 5 mins with Iso propyl alchohol and a syringe. The speakers are back to its sweet sound!

Disconnect the speakers. Use a pointed screwdriver to open the grill slowly.

Remove all the four screws

Find the potentiometer (the brown circular thing)

Use a syringe to pour isopropyl alcohol to the small opening at the side. Rotate the volume control a few times to clear the pot.

Regex power

I've been hooked to regex for a couple of days now and getting to know the real power of it. I wish that I had tried this years ago.

And the coolest one is this one which I just figured out. Change the date format from DD/MM/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY and vice versa (assuming date is the first field in the line).

Search: ^{[0-9]*}/{[0-9]*}
Replace: \2/\1

I did this in MS VC.Net 2003 editor, and as far, its supports regex well.

PDFCreator

I have been using the PDFCreator for long time. It helps converting any documents to a PDF file with ease. But this creates just plain PDF with no links or bookmarks (document map as in Microsoft Word). I disparately needed to include the bookmarks in one of the huge document ( >1000 pages) and I came across Word to PDF pluggin for Word, called as PDF-T-Maker

It converts the word document into an intermediate format, containing the bookmarks, comments, links and routes to the PS converter.

Disabling zip folder integration in Windows XP

After I got my new laptop which had new XP installation , I found that the Windows Explorer being slow to update at times, especially expanding the folder in the tree view. Figured it out that the built in zip support was slowing things up, I decided to disable the feature. To disable, simply unregister the component:
regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll

Widescreen hassles

The new format of the computer monitors and laptops are definitely good for watching movies, but not at all for regular web browsing. The increase in real estate can be better utilized by having two documents opened side by side and could improve some productivity. But the web pages in wide screen mode is annoying. I was searching for a tool which limits the browser window to be maximized only to 1024 pixels wide. Fooled around with msdn and thought that SetWindowPlacement would do the trick, but I was mistaken. Apparently it doesn't work with the explorer shell and the documentation doesn't say so. i found that there is another way that is handled by the individual applications. Each application can specify its maximized size. The message to handle is WM_GETMINMAXINFO. I would need to install a message hook to get into the application and handle for each of them. Still not clear whether its worth the try.

My Shares

I was back to my WIN32 programming days after a break. Reason being that I wanted to have an easy way of inserting a link to a local shared folder into the email message. For long I've been using a signature which contains only the NETBIOS machine name (these corporate machine names are long and difficult to remember) and would insert it and then complete the path by typing in the folder name. Wish I had a tray applet that would show the list of shared folders and allow me to copy the path to clipboard. Couldn't resist waiting more and after 2 hours of meddling around with MSDN help a tiny WTL app was up and running.
It was not very hard, but finding the right API's was a bit challenging. And then I was stuck at some conversion functions.
Here's are the main functions that I chose:
NetShareEnum - Gives the list of shared resources on a given machine
wcstombs - To convert wide str to mcbs (NetShareEnum returns wide str)
OpenClipboard, EmptyClipboard, SetClipboardData, CloseClipboard- For clipboard operations
GetAsyncKeyState - Status of shift key

Removing labels from VSS

If you had accidentally created a label for any items (file of directory), you can remove it by viewing the label from the item history, and deleting the label text. Close the dialog after confirmation and the label is removed. The changes would be affected globally irrespective of the item for which the label was modified.

Share data among processes through DLLs

I ran across this problem wherein I had to notify a process of an event which is triggered by another process through a DLL. Well, more precicely, the first process would invoke (this is an event) an exported function of the DLL and this function has to notify another process about this event. Now, this function could simply post a message to the main window of the second process, if it has a handle to it. Storing this handle is the problem. One obvious solution is to declare a static data in the dll and let the second process 'register' for notification by passing its window handle. Once it is stored, subsequent notifications are easy - just call PostMessage with this hwnd parameter. But there is a caveat. Eventhough DLL's map their code into the memory of each processes, it has separate instance for globals and static variables. Now these static members will be initialised separately for each processes when the DLL is loaded, which defeates the above method of sharing the window handle. There is a solution, atleast in MSVC environment. Create a named data-section in the dll code and place the data to be shared in it.

#pragma data_seg (".sharedseg")
HWND hNotifyWnd;
#pragma data_seg()

And give the linker option: /SECTION:.sharedseg,RWS

Logon Notification events under Windows

While working on the PSP program, I wanted to have a mechanism where to get notifications when the computer is locked and unlocked. Initially I thought that there would be some windows notification messages sent to every windows, but it was not the case. There is something called Windows Notification Package, which fecilitates the logon events for an application. All you need is to create a dll with required export functions (each function for Lock, Unlock, Logon,...) and create some registry entries. Now, this is a service of the Winlogon process, which is the main process started after the boot sequence. It is the Winlogon process that displays the SAS dialog. The registry key need to be created under:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify
Once the registry entries and dll are in place, the Windows need to be restarted. Apparently the Winlogon creates a list of notification functions at startup and debugging becomes a pain since the dll is locked by the process.