Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Canon Power features...
Please note that not all cameras are supported by such free 'add-on'... if your camera is on the list .. you're a lucky one... now you have no excuse for don't try HDR exposure bracketing technics, motion detection technics and don't even dare to take over/under exposed photos again (unless playing with exposure technics), multi focus technics and lightning shot tricks are also possible ... this puts canon cameras in quite some weird place... really... now you can even play games on one... or just remote shot via USB... ... but really this kinda makes me buy a Canon camera just for the goodies in firmware... Digic II, III or IV are the possible engines that cameras have... they have a list on that wikia on the link above... have fun!
Monday, August 10, 2009
5800XM v30.0.011
- Snapier on some tasks (web browsing is more stable and fast)
- A few graphical glitches disapeared
- Tab (unable to change tab in settings and in messages) bug disapeared
the neutral:
- fullscreen toggle button (when in fullscreen) in web browser is located on the corner and is transparent
- Max sound volume is a bit lower... not bad since at old max volume the phone vibrated
the bads:
- Slower on some tasks, specially when is the first time (rotate screen for the first time on some places is slower)
- Interface got a little slower in my opinion
- Hue bug is back! ... but now auto-corrects it self after a second or so
With this update i updated Maps to 3.0 as well... please note that Maps requires a huge amount of memory to install! Now ... when will 5800XM get the interface of 5530XM? ... kinetic (inertial) scroll is welcome as well as a better use of homescreen (landscape on it would be nice as well)
OMFG: http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/5800_XpressMusic Please read CPU speed - They upgraded it from 360Mhz to 434Mhz!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Stuff..
That's all ... oh! ... Having trouble with input on J2ME for 5800xm due to lack o numerical keypad? search for Virtual Keyboard S60 0.91 or 0.94 (1.01 is buggy - 0.94 is tricky - 0.91 is beta) it will help on some of your needs ... (i wonder why nokia doesn't have something like that for legacy applications - Adobe PDF Reader non-Touch is free ... but LE edition with touch it isn't... lame...)
On a side note... Galaxy on Fire 2 was released .... you can download it for free (be warned that to play it till the end you'll have to pay for it - nice marketing manouver by Fish Labs - Same goes for one of their car racing games), i've mastered GoF (first version) on my old mobile phone, but never finished it ... with more than 45h of gameplay i hadn't visit all the planets >_> ... GoF 2 is also big... and while playing on the first solar system is free, after that you have to connect to internet to check for activation EVERYTIME ... so .. enjoy that one solar system ... it's free XD ... try to get all the stuff from it... is a nice quest ... Oh... good summer vacations... i won't have them... *goes emo*
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Ovi Suite + Nokia Maps 3.0 + Nokia 5800
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Zapp ... noticias!
Line of code of the day #4
solution[i] = solution[j] | (~0)&(1<<z)
The most familiarized with C and pointers will notice that if i is not related in bounds with j value (or vice-versa) something really bad will happen with memory access/write... the lovely usual segmentation fault or worse... the line should have look like this:
solution[j] = solution[j] | (~0)&(1<<z)
Or in a more compact form:
solution[j] |= (~0)&(1<<z)
I lost 3h to find where the error on my code was... you see, when instead of j the i was there I was writing in some area, that area was where a pointer inside a struct was, at first I though the error was in functions that manipulate variables of that struct... when I noticed something very strange when I switch some entries on struct... it looked like something impossible to happen, but after I've done it some stuff worked, so struct control looked fine... only answer would me that I was modifying struct data unknowing it... after a bunch of printf's (like... everywhere) I tracked the error down... cost me a lot of time... and now I 'only' have to finish some algorithmic stuff that is implemented, polish some of the code and optimize some memory accesses...
Well... good coding... i hope you have better luck than me...
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Vista + ICS + NSU
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Line of code of the day #3
(( f[(m & 0xF0) | (val & 0xF0) >> 4] >> 3) >> (f[(m & 0x0F)<< 4 | (val & 0x0f )] >> 3 ) & 0xF)
Oh, this code is just for 8bits, a simple expansion allows me to use it for 32bits (with look-up table taking up 2Mb)... and no... I won't explain what is in f table has... and yes... I might screw up with the parentesis... I didn't compile that piece of code, but tested it manually instead... it should work... efficiency wise it's better that scan all bits one by one...
You can now commit suicide.
PS: By reading this you agree that i'm not responsible for any harm occoured both physically or mentally when reading the text above... really...
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Line of code of the day #2
Friday, May 22, 2009
Need a media center/entertainment PC?
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Cleaning fail...
Monday, May 4, 2009
Hmm...
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Line of code of the day
Monday, April 20, 2009
LCDs...
Saturday, April 18, 2009
A new gamepad!
Friday, April 17, 2009
A new pen tablet!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Random photos
Photos |
During easter i took some photos on a small town, where ACRA-EC HQ are, click on the photo to see them, enjoy!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Questing for a Pen Tablet...
Well... my old (not so old ... but old enough to be dead) Wacom Volito2 is dead... so... i searched for a new pen tablet.... my experience with Volito2 told me that a bigger area than A6 is desirable for the kind of stuff i do.... so an A5 area or an A4 would be better... what choices do i have? After google a bit i come to join this conclusions/facts:
- Wacom pen tablets are .... overpriced... no doubt there...
- Wacom pen tablets are the only ones that use battery-less pens
- Wacom pen tablets replacements/extras are .... well.... overpriced... (as expected)
- European Wacom pen tablets are ... more overpriced than the rest of the world
- Other brands seem to have identical models - Aiptek, Genius, Trust
- New Wacom Intuos4 is very very nice .... and expensive (among the Wacom offer is the less overpriced one)
So... to put things shorter (please note that Intuos4 pens have tilt and rotation sensors):
Genius G-Pen M609 | A5 | 1024 pressure levels | 4000lpi | 70€ |
Genius G-Pen M712 | A4 | 1024 pressure levels | 4000lpi | 90€ |
Wacom Bamboo One M | A5 | 512 pressure levels | around 2250lpi | 180€ |
Wacom Intuos4 S | A6 | 2048 pressure levels | 5080lpi | 220€ |
Wacom Intuos4 M | A5 | 2048 pressure levels | 5080lpi | 370€ |
I really liked the Genius A4 area and price.... according to reviews some people complains of pen size and weight... but since my hands are big and i'm used to heavy ink pens (bigger inertia, steadier strokes, my calligraphy is horrible) i'm quite tempted to try it... a Wacom pen with the same area costs almost 5 times more... if that isn't overpriced... i don't know what to call it... also in european countries intuos4 doesn't come with a mouse... while in other countries it has it included (as well as some extra software from adobe, and conversion ratio from dollar to euro is like 1:1 - considering that mouse costs 70€ i would say dollar worths more than euro for the given prices/hardware...).
Well after easter i might buy one Genius pen tablet... If i do so, i'll review it... hoping that someone with the same trouble will save some zeny
EDIT: On a side note... after hacking the drivers of genius, i can confirm that genius tablet is in reality an Aiptek ... i did check the one from Trust (that i'm willing to buy since is the one available in stores around here) and the aiptbl.ini file is a little give away... xD oh.. acording to store that sells Trust one, it is supposed to have 60º tilt sensor! I can't wait to get my hands in one...
EDIT 2: 60º tilt seems to be a fake feature... but in the other hand i found the A4 tablet at 68€!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Blender...
Ah... o blender ... aquele programa de modelação 3d que 'ninguem' consegue usar devido a uma interface intragavel... bem... eu nao o consigo usar mas isso nao evitou que perdesse uma hora a tentar fazer algo ... lol... bem o resultado fica aqui exposto para todos os que quiserem ver... eu puz texturas ... mas nao faço a mais palida ideia de como as renderizar correctamente...
"fear the mad kitty" XD
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Wacom tablets...
Hmmm ... tomorrow (25th) wacom will reveal something (my guess would go to intuos4) but i'm not here to rant about it... this actually happen a 'long' time ago...
Wacom tablets are good, yes, very good indeed, i had (well... have) one that stop working for quite some time now...
After my pen tablet (a volito2) stop working i solve to open it up to check if a wire from usb cable was broken or something... what i found left me a bit.... out of mood... i was expecting to find some state-of-art circuit board, what i found was 6 small chips (big enough to be hand soldered) and a some cooper tracks... a simple design... the worst part is that for the looks of it, 70€ isn't exactly a fair price.... at least in my opinion... i didn't open the pen... but ... 70€ is way too much for something of that complexity... Wacom is ripping off customers... but ... there are not much alternatives anyway... at least not with the system that wacom has patented... and that is what i guess customers are paying...
If each pen tablet (at least the low-end ones) costs like 5€ to make (i'm estimating - could be wrong of course) and they want 70€ (the new bamboos cost even more and are worse or the same) they are making rivers of money... *sigh* i serious doubt i will buy a wacom tablet soon, mainly because a 400€-500€ cost 150€ on other brands (i'm talking about a A4 area, 4000dpi, 100rps, 1024 levels of pressure), well, yes they don't have extra pens or such, but wacom extra pens also cost awfully a lot...
In the end it is customers choice, wacom's top quality vs other brand's awesome prices... in low-end i actually think wacom is nice, because of the crappy quality on other brands tablets for that segment... but when the features increase quality differences get reduced, making the choice harder.... oh well... i guess my G5 will have to do the job... (G5 is a logitech mouse - i have the 1st revision one, it's OLD ... but works better than any other mouse, specially for it's age)
Oh well... but this is just me ranting ... yes... i was bored when write this (i corrected some - ugly - algorithms that by some reason continue to work wrong)
VHDL considerations...
While programming in VHDL can't be considered a very easy deal, there are certain things on it that are very easy to do... i lost 2 days with one of those things...
Making a crash course into VHDL sintax (and assuming that you know how a computer works in hardware terms), you control bits in vhdl... yes... bits... the simplest think in computers world... of course that it isn't very easy to do complex things of a thing so simple, but anyone understands that shifting bits is just picking a bunch of them and putting them a little bit aside.
In VHDL you can create arrays - vectors - of bits, and you can access each bit or a pack of them by indexing them, sounds scary, but it's very easy actually, one with no knowledge in programming should have no problem doing a static shifter in vhdl.
To index bits, you need to 'create' them... well ... there is a lot of mambo-jambo in VHDL for doing declalations, and while i mastered most of VHDL sintax i still fail in the most basic stuff (well, i'm always learning from mistakes but it doesn't seem enough xD).
Well... lets say you have a array of bits, better saying a vector, in vhdl it is called std_logic_vector, and it's simple a vector of std_logic elements.. std_logic elements are the representation of a signal value in hardware (well, kinda) they can be 1, 0 or other ugly stuff you really don't wanna know...
Ok... we have our vector puppy in a signal, this should be human readable (or i'm loosing my human side):
signal puppy : std_logic_vector (31 downto 0);
So puppy has 32 bits ordered like 31 down to 0... how nice...
if you want a bit from puppy, you just do like this:
puppy(3)
And that is bit number 3... it's 4th bit if you count from right, since there is a bit 0... easy to get right?
Now harder! >:D you want... the 8 first bits... that will be hard, right?
puppy(7 downto 0)
Damn... was too easy... well... this is being great but grabbing bits without interact with them is a bit... worthless... well... you have a nice operator for concatenate bits! So now we can make our shifter... to concatenate bits you just use & operator like so:
'0'&"0000001"
So ... easy to get ('0' is a bit with zero value .... and "0000001" is a vector of bits) ... so 8 bits with the least significant bit (if you consider the right the least significant bit) at '1'
Now ... how to shift? You should get it now without any help, let's shift our puppy 8 bits to right!
"00000000"&puppy(31 downto 8)
Easy... right? I mean... you couldn't fail that... no way.... right? I did fail at doing that... and lost 2 days of work >:(
I wanted to shift one bit to right, i did like this (taking puppy as an example):
'0' & accu(30 downto 0)
That simply replaces the last bit with '0' ... >___>''
PS: Sorry for the length of this post...
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Manga reading...
Monday, March 16, 2009
Rubik's Cube
I like puzzles... and i happen to own several Rubik's cubes [at right: 2x2x2, 3x3x3 and the demoniac 4x4x4 (5x5x5 is hard to find...)]
Today i took the day to think a bit of solving approaches to the 3x3x3, the method i first learn was the layer by layer method, the first 2 layers and the top cross are pretty intuitive for me, i found the algorithms to solve them by myself, the top corners are easy but since i have a bad memory i can't memorize all the algorithms (like +50) that allow the a nice optimization. So i researched for a new method, i found Lars Petrus method to be quite funny to apply, it requires some understanding of the cube, at least to solve the 2x3x3 (first 2 layers) but if applied the top cross will automatically be done and it isn't required to go into that 4 corners twist algorithms application.
I can't tell if the method is faster or not since i can do the cube under 90s (if i don't get too unlucky) with my old approach, this one requires a bit more of look ahead, but is funny how the top cross is automatically created (this is due to a parity trick in algorithm).
---
Now a question for the readers, you don't need to be a cube expert: Do you think it is easier to solve a 4x4x4 cube with different colors on the sides or with different images?
My answer is with different colors, at least with my method. I don't own a cube with images, but by trying to make patterns on the 4x4x4 i found out that it is really hard to make stuff on the place we want, so in a image all cubies have a specific place giving the same trouble.
Monday, March 9, 2009
That was big...
Just some random (funny) fact, this was the message that you would (will - hmm, better don't ask how) get when you've finish Lemmings for Atari Lynx:
Link (7442 bytes .TXT)
Yep... they took almost 7,4Kb of perfectly good space and used it to something that can be called one of the longest game over screens ever made (maybe not, but at that time there weren't many games with such big end), well, it was some way of developers reward player... ...a weired way...
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Nexys2 with plexiglass
"No... I will not fix your computer..."
Hmmm ... ultimamente tenho sido, demasiado requisitado para compor PC's, redes, saber que componentes são uteis ou não, resolver problemas ligados à informática no geral...
Se têm algum problema desses, tenham o meu contacto e tenham a infeliz ideia de me contactar para resolver tal assunto vão aqui umas dicas:
Primeiro, procurem no google, se não sabem o que o google é ou não tenham internet... bem ...ou vão a uma internet pública e procuram ou desistam de usar um PC...
Segundo, procurem por uma solução no google, o uso de termos em ingles ao inves de portugues ajuda... procurar frases completas não é grande ideia...
Terceiro, procurem no google, a serio... não desistam se a primeira pesquisa não der resultados uteis, o google é um ferramenta util, façam uso correcto dela e obterão respostas
Caso após seguir as dicas acima indicadas não resolveram o problema, podem desistir de usar o PC, ou contactar-me, caso optem pela segunda opção devo avisar que estou a pensar em pedir remuneração pelos minutos gastos...
...Por isso ... voltem a procurar no google... caso não gostem do google, têm muitos outros motores de busca: Ask, Yahoo, AltaVista, Wikipedia, kuantokusta (não me venham perguntar outra vez se aquilo tá barato ou caro)....
Friday, February 27, 2009
Pong... yay...
Thursday, February 26, 2009
VGA 8bits per pixel limitation... not a real issue!
FPGA and VGA Screen
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Hello World!
Comics update!
Monday, February 23, 2009
FPGA - Nexys2
Monday, February 9, 2009
Awesomeness!
A very big joke...
Monday, February 2, 2009
5800 XpressMusic - Review
- The screen is perhaps the best screen i ever saw in a mobile device, a little smaller than iphone but with increased resolution, it has an awesome constrast and bright (i use it with bright on lower settings).
- The battery looks like it gives what it promises, i used it for 2 days on a intensive kinda way and it is still kicking
- The performance doesn't make it the fastest device, i won't recomend it for 3d games, but it is quite fast on most of the tasks, reproducing video with 640x368@25fps without trouble.
- Connectivity tests were flawlessly, Wi-Fi wizard configuration is quite intuitive, bluetooth sincronization with hands-free headset was easy, trully a nice experience on this point, helping all this browser is really good rendering pages very similar to desktop way, flash lite 3.0 is a nice think as it supports flash 8 videos and animations.
- The GPS works quite well ... Nokia Maps and Google Maps (google maps works really well on this device!) provide a nice interface and worked quite smoothly.
- Multimedia features are quite nice, video, music, radio and images are presented/rendered nicely, the interface on these aplications was quite well made.
- The interface while fast (except for auto-rotate in internet browser) it's not the most intuitive thing, sometimes you need to tap to select and to tap again to confirm, requiring a double tap, this usually happens in dropdown-like menus. There are also some gliches in browser and with mini-QWERTY keyboard (not that bad). Also in landscape mode the top bar of the browser (equivalent to the title bar and status bar of the desktop merged) is freaking huge the could save that area to the page and provide a bar identical to the one in portrait mode...
- Lacks pre-loaded software, you can however download a bunch of free stuff in a aplication very similar to app store, some are trully free like QuickOffice (only for read documents not to edit), others are trials... the worst thing is that Adobe Reader 2.5 LE is TRIAL!!! I mean with all that bunch of pdf's that exist on the internet a pdf reader is quite handy but to not make it free when non-touch versions are free is freaking bad...
- OS is not that open as most of people may think by look at nokia foruns, installing some applications may prove near to impossible (certificates are a pain), adding to that, the tools provided to development are beta or bug filled. The device is still 'green' require a some extra time to enable development of aplications worth the effort.
- Game Boy Color Emulator MeBoy - A freaking good java aplication that works pretty well with the touch interface provided by the phone to java aplications.
- Google Maps -You know what this is ...
- Handbreak - You WILL need this to watch your videos on the phone, SUPER is also a nice alternative.
- Well .... this - I didn't tested all of them... lol