Weblog
Stream of consciousness from the minds of es
A Quick Note
Monday, June 22, 2009
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Just wanted to let you know we're still alive and kick'n. The last 4 months have been pretty crazy around here. My Wife and I unexpectedly bought a house after our landlord decided he wanted to sell the house we were renting. We found a house after an intense 3 months of looking and moved in just 2 days, with some major help from our friends, about 3 weeks ago. To top that off, my Wife is also 9 months pregnant. :) We spent the last several nights working on patching cracks in the plaster in our nursery so we can get it painted and set up in time; we're down to the wire here! :) Wade has also been staying quite busy has well with his new little one who is going on 6 months old. We are truly trying to wrap up a beta of Bookit 4, but as you can see, we've been busy so it's taking longer than we'd like. Thanks for your patience. cheers, will
comments posted at 11:29 PM
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A Little Audio Hackery
Monday, January 12, 2009
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Hi All, Well, I just wanted to share a bit of nerd fun I had tonight. For Christmas I received a Griffin TuneCenter Pro (whew, that's quite the name). I've been pining for a way to navigate my iPod on my TV and until now have been too cheap to buy anything. Well, the TuneCenter has been discontinued (rightfully so it turns out) so instead of being $130 dollars it was $17. I read reviews saying it was terrible but I decided to risk it. I told my step brother I wanted one and he delivered. :) I hooked it up and all was great until I was listening to some Radiohead at moderate volume and noticed some distortion in the song "Videotape". If you're unfamiliar with the song, the piano is quite dynamic as the track itself is very quiet. When the piano played, it distorted badly. I wasn't sure if I was imagining this problem or not, so I plugged my iPod directly into my stereo and presto, no distortion. I was bummed, but not surprised as I'd read the TuneCenter has problems with audio distortion and general audio issues. Griffin may have bit off a bit more than they could handle with this project, which is probably why it's dead. :) I removed the dock from my system and threw it in my computer junk drawer...oh well I thought. That leads us to today. I went to work and told my co-workers about the problems with the dock but that got me thinking. What if I cracked it open and by-passed the audio processing of the dock and just ran the iPod output audio signal directly to my stereo. I would loose the ability to stream music from the dock but I doubt I'd ever use that feature anyway so no loss. I'd have to solder wires to the dock connector audio out inside the case but it seemed like it might be doable. What's the worse that could happen, it could end up back in my junk drawer. :) Tonight I dissected the dock and found the audio out from the dock connector. It was running through the PCB out the bottom side where the left/right channels were connected to a couple of resistors. The ground was also in the same general area and had a couple through holes I could solder onto. I broke the original 1/8" pin output jack off and ran a new 1/8" jack out the back and ran the lead wire through the old hole. A bit of splicing tiny wires and I had a new 1/8" output jack soldered to the PCB board. I then de-soldered the left/right resistors to disconnect the audio signal path from the TuneCenter so the dock pins now go directly to the 1/8" output I routed through the back. I hooked it back up to my stereo and success. No more distortion! Turns out I might end up with my on-screen navigation after all. :) This has been a night in the life of an audio junkie and a nerd. :) cheers, will comments posted at 9:50 PM |
Big Family News
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Hi All, I'm pleased to announce Wade had his first child, Liam Colin, December 23rd! =) Both Mom and Dad are adjusting well and Liam is cute as a button. We had hoped to have a Bookit release out before the big event, but that didn't happen. It turns out preparing for a baby is a lot of work. :) Unfortunately, this will most likely slow our progress on Bookit 4 as Wade adjusts to running on little sleep. However, I'm still plugging away. I've recently finished the new MobileMe support and am now working on finishing up the new syncing infrastructure code. cheers, will
comments posted at 11:54 AM
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Bookit update progress
Saturday, November 08, 2008
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Hi All, Just a quick note to say we hear you guys. We know you all want Firefox 3 support and we're working on a new, from the ground up, version of Bookit which supports it. Rewriting a product from scratch, literally, takes time and we thank you for your patience. We had hoped to have a release out by now, but our family obligations over the past several months has slowed our progress slightly. We still hope to have a free beta out soonish for people to kick the tires and get syncing their Firefox 3 bookmarks. Hang tight and thanks for checking in. cheers, will comments posted at 2:29 PM |
Firefox 3 and Bookit
Sunday, July 20, 2008
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Hi All, As many of you already know, Bookit does not currently support Firefox 3. Of course we want Firefox 3 support in your hands as soon as possible, trust us, we do. Unfortunately Firefox 3's release landed at an inopportune time. You see, We are currently knee deep on Bookit 4 (which supports Firefox 3) and aren't quite done with it. But if you buy Bookit now, you'll get Bookit 4 free, so don't worry about that. Now, all we ask from you is a little patience while we wrap it up. You see, We do this little operation in our free time after our regular 9 to 5 so development isn't as fast as everyone (including us) would like, but we're making progress. With the 'I want it yesterday' attitude of the internet these days it will be hard for some, but I have confidence most of you will be able to do it. For the next couple months, your Firefox 3 bookmarks won't be in sync, but listen - it will be OK - trust me. So instead of shooting off an email telling us how much we suck because we don't support Firefox 3 yet - which wastes our time and yours - how about you take a big deep breath and do something enjoyable with your time. Luckily, it's summer and there are a lot of great things to do outside while you wait for Bookit 4. cheers, will
comments posted at 10:41 PM
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Chirp, chirp
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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Hi All, I thought it'd been long enough since you've heard from either of us, so it's time to let you in on what's going on at ES. Wade and I have been tossing around an iPhone application idea and have started noodling around with the SDK. The iPhone is a whole new world and everyone is starting from ground zero which is super cool. I'm excited to see what people come up with. Most likely we'll be starting our iPhone app later this spring/summer. In the here and now we've been working on the next version of Bookit which we're pretty stoked about. Besides adding support for all modern browsers we have a laundry list of other new features we think you'll enjoy. That said, if you want to see a specific feature in Bookit, please post a comment and we'll check it out. We've learned a lot since Bookit 3 was written many moons ago so we're taking time to rewrite a lot of it from scratch. This allows us to clean up, modernize and simplify the code base giving users quicker releases with more features. While we don't know when we'll be done, we just wanted you to know we're work'n on it. :-) cheers, will music: meg hutchinson comments posted at 10:39 PM |
Time Capsule...what about us Airdisk users?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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Hi All, Keynote fever has passed and we all lived to see another day...sometimes one can never tell with the rabidness of the Mac faithful. Overall, the keynote was just another keynote - some cool stuff, some lame stuff. But one announcement really got my goat. Time Capsule. First a history lesson, before Leopard was released Apple had blazoned all over their Airport Extreme/Time Machine product pages that Airdisk would work with Time Machine. I, like many others, thought this was a great deal. I purchased an Airport Extreme (and a 500 GB external drive) in preparation of the great Time Machine. I wanted a gigabit hub and wireless N router and was stoked to get a NAS disk add-on to boot. Well, a week or two before Leopard shipped they pulled any mention of Airdisk working with Time Machine. Needless to say, I was bummed. To add insult to injury, I've never gotten Airdisk to work correctly. After 12-24 hours it simply will stop accepting logins. Whenever I try and login, it will say the login is incorrect. The only solution is to reboot the router. After a reboot, it will work correctly for another 12-24 hours and then it will stop working again. This issue has been documented all over Apple's forums and I've even logged a bug on it (which is currently open). So you can start to see the rub here. First, Apple states Airdisk will work with Time Machine. Then they say, 'oops, nevermind.' Then Airdisk doesn't work correctly at all with no fix in sight. But to top it off, they announce a brand new product that is supposed to do what Airdisk was promised to do last spring (or later). All this leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I can only hope that when Time Capsule actually ships, they release a patch to fix all the Airdisk woes as well. cheers, will comments posted at 11:34 AM |
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