David Trebacz Blog

So I got an email from Verizon thanking me for upgrading to Android 2.1 ( Verizon email link ). It mentioned all the great features that I should be enjoying (and have been been patiently looking forward to). Last time I tried a manual update install and probably got my self into trouble. The problem is I didn't actually accept the over the air update and 2.1 wasn't running on my droid. I went to Home> Settings> About Phone (still on 2.0.1)> System Update (presented with a Android Update 2.1 screen) press the download button. Nothing downloads and I'm presented with the same screen again and again and again. Searching the internet presented me with some unplug my battery options tried it -no joy. Decided to let the droid sit overnight. Hopefully it would fell better in the morning.-no joy. Next posts that I saw ( http://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/26494 ) started talking about doing a hard reset, pull the battery while hopping on one foot, etc. I we...

My cable area is one of the areas transitioning to more digital cable and cutting out many of the current analog channels. You can read about the digital conversion from Comcast at Digital Conversion I thought I would chronicle my experience receiving 2 of the small set top (or side top -or bottom mount) from our local cable office. I read about the conversion in a letter I got from Comcast. Essentially it sounded as if my old TV's without some sort of cable box, would no longer get most of the channels that I was paying for. If I ordered these DTA's I would get my existing channels and pick up a few extra. Understanding that to be the case I ordered two of the smallest boxes (Digital Transport Adapters and Comcast calls them) online and picked them up at the local office. It was a quick pickup at the local office for us, since they're around the corner from our house). Here are the pictures from the unboxing: The box was a very generic black cardboard box. ...

I just noticed that the majority of the machines on my home network started failing with "No Ping Response" back in November. My storage is pretty redundant for most of my network so it took me some time to get around to figuring out the issue. In my case the machine have been faithfully backed up by a linux machine running BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) going on several years. On November 23rd (between 10 pm and midnight) that all changed. All of my DHCP Windows machines failed with the "no ping response". I knew the machines were up, but why was BackupPC not seeing them -or at least reporting a ping failure. Turns out this was all caused by a change I had made to my Smoothwall 3.0 firewall . I had removed the Services > Static DNS entries from Smoothwall doing some routine maintenance -I think. I mean why would you have static DNS entries for machines that have their IP addresses dynamically assigned. Ultimately, I found a solution to keep my...

I was looking for an inexpensive remote for my Canon 40D SLR. I had looked at the Canon infrared remotes (like the Canon RC-1), but didn't like the idea of having to be line of sight with the infrared window of the camera. They were inexpensive, but you'd still have to use the in camera timer if you wanted to be in the shot (or have a nice picture of yourself holding the remote). I decided to take a chance and buy a inexpensive wireless Canon remote on ebay. The seller was located in Hong Kong, but the $18 price was great so I took a risk. The remote had the features I was looking for: JYC JY-110 Wireless Remote Control includes: 1 x V2s Wire/Wireless Remote Control C3 for Canon 10D 20D 30D 40D 50D 5D 5D Mark II 1D 1Ds and etc. 1 x CR2 Battery 1 x 23A Battery 1 x English Instructions FREE 32 inches Lanyards with K hooks What's new with this Wire/Wireless Remote Control? Work as both wired and wireless remote control. The receiver works as a wired remote as w...

I decided that I should keep snapshots off my Panasonic IP webcam every 2 seconds over the holidays. I set the IP webcam's internal software to drop of an image on my FTP server using the configuration software built into the camera. I primarily did this as a security measure for our house. I also created a script on my linux box to delete any images older than 2 weeks. I set this up to run once a day as a cron job. If there ever was an security question or issue we had 640x480 images of (about 20,000 images at 44KB apiece) our house covering the past 2 weeks safely stored on my server. Then I got the idea by playing with Picasa, that it would be cool to build these into a time lapse video sequence that I would make avaiable on my website. Needless to say after playing around with various tutorials and scripts I have something that works really well. The once daily updated finished product is available here: http://gpigs.trebacz.com/Office_Cam.htm (embedded flash v...

Just replaced the bulb on my Samsung 50" DLP TV this week. We were watching a movie, when we heard a large "pop" come from the DLP TV and the screen went black. Every few minutes we'd hear a "clicking" sound out of the TV, so I unplugged it and got online. My wife freaked out a bit. We bought it in 2004, so it's almost exactly 5 years old at this point. I guess that's the life I would have expected out of the bulb. I was pleased to see that the replacement bulbs had come down in price significantly from when we bought the TV. I bought the bulb from discount-merchant.com for $120 and normal shipping charges (also found a coupon code "fiveoff" for $5 off my order): http://www.discount-merchant.com/Samsung-BP96-00826A-Lamp-Enclosure-p/samsung-bp96-00826a-lamp-enc.htm The company sounded a bit like a shady internet business, but the more research I did -the more comfortable I got with them. I decided to buy the whole assembly for the e...

At least I'm not alone in the fact that my Motorola Droid keeps loosing my Microsoft Exchange email account periodically. I have personally lost the exchange account 4 times (and the other IMAP accounts under the email application). Putting in the credentials again "fixes it". The frequency has gone up since the upgrade to Android 2.0.1. During the entire time the gmail mail accounts are fine. Here are a few of the posts that I'm tracking relating to the issue. No official word from Google, Motorola, or Verizon on the problem -or a pending fix. Reports on Google's Android forum: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4866 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4980 Reports on Verizon's droid forum: http://forums.verizon.com/t5/Android-Devices/Email-accounts-being-deleted-from-Droid/td-p/117067;jsessionid=32c7704020432f772a7cfec1677f7fd52 Reports on Motorola's message forum: http://supportforums.motorola.com/message/89501 I...