Translation of IKEA frukt soppa instructions

This is silly, I know, but I bought a packet of the Swedish fruit soup from IKEA then realized I couldn't read the directions.  So I tried googling it but without success.  Finally, I used Google Translate (which includes a virtual Swedish keyboard for the extra symbols) and the translation is as follows:

ORIGINAL FRUKTSOPPA DIRECTIONS

gör så här, vispa ner påsarnas innehåll i 1 liter kallt vatten, en påse till 0,5 liter. Tillaga på spis eller i mikrovågsugn. På spis, Koka upp under omrörning. Låt svalna, gärna i vattenbad och under lock. I mikrovågsugn, Värm på hogsta effekt (600W) i 6 minuter. Rör om efter ca halva tiden.

TRANSLATED ENGLISH DIRECTIONS

Do this: whisk the bag's contents in 1 liter of cold water, (a bag to 0.5 liters). Cook on stove or in the microwave. On the stove, bring to boil, stirring. Allow to cool, preferably in water and under cover. In microwave, heat at maximum power (600W) for 6 minutes. Stir in about half the time.

Problems with Pelco and Swann security-camera DVRs

OVERVIEW

My office has an established array of 8 security cameras but our DVR is now broken.  The old DVR was a Dedicated Micros DS2 and it never really worked as expected, but it was minimally sufficient so we put-up with it.  Now that it's died I was excited at the prospect of finally replacing it with something that worked exactly as we'd always wanted.  But I continue to run into a bewildering array of problems, none of which could have been predicted.

MY RESEARCH METHOD

I have now researched about 8 possible replacement DVRs.  In addition to reviewing their online product-pages, I downloaded all the brochures and I read all the manuals cover-to-cover, keeping detailed notes.  In this fashion I was able to immediately eliminate several DVRs because they did not allow you to limit users to individual cameras (just general access-levels, e.g. live-view versus playback).

I have also been testing the online demos, of which I was surprised to find so few?  This experience gave me a general 'feel' for the level of spit-and-polish on the UIs, which one would expect to reflect the overall quality of the product.  Some DVRs had a distinctly 1990s UI -- not a deal-breaker but it definitely gave me pause.

REVIEW OF PELCO

After much discussion, I was able to get an in-house demo of the DVR recommended by our security-system vendor -- the Pelco DX4808.  This is the current mid-range DVR by the same industry-leading company that made our 480-line analog cameras.  It featured full-resolution D1 recording capability across all 8 cameras simultaneously, which was the biggest failing of the old Dedicated Micros unit.  Unfortunately, we quickly ran into serious issues with the new unit.

1. The D1 recordings were not properly de-interlaced.  When people would move side-to-side in the camera view, there were major 'jaggies' around them.  And this issue extended to motionless images, too, i.e., the new '480-line' recordings looked worse than our old 240-line recordings (which skipped the whole de-interlacing issue by simply recording one set of NTSC video frames).  I asked several people at Pelco about this and none of them had any idea how to fix it; they confirmed that there was no hidden setting I could use to 'flip' the odd/even frames, nor was there a switch on the cameras to reverse how they were sending the image.

2. There were 3 different DVR interfaces available but none of them allowed you to easily review the recordings?  The 'old' DX Series application allowed you to search by camera and date/time, then presented you with a time-line indicating when the camera had been triggered.  But the timeline was awkward to use since most (short) recordings would show-up as a single pixel-wide 'event' and clicking anywhere nearby would result in the 'invisible' playback of other cameras rather than skipping ahead to the next event on the camera you had searched for.  There was also a newer DS Control application which allowed you to search but then played-back events without any timeline or listing, i.e., it was like you were randomly playing back events.

3. The remote viewing apps used an old Win95-style video interface.  This meant that you could not move the view screen to a 2nd monitor nor could you resize it.  Also it would force my Windows 7 computer to drop out of 'Aero' mode.  The new DS Control app seemed to work properly but the playback UI made it a deal-breaker for my boss.

4. Finally -- and this is really a weird stupid one -- I could not get the DVR to properly use the local-time.  It seemed stuck on GMT, no matter what I tried.  I think the issue was that the initial recordings were done when the unit was still fresh-out-of-the-box running on GMT and so it insisted on deferring to those time-stamps even though I'd switched the general configuration to PST.  I repeatedly asked Pelco if I should just reset the cache of recordings but they never responded, and I returned the demo before bothering to test it.

One good point:  I was able to successfully operate the Pelco DVR remotely across our Cisco VPN.  The old Dedicated Micros had apparently used a faux 'UDP' mode of transmission (TCP packets without the full handshake) which tripped-up our VPN and made playback almost unbearably slow.

CONSIDERATION OF 'OFF' BRANDS

From all my extensive research I had started to notice distinct similarities between some brand-name DVRs and comparable 'off-brand' models.  Clearly, some of these units were simply OEM versions of the same recorder!  For instance, the Pelco DX4800 was really just a rebranded LG LE5008-NH albeit with additional remote interfaces like DS Control.  But this made me realize that I should consider some of the smaller (cheaper) brands, too.

REVIEW OF SWANN

The local Fry's Electronics would frequently advertise security DVRs for a fraction of the cost of the 'real' DVRs I had been reviewing.  In the past, when I would try to test the products' online demos or read their manuals, it was clear that they were shoddy fly-by-night units, totally unfit for a business environment.  But then I saw the brand-new 'top-of-the-line' Swann DVR8-4000.  It featured full D1 recording across all 8 channels as well as a well-reviewed mobile app.  And it only cost $400 -- a third what the Pelco would have cost!  So I purchased a unit, with the expectation that I could return it within 30 days if it wasn't All That.

At first it seemed a roaring success.  Out of the box it appeared to be a very well built and professional unit.  The default settings were all totally appropriate so I didn't even have to change anything to suit our desired recording-mode, i.e., only motion-activated and always max quality (D1 and 30 fps).  And the live-playback was properly de-interlaced -- finally, true 480-line resolution!

Unfortunately it went badly south from there:

1. First, I ran into weird UI issues where I would think I had saved a setting (because I'd clicked OK afterwards) only to learn that the unit only saved some changes if you clicked OK, then APPLY, then confirmed OK again.

2. Next, I created a new user-account and assigned it access to just 1 camera; this was one of the primary requirements which the old Dedicated Micros was unable to perform.  Unfortunately, the remote viewer would either show ALL the cameras (ignoring the configuration) or NONE.  I called Swann tech support and they eventually admitted that these were known issues, to be fixed in a 'future' firmware upgrade -- no ETA.

3. They also asked me if I was able to playback the recordings; I could not!  Apparently this was another known bug.

4. Since I only had 30 days with which to test, I escalated my issues to the senior tech support and asked if I could beta-test the next firmware.  They were very helpful and obliged me, sending me the file which was very easy to install ... and rendered the unit completely inoperable.  Now the tech support people offered to send me a replacement unit, but I declined that in favor of simply returning the unit to Fry's for a refund.

CONCLUSION

So here I sit, sans security recordings.  Of course, the cameras are still serving their primary 'deterrent' role since people don't know they're inoperable!  I'm staying in touch with Swann and if I don't find something else, soon, I may just re-purchase the DVR8-4000 after the firmware is upgraded.

Reactivate Mirror immediately caused Failed Redundancy?!

WINDOWS MIRROR IS NOT SO SMART
I just spent a frustrating couple of days trying to upgrade the SATA controller on my Windows 7 workstation.  The controller upgrade went smoothly but, in the process, my existing software mirror (RAID-1) broke and I could not re-establish it!  Everything I tried to google was unhelpful, i.e., I never found anything beyond, "Delete the mirror and recreate it."

Both drives were still visible and with identical partitions/folders, but Windows Disk Manager reported "Failed Redundancy."  As soon as I saw there was a problem, out came the external hard-drives and I spent those first 24 hours updating my offline backups.   I then tried breaking the mirror, deleting the volumes on the 2nd drive, and then re-adding them to a new mirror.  No go.  No matter how I tried to do it, the new mirror immediately came up saying, "Failed Redundancy."  Checking the Windows Event Viewer merely reported, "FT Orphaning : A disk that is part of a fault-tolerant volume can no longer be accessed."

FYI - I was also SUPER CAREFUL to consistently remove only the 2nd drive, i.e., so that I didn't accidentally nuke the copy I was keeping.  (The original partitions on that 2nd drive had long-ago been nuked.)

MORE THINGS I TRIED

• The only suggestion I found online (that I hadn't already tried) was to click Reactivate Volume on the newly recreated (and 'failed') mirror.  But this simply triggered a new "FT Orphaning" error in Event Viewer.
• I had originally upgraded from a 2-port controller to a 4-port Sil-3114 controller.  Out of the box the 3114 was running the latest/final v5.403 RAID firmware.  When my continued attempts to re-add the mirror kept failing I began to suspect the card.  So I re-flashed it with the non-RAID firmware, v5.500.  (I was able to do this from within the Windows driver!  Very cool. I had to install the non-RAID driver afterwards, too.)  Unfortunately this didn't help.
• I had already tried deleting everything on the 2nd drive from Windows Disk Manager but I wondered if maybe there was some left-over MBR data that had to be deleted.  So I booted a copy of FreeDOS and ran the following command:  fdisk /clearall 2
  Unfortunately, that didn't help either.

WHAT FINALLY WORKED :-)
I have no idea why but re-arranging the drives' positions on the controllers did the trick!  Specifically, I took one of the drives connected to the motherboard (not my boot drive!) and swapped it with the 2nd mirror'd drive.  Other than that I made no additional changes to the drives, partitions etc.

It's disappointing, really, that after all these years the Microsoft software mirroring system still has such deficient error-reporting.
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How to fix blank/default icons on Windows 7 Task Bar (oops!)

My office is in the process of converting from Windows XP to Windows 7 and I am one of the early testers.  One problem I ran into was that Acrobat PDF files would open-up but without the proper Acrobat icon on the Task Bar.  Normally you could simply right-click on the Task Bar icon, then right-click again on the program name ("Adobe Acrobat') and then click on 'Change Icon' to fix it.  But because of the way Acrobat installed the 'Change Icon' link was greyed-out.

When I tried googling this situation I found lots of varied suggestions, none of which seemed to apply.  What seems to have worked, fortunately, was the following procedure which I believe triggered an update/refresh of the cached icon-image for Acrobat.

PROCEDURE

1. located original 'acrobat.exe' in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat
   (I noted that it had the correct icon but it was missing from Task Bar once opened)
2. created a shortcut to the .EXE
   (the shortcut also had the correct icon)
3. opening the shortcut showed the correct icon!  
4. At this point I temporarily pinned the app to the Task Bar.
5. I tried opening some PDFs and found that they opened in the pinned app and with the correct icon
6. I unpinned the app from the Task Bar
7. I opened some PDFs again and now the icon is correct

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UPDATE: And just like that it's gone...  I thought I had fixed it this morning but now it's broken again.

Convert phone contacts to Gmail

I just helped a co-worker convert all her built-in phone contacts to Gmail contacts, in preparation for getting a new phone.  (This was on an older Android smartphone.) The trick is sort of counter-intuitive -- you need to disable the built-in contacts rather than the Gmail!

FYI - Here's where I found the solution (though it's not written as clearly as I'm about to do it):
http://www.samsunggalaxysforum.com/samsung-galaxy-s-how-to/copy-move-contacts-from-phone-to-gmail/msg2462/#msg2462

PROCEDURE

1. (this might not be necessary?) Open your Contacts app, click the menu button > More > Import/Export Contacts > Export to SD card.  This creates a .VCF file in the root-folder
2. again click the menu button > Display Options, and disable the view of all built-in Phone contacts.  Only leave your Gmail account selected.  Don't freak-out when the Contacts list goes blank :-)
3. again click the menu button > More > Import/Export Contacts > Import from SD card > Import from VCF

At this point all the contacts should re-appear and now they'll be marked (the tiny icon to the right of each entry) as both 'G' and 'P' for Gmail and Phone.  Login to your Gmail account, click on the drop-down next to the big MAIL link (in the top-left) and select Contacts.  Everything on the phone should now be there!
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Quick fix for secure erase of used SSD

I just bought a Corsair Force3 SSD on-sale at Fry's.  I saved money coming and going, in fact, as there was a mail-in rebate and the drive had been returned by someone else -- so it was discounted another $15.  These particular drives use the new 'SandForce' SSD controller which have lots of reliability problems so they probably need to offer the rebates to move them off the shelves...  Now, why did I bother buying one??

CHECKING THE FIRMWARE
The first thing I checked was the firmware on the drive.  'Fortunately' it was not running the current v1.3.2 which tells me any problems the original purchaser had might have been fixed by this firmware upgrade.  I proceeded to install the new firmware and had no problems.  Now all that remained was to do a secure-erase, to ensure I got the correct 'New Drive' performance.  (The write-speed on SSDs gradually drops as they get full and the 'free space' becomes fragmented. Since the physical memory 'sectors' are remapped 'logical sectors' you can't use a traditional OS or application defragger.)

TRYING TO PERFORM A SECURE ERASE
Most of the online instructions said to download the Parted Magic ISO, boot from it, then select the 'Erase this drive' option in the GUI.  You also need to select the 'Internal' mode (which tells the drive to do it's built-in erase command) rather than 'External' mode (which manually rewrites the entire drive and just adds wear to an SSD).  I knew that Parted Magic just relies on the same Gparted and 'hdparm' commands on my beloved Ubuntu, so I decided to just use an Ubuntu boot-drive I already had setup.

Here's where the problem came in, and the fix:

INPUT/OUTPUT ERROR
For whatever reason the Ubuntu flash-boot and/or the BIOS locked the drive.  I was able to run the basic-query hdparm command successfully,
 > sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda

But when I tried to run the advanced query,
 > sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda

or when I tried to trigger the internal secure-erase command,
 > sudo hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sda

I got an error message re "Input/Output Error"

THE FIX
After much googling I finally found one discussion (on the Intel SSD forums) which made passing reference to either hot-swapping the drive or sleeping/waking the machine.  From my Ubuntu 10.10 flash-drive boot, I was able to click the 'Suspend' command, then power-on again, and the hdparm command now worked.
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Why my next computer will be Windows, not Linux

For those of you who have been following my blog (anyone?!) it may be surprising to hear that I'm abandoning Linux.  It is not a decision I am making lightly.  But after several years dealing with the limitation of Linux (specifically, Ubuntu) I have realized that the Windows 'ecosystem' really is better for me.  Let me explain...

Multimedia support
I use my computers as my primary source of video, both TV shows, movies, and my extensive collection of home videos.  On Linux the playback of high-definition video has always been problematic, requiring never-ending experimentation with replacement video-drivers (the proprietary vendor 'blobs' versus the open-source drivers).  The h.264 hardware-acceleration still doesn't work properly with ATI videocards, even with extensive manual revision of the installed drivers.

On Windows, this multimedia support is trivial, as Microsoft has created a well-organized system (DirectX) that all the manufacturers use.

Multi-user support
Linux is inherently a multi-user OS yet the graphical interface is poorly tested.  My wife and I share our Linux workstation, taking turns as the current login, and we can attest to these problems first-hand.  Whenever one of us connects a flash-drive, the other user gets non-sensical error messages.  This is a known problem with a longstanding Launchpad bug; never fixed.  When we switch from user-to-user (using the longstanding 'fast-user-switch' feature) the login screen always flashes the name of the current user, then corrects itself... 'always' except for the occasional crash!  Clearly this feature has not been properly tested.  The first issue is cosmetic, the second is clearly more, but neither has ever been fixed.

RAID support
One of the reasons I was initially thrilled with Linux was the ability to setup a software-based RAID mirror and get improved read-performance (as well as piece of mind).  I used this on my combined boot/data drive(s).  But now I am switching to using a single SSD for my boot/OS drive and a separate pair of mirrored data drives.  This combination has always been supported under Windows so Linux has no advantage.  Plus, on Linux, there was no built-in GUI for checking the state of the RAID array.  I managed to find an old unsupported utility to do it but I have no idea if it would actually warn me of a failure.  On Windows, I'm quite sure this GUI is available and supported.

Printer and Scanner support
I have had non-stop problems with both my printer and scanner under Linux.  From kernel rev to kernel rev the support for my peripherals has come and gone, unpredictably.  This has been true for my Canon inkjet, my Brother laserjet, and my Epson scanner.  In theory I appreciate the use of generic hardware drivers -- the use of shared drivers means that they are better tested than individual/per-device drivers.  But that advantage is moot if they don't correctly work on your hardware. 

To add insult to injury, everything prints slower, especially the Brother laser.  It's like there's an extra layer of translation taking place during the print-file generation?  Printing even a single page will require a 20 second delay, whereas the printing from Windows is instantaneous.

I also have a 'pro-sumer' Epson scanner with 'ICE' support for correcting scratches in photos.  But this feature is only usable through the Windows driver, there is no support for it through the generic scanner driver.

USB wake from sleep
By default, Windows lets you wake a machine from sleep-mode by moving your mouse and/or typing on the keyboard; Linux does not.  It is possible to configure Linux to do the same but it can't be set as the default?!  Instead, the best you can do is add a startup script to manually change the power settings at boot.  And the configuration of this script varies from distribution to distribution, and even from release to release (as the startup processor changes or is replaced).  On Ubuntu there is a Launchpad request for either a change in the default behavior, a GUI to easily edit it, or even just a way to make a permanent change in the configuration.  It has languished for years without action.

Windows-only apps
I have also tried resolutely to only use native Linux apps.  Some are actually better than their Windows equivalents, e.g. MP3 music managers.  But I continue to run into unsolvable situations where the only functional option is the Windows version.  My scanner, as I already mentioned, can only use it's ICE scratch-recovery with the native Windows driver.  My Oregon Scientific weather station is only recognized under Windows; some other models have Linux drivers but not mine.  The only Newsgroup Binary Reader with bandwidth control is on Windows.  Quicken is still the best checkbook app.  Outlook is still the best email/organizer app.  Yes, for many years now I've been using Evolution in place of Outlook...  And I have a handful of unresolved bugs (filed with Gnome.org) to prove that Outlook works better.

For the past couple of years I've resorted to running these Windows apps in a Virtualbox VM.  In general this has been a satisfactory workaround.  But I've long suspected that the majority of my system crashes were related to this VM sub-system.  Surely it's better to run a single OS?

Conclusion
All these experiences have made me appreciate the relative pro's and con's of open-source software like Linux versus for-pay software like Windows.  Obviously, no one in the Linux developer community is concerned enough about the various glitches to which I am subjected to try and do something about it.  I still love the freedom of Linux and plan to continue using it on my personal single-user workstation.  But, much as I hate Microsoft, I am forced to admit that the nominal cost of their Windows is a small price to pay for a 'sane' OS.
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