Rick's b.log - entry 2016/01/17

Winter sales and vide grenier

I lost the hands-free kit from my phone (since found) so I picked up a Bluetooth headset for €6. It functions. Connects to the phone for both audio during calls, or for audio from the music/video player. It is not great, the ear lugs don't have much bass capability, and the built-in microphone overcompresses so the sound at the other end of a phone call sounds a bit robotic. I'm not sure how the single +/- control is supposed to control both the track playing and the volume. I think the instructions are wrong, but then the instructions don't make a lot of sense (translated from Chinese?). There is no place-a-call option, holding down the action button turns the headset off.
However, it is useful for making calls and stuff when I lose my hands-free the next time...

Given that the Bluetooth headset seemed to be useful, if a little crappy sounding, I decided to try a set of Bluetooth headphones. At €14, it didn't seem a bad idea compared to the prices I'd seen quoted in Amazon previously (as my wired sound-cancelling headphones are getting old and worn out). Okay, a Manhattan range from Campus (honestly, I've never heard of them before), the blurb on the box goes to lengths about how cool you'd look wearing these in Central Park; which rather takes the p!$$ as Central Park is 3.41km² (843 acres) and planet Earth's habitable land totals approximately 63,824,447km² (~15.8 billion acres). There's about 57% more if you include mountains, deserts, etc. Anyway, American Arrogance at its finest, no?

A clearance item for a tenner was a Microsoft media keyboard. Using a USB device and presenting itself as an integrated HID device, I thought that this would be useful for the Pi. I wanted to avoid a Bluetooth keyboard as hell will freeze over before RISC OS gets a functional Bluetooth stack.
A small adaptor would plug into the Pi and the keyboard would function as a keyboard and the little touchpad as a mouse. I'd need to do something in order to get the menus working - probably a low level hack to switch the middle and right buttons - so I wouldn't have ADJUST but I'd have MENU. It's really important on RISC OS.
Anyway, no go. The keyboard works, but using the mouse freezes RISC OS. The pointer still moves (it moves on interrupt) but the callbacks cease (my OLED is updated on a ticker) so this means something has gone horribly and irrecoverably wrong inside the USB driver.
The keyboard seems to work okay on the Pi with an older version of RaspBMC.
Right now I have it hooked to my EeePC for testing - many of the media keys seem to work well with XP which is interesting given that it is designed to work with Windows 8 or later.

This cost a euro. One end is a squishy prodder for use with tablets and smartphones. The other end is a laser. It runs off of an AAAA (yes, quad A) cell. The squishy end works, the laser is capable of placing a spot on a tree from nearly one side of the property to the other. Maybe seventy odd metres? It could probably do better, but my visual acuity is not suitable to see a red dot less than a centimetre across from further than that.
The one that got the most out of the laser pointer was Tiny (the cat). She passed a good ten minutes hunting and wishing to capture that red dot. Climbing up doors, walls, humans, chasing it around the floor, under tables, and so on. Obviously one must take special care not to point it in the eyes. The laser is activated by a press button, not a switch, so it was easy to turn it off if she was turning her head towards the light.

Global warming?

First up is a rose. Called Ghislaine de Feligonde (or something like that). Doing what making flowers in January?

I think mom said this was a Celandine, growing there against the wall of the house.

Some bulbs. No idea what they are (mom said, but there was a memory parity mismatch), but mom said that they are supposed to be doing this in early March.

The Daffs are on the way:

Here's the Hazelnut. Are those flower buds?

The Almond has buds starting to form, but it'll be a while before flowers. Likewise for the Willow.

The coldest it has been here so far this year has been -0.5°C. There have been some ice and frosts, and some snow to the north and east (as usual) but nothing particularly cold, and so far no snow days. I hope winter just sort of fizzles out and spring hurries in its place.
If this is Global Warming, then Bring It. Forget the reality of melting Arctic ice likely pushing Europe into a mini ice age, and let's have the weather be like Spain, huh? ☺

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Zerosquare, 17th January 2016, 23:36

"I'm not sure how the single +/- control is supposed to control both the track playing and the volume."  I used to have a Chinese-made media player with a simiar control scheme. IIRC, a short tap would change tracks, and a longer press would increase/decrease the volume.    "I don't understand, though, why there is no direct control of the volume in the phone. Two independent controls seems...silly."  Not sure, but maybe there's no standard way of controlling the volume that works on all devices (phones, PCs, etc.). In that case, having a redundant volume control is less worse than ending up with a non-working volume control on the headphones.    "The volume up/down keys don't work. There doesn't appear to be any command control for adjusting the volume that way in XP."  Strange. I have a Microsoft keyboard that's a few years old, and the volume up/down keys definitely worked back when I was using XP, and I never had to install any driver. I think those keys are even defined in the HID standard. Maybe they changed the keycodes in newer keyboards for some reason? Anyways, with key-remapping software, you can probably get them to work.

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