Which was a bit of a shame, since it was quite a nice camera. Its start-up time was insignificant, because the lens is not retractable–you just slide the cover down and it is ready almost instantaneously.

Some months after, I found again the camera in the shelves and turned it on (after recharging its battery, of course). Imagine my surprise when I found out that it didn’t work anymore. Well, actually it did turn on, and you could browse existing pictures, and navigate the settings, and everything worked, except that all the pictures that you took came up black.

It was something quite odd, because we hadn’t knocked it hard (or knocked it at all). But a quick visit to google confirmed we weren’t alone in this. Many people had experienced the same, so much that Sony had been forced to do a recall of those devices and offer a free repair, even if the warranty had expired (which was totally the case). I looked at that option, but it was a bit of a hassle. You had to properly and safely package the camera, send it somewhere to a Sony repair centre, and cross your fingers that it would qualify as a “free repair”, and then maybe they would repair and return it to you without no extra cost. Or maybe they could decide that it wasn’t a CCD failure, and ask you to pay for the fix, or send it back–and ask you to pay for the return post.

Also, you had to weight the cost of packaging it and sending it securely, plus the time it takes to do so. All in all, it wasn’t much of an attractive option, so I kind of forgot about that, and quietly returned the camera to the shelves again… until recently.

I was casually browsing ifixit, mostly because–I must confess it–I like seeing what’s inside the machines, but I usually don’t take them apart unless I have a good reason to do so (i.e. they don’t work properly). You know, if it works, don’t fix it, and all that.

I found that they had guides for repairing cameras, and since those are such a delicate type of equipment, I felt curious about that. And finally ended up remembering we had this somehow broken camera here, and wondered if there was a repair manual for it. And yes, they had a section for the T1. And they mentioned the typical faulty CCD sensor, and how to replace it!

It didn’t seem hard, and didn’t involve desoldering or soldering, so I decided to have a go at the repair myself.

First thing was finding the replacement part. Some people suggested buying a faulty camera from ebay and attempt to use its sensor, but that was a bit like playing a lottery–maybe it had a broken sensor as well! The ifixit guide pointed to a shop in USA selling those parts… from recycled cameras, and while they might have verified the parts, they might stop working somehow soon too.

I kept searching and I finally found a couple of guys selling that part in ebay. They were based in Hong Kong, and mostly had good reviews. It was cheaper to buy that part from Hong Kong than simply sending the camera to the repair shop in the UK, so I thought I would risk it. I bought it and hoped for the best–i.e. the part actually arriving here, preferably this year.

That was sometime in March. Two days ago a small padded envelope showed up in the post and surprised me, because I had slightly forgotten about the entire thing. I had a look at the envelope and confirmed it came from Hong Kong, so it had to be that. I was super excited!

I also noticed it was marked as “gift”, which as I understand is a usual procedure for preventing customs from charging any tax or similar… and the funny thing came when I finally opened the envelope: inside it was a meticulously bubble wrapped item (which I assumed was the CCD sensor)… and a gift box, with lace and all!

When Chinese people say something is a gift, they really mean it!

Turned out I was wrong about the contents of the pack. The CCD module was inside the gift box, and the bubble wrap contained two accessories I wasn’t expecting: a handy screwdriver exactly sized for a couple of screws in the CCD module, and another tool for yanking the ZIF sockets open, although I didn’t use this one because my nails were a higher precision tool in this case ;-)

The repair itself was straightforward. If you know what you’re doing, it takes like two minutes to open the camera, then another two minute to disconnect the ZIF sockets and remove the CCD block. Around eight minutes to remove the old CCD sensor (because it might be taped to the block, so carefully removing the tape takes time), and three minutes to put into place the new one. Then two minutes to assemble everything back again, and you’re done. Total time: 2 + 2 + 8 + 3 + 2 = 17 minutes. But since I didn’t know what I was doing, it took me a little bit more, specially the disassembly and locating components part.

I turned the camera on (excitement pumping lots of adrenaline into my blood). Would it work? Would it work? Would it work? Would it work?

…

I pressed the shutter button.

The camera flashed.

With trembling hands (excuse my poetic license, ok?) I pressed the review button. I thought I was on the verge of fainting (my poetic license still applies). I closed my eyes during the short moment that went from me releasing the review button to the camera actually showing the last picture. I felt scared about opening them and finding a black picture in the camera again. But…

YES!!!!!!

No more black pictures! It worked again! And the pictures seemed decent as well, with no stains or dirt in them, as I had been very careful about not touching the internals with my fingers (the eye of the camera, so to say).

I was ecstatic. Yeeehaaa!

So if you have the same problem and don’t want to throw away your camera, I totally recommend you to repair it yourself. Yes, it’s an old camera, so what? It still takes better pictures than most recent mobile phones, and this way you don’t contribute to the landfill, which is a very sensible thing to do.

And by the way, if you haven’t read it yet, here’s the DIY manifesto, to which I totally subscribe. Bring on the DIY repairs!

I hadn’t noticed some of the details when I watched it at the party, such as the cube edges morphing into some kind of connected curves after a while, and it’s generally cool to appreciate shades of green anyway. Besides, phosphorescent green is retro, trendy, and I love it!

Here’s the video of the demo live at the party place:

A laptop computer was in charge of playing the audio, computing the visuals and sending them to the laser projector. Initially they were going to generate the audio in real time with a software synth as well, but they ran out of –guess what?– time!

The audio was sent from such computer to the main audio mixer (which was like 30 metres away!) using an Ethernet network cable and a nifty connector he had soldered with a couple spare parts he had around –trust me, this guy is the real McGyver!

Hardware geeks, here’s your pr0n:

or in Marcan’s words:

two galvanometer based servomotors with closed-loop position control [...] The engines (+drivers) come from a kit, the rest is pretty much homebrew (a heavily modified USB 5.1 sound card used as DAC, and the laser itself which is a DealExtreme pointer with its driver replaced by one designed by me). Software is 100% homebrew

(Source: …dos servomotores tipo galvanómetro con control de posición de bucle cerrado… Los motores (+drivers) son de un kit, lo demás es más o menos casero (tarjeta de sonido USB 5.1 muy modificada utilizada como DAC, el láser en sí es un puntero de DealExtreme con el driver reemplazado por uno de diseño propio). El software es 100% casero.)

On the raster to vector algorithm he’s using:

I rendered the metaballs and fire effects in a bitmap and then converted them into vectorial with a superlame algorithm I came up with

(Source: Los efectos de metaballs y fuego de la demo anterior los calculaba en bitmap y luego los pasaba a vector con un algoritmo supercutre que me inventé)

He’s made another test with a different input video (feeding the projector with libavcodec, haha) and the result is pretty nice too.

This is the original video:

All in all, awesome work.

I’m looking forward to their next inventions, and actually we can already have a peek at what marcan’s working on at the moment: the PS3 Linux netbooter, python bindings to chip families I’ve never heard of, and other incredibly esoterical stuff… if it’s odd and/or arcane, it’s surely there!

~

The Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Medio Rural y Marino (Spain’s equivalent to DEFRA) doesn’t get it: the new version of its own cartographic and satellite maps viewer (SIGPAC) will use Silverlight.

Yet another failed opportunity to jump onto the Open Standards wagon. Who’s got the commission for this work?

~

JpegMeta: Javascript library for reading JPEG metadata (includes GPS and EXIF data) from JPEG’s, client-side, using HTML5′s new File API.

~

Fake Plastic Cubes: Gasman surprises us again with some more realtime Javascript goodness. This time it’s a 9K Javascript demo|intro featuring 3D and sound synthesis (!!)

The actual demo has its contents packed in an image using the recently released PNG compression trick, so you can’t use the good old “View page source” to have a peek at the intricacies of his mad creation. However he’s also published the uncompressed code. Plus there’s the accompanying and illustrative blog post.

Exciting times ahead!

~

The Unlibrary –an interesting concept in-between shared office space, a library and a coffee shop. I like the idea, although it looks a tad too claustrophobic for my taste. I personally would remove the computers and replace those big bulky tables with something more cafe-style which invites to more intimate laptop-screen sharing and acquaintance-making. Otherwise it looks like we’re in a uni lab!

Anke Holst is one of the founders of the project — and her front page images look like they’ve been made with Harmony!

~

Most common words unique to 1-star and 5-stars App Store Reviews. It’s not directly applicable to the Android market, because iOS prompts users to rate apps on uninstall (probably the worst moment to ask for a review in the life-cycle of an application), but certainly the behaviour is quite similar.

In our experience, free apps get more reviews, and by pure statistics, more negative reviews too. Paid apps might get fewer reviews, but they are probably going to get nicer, more positive reviews. Unless they’re decidedly bad and people feel robbed.

~

By the way, here’s the new Licensing scheme for Android. The old copy-protection scheme will be deprecated.

~

Foley sound effects –you’ve heard them but you don’t know it yet! Example:

Frozen romaine lettuce makes great bone or head injury noises #

BIOS settings

When I first assembled it, the default settings from the motherboard were set to have all the fans spinning at maximum power, and the CPU was set to work at maximum speed as well. It was a bit like having a jet engine under the table. Then I learnt that these things could be configured in the BIOS, and after a BIOS upgrade, I managed to convince the motherboard to behave a little bit more reasonably and slow down both the fans and the CPU, but using the latter “on demand”, which means it can accelerate when the operating system requires more crunching power.

Switching off chassis fans

That improved things a lot, but there was still too much noise for my ears (I like to hear myself think, so to say). I investigated a bit more and found that unless I played 3D games with the computer, which I never do, I really didn’t need to have so many chassis fans working. So I disconnected two of them and the noise went down even further, but it was still quite noticeable.

Replacing noisy fans

I investigated a bit more and found that not all fans are the same. I guess it’s not that surprising if you think about it, but we rarely pay attention to computer fans. They are just there, rotating, and that’s all we know about them. But there’s a lot to be written about fans. The cheapest ones do the job but at the cost of noise and extra energy consumption; the more expensive ones are better engineered, have better airflow and make less noise and consume less energy because they can move more air with slower speeds.

So once I found about that, I replaced the rear fan (the tower exhaust) with a noctua fan. It is virtually silent, apart from being cream-coloured and having a very strange installation method with rubber ‘screws’ that got on my nerves, but supposedly reduces vibration noise. This improved things a lot, but…

We’ve been experiencing an incredible hot weather for the last days here in London. I mean, 25 degrees! A heatwave! While that’s fine for me (after all, I grew in a place where 38ºC in summer were the norm), it isn’t that nice when you’ve got the computer turned on pretty much 24/7, because the fans are at such hard work that you can know when the computer is doing anything CPU-intensive just by listening to the fan noise.

Better CPU cooler

There were two noise sources in the computer: the CPU fan and the power supply. I didn’t feel like replacing the power supply, and besides, I could perfectly pinpoint the dominant noise source: the CPU fan!

It turns out the stock CPU coolers, supplied by Intel, are simply “good enough” to prevent your CPU from melting. But they aren’t really that good efficiency and quietness wise. The sensors reported around 65ºC in the CPU, which seemed a lot to me (as a friend said: you could fry an egg there!!). So I decided it was time for an improvement in that area (either that, or buying a ton of paracetamol for the headaches). I chose the Freezer 7 Pro R2 cooler from Arctic Cooler, mostly because it seemed quite good but also because it wasn’t insanely expensive. And it’s been the best decision this year, I think!

Nice video (not by me), showing how to install it; the default stock CPU cooler is shown as well

Once I installed it and re-plugged everything I had to unplug (because it’s somehow bulky and requires you to make room for it in the motherboard) I couldn’t stop looking at the computer, side panel still not installed just in case, and wondering: but is it really working? Indeed it was! I opened three chrome instances with mrdoob’s javascript experiments while also encoding a video in another program and you could barely hear the fan. It was fantastic!

And not only there is a lot less noise now, but the readings report healthier values from the inside: the CPU reports around ~40ºC now. It’s an amazing drop of temperature: more than 20 degrees!

In a way, it was kind of expectable: the design of this cooler makes way more sense to me, compared to the stock one: instead of expelling air towards the side of the box (which doesn’t quite work that well unless you’ve got one of those tube sleeves for channelling CPU hot air) it uses the fan for moving cold air from the front of the box through the dissipation fins and towards the back of the box. The (silent) chassis rear fan makes the rest. Also, this fan is larger, which makes a lower frequency hum and also moves more air at lower speeds.

And the rest

Both the graphics card and the memory use passive dissipation already, with no moving parts whatsoever, and the hard disk noises don’t bother that much as to replace them with SSD drives, so I’ll leave them for the time being. Oh, and I use the DVD drive like… twice a year? So it really doesn’t make much noise.

At some point I might replace the front fan, which I suspect is the reason of some sporadic humming I can hear, with one of those silent noctua fans. But it’s slightly cumbersome to reach the front panel, and it doesn’t annoy me that much unless I look at it and see its horribly tacky and kitsch blue LED light.

Therefore, there’s only the power supply left. I’d like to get one which is not only quiet and green (energy wise), but is also modular, so that you only connect the SATA/IDE/power cables you really need, and don’t end up with a lot of unused cables hanging from the power supply. But that will probably wait until next year.

Software wise, I am looking into ways to underclock the system, since I don’t really use that much power generally. It seems that at least the graphics card clock and memory can be slowed down, but in my tests the settings I entered were reset to the default speed on each reboot, and besides, I couldn’t notice any difference, so I wonder if the settings really changed anything or not.

On the computer’s CPU front, it is currently set to “On demand”, and there’s a range of speeds I can choose, from 1.60 GHz to 2.4 GHz. I wonder if it could even work at lower speeds but still scale to higher when needed. I’ll have to look into that too :)

But some weeks ago it was playing a plain AVI and it suddenly got absolutely frozen. I began to blame Leopard, since everything has been kind of awkward since I upgraded to it. I restarted it, played the video again and luckily it finished playing without freezing. I left it there and went for some coffee; when I came back it was frozen again! No response whatsoever to mouse moves or key presses. Something was really wrong there and I kept believing it was Leopard’s fault.

I immediately began to look for info about Ubuntu on powerpc mac’s. It’s not a very positive experience; powerpc macs are not very mainstream nowadays (or so that seems) and so they are not part of the main ubuntu distribution. The powerpc port is maintained by volunteers and not officially endorsed or supported by Canonical. Not that it makes it unusable but it’s somehow less shiny. There are other distributions which do support powerpc, but I am not too keen on changing: I like Ubuntu.

Anyway, while I decided about ubuntu or not, I thought about having a look at the powerbook’s system logs. Ahhh the horrible sight I found!

14:23 disk0s3: I/O error

(… lots more stuff…)

16:48 disk0s3: I/O error

Or what is the same: each time the computer had got frozen, there had been an I/O error. Not nice…

All the searches pointed to one and only solution:

Back up your data and replace the hard disk as soon as possible!

Since I don’t really like to give my computers to strangers for them to be fixed, I decided I was going to replace the hard drive myself, just as I did with my mac mini.

What you’ll need

First thing was to look for info on how to do that. This is the main page I used: ifixit. It is very clearly explained, including the required tools one would need. I only had to buy a Torx 06 screwdriver for the two hexagonal-like screws on the keyboard side, since I already had Philips screwdrivers.

The guide is very complete and the only thing it’s missing is some geek-porn details of the powerbook interiors, so I’ll just complete it with that and some remarks:

Apart from the hard disk (a SATA disk, not a SATA2 disk) and the screwdrivers, there’s something else which you will need and no one speaks about: STRENGTH!!!

I was lucky mr.doob was there when I needed to remove the screws which hold the hard drive to the chassis. They are extremely tight and I wouldn’t have been able to finish the replacement without his help. All the other screws are quite tight and hard to remove, having a dismaying tendency to tear up when trying to unscrew them, specially the ones which need the Torx driver (in the keyboard area). They almost ruined the screwdriver!

I would say replacing the hard drive in a powerbook is way more tedious and scary than replacing the mini’s hard drive. Things are very tight and tiny, and you have the general feeling that you’re going to break it, so I don’t recommend it if you’re not a patient person.

Hands on!

First thing I did was putting a nice kitchen towel on the table, to avoid scratching the cover of the laptop. You can use whichever type of towel or soft surface you like of course!

Then the guide recommends removing the battery using a coin, but if you have a wood clothes peg handy, do use it! That way you’ll avoid leaving marks in the metal. Example:

Once you remove the battery begins the monumental task of removing the incredible amount of screws that this little machine has. For not losing a single one, I placed them in a big notebook like this:

It’s interesting and perhaps the reason for them to be so terribly tight that there’s some kind of blue mass at the end of some screws, like if it was glue or something. If you know what it is, please let me know. I’m intrigued.

After a thousand screws, you’ll be able to access the compact and tight interior. Be very careful when removing the keyboard, take as much time as you need and don’t use too much of your strength for that, or you may tear the connection to the motherboard quite easily (I almost did – and it was a truly terrifying moment!).

The hard drive is right underneath the touchpad, surrounded by the battery and the optical drive on left and right respectively:

And as I said you might need help for these screws if your hands are not extraordinarily strong. Once you remove them you still need to carefully remove that orange tape which keeps the hard drive connected to the motherboard. Here’s a close up just for the sake of it:

There’s still another piece of orange tape to remove on the left of the hard drive. See my thumb here for having a sense of the scale of this operation:

When you finish with these details you can remove the hard drive from its place but there’s still some work to be done.

And guess what… there are more screws to remove!

The hard drive is surrounded by a piece of plastic, which is fixed to the hard drive with those extra screws. I’m guessing it is for insulating it from static electricity or something like that; otherwise it doesn’t make much sense.

Remove the other cushioned piece on the bottom of the disk but do not throw it away, the new hard drive still needs it:

You still need to disconnect the little piece of circuit board on top of the hard drive, which in fact connects to the motherboard. Be very careful when disconnecting this piece or you may destroy a pin or two (and say bye to your laptop!).

Then you just connect the new hard drive to the little circuit board thing, wrap the disk with the awkward piece of plastic, put the screws back, put the hard drive back to its place:

Do not forget about the motherboard connection … and the orange tape ;-)

Fnally the little cushioned piece on the right:

And back to screwing on!

After all the screws are in their place comes the scary moment – will it still work? As I had used this disk for cloning my mac mini’s hard drive, it had an intel boot image, which the powerbook’s powerpc chip didn’t like very much. So it gave me a big kernel panic as you can see:

But nothing that a good install of Mac OS couldn’t fix!

I have had the computer running for a couple of weeks already and I must say it’s working perfectly. So if your powerbook’s disk fails and you feel brave enough, do replace it yourself! :-)