TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

I've been using my new Mastech MS8218 DMM for a while now.  I've been quite happy with it.  Fantastic value for a $199 meter, no worries at all.  Much better investment for me right now than an 87-V or 189.   I wanted to use my shiny new toy for datalogging, so I installed the Mastech DMM Viewer on my old laptop.  It all installed fine, but the viewer software wouldn't connect to the DMM.  The error was a Visual Basic one, "Run-time error 8002: invalid port number".  Good old VB. Solution reproduced here is from the Power Hungry Performance forum (copied without permission, hope nobody minds): "The issue is related to an inherent port limiting problem with the Windows COM control. It has the nasty habit of only allowing enumeration of 16 COM ports in Visual Basic. When you installed your USB drivers, it enumerated an emulated serial port and assigned it a port number higher than 16. To correct this perform the following: Go to Device Manager...

I swear I must be the only schmuckazoid in the world having so many problems with the MSP430 LaunchPad. Well, maybe not, as a lot of other people found out (by accident) that several of the MSP430 chips were not, in fact, supported.  Kudos to TI for recognizing this - see the thread here . Anyway, I managed with a different chip for a while, then found the LaunchPad Updater .  "Awesome!" I said. To be safe, I tested the LP with IAR, just to make sure.  It is a bit twitchy.  For $5, you put up with a few niggles.  Worked fine. Ran the LaunchPad Updater - version 2.0.  Didn't work. In my case, it gave the "No MSP430Gxxx device found" error message straight off the bat.  It said it saw the LaunchPad, but not the chip in the socket.  Kinda hard to put a chip in the socket when one is already there, TI! I tried both a '2231 and a '2152.  No luck.  Checked IAR again, yes, that works. Anyway, in my case, what fixed it was putting ...

Ever since I upgraded to Windows 7 x64, my Samsung ML-2010 printer has failed to print in landscape mode.  It's connected to an XP machine that acts as the print server, but I print from my Windows 7 machine. This was annoying, but I didn't much care.  I have another printer, an HP 2600n, that works OK, so I always used it.  Lately, though, I wanted to print some large B&W documents.  The 2600n is color, which makes it more expensive to run.  So I decided to fix it. After much mucking about, I still could not print landscape from Win7 through XP to the ML-2010.   This is another annoying Windows 7 permissions issue.  Apparently, my W7 user does not have permissions to modify the printer settings.  Therefore, programs running on the W7 can't alter basic parameters, such as paper orientation. Haven't fixed it yet, because all of the permissions settings for the printer on the W7 machine are greyed out.  Great. I got around the p...

Now, I've always wanted one of these.  Who wouldn't?  They're cool, exotic, and expensive.  They used to be a lot more expensive, but competition has forced prices down (fortunately for Joe Consumer). Anyway, in the interests of educating others who may be interested - and, potentially, supporting a worthy Canadian manufacturer - here's my first impressions of the thing. [I will apologize in advance if the pictures are small/low resolution.  The originals are huge, but Blogger shrinks them automatically.  You should be able to click on them to get to a photo gallery.] For context, I used to sell cameras back in the days when AF was just coming in.  We had Pelican cases in the store occasionally - it was a branch store, and Pelican's were famously expensive - and we got to play with them sometimes. Everyone always wanted one, but nobody at my store could justify the expense.  So most of my impressions will be measured against the older Pelican c...

Having upgraded the hardware, the software must follow, sooner or later.  The old Photoshop Elements wouldn't run on my shiny new SSD-equipped Core i7-2600K Win7 x64 machine.  Eventually it was time to upgrade, once PSE10 went on sale for Xmas. I liked Elements for the tagging and organization, but always hated it for it's slowness.  On my 'old' Latitude notebook, it would take at least 10 seconds to flip between full-screen photos - something Irfanview could do in milliseconds.  Tagging, importing, and all that was OK, but not being able to view the pictures to rate them quickly was a ball-breaker.  It got so unbearable that I stopped putting new photos in, figuring I'd fix it all on the new workstation. So I got Elements 10 installed, and it found and imported the old catalog (after performing some kind of 'conversion' that it never explained).  Unfortunately, it mangled the links to over half of my 10,000 photo collection, forcing me to the dreaded ...

The TI MSP430 Launchpad is absolutely great.  For a great take on the thing, watch EEVBlog #92 .  [Dave, you are great.  Sometime I hope I can do similar stuff, even if I can't be as good as you are.] I like the Launchpad too, but it has been a bit of a love-hate relationship so far. Every emulation tool has quirks.  However, I must be the only one having problems with the Launchpad, as nobody else seems to be mentioning it.  That makes me very unlucky, very inventive, or very dumb (or all three). Here's what I've found so far: "Failed to initialize" error:   can be caused by several things.  I've had a terrible time figuring this one out. Fixes so far: -  If you unplug the Launchpad while IAR EW is running, IAR may fail to reconnect.  Restart IAR. -  Oddly enough, rebooting the machine does actually help sometimes. -  In one case, the mini-USB connector was plugged in far enough to give power, but not fully engaged,...

I downloaded Camera ZOOM FX during the Android Market 10 cent sale.  Here's what I found out in the first 30 seconds: Good: Stable shot mode is cool. Macro focus.  Awesome. Zoom is fast. Bad: There is no exposure compensation.  Pretty piss-poor. FX settings are useless.  Seems to be the main claim to fame, really. Pressing the hardware camera button caused a crash.   Restarting it, it claimed it "could not connect to the camera", and suggested either a task killer (without suggesting which task to kill) or a phone reboot. Finally, on the Xperia X10i, Camera ZOOM FX is unable to mute the shutter sound.  The FAQ claims this is unavoidable due to operating system restrictions - yet, somehow, the native app manages to take silent photos just fine.  Obviously there is something there the CZF developers don't know (or don't have access to). The non-muting shutter sound is a dealbreaker for me, as I generally do not want people to know w...