Category Archives: Geek

Is 1.0 × 10⁴⁸ one quindecillion or one billiard? The real question is, which numbering system do you use?

From http://spectrum.lbl.gov/www/personnel/smoot/smoot-measure.html:

Here’s some good links for LG VX6000 info (will update this link as I find more):

• Yahoo VX6000 Group
• Howard Forums’ LG Board
• The VX6000 Cellar
• VX6000 Manual (PDF)
• Digital PIMP – sync phone with Outlook calendar.
• PureVoice converter for Win32 (convert WAV to QCP audio file)
• LG1200 USB data cable – compatible w/ VX6000
• GAGIN – sw for accessing VX6000 via data cable
• Create .BIT (picture) files
• Bitpim: an app to view and manipulate data on LG VX440 and VX6000 phones
• The phone uses r5g6b5 bitmap format.
• Bitmaps are 120×131, 16 bit color depth.
• Sound files must be under 30K.
• Bitmap hint:
  If you have photoshop (or any program that can produce flipped bitmaps with r5g6b5 bitmaps), crop your images to 120×131. Save as bitmap and use advanced settings to select r5g6b5 and flipped row order. Open the resulting file with a hex editor and remove the first 54 bytes, then add 0x78008300 to the beginning of the file. Additionally remove the last 2 bytes which should be 0x0000. Now send this to your phone to replace wallpaper.bit, poweron.bit or poweroff.bit. My wallpaper does not contain any white space except for where it’s supposed to be in the picture.
• How to turn on “speakerphone” mode
  — Initial Preparation: One-time Setup —
  It requires a little bit of initial setup which can be a little bit of a
  pain. Basically you need to make sure you have a voice ringer on your
  phone. The easiest way to produce one of these is to go into the Voice
  Memo feature, record a quick memo (can be silence if you like), save it,
  then go into Send Pix Message in the Camera mode, enter your cell number
  as the destination, go down to Sound, hit OK, choose Voice Memo, and
  select the memo you just recorded. Send it. When you receive the message,
  select Save Sound from the options menu and enter a name of some sort.

  — Starting Speakerphone Mode —
  Now you’re all set. To initiate Speakerphone mode, you need to press and
  hold the * key twice to throw the phone in Silence All mode. Go into your
  My Media menu (Menu + 7), Music (2), and scroll down to the voice memo you
  saved as a voice ringer. Let the phone sit there for a few seconds, then
  hit End to return to the main screen.

  If you like, you can now hold * a few seconds to exit Silence All mode.

  Place a call. To turn the Speakerphone on, press any key.

  — Drawbacks/Bugs/Needs Further Investigation —
  The press-any-key-to-go-speakerphone functionality seems to remain active,
  surviving power-cycles, until you remove the battery. I haven’t found a
  way to turn off this functionality without killing power to the phone, but
  then again, most of my work tonight has been focused on getting the phone
  INTO speakerphone mode, not out of it.

  Obviously, this is better suited for use as a “toy” feature more than
  something that will appeal to die-hard speakerphone fans, since there’s no
  way to toggle the speakerphone off during a call. You need to pop the
  battery off and reboot. But, again, I’m sure someone else will find a way
  around this and will post it here (e-mailing me a copy of the details
  while they’re at it, of course).

• How to use VX6000 as modem
  1. Purchase the LG1200 cablecable from futuredial.

  2. Install the Prolific USB driver which is included on the CD. It will install the driver on COM4 by default.

  3. Set the phone to

  Menu/(9)Settings/(6)1xData/(2)Select Port = RS232C(COM Port)
  and
  Menu/(9)Settings/(6)1xData/(3)Port Speed = 115200

  You may need to repeat step 3 as the phone sometimes reverts to USB.

  In the Device manager under ports set the Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port (COM4) speed to 115200 as well.

  Now if you have the Verizon Dialer you can install it and it will add a modem, and 2 dialup connections.

  The modem name is “Verizon Wireless Phone HS (1xRTT)”

  Dialup Connections are
  Express Network (1XRTT)
  and
  Quick 2 Net (14.4kbps)

  Both are configured to use the modem above.

  If you do not have the Verizon Dialer software, you can get to the same point by adding a *generic* 33.6K modem and adding the initialization string: AT$QCMDR=3

  Place this modem on COM4 or whatever port your cable is on.

  Next create a dialup connection using the modem above and use

  Phone Number: #777
  Username: 10digit_phone_number@vzw3g.com
  Password: vzw

  I think to get the 14.4 Quick 2 Net connection use the

  Phone Number: #777
  Username: qnc
  Password: qnc

  or

  Phone Number: your dialup isp #
  Username: your dialup isp id
  Password: your dialup isp pwd

  I think that’s it. Happy surfing…

• BigFlavor’s Tutorial for LG VX6000

I finally got sick of carrying around my overly large Kyocera 6035 SmartPhone. Good timing, too, as Verizon is finally selling a low-cost camera phone — the LG VX6000. So far I love it, with the only bad features being the obnoxious polyphonic MIDI ringtones (do you *really* need to have tinny, bombastic classical music for your ringer?) and the lack of PC cable (USB cable to be released “soon”).

Here’s some sample pics:

Arch Street in Boston	The lobby of 101 Arch St.	View from the commuter boat
Another from the boat	Tommy	Unsafe driving

Google never fails to amaze me. Their site is not only the best search engine around, but it also includes additional useful functionality – maps, phone book, stock quotes, etc.

It now even has a built-in calculator.

Want to know the mass of the sun * pi as measured in stones? Pounds? Grams? Atomic Mass Units? How about pennyweight?

How about converting 3,737,844,653 to hexidecimal? Binary? Octal?

Very handy.

My first computer (circa 1983) – Franklin Ace 1000

My second computer (circa 1984) – Apple //c:

My third computer (circa 1985) – IBM PC/XT:

Let’s hope Lucas doesn’t have Chewie rooming with Jar Jar…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/2981081.stm

“One question might be, and I’ll be as direct as I can be about this, what is .Net? Unlike Windows, where you could say it’s a product, it sits in one place, it’s got a nice little box. In some senses, it’s a very good question.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at a Microsoft .Net briefing day in July

“We don’t have the user-centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion of context.”

– Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on the same topic at the same briefing

“Our biggest problem was policing the use of .Net. Things like .Net Enterprise Servers. That’s a great example of where the confusion came from, because it looked like we were slapping .Net on a bunch of random products.”

– Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Microsoft’s platform strategy group, in August on ZDNet News

“It’s about connecting people to people, people to information, businesses to businesses, businesses to information, and so on. That is the benefit.”

– Steve Ballmer, trying again, in an October interview with News.com

I have a real love/hate relationship with my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. On the plus side, it’s powerful, convenient, and solid (ie. not cheap plastic). On the negative side, a motherboard problem was causing it to overheat (it ultimately needed a new mobo) and the video drivers provided by Dell and NVIDIA *suck*.

The drivers are old and lack many of the added features that more recent NVIDIA drivers provide. They also cause the laptop to crash 3-4 times per day. At first, the driver would go into an infinite loop. causing a BSOD. At Dell’s suggestion, I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the OS (oh joy of joys) and also flashed the latest version of their BIOS. The crashes changed from BSODs to sudden slowdowns, where the icons on my explorer bar would start to turn black and the system would become unresponsive. 75% of the time I could hit Fn-ESC and go into standby mode. Bringing it back from standby would “fix” the crash. But 25% of the time the system would be dead. The screen would just lock up and I would need to cold boot, which is a real pleasure when you’re in the middle of coding.

So, since Dell’s tech support was useless and could provide no further help in the matter, I went to Dell’s Community Support forum and found a suggestion that seems to have “fixed” the problem. It’s been three days and the laptop has not crashed. I was directed to a web site that provided “hacked” INF files for NVIDIA’s drivers for the GeForce2Go and GeFore4Go cards. All I had to do is download a standard driver package from NVIDIA’s web site, unpack it, replace the INF with the hacked version, and then install.

At first I tried version 41.09 of their drivers, but it still locked up (albeit slightly differently – this time with the red line/blob that many people complained about on the forums). I then uninstalled 41.09 and tried an older set, 40.72. Sure enough, no crashes at 1600x1200x32. Next I’ll try 1920x1440x32 on an external monitor and see if it’s still stable.

—-

[Additional info]
Sure enough, after running at 1920x1440x32 for 15 minutes, it crashed. Looks like I’ll stick with 1600x1200x32 for now…

Happy 03/03/03!