I've fixed my Droid 1 more times than I can count (due to my own various abuses). The sticker under the battery covers a plastic flap. Feel around it, and slice it with a knife along the edge in the middle it won't be an issue anymore.
The other stick-on bits are the rubber bumpers top and bottom, and the shiny cover near the camera. The acrylic adhesives holding these bits on seems to be very reusable.
All said, it's much, much easier to completely disassemble and reassemble a Droid than an iPod Touch 1g (which has layers of PCB literally glued together, and to the battery, and...).
And you know why? It's because it's the only way to make a battery cover that doesn't take up huge amounts of volume with the latching mechanism. Short of going the Apple way, it's practically impossible. And the plastic has to be flimsy because it has to have elasticity so it doesn't break the first time you take it out of the box to put in the battery.
I only mention this because it is impossible, but: The original Motorola Droid/Milestone uses a battery cover consisting of a very thin piece of neatly stamped aluminum, and the latch is both minimal and elegant.
And before you write another novella about how flimsy it must be, please also allow me opine that I used the battery cover on this phone (with a bit of steel adhered to it) as a magnetic dash mount for years in my work truck. Accordingly, the battery cover has about 30,000 miles worth of holding the whole rest of the phone to the dashboard.
It doesn't seem to have suffered from this use in any way that I can observe.
It really all depends. Some of the most mundane factory heads (I'm looking at you, GM) have all manner of non-adjustable, fancy-pants DSP built in, just to help correct the deficiencies of the shitty speakers they include (DSP parts are cheaper than speaker parts).
So, in that instance you'd really want to replace both the speakers and the head at the same time, since they're somewhat irrevocably mated.
Not all companies do this, and I don't know enough about how Toyota does their stuff to be sure. Meanwhile, the Internet is full of misinformation about the topic.
My BMW, for instance, has a 10-channel factory amp hidden in the back, but it expects 4 sets of normal, flat speaker-level inputs. Replacing just the OEM head with a different one is a plug-and-play operation, and everything works properly even from a signal theory standpoint, but there's still companies (including Crutchfield) lining up to sell adapters with transformers and stuff to "help" with this on this model...even though it's absolutely not needed (or even useful) in this particular instance.
That said: If it were me, I'd probably replace the speakers and the head at the same time. I'd have done this on my BMW, but the speakers are mounted strangely enough that it'll be a bit more time and money than I'm willing to throw at it.
(Also, too: If you get the correct mounting kit for a Toyota, it'll come with a handy little pocket for holding a phone or a pair of shades or something. It's kind of neat, and probably worth digging around for if you can find one.)
What happens: You use tools* to remove the fasteners. After that you can either replace them with new fasteners of the same type, or use some other variety of fastener.
It's like performing any other mechanical work on any manner of machine: You observe the work to be performed, gather up the appropriate tools, and then use the tools until the work is complete. *shrug*
*: In order of my own personal preference: A sharp, offset cold chisel and maybe a punch will remove common aluminum pop rivets with a few mild swings from a hammer. Or, a drill motor with an bit will accomplish the same thing, in a non-impact sort of way.
Except for the facts that a shitty ill-suited and poorly designed speaker can be made from any cone material, and that rivets are mechanically superior than the usual way of mounting car speakers (sheet metal screws and speed clips), I agree with everything you say:
Indeed, your head unit is bad. Get a different one.
You're assuming that OP actually tested the disk in isolation before spouting off. I'm assuming he left it in the home-built HTPC, along with the half-dozen other drives that seem to be present, and that the load of spinning them all up at the same time is pulling down the 12V rail of a less-than-capable PSU.
In other words, I think the drive is probably OK. Just a guess, though.
IBM UltraStar SCSI disks used to have jumper-selectable spinup delays to avoid just this sort of problem.
Have you seen the ingredients label for a "food product" lately? Sometimes I read them just so I can have fun trying to pronounce the names of the chemical substances I'm ingesting.
One failed within months, it wouldn't fully spin back up after I had the machine off for a couple of hours for a wiring reorganization... Sounds like cheap ass bearings to me.
Without knowing more, I'd like postulate that it sounds more like "cheap ass power supply" than "cheap ass bearings."
Saying 20KHz is the upper limit of human hearing, is the same as saying that a human may run no faster than 27MPH. You're arguing against something which, obviously, is completely arbitrary.
20KHz is a rule of thumb, not a hard-and-fast limit. I'm glad to hear that you can hear up to 24KHz (and yes, it is an annoying sound), but you simply serve to counter-balance all of the other folks in the world who can't hear a lick past 5KHz (yes, really -- there''s lots of 'em).
(This being Slashdot, I refer you to the MTBF of a hard drive.)
I myself annoyed the hearing-testers at school when I was a kid, because they'd push the "Go" button on the automated tester and I'd keep giving them a thumbs-up for every progressively-higher tone...even though I could hear them telling me the test was finished and I could see that they'd stopped writing. I have no idea how high my hearing used to go. When I finished my own partially-documented tests, I could still hear the tones from the other testing stations from other kids who followed instructions better.
I used to hear 38KHz peizo remote controls, plain as day, though quiet. I was only 7 or 8 at the time.
Can I hear that now? No. Not a chance. I've got a hole around 4KHz, another around 8KHz, and it trails off to nothing lot long after that. The tinnitus takes care of much of the rest, if things are quiet (and if things are loud, it just gets worse in the very long-term).
Too many concerts, too much time listening to angry music, and too much time playing FOH engineer, along with a few hundred thousand miles driving cars seems to me to be an adequate explanation for the loss in my case.
I still listen better than most folks, in that I can interpret what I'm hearing to mean a specific mechanical or electrical issue after decades of careful self-training, but I can't always hear everything that they can.
To this end, I'm in favor of higher sampling rates for recorded music. Why? Because even though I can't hear it anymore, I remember what 38KHz sounds like and if there's any musical information there, some kid will hear it and --hopefully-- enjoy it.
The problem with low-pass filtering was resolved eons ago with a concept called "oversampling."
Only the earliest and ruddiest of CD players (and a lot of computer sound cards) had a brick-wall filter at ~22.5 KHz. The rest of them resampled the input by 4x or 8x, or converted the original signal to PWM, and then applied the anti-aliasing filter at a frequency several octaves above the range of human hearing.
This hypothetically pushed the nastiness inherent of a steep filter to a realm well outside such that humans could hear, and at least far beyond the limited confines of a CD.
Welcome to 1985, where your stated concerns are both accurate and already solved.
The concept of "Stereo MP3 as a rule == better" died alongside an old MP3 encoder, which shall not be named, over a decade ago.
The Encoder That Shall Not Be Named notwithstanding, MP3 has always supported both mid-side and joint-stereo encodings. And it can switch between them, in the middle of a recording if it is useful to do so, to make the best of the available bits.
But more to the point, nobody uses straight stereo MP3 these days. It's not useful.
Accordingly, for a given bitrate, mono works better than stereo, given modern tools and techniques.
(Please learn a bit about the format and the processes used before proclaiming things to be impossible.)
I own an $8,000.00 CD player, and a $3995.95 receiver, and I must say: I agree. "High-end" power cords are a fallacy built upon a whim built upon a notion to make money.
But there's a little bit to say about power: When the windows and the walls themselves are rattling, the overhead lights are dimming on every bass note, and the power supplies in the amplifiers are struggling to keep up with the diminished current availability, one does what one must.
Does that mean $5,000 power cords are cost-effective? No, of course not. But it might mean bigger power cords, more branch circuits, and perhaps a service upgrade to the house are worthwhile. Copper is copper at 60Hz@120VAC, and more of it is better.
(Please note that I have very little time/money in this ~$12k worth of silly high-end gear, so my confirmation bias may be lacking compared to someone who actually had something significant "invested" in such pricey kit.)
48 would have been better, and this was rectified with DVD, but the music industry lags behind...
Lags behind? Meh. The music industry succeeded while the film industry was still pushing analog.
We didn't get digital 48KHz film soundtracks (let alone digital soundtracks of any sort) for movies in the home for another decade or more after CDs had become routine and commonplace.
I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a place to find good, used RAM. I don't know of any since the one local computer store that had a proper hardware RAM tester failed 1.5 decages ago, but: I don't care if my RAM is old or new. I just want to be certain that it will work as specified.
There's got to be hundreds of gigabytes of good DDR2 literally being thrown away every day, these days. It's really a waste.
Because there are things police do which I, a constituent, both have no business knowing and simply don't want to know.
Random cop arrests person, cop seizes phone, cop places phone (without mashing any buttons) into a Faraday bag. Phone is both preserved, and unable to communicate. This is a Good Thing in terms of chain of custody, and of preventing leaks, while also preserving my hardware for my future use.
The alternative is that the phone is thumb-fucked by a Bad Cop until he gets frustrated with the process, pulls the battery and loses the SD card ("What SD card?").
Or, the Good Cop puts the phone in a paper evidence bag in the trunk of a cruiser without thumb-fucking it. On its way to the evidence lockup, the phone is still streaming out to ustream. The Good Cop finds another Bad Guy, and we get detailed audio of that streamed live over the internet. And once it finds its way into evidence, we get streams of that, too.
The Good Cop scenario is a very cute idea, to be sure, but it could really fuck up investigations of Bad People (of which there are more of than Bad Cops, in my experience. YMMV.).
But if it were policy to just put seized portable electronics into Faraday bags and not fuck with them, I think everyone wins.
(Disclaimer: As a freedom-loving American who hates to see police abuse anywhere, and a person who works closely with police agencies on their own internal recording and communications systems, I get to see both sides.)
Would you mind telling me how I can back up my Rolodex, so that if it dies in a fire I can just buy a new Rolodex and have it filled out automatically?
Slashdot Mirror
You just broke the first two rules. Now we have to take your balls.
I've fixed my Droid 1 more times than I can count (due to my own various abuses). The sticker under the battery covers a plastic flap. Feel around it, and slice it with a knife along the edge in the middle it won't be an issue anymore.
The other stick-on bits are the rubber bumpers top and bottom, and the shiny cover near the camera. The acrylic adhesives holding these bits on seems to be very reusable.
All said, it's much, much easier to completely disassemble and reassemble a Droid than an iPod Touch 1g (which has layers of PCB literally glued together, and to the battery, and...).
I only mention this because it is impossible, but: The original Motorola Droid/Milestone uses a battery cover consisting of a very thin piece of neatly stamped aluminum, and the latch is both minimal and elegant.
And before you write another novella about how flimsy it must be, please also allow me opine that I used the battery cover on this phone (with a bit of steel adhered to it) as a magnetic dash mount for years in my work truck. Accordingly, the battery cover has about 30,000 miles worth of holding the whole rest of the phone to the dashboard.
It doesn't seem to have suffered from this use in any way that I can observe.
Just sayin'.
It really all depends. Some of the most mundane factory heads (I'm looking at you, GM) have all manner of non-adjustable, fancy-pants DSP built in, just to help correct the deficiencies of the shitty speakers they include (DSP parts are cheaper than speaker parts).
So, in that instance you'd really want to replace both the speakers and the head at the same time, since they're somewhat irrevocably mated.
Not all companies do this, and I don't know enough about how Toyota does their stuff to be sure. Meanwhile, the Internet is full of misinformation about the topic.
My BMW, for instance, has a 10-channel factory amp hidden in the back, but it expects 4 sets of normal, flat speaker-level inputs. Replacing just the OEM head with a different one is a plug-and-play operation, and everything works properly even from a signal theory standpoint, but there's still companies (including Crutchfield) lining up to sell adapters with transformers and stuff to "help" with this on this model...even though it's absolutely not needed (or even useful) in this particular instance.
That said: If it were me, I'd probably replace the speakers and the head at the same time. I'd have done this on my BMW, but the speakers are mounted strangely enough that it'll be a bit more time and money than I'm willing to throw at it.
(Also, too: If you get the correct mounting kit for a Toyota, it'll come with a handy little pocket for holding a phone or a pair of shades or something. It's kind of neat, and probably worth digging around for if you can find one.)
What happens: You use tools* to remove the fasteners. After that you can either replace them with new fasteners of the same type, or use some other variety of fastener.
It's like performing any other mechanical work on any manner of machine: You observe the work to be performed, gather up the appropriate tools, and then use the tools until the work is complete. *shrug*
*: In order of my own personal preference: A sharp, offset cold chisel and maybe a punch will remove common aluminum pop rivets with a few mild swings from a hammer. Or, a drill motor with an bit will accomplish the same thing, in a non-impact sort of way.
Except for the facts that a shitty ill-suited and poorly designed speaker can be made from any cone material, and that rivets are mechanically superior than the usual way of mounting car speakers (sheet metal screws and speed clips), I agree with everything you say:
Indeed, your head unit is bad. Get a different one.
What food?
You're assuming that OP actually tested the disk in isolation before spouting off. I'm assuming he left it in the home-built HTPC, along with the half-dozen other drives that seem to be present, and that the load of spinning them all up at the same time is pulling down the 12V rail of a less-than-capable PSU.
In other words, I think the drive is probably OK. Just a guess, though.
IBM UltraStar SCSI disks used to have jumper-selectable spinup delays to avoid just this sort of problem.
Have you seen the ingredients label for a "food product" lately? Sometimes I read them just so I can have fun trying to pronounce the names of the chemical substances I'm ingesting.
It's possible (quite likely) that Minecraft is full of lousy, inefficient code.
But it is also possible that Java is (still) inherently shit for desktop gaming.
You can rip it, as others have suggested, or pick up a cheap Chinese made "video stabilizer," put it between the Tivo and the TV, and call it done.
I've heard that before. It always seemed like a heat problem to me.
Improving it is easy: Stand the drive on edge, and prop up one end slightly to let air enter the bottom. Instant chimney-effect cooling.
Without knowing more, I'd like postulate that it sounds more like "cheap ass power supply" than "cheap ass bearings."
I thought the meta-discussion was about hardware.
When did it become about software?
Yep. Heard that theory before. It's a good theory. No way to test it, now.
Comprehension, FTW.
Saying 20KHz is the upper limit of human hearing, is the same as saying that a human may run no faster than 27MPH. You're arguing against something which, obviously, is completely arbitrary.
20KHz is a rule of thumb, not a hard-and-fast limit. I'm glad to hear that you can hear up to 24KHz (and yes, it is an annoying sound), but you simply serve to counter-balance all of the other folks in the world who can't hear a lick past 5KHz (yes, really -- there''s lots of 'em).
(This being Slashdot, I refer you to the MTBF of a hard drive.)
I myself annoyed the hearing-testers at school when I was a kid, because they'd push the "Go" button on the automated tester and I'd keep giving them a thumbs-up for every progressively-higher tone...even though I could hear them telling me the test was finished and I could see that they'd stopped writing. I have no idea how high my hearing used to go. When I finished my own partially-documented tests, I could still hear the tones from the other testing stations from other kids who followed instructions better.
I used to hear 38KHz peizo remote controls, plain as day, though quiet. I was only 7 or 8 at the time.
Can I hear that now? No. Not a chance. I've got a hole around 4KHz, another around 8KHz, and it trails off to nothing lot long after that. The tinnitus takes care of much of the rest, if things are quiet (and if things are loud, it just gets worse in the very long-term).
Too many concerts, too much time listening to angry music, and too much time playing FOH engineer, along with a few hundred thousand miles driving cars seems to me to be an adequate explanation for the loss in my case.
I still listen better than most folks, in that I can interpret what I'm hearing to mean a specific mechanical or electrical issue after decades of careful self-training, but I can't always hear everything that they can.
To this end, I'm in favor of higher sampling rates for recorded music. Why? Because even though I can't hear it anymore, I remember what 38KHz sounds like and if there's any musical information there, some kid will hear it and --hopefully-- enjoy it.
The problem with low-pass filtering was resolved eons ago with a concept called "oversampling."
Only the earliest and ruddiest of CD players (and a lot of computer sound cards) had a brick-wall filter at ~22.5 KHz. The rest of them resampled the input by 4x or 8x, or converted the original signal to PWM, and then applied the anti-aliasing filter at a frequency several octaves above the range of human hearing.
This hypothetically pushed the nastiness inherent of a steep filter to a realm well outside such that humans could hear, and at least far beyond the limited confines of a CD.
Welcome to 1985, where your stated concerns are both accurate and already solved.
As a child, I was able to reliably hear 38KHz signals from an piezoelectric TV remote control.
So, that's >76KHz (Nyquist) just to satisfy my own childhood ears. 96KHz would do fine.
But I'm not so special (and wasn't than, either), and both storage and bandwidth are cheap these days.
So why 192KHz? I ask: Why not?
The concept of "Stereo MP3 as a rule == better" died alongside an old MP3 encoder, which shall not be named, over a decade ago.
The Encoder That Shall Not Be Named notwithstanding, MP3 has always supported both mid-side and joint-stereo encodings. And it can switch between them, in the middle of a recording if it is useful to do so, to make the best of the available bits.
But more to the point, nobody uses straight stereo MP3 these days. It's not useful.
Accordingly, for a given bitrate, mono works better than stereo, given modern tools and techniques.
(Please learn a bit about the format and the processes used before proclaiming things to be impossible.)
I own an $8,000.00 CD player, and a $3995.95 receiver, and I must say: I agree. "High-end" power cords are a fallacy built upon a whim built upon a notion to make money.
But there's a little bit to say about power: When the windows and the walls themselves are rattling, the overhead lights are dimming on every bass note, and the power supplies in the amplifiers are struggling to keep up with the diminished current availability, one does what one must.
Does that mean $5,000 power cords are cost-effective? No, of course not. But it might mean bigger power cords, more branch circuits, and perhaps a service upgrade to the house are worthwhile. Copper is copper at 60Hz@120VAC, and more of it is better.
(Please note that I have very little time/money in this ~$12k worth of silly high-end gear, so my confirmation bias may be lacking compared to someone who actually had something significant "invested" in such pricey kit.)
Lags behind? Meh. The music industry succeeded while the film industry was still pushing analog.
We didn't get digital 48KHz film soundtracks (let alone digital soundtracks of any sort) for movies in the home for another decade or more after CDs had become routine and commonplace.
The Xbox and the Xbox 360 are completely different pieces of kit: One of them is a Pentium III, and the other is PPC.
They don't even share the same endian-ness.
Commodity PC parts (as we've known the term for the past twenty years or more) haven't ever experienced such a change.
I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a place to find good, used RAM. I don't know of any since the one local computer store that had a proper hardware RAM tester failed 1.5 decages ago, but: I don't care if my RAM is old or new. I just want to be certain that it will work as specified.
There's got to be hundreds of gigabytes of good DDR2 literally being thrown away every day, these days. It's really a waste.
Because there are things police do which I, a constituent, both have no business knowing and simply don't want to know.
Random cop arrests person, cop seizes phone, cop places phone (without mashing any buttons) into a Faraday bag. Phone is both preserved, and unable to communicate. This is a Good Thing in terms of chain of custody, and of preventing leaks, while also preserving my hardware for my future use.
The alternative is that the phone is thumb-fucked by a Bad Cop until he gets frustrated with the process, pulls the battery and loses the SD card ("What SD card?").
Or, the Good Cop puts the phone in a paper evidence bag in the trunk of a cruiser without thumb-fucking it. On its way to the evidence lockup, the phone is still streaming out to ustream. The Good Cop finds another Bad Guy, and we get detailed audio of that streamed live over the internet. And once it finds its way into evidence, we get streams of that, too.
The Good Cop scenario is a very cute idea, to be sure, but it could really fuck up investigations of Bad People (of which there are more of than Bad Cops, in my experience. YMMV.).
But if it were policy to just put seized portable electronics into Faraday bags and not fuck with them, I think everyone wins.
(Disclaimer: As a freedom-loving American who hates to see police abuse anywhere, and a person who works closely with police agencies on their own internal recording and communications systems, I get to see both sides.)
Cool.
Would you mind telling me how I can back up my Rolodex, so that if it dies in a fire I can just buy a new Rolodex and have it filled out automatically?