Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Liturgical Mysteries

Want a cheap thrill? Slim introduced me to these books about a small town police chief/organist/writer. While I am not Episcopalian, the church humor is easily translatable to my own experience. I hear if you are a member of a choir, there are lots of jokes for you that probably went sailing over my head. I was sick over the week-end and read a couple of them during my downtime - easy, fun reads.

Less than a buck if you want the Kindle version... if you click the link below to buy, I get a cut of your $0.99. No one has ever used my Amazon links before, so I don't even know what that would be.

If you'd rather go to the author's site directly, click here.


AR-15: Good for You, Good for Me

Department of Homeland Security: Sport rifle (AR-15) “suitable for personal defense” - including 30 round magazines and select-fire.

Knoxville - Well-Versed

Knoxville - America's Most Bible-Minded City.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Anytone AT-5888UV: Firmware

Milton posted an update for Ed in the AT-588UV Yahoo Group.
"Ed says he's shipped 100 radios in the past two days. He is now updating firmware in his previous inventory. He must replace the mic board in the head, update the head firmware, remove the top cover on the body and update the main firmware. He says it's very time consuming. Probably 20-30 minutes per radio counting the unpacking, repacking and etc. And he has to work carefully as not to scratch anything. 
Updated radios will be shipping the first of next week. These will be EXACTLY like the recently arrived new inventory. Only difference between the updated inventory and the recent inventory is the updated inventory will have the updated mic board and the updated firmware. Ed says an additional 100 radios are supposed to ship at the end of this month from China. 
So as you might guess Ed is working night and days shipping radios and applying the updates to his previous inventory. Plus I'm getting a new radio too! Mine was part of the first 50 and had a problem with the mic board and some oddities to the receiver that I documented on a General Dynamics R8000 test set and sent my results to Anytone in China."
So what does Ed have to do to update the firmware? I wonder if end-users would be able to update it.

It would be fantastic if end-users could plug a radio in via USB and do an update. While software isn't the only issue in the rushed to market radios, it would make be an early adopter a little less painful. Aren't we getting closer to that everyday with SDR?

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Options

I like having options. This gives you several.

First Computers

Lifehacker asks "what was your first computer?"

My uncle loaned us a Kaypro of some flavor. I remember playing a lot of an ASCII Donkey Kong clone. (About this time, a friend has a Commodore VIC-20 that we played with as well.)

We then bought an IBM PCjr. I saved my pennies and we bought the BASIC cartridge, so I could do some simple programming.

When I went off to college, I bought a new computer. I think it may have been an AT&T branded 286. I remember connecting it via a null modem cable to the computer of the guy in the dorm room next door, so we could play a submarine game together.

A few years later, I bought a Radio Shack 486. It had a modem and I could dial up to various BBS. I think I had an AOL account then, too.

My wife claims I fell for her only because when we met, she had just taken delivery of her new Pentium Gateway computer.

The next one, I built using an Intel Celeron 300A - that was easily over-clocked to 450 MHz by changing the FSB to 100 MHz in the BIOS. Toss in a 3D video card along with my ISDN connection and I had an awesome Quake II gaming rig!

Puxing PX-888K: Follow-Up 2

Good things come to those who wait... Hans has completed his full review of the Puxing PX-888K. He's taken the original post and expanded on it. He still gives it a thumbs up:
"I like the Puxing PX-888K, but the radio is not without flaws. Phase noise is generally low, but the signal is not entirely clean. TX audio is muffled. The jacks for connecting programming cables and headsets can give you trouble later in time. Harmonic suppression is fine though, and the receiver is quite good. RX audio is brilliant – the most beautiful sounding audio to date. 
In spite of the price I can still recommend this radio, but using a good speaker/microphone is recommended."
Having never used one or even seen it in person, my contribution to the discuss of the PX-888K is: I like the green color. It has cool retro feel to it.

I did just check CHIRP again and did not seen other notes about adding support for the PX-888K.

Magpul iPhone 5 Case

Coming soon a Magpul case for my iPhone 5! Hopefully, they will continue to have it in orange!

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Excel Pins Disappearing

I have a problem. Every once in a while, my Excel 2010 "Pinned" and "Recent" documents disappear from the Jump List in the Start Menu. I'm an Excel junkie, so I like to keep my favorites pinned and access my most recently used files with the Jump List.

Others have had this or similar problems, too. (here, here, and here.)

I have a guess about why mine disappear. I use a dual monitor setup at work. Sometimes I need a second instance of Excel running, so that I can compare files using both displays. So, after opening one Excel file, I click on the Start Menu and type "Excel" to start a second instance.

When the second Excel instance starts, I get a "File in Use" messagebox. It says:
"PERSONAL.XLSB is locked for editing 
by %Username%.
Open  'Read-Only or click 'Notify' to open read-only and receive notification when the document is no longer in use.
The buttons give me the options of Read Only, Notify, or Cancel.

I've not gone through and documented each case, but I can replicate the problem where it will delete the "Pinned" items and only the last files I was using show up in the "Recent" list. All it takes is opening the second instance of Excel and then closing them in a certain order. It may also require that changes be made and saved to one or both files. I don't have a fix yet, but at least I know how to avoid the problem.

This does not affect the files that are pinned inside the Excel application under File | Recent. In fact, that is where I go to recover my Jump List pins. I scan the list and open the files I want to re-pin.