Archive for February, 2007

Luxeon K2: World’s Brightest LED

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

Light Emitting Diode or LED is very popular light source later these days. It is cool, bright, consume less power, and almost maintenance free. One of the famous brand is Luxeon, made exclusively by Philips Lumileds Lighting Company, LLC.

This so called Luxeon has superiority in terms of highest flux. The lowest version may deliver more than 40 Lumens in white. It’s bright, very bright. The highest version, the K2 may deliver up to 140 Lumens (at 1500 mA). Remember, this 140 Lumens comes from single LED only! Imagine that your digital video projector only capable delivering 750-1000 Lumens. By using 10 of this Luxeon K2, you can easily reach 1400 Lumens! And of course, because this is a LED, it’s quite cold (though somehow you still have to use heatsink on the bottom).

Picture above is Luxeon K2 Emitter. Up to 140 Lumens @ 1500 mA from this tiny LED! Amazing!

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Barton and Guestier: France Red Wine

Monday, February 26th, 2007

Nothing special in this post. Last night, I saw my brother brought a bottle of red wine. It was Barton and Guestier: CUVÉE SPÉCIALE. I tasted it. Not much, since I don’t drink, only at special occasion. Well, this was not the kind of red wine that I liked to drink. It tasted bitter, just like beer. It contains 12% alcohol inside. I think it is going to be nice to drink it in small amount after eating a lot of meat.

HD-DVD vs Blu-ray

Monday, February 26th, 2007

The high definition video era has come. VCD and DVD soon will be dropped from the list. VCD can hold up to 700 MB of data, while DVD can hold up to 4.7 GB (single layer) and 8.4 GB (dual layer).

For a high definition video, we are talking about higher capacity. Please welcome the new comer, Mr. Blu-ray and Mr. HD-DVD. HD-DVD offers up to 15 GB (single layer) and 30 GB (dual layer), while Blu-ray offers up to 25 GB (single layer) and 50 GB (dual layer). Bigger capacity may be released soon in the near future.

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Nokia 7110 Disassembling

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I’ve used my old Nokia 7110 for 6 year or so. I bought it when it was launched at the very first time. After using it for a very long time, I think it’s time to clean her up ;) Sometime, the slider doesn’t response well when opened.

I will not show you how to open this phone. Just for your information, you only need to open 4 screws inside the battery compartment. You need special (Torx) screwdriver in order to open them. Just pry the case from the bottom after you open all the screws. Then, open 2 screws from the main PCB. Voila, you have disassembly her completely. See the photo below.
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How to Translate Long Text with Altavista’s Bablefish?

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I downloaded a movie and just realized that there was no subtitle. I looked for the subtitle file (the .SRT or .SUB or whatsoever) but found none of them in English, only in France.

I decided to visit my favorite place to translate, the Altavista’s Babelfish and gave it a try. I just realized that the onboard translation would screw up your document’s format! See the screenshot below.


Man, I couldn’t live with it! Re-formatting the document would take too much effort.

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Geeee… I Have Typed a Lot!

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Nothing is important here. Just want to show that I’ve typed over 1.000.000 characters (with spaces) in my translating tasks (I was doing translation for a book). All was done intensively around 50 days. I spent around 3-5 hours per day in order to accomplish this. Well, here’s the statistic from Microsoft Word ;)

Udial Explained

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Due to the raise of resampling problem of most consumer sound card (most likely Creative, prior X-Fi), some people claimed to use the “udial” test tone to check whether they have resampled sound card or not (or having intemodulation distortion problem or not). I’ll explain a little bit more.

You can search around the Internet with keyword “udial” and one of the links is:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=9772

You can download the “udial.zip” from that link. I’ll give you direct link to download the file:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=3

If the link is broken, you can download from my website:
http://www.jimmyauw.com/wp-datajim/junk/udial.zip

Read carefully before you play the tone. I will have no responsibility for any damage on your speakers!

As I’ve told you, some people claimed that this file can be used to check whether your sound card has any problem or not (resampling, IMD distortion, etc). But IMO, this is more likely to be a “virus” to blow up your tweeter. As you can see from the picture above (click to enlarge), the sound only has tone at 555-1400 Hz with intensity around -35 dB. But check the upper band. You can see huge amount of power (around -4 dB) on the 19.5-20 kHz. Normally, you will hear a sequence of dialling tones (tone at the 555-1400 Hz area). Some people say that on a “bad sound card”, the tone will be distorted like a laser gun.

Most likely, you will pump up more volume to check the noise, etc (to make sure that your sound card has no problem), but you don’t realize (or can’t hear) the upper band (19.5-20 kHz tone). This tone will clip you tweeter whether you hear it or not. Some people around the net have claimed to destroy their tweeters!
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Five Days “Holidays”

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

I woke up at Friday, 2 February 2007 and saw a great thing to make me stayed at home: flood! Luckily, my house was located quite high above the road (around 1-1,5 metre above the street line). The flood raised around 30 cm on the road outside my house. I sticked inside my house until today, Wednesday 7 February 2007 ;) No lights, no electricity, but lots of food and clean water.

Photo above was taken on the 2nd day (Saturday, 3 February 2007). My neighbors deciced to move out from their house.

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