Google Translation REALLY sucks

One of my friends from India was in China & I decided to wish him in Chinese. I went to translate & typed "Happy birthday dude!" & then I pasted the translated chinese into his scrapbook at orkut. Then suddenly just out of curiosity I wanted to see the english translation of what I just posted to him. The translated english said : "Happy Birthday Pig!" I had to immediately delet it... ROFL

Dumb Google Translation...

The other day I was looking at this page: http://site.mynet.com/piracz/inver/inver.htm It was in some foreign language, Turkish I guess... I found it interesting (the images ;) So I went to Google Translate & tried the translated version of it. The translation was extremely dumb! & whenever you hover your mouse over some translated text a more dumb pop-up box would emerge saying "Contribute a better translation" DUMB!! I mean why would I take the extreme pain of typing "translate.google.com" in my browser & pasting the address & blah blah if I was able to translate it myself..... LOL!

website for USB pinouts for K310i !

Oh man... I was looking for this information for so long.... the USB connector details for my Sony Ericsson K310i mobile phone. While from the 2 pins from the charger, i was able to make out which pins were used for charging. I even made a charger which charges with any Input voltage (up to 37V DC!) & provides 5V regulated to the phone @ 500 mA with proper heat sinking.
But I always wondered how the phone detects that the earphones are connected to it. In normal audio appliances (radio, TVs, laptops...) the design of the connector (audio Output jack) is such that it disconnects the audio input to the inbuilt amplifier inside the device & routes it towards the earphones. Basically that's a mechanical arrangement.

Now looking at this information that I had found, it looks like the male connector shorts some pins on the phone side (8 & 9):


Some days ago, I bought an adapter that enables the conventional jack to be connected to Sony Ericsson phones:



But couldn't open it to find the pinouts. Anyways, it's good to know things, be it from webpage or practically :)

LED torch version 3.0 made!

Today I made the 3rd verison of my LED torch... Now it does not have a slide switch to turn on the white LEDs as in the previous versions (1 & 2). The LEDs used are five 5mm superbright LEDs. I put a micro switch which turns on/off the LEDs successively as you press it. It's quite comfortable to work with as compared to a slide switch (you have to remember which side to slide it towards :P) For this circuit I used a CMOS JK Flip-Flop CD4027 for storing the 1 bit value. And ofcourse there's a light sensor just like previous ones to help not keep bumping your head in the dark :). The battery was Panasonic make & it is the one used in cordless handsets: 3.6V, 300mA. Checkout the complete schematic & technical details on my website, I'll be shortly putting it. Here are some pics:

The panasonic battery, enough to power it till ~5 hrs!




"Motherboard" :D


One jumper connector is for charging & the other for battery terminal

The back-side

That's how they connect


Action!

Finally finally finally !!!

Finally I was able to program my P89V51RD2 with a USB-serial converter cable. I was using FlashMagic. I was unable to do it before as I thought that the converter cable should be FTDI chip based & mine was BAFO make. The controller was communicating with ease but not being programmed. Some People told me that non-FTDI based USB-serial converter cables have a handshaking problem in programming some devices. But one of my friends was successful in programming RD2 with BAFO cable.

Then I played around with some options in FlasgMagic. I tried to lower the baud rate first of all. It didnt work even at the lowest baud rate. Then I tried to change the interface type from None (ISP) to FDI USB-ICP-80C51ISP & various others. It didnt work either.

Then finally I went to "advanced options" under "options" menu in FlashMagic & unchecked "use DTR to control RST" under the "hardware config" tab:



& it worked! Then I even increased the Baud rate to 115200 for programming big hex files quickly. It's now working perfectly...

Photoshop problems with less RAM!

I downloaded Photoshop CS4 a few days back. Thought it might be necessary for editing pics/ making animations or GIFs etc for my website. Hell of a program it was on computer resources! I have a IBM R51 laptop. Now it's getting old & weak... poor laptop. It has got only 256 MB & 40 GB HDD. The page file size rose to 1.2 GB when I started CS4! Although the program itself is around 70 MB, it still needs a lot of memory for doing its image processing thing... The adobe people recommend 1+ GB RAM & 512MB absolute minimum. I wondered how it's even running on my R51? :)

I searched the online help on the adobe's website, there I read a tip that do not set the scratch disks the same as the ones the Windows is using for paging file. A scratch disk is a disk area that PS uses for doing its stuff. Then I changed this property in CS4's preferences & I got a far better performance than before!

I was really fed up with the slow behavior of photoshop before as I watched the tutorials on the YouTube. I saw the amazing speed with which those machines were doing the ops on the images. sometimes I started to read the newspaper in the meantime when an image was loading in it LOL. & sometimes I would get the "out of memory" error when I tried to save an image after much editing! What good is it if you cant save the image after all the editing?? Then I had to exit all the extra applications (which were already a few LOL) & then save the image.

It's for sure i need extra computing power now...