Thoughts on iOS, Android and Windows phone

I am happily using the iOS devices for the past years. I stepped in when the iPhone 4 came and so far nothing has given me a reason to step out of the iOS ecosystem. I have an android tablet (Asus TF300) and that was quite underwhelming experience.

Back when i bought it the quad-core nVidia Tegra 3 chip looked great on paper and in the benchmarks, but actual performance in day to day usage was just nuisance. It was sluggish, things would take forever to load and simple things like browsing and typing in a web-page would be a chore as the tablet would hack and cough its way through the ordeal. I still have the tablet and use it occasionally, but my expectations of the experience are already quite low. To be fair after 3 years my iPhone 4 was also lagging like crazy, but the android tablet did this out of the box.

I have never owned a modern Windows mobile phone, I owned a HTC s710e back in the day, it had windows mobile 6.0. The experience frustrated me so much, it was bad at everything it was supposed to do. It was a horrible as a phone, seriously you could not pick up calls or call anyone without the OS glitching in some way. It was horrible at being a PDA, you could not get alarms to function correctly without tweaking the registry. It was hugely underpowered in CPU and RAM and would freeze up constantly. The thing is I wanted to love this phone so bad because I liked the form factor and the functionality, when it actually worked. I ended overclocking the phone and bricking it within 9 months of purchase. Thoroughly cured of my desire for smartphones I got a samsung G600 and what a relief. It just worked ;)

A few of my colleagues have Windows phone devices and to my surprise I find it quite appealing. All transitions are smooth and slick. The always on screen with time display is a nice touch. The tiles look orderly. So I wonder will it ever entice me to go back?

Samsung 850 EVO SSD Windows 10 flickering redraw issue

So I got myself a brand new SSD to upgrade my ASUS x750 Laptop. I cloned the HDD using the samsung Data Migration App, all fine and dandy.

Asus x750 headaches

Unfortunatly this laptop is the most impractical laptop to upgrade I have ever seen. After removing all the bottom screws, it actually opens from the top and practically nothing is accessible without removing 40+ screws and disconnecting every cable to the motherboard. And then removing the motherboard. Check youtube for a detailed opening video, you need it. Then when finally the SSD is fully seated and the other HDD plugged in the secondary HDD slot. The ordeal is over right? No, it never is that easy...

Loading from the SSD the first

Restructered the boot options in the Bios, SSD shows up, yes, check

so far so good

user logon, check yes enter credentials, logging in here we go...

hmmm why is my screen constantly redrawing? arg it keeps flickering. what is up with windows 10!

rebooted from the HDD, all is well. So that rules out any other hardware issue, it must be the ssd...

After a long fruitless internet search decided to clone the disk again and this time first disable the HDD in the Bios, and what do you know it started with no flickering. Restarted and enabled the disk again and... no flickering! I am a genius.

Summary

- Clone disk
- Make sure SSD is the only visible disk for the laptop
- Boot up from SSD
- Enable/mount old HDD
- Enjoy high speed OS on SSD steroids

(As far as I could deduce the flickering issue came from loading up both the original HDD and cloned SSD. The old HDD got the adress C:\ and SSD something like H:\, then some conflict with the user information data (C:\users) caused the information to redrawn constantly on screen. This was impossible to change easily in the current configuration so I had to reclone the disk afresh)

Upgrading to windows 10 from 8.1 on an Asus R750 and X750

Introduction 

So I installed Windows 10 on my Asus R750/X750 after cautiously waiting a few weeks and keeping an eye out for bad experiences from other users. This Saturday I decided to take the plunge and click "upgrade" and my laptop did not explode... yet.

The Upgrade

Starting the upgrade from windows 8.1 to windows 10 was a pain-free experience. The update wizzard was quite brief and seemed to know what it was doing. I don't exactly know how long it took as it ran overnight and in the morning I had a nice Windows 10 login screen to greet me. So far so good.

Then I noticed something strange, the touch pad was not working. Apparetly this has got something to do with the Asus Smart Gesture application and the "Elan Touchpad driver" that windows update automatically installs. Check out this link for the solution that worked for me:
http://ivanrf.com/en/asus-smart-gesture-and-windows-10/
 After following the steps and rebooting a couple of times, Win 10 plays nice with my touchpad is ready to go.

The first impression 

My first impression of Windows 10 is generally positive. All my apps from windows 8.1 got transferred well, my files are where I left them and even my Desktop is just as clutery as I left it. It felt a bit like repainting the house, it feels new but the stuff shows you it is the same place.

Small irritations popped up with dealing with the settings as they are still in two places, the control panel and the "settings". At least it is not as hidden as in windows 8 but still, why?

Another irritation is that the touchpad does not play nice with all windows 10 features. Take the new Edge browser, two finger scrolling? no that's not allowed, oh well, back to FireFox.

All in all I think Win 10 is step in the right direction, but I would'nt be surprised by a Win 10.1 in a few months...

Materiaalkune 1 on OCW Delft lesson 2

Materiaalkunde 1 on OCW Delft lesson 2 

In this lesson I learned more on the properties of materials. One specific property that stood out for me was Dielectric strength. Other topics were the classification of materials in families and counting with logarithms. 

Material properties 

As mentioned dielectric strength stood out for me as it is a property to which I don't have an intuitive grasp. The guy in the lecture defined it as follows: 

"The dielectric strength of a material is a measure of how much a material will interact with electromagnetic waves"

And he had this picture on. But what does it mean?! So the radar sphere has a low dielectric response and the ships beam has a high response thereby making it visible on the radar? I think so, so basically high dielectric response indicates that a material will interact with electro magenetic waves, like the definition said... right

uh.. what?

To grasp this subject I first tried Khan academy which has a really good lesson on this. Other websites that were helpfull to me were:

http://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/capacitor/cap_1.html

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/capeng2.html#c4

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/capchg.html#c2

 and this websites has some interesting information on dielectricity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permittivity.

σ/(ωε’)	Current conduction	Field propagation
0		perfect dielectric lossless medium
≪ 1	low-conductivity material poor conductor	low-loss medium good dielectric
≈ 1	lossy conducting material	lossy propagation medium
≫ 1	high-conductivity material good conductor	high-loss medium poor dielectric
∞	perfect conductor

This is already very helpfull in my day to day work. Getting a more intuitive grasp of dielectrics also gave me a better grasp of capacitance. A dieelectric is an intergral part of a capacitor. As a dielectric material increases the capacitance rating of a conductor. 

Classification of materials 

A helpfull and quite intuitive section of this lesson was the classification of materials. Basically it helps me group materials by family. For this classification to be really helpfull it would be good to know what the basic properties of each material family is.

Material science 101

Being my inquisitive self, I have decided I would like to learn how the Finite Element analysis actually works. However having studied biomedical engineering this was not an obvious subject and I do not have the necessary background information to grasp it. So what do you do? 

I just finished the first lecture and what stuck was the following. I liked the part of putting energy usage in perspective. That we as dutch citizens have on average about 6 kW/s working for us compared to ~2 kW/s for the average world dweller is quite a difference.

Everyday energy costs, note the amount of energy it takes to power a house/car 

Moving on to the actual material science part of the lecture. I learned the basic properties of materials. Which you know by experience but I need to find how to get an intuitive grasp of these concepts. Take Elastic modulus for example... what does that mean, which materials have a high/ low Emod? high would be steel and low would be plastics... meaning... meaning... meaning... meaning that steel is harder to bend than plastics, right? correct me if I am wrong. 

The picture below helps kind off to make sense of these properties: 

All in all an interesting lecture and I am determined to follow at least 3 more lectures. The key to happiness is to set low expectations  :P 

An all in one Macro - Excel Macro beginner

If you have to use excel a lot to create graphs and figures chances are that you have thought to yourself: ‘There has to be a way to automate this…’. And if you’re like me and know your way around Microsoft Office, you have the developer tab enabled and you’ve seen that button record Macro.
“Ha! my tiresome repetitive tasks are over!” you think to yourself, but if you’re not used to programming in VBA, watch out! here is a pitfall I ran into so you don’t have to:

Trying to do everything in one Macro:

Macro’s so powerful, they can do everything you want. The problem is they need to be told exactly what to do and as a beginner you don’t know the language. (Try asking for directions in French for example and see if you understand the answer). So you have all this power under your fingertips, but no way to (quickly) use it. What I learned as a superficial Macro user is not to try everything in 1 Macro.
For example I had 10 sheets of raw data formatted exactly the same but needed to be set up differently and I wanted a graph plotted of each sheet. Trying to do that all at once resulted in a graph I couldn’t use and a Macro that was so specific it couldn’t be used for other sheets unless I did some serious tweaking. Which I did have the time nor experience for. So I went for the next best thing:

1. Record a Macro of moving the raw data in the correct format
2. Create a graph manually
3. Record a Macro of adding all the titles and getting the correct formatting

This took me 5 minutes to set up and saved me 20. While trying to figure out how VBA took me 2 hours and it still doesn’t work.
So hope this helps you Macro beginners out there.

IOS 5.1 Improves responsiveness of the iPhone 4

I have my iphone 4 for almost one and a half years and it was starting to get sluggish. It was running on IOS 5.0. This resulted in long load times for the camera app and even jittery transition effects when changing homescreen pages. Now I have the 16 GB model and I thought it was due to it being almost filled to the brim with apps and music. But after freeing up 2 gigs it still had the same issues. Now I just upgraded to IOS 5.1 and everything works a smooth as it was in the beginning and even my camera app launches in about 2 seconds.

Bottomline: I like the IOS 5.1 upgrade!