How to open an Mbox 2: teardown

Here are some tear­down instructions/destructions for open­ing up Digidesign’s Mbox 2. This lit­tle jour­ney took place after the USB port decided it would be a great time to fail, thus ren­der­ing the entire device use­less. Got to love it when a $2 part breaks a $500 device, huh?

Pre­sented with a choice of ship­ping it off for at least 2 weeks and some probably-not-insignificant freight costs (the device in ques­tion was under war­ranty but a par­al­lel import from the US), the best option was, of course, to crack the thing open.

YouTube evi­dence of the (highly suc­cess­ful) insan­ity follows:

I’ve been using it reli­ably for about a week now and can say con­fi­dently that no dam­age was done! In fact, it’s actu­ally sound­ing bet­ter, too.

Not only did the USB port com­ing loose stop data from flow­ing, it also caused ground­ing issues and intro­duced some hum/other noise when it was incor­rectly posi­tioned. The new USB port has not only stopped the device from spon­ta­neously dis­con­nect­ing, it’s also improved the qual­ity of the audio recorded. Brilliant.

# by Josh on July 24th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Facebook Tag a Friend feature destined to confuse

Tag a Friend feature on Facebook

This was the first time I ever encoun­tered this face-detection fea­ture, and it just so hap­pened Face­book picked a par­tic­u­larly poor photo to intro­duce it with!

Clearly they’ve started using a face-detection algo­rithm to pin­point prob­a­ble can­di­dates for tag­ging — unfor­tu­nately, the algo­rithm is eas­ily fooled by V for Vendetta masks. The photo in ques­tion fea­tures four friends and we have no idea who is whom — it was a few years ago and we’re all iden­ti­cally clothed!

Nice one, Face­book!

# by Josh on July 6th, 2010 Tags: , , , ,
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Sony DSC-TX7 low light review

Just bought a cheapie com­pact dig­i­tal (well, next to the Nikons I usu­ally chuck around) to do some low effort film­ing with and decided to (lit­er­ally) take it for a drive. Titles and speed are the only changes I’ve made to the footage apart from the fact it’s only PAL widescreen.

The cam­era did okay, but for the slight inabil­ity to focus a lot of the time (and for­get man­ual focus, this is a strictly for-dummies camera) — no ver­ti­cal flar­ing or other weird­ness that has plagued many a dig­i­tal still cam­era in the past.

For me, it was a toss up between jello-vision D90 land and get­ting a com­pact dig­i­tal that would do HD (1080/50i) well enough to last in sit­u­a­tions where hir­ing a real cam­era is total overkill. Biggest down­side so far seems to be bat­tery life. The inter­nal mic is decent enough for a lot of uses because, beau­ti­fully, the whole thing is pretty much solid state and the zoom is internal/not-that-noisy. The few unfa­vor­able (audio) reviews out there seem to come from the party video crowd — and they’re right, no, it will not deal well with Tiësto’s basslines.

Crap bat­tery life aside, seems like a decent cam­era so far.

# by Josh on July 5th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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WordPress 3.0

I heard pre­cisely one per­son com­plain­ing loudly when Word­Press 3.0 first released but I’ve hit no snags so far — ele­gant, pain­less upgrade on Web­Fac­tion (Dis­clo­sure: I’ve got an affil­i­ate link in there, 10% of your spend — but I’d rec­om­mend them even if you want to strip the link out) which is more than can be said for most web hosts I’ve used over the years.

Admit­tedly I’m not using the most zany set of plu­g­ins in the world, but it’s nice to know that an open source project can be so darn pain­less. Upgrade, the water’s fine.

# by Josh on July 5th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Business Podcasting for the little guy

Today I had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion about busi­ness pod­cast­ing for a B2B focused small busi­ness look­ing to gen­er­ate leads and per­ceived exper­tise in their area. We chat­ted a lit­tle bit about the tools that were needed and observed that, far from being a big bur­den, pod­cast­ing is rel­a­tively low effort while giv­ing an authen­tic con­nec­tion with peo­ple who con­sider you an expert in your field.

Pod­cast­ing ful­fills much the same role an email newsletter/mass con­tact does — yet man­ages to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself in the medium to actu­ally get onto people’s desks in a bit of a unique way. Tech­ni­cally pod­cast­ing is pretty easy to imple­ment, with Word­Press being one obvi­ous tool to make it hap­pen online and most new com­put­ers sport­ing Win­dows, OS X or Linux com­ing with free soft­ware included (or at least eas­ily avail­able) to pro­duce the content.

So what’s our role? Just lift­ing the bar, really. From snazzy intro/outro music to stan­dard­ised call-to-action snip­pets that get attached or rotated week by week, a lit­tle bit of exper­tise goes a long way to cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful, easy to cre­ate pod­cast­ing expe­ri­ence. This makes it eas­ier for small busi­nesses to stay in it for the long haul, build­ing bet­ter brands, leads, and adding value for customers.

# by Josh on June 9th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Some thoughts on Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile

Adobe Acro­bat Con­nect Pro Mobile is a piece of soft­ware recently released for iPhone/iPod touch that is rather inter­est­ing for a num­ber of rea­sons. I noticed it because it largely over­laps with a prod­uct that we’ve been can­vass­ing sup­port for to release on the iPad (and likely still will), but there seems to be a lot more going on here!

Firstly, it’s worth not­ing that this free soft­ware is pub­lished by Adobe, devel­oped using Flash, and is fea­tured in the App Store.

For those who keep their head off the Internet/are apa­thetic towards Apple’s mobile plat­form pow­er­plays, let me just briefly note that Apple and Adobe are hardly best of friends. Accord­ingly, while the approval of a Flash-based appli­ca­tion is a lit­tle cheeky, the ele­va­tion of one to fea­tured app store sta­tus is straight up devious.

We can only spec­u­late as to whether prag­matic or polit­i­cal rea­sons moti­vated Adobe’s devel­op­ment in this way. Self-evidently, they have a lot of in-house com­pe­ten­cies around Flash devel­op­ment, but they would also love to get a prod­uct approved inso­far as it dri­ves adop­tion of their Con­nect plat­form (which, unlike the App Store app, is any­thing but free).

There are many less sneaky ways of build­ing a com­pelling tech demo. If I had to guess, I’d attribute the use of Flash to a sub­stan­tial exist­ing soft­ware invest­ment for web-based clients that was largely portable to the mobile con­text. The impact this has on user expe­ri­ence is likely to be min­i­mal, as they likely redesigned the fron­tend entirely — though obvi­ously other per­for­mance con­cerns may apply.

At any rate, this is the first I’ve noticed of approvals of overtly Flash-based appli­ca­tions. If pos­si­ble, this may open the App Store flood­gates even fur­ther, while pro­vid­ing hope to many for whom the bar­rier to entry in terms of rewrit­ing code was sim­ply too high.

We’re excited about this as cer­tain com­po­nent parts of soft­ware we’ve devel­oped depends strongly on Flash for data visu­al­iza­tion and report­ing. The prospect of being able to deploy this on the iPhone (and yes, the iPad) is a com­pelling oppor­tu­nity that is, plainly, freak­ing exciting.

# by Josh on March 13th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Own Tomorrow: not AMP

I stum­bled across quite a visu­ally beau­ti­ful com­mer­cial today. Its script follows:

In the future, one thing is certain.

Someone’s going to drive it.

Someone’s going to col­lect it.

Someone’s going to lie on it. Sit on it. Sleep on it.

Drink too much Ger­man beer on it.

Some­one will sit in front row seats, here, here and here.

Some­one will land it. Some­one will save it. Some­one will find it. Then get hap­pily lost in it.

Some­one will sleep five stars, some­one will sleep under the stars.

Some­one will ski down it, fly over it, and scream across it.

Beau­ti­ful things will still be made in the future. Some­one is going to buy them.

Someone’s going to walk it. Some­one is going to ride it.

And at the end of the day, someone’s going to watch it.

And there’s no rea­son why that some­one can’t be you.

Since 1849, AMP has helped more Aus­tralians own their tomorrows.

Own tomor­row. AMP.

Emo­tive as it was, it is also, of course, absolute hog­wash — GFC or no!

Some­one once told this story:

A rich man once thought to him­self, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’

He decided, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

But God said to the man, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have pre­pared, whose will they be?’

You don’t own your tomor­row. It’s not even yours today. The Bible says there is one good kind of stor­ing up to be done — I can “store up God’s word in my heart, that I might not sin against Him.” (Ps 119:11) — yet I still fail and need to fall upon His mercy.

The man who told that story was Jesus. (Luke 12:16 – 20) He promises peace and a greater secu­rity than all the riches of the world.

Own eter­nal life. Jesus.

# by Josh on February 24th, 2010 Tags: , , , , ,
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