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  1. Commenting

    January 17, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Due to increased spam mes­sages, I have lim­ited the com­ment­ing option to reg­is­tered users only. Please reg­is­ter to this blog as user to be ale to comment.

    Category Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  2. iOS 5 update

    October 17, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    So, on the 12th (13th here in Oz, as we are about 19 hours ahead of the Cuper­tino folks), the long awaited and eagerly awaited update to iOS became avail­able for down­load on the Apple site.

    First impres­sions:

    Pos­i­tive:

    Looks good.

    Some really clever changes to the noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem, which now pro­vides a list of noti­fi­ca­tions listed in appli­ca­tion order. This makes it easy to see more than one noti­fi­ca­tion and allows you to pri­or­i­tize them to your liking.

    Cam­era but­ton on home screen (iPhone 4, but not my iPad 1) and using the vol­ume switch as shut­ter but­ton (yay!). It acts like a real cam­era now.

    WiFi updates and sync­ing. What can I say. This was prob­a­bly the most com­mon com­plaint peo­ple had with iDe­vices. The fact that you couldn’t do any­thing with your iPad, iPhone, iAny­thing, until you had plugged it into your inter­net con­nected PC or Mac and allowed it to com­mu­ni­cate back to cuper­tino for it’s breath of life.
    And then, after the ini­tial acti­va­tion, so many func­tion­al­i­ties and file trans­fers where com­pletely reliant on the cable con­nec­tion, or oth­er­wise known as the umbil­i­cal cord.

    iCloud backup. This would have to be one of the best parts of the update. The abil­ity to syn­chro­nize with the cloud.


    Negative:

    But as always, the pos­i­tives are only one side of the story.

    Slow! It has def­i­nitely impacted on the over­all respon­sive­ness of my iPad. I my not have the iPad 2 or the iPhone 4s, but both my devices are less than 1 year old. For all intents and pur­poses they are brand new devices, which have now become sig­nif­i­cantly more slug­gish than a week ago.

    iCloud backup. But hang on.…? How can this be listed as a neg­a­tive, when you just listed it as a positive?

    Because, Apple giveth, and then Apple char­geth away. Yep, the gen­er­ous folks at Apple sell you a device with a min­i­mum capac­ity of 16GB and tell you that you can now back it up ‘for free’ to the iCloud.…..except.….…you can’t. Why, because you can­not backup a 126GB device to a 5GB online iCloud account. Let alone two 16GB iDevices.

    But you can pay to add more stor­age.….….…! Nope, not gonna happen.

    So, there we have it
    Yes, it is just a first impres­sion and for now, the pos­i­tives out­weigh the neg­a­tives by a long shot. Great update, but it needs some stream­lin­ing and more iCloud storage.

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  3. Started up and encouraging so far

    October 6, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    So I started the machine up and it didn’t explode! Hehe!

    There are a few fit­tings that need a bit of tight­en­ing. With brass and cop­per fit­tings it is always bet­ter not to tighten the fit­tings too much when you ut them together as it is soft metal and you can eas­ily dam­age the thread. So then, when the machine comes up to pres­sure and full heat, You’ll see there’s a few spots where you need to tighten it up a bit more if it is dripping.

    Also, it looks like one of the sole­noid valves it short­ing out when I run the group. The elec­tric ‘brain box’ is oper­at­ing beau­ti­fully and the right hand group (which wasn’t work­ing prop­erly before) is tun­ning like a dream, but when­ever I try the left hand group, it trips the power. At least that means a direct short some­where, which should be a sim­ple thing to find and fix.

    All in all, I’m encour­aged by the ini­tial results. But there’s still some work to be done.

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | 2 Comments

  4. Coffee machine almost ready to go!

    October 5, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    So close, so close.

    The girls have gone down the coast for a cou­ple of days to visit Kelli Thomas, so I’ve had a bit more time to work on the machine. On Mon­day I pretty much had the machine reassem­bled to the extent I could, apart from the few bits and pieces I was wait­ing for.

    Yes­ter­day the boiler gas­ket and and a few other bits arrived that I needed to fin­ish it all off. So now the entire machine is rebuilt. I’ve rewired any electrics that needed rewiring. The machine is quite old and still had it’s orig­i­nal wiring. Over time the cop­per and the plas­tic insu­la­tion starts to get hard and brit­tle, espe­cially at those parts where it comes in touch with the brass (hot) parts of the machine.

    So, a bit of rewiring, and hope­fully it will all work when I start the machine up.

    IMG 1306

    Clean pipes!

    IMG 1307

    It’s all quite intricate!

     

    I’ll prob­a­bly power it up tonite. Will let you know how it goes. It’s always a bit daunt­ing to first turn a machine back on after a com­plete refur­bish like this. Espe­cially as I’m not an expert and this is only my third rebuild. But that’s half the fun!

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  5. Putting her back together

    October 1, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Slowly but surely she’s becom­ing a machine again. The are still some parts I’m wait­ing on. A few fil­ters and gas­kets that need to be replaced and one steam wand, which broke when I took it off.

    But as you can see, I’m slowly get­ting it back the way it was meant to be. The pic­tures are a bit dark, but nevertheless.

    20111001-121332.jpg

    20111001-121347.jpg

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  6. The B3000 re-build commences

    September 23, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Have I bit­ten off more than I can chew? Nah! Just got to take my time and do it properly.

    Just a short sum­ma­tion of the facts. This machine has been sit­ting on my bench for a few months now and works fine, but has had a few issues.

    Ini­tially, the issues where:

    1. Right group not heat­ing up properly

    2. Elec­tron­ics on auto dosage not working

    I resolved the elec­tron­ics issue a while back.

    The group heat­ing issue is due to exces­sive cal­cium build up on the machine plumb­ing. The machine is designed as what is called a Heat Exchange (HX) sys­tem. In essence this means that the entire machine gets heated up by the ele­ment in the boiler. The boiler heats up, the brass con­ducts the heat and the whole sys­tem gets really hot. How­ever, if cor­ro­sion and scale (cal­cium build-up) start to become an issue, than this heat con­duc­tion gets ham­pered and your machine starts to run far less effec­tive. Hence, you need to address these two issues.

    Below some images to show how bad this prob­lem is with this machine (I hon­estly believe the machine was never de-scaled or ser­viced in it’s life).

    Boiler

    Here we have a photo of the back of the machine

    (the big round green thing is the boiler)

     

    Boiler seal leakage

    Clearly the boiler seal has been leaking.

    (notice also the nice burn­ing mark on the plugs to the element)

    Right-group-head-sml

    The lovely green buildup on the right group head is

    a fair indi­ca­tion of why it isn’t heat­ing up!

    An new prob­lem has been that the pump is start­ing to ‘pulse’, which is not the way a rotary pump is meant to work. By ‘pulse’, I mean that when pulling a shot, instead of the flow being con­sis­tent, there seems to be a fast-slow-fast-slow action. This neg­a­tively affects the qual­ity of the shot. Con­sis­tent pres­sure is needed. It is my believe that this may also be caused by cal­cium deposits build­ing up in the pump inter­nals. If con­nec­tion between pump and boiler is any­thing to go by, I’d say that is the issue.

    Pump-to-boiler-sml

    OUCH! Poor pump!

    Apart from these issues, the frame itself could do with a bit of a sand and repaint, so while I’ve got it out, I may as well do that.

    At the moment, the first lot of parts is sit­ting in the lovely de-scaling acid:

    descale-sml

    Got to admit it’s get­ting better,

    a lit­tle bet­ter all the time (it couldn’t get no worse).

    Frame-sml

    Frame

    So, there we have it folks. It’s by far and large the most exten­sive rebuild I have started so far. The last B3000 machine was a far sim­pler setup as there where no auto­mat­ics involved, mean­ing far less plumb­ing to take into con­sid­er­a­tion. It also was in bet­ter con­di­tion to start off with.

    In the end, this machine cost me $200 to buy and will give me lots of plea­sure in tin­ker­ing with it. I hope to get it back together again after it has been cleaned and refurbished.

    I have the 113 page schemat­ics, so I’m not just ‘wing­ing it’.

     

    I’ll be pro­vid­ing reg­u­lar updates on this lit­tle gem.

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | 2 Comments

  7. Is the PC dead as many in the tech world claim?

    September 21, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Dis­claimer: for non techies this will be a very bor­ing article.

    For some time now, tech writ­ers and blog­gers have been argu­ing that the PC era is com­ing to an end. Recent demon­stra­tions of the Win­dows 8 devel­op­ment ver­sion have brought this debate right back into the limelight.

    Their state­ments, largely based on a few trends in the mar­ket, namely:

    1. Tablet devices such as the iPad and var­i­ous other competitors.

    2. Win­dows 8 run­ning on ARM CPU’s as well as the clas­sic x86 CPU.

    3. Win­dows 8 mov­ing away from the tra­di­tional desk­top inter­face we have grown accus­tomed to since Win­dows 95/NT and arguably the very first Windows.

    So, many well respected experts and tech writer deter­mine that the era of the PC is com­ing to an end.

    I say they are wrong! They are wrong because they are bas­ing their argu­ment on a flawed understanding/idea of what a PC is. They have come to see the Win­tel machine (A com­puter run­ning Win­dows, pow­ered by an Intel CPU) as the def­i­n­i­tion of a PC. Many writ­ers, in fact, will use the term Win­tel to describe a PC. This in itself is a mis­nomer. It is like call­ing a vac­uum cleaner a Hoover. Intel is one (the biggest) man­u­fac­turer of CPU’s based on the x86 archi­tec­ture which they devel­oped. How­ever, through­out the years we have seen oth­ers build these x86 CPU’s. Other man­u­fac­tur­ers over the years to, name some, have been Cyrix, AMD, and Via. Amd is cur­rently Intel’s main com­peti­tor when it comes to x86 chips.

    PC stands for ‘Per­sonal Com­puter’. Noth­ing more, noth­ing less!

    For years, we dif­fer­en­ti­ated the two main types of PC’s by call­ing one an IBM-Compatible and the other Mac. Both are per­sonal com­put­ers (PC’s).

    So, how is the PC dead in people’s minds? It is because Microsoft has decided to develop Win­dows 8 for both x86 and ARM sys­tems, with the indi­ca­tion, in may people’s opin­ions, that they will phase out the x86 edi­tion at some stage.

    In short, Microsoft, the biggest soft­ware com­pany in the world is rad­i­cally chang­ing the direc­tion of it’s main product.

    But wait… where in this is the PC’s demise evi­dent? It isn’t! Microsoft’s deci­sion to move to ARM archi­tec­ture is based on the fact that the ARM archi­tec­ture is much bet­ter suited to mobile devices and as such, Microsoft is try­ing to finally make a suc­cess­ful entry into the mobile world with it’s flag­ship prod­uct Win­dows. For years they have offered the likes of Win­dows Mobile and Win­dows CE, with some suc­cess (Win­dows mobile ruled the PDA era). But this always sac­ri­ficed func­tion­al­ity and power for bat­tery life and porta­bil­ity. Now, they are rebuild­ing their entire OS (oper­at­ing sys­tem) around an archi­tec­ture which is designed with low power con­sump­tion in mind. A plat­form which promises much higher com­put­ing capa­bil­i­ties at much lower energy con­sump­tion lev­els. In short a plat­form des­tined for mobile devices.

    Mobile per­sonal com­put­ing devices. PC’s. Smaller, more con­ve­nient, yet powerful.……PC’s. Be it in Tablet form, in Mobile Phone / Organ­iser form, or in what­ever form they will come up with, they are still PC’s.

    Take into con­sid­er­a­tion too, as a side point, that cer­tain con­tent cre­ation appli­ca­tions will always remain bet­ter suited to a desk­top com­puter in its tra­di­tional form, and we can only come to one conclusion.

    The PC is dead, Long live the PC!

    Category Opinion, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  8. Website hacked

    August 17, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Yes­ter­day, I got a fran­tic call from Lilly’s old pre-school. Their web­site had been hacked and now showed just a mes­sage by the hacker.

    Need­less to say, it took a fair bit of tech­ni­cal acro­bat­ics to get it all back up and running.

    They where lucky in that this hacker hadn’t done a bril­liant job in remov­ing all the old user infor­ma­tion. As such I was able to find my way in and reset some things before hav­ing to rebuild the website.

    The les­son, the school has learned is that they should have been doing reg­u­lar backup oper­a­tions of their files, not just the local ones, but also their web­site. They hadn’t. Luck­ily, they had asked me to fix a prob­lem with their Word­Press instal­la­tion about a month and a half ago, and I’d per­formed a backup onto a USB mem­ory stick at that time (as is my prac­tice before doing any work on a web­site). So at least I could per­form a restore from there after rebuild­ing the basics.

    But, they are up and run­ning again.….

    byronbaypreschool.org.au

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  9. Fonts, fonts, fonts

    August 16, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Reilly has had some issues using dif­fer­ent fonts in her blog and try­ing to get some changed.

    I think I’ve found the fix.

    That is, I think so?
    Yep, I have!

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

  10. Categories

    August 15, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Up till now, I haven’t used the cat­e­gories option in my blog post­ings. As of today, how­ever, I have started to add cat­e­gories to my blog.

    So far, there’s only three, but more are likely to fol­low. It makes it eas­ier to nav­i­gate my posts.

    The cur­rent three are:

    Seb’s life

    Tech

    Opin­ion

    Some­times the posts will be linked to more than one cat­e­gory but other times they’ll just be linked to one.

    Any sug­ges­tions are welcome.

    Category Seb's life, Tech | Tags: | Comments Off

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