Unbalanced audio on wallboxes - here is a cute little method of ensuring you have an equivalent unbalanced feed in a suite (for the inevitable VHS or DVD recorder) - Tony Dwarika figured out originally.

The rep coils (between the XLR panel mounts and the phonos) are from RS - part number 210-6419 and are mounted on double-sided pads. The coil has a high i/p impedance (typ. 10k) and so doesn't load the balanced signal but it ensures that the Avid (or whatever) is also available as an unbalanced feed - very neat when fitted in a Kelsey wallbox.

RS422 over cat5 continued....Back in November I wax'ed lyrical about how I do this - see here - but I didn't reckon on Quartz using RJ45s on their current range of '422 routers - although I satnd by what I said before I'm gonna have to comply on the MTV job!

Dell TrueMobile 1150 Series Mini PCI Card is the wireless adaptor in my Dell C640 Latitude laptop - with the version of the drive that ships with the computer I found that my home connection was v.unreliable - I'm using a no-name USB wireless adaptor on the server at home and running it in peer-to-peer (ad-hoc) mode. Untill the weekend it would take several changes of channel and re-boots to get the two talking. However, with the current driver (v.7.86.15.638.A22 - how do they number things!) all is well. It finds the server as soon as it boots and I can get all the way to the end of the garden (small garden!).

"Application services provide the complex operational and business logic to manage task automation. Examples include resource management, storage (cache) management, playlist automation, dub (transfer) management and ingest management."

This was taken from Omnibus's "System G3" website - broadcast automation. Now, I've been doing this broadcast engineering lark since the late 80's and this means nothing to me!

War Chalkin' - since playing around with my wireless network at home I thought I'd blog some examples of open networks as I find them....

• Wardour Mews in Soho, W1 - SSID - 3Com, Internet-facing IP - 62.249.228.198, DNS enabled - yes, 192.0.168.x
  
  

Never a truer word!

Bill Gates interview from 1995! A friend who was working for Radio 4 at the time recorded this but it was never broadcast because Microsoft embargo'ed it - don't know why.

Welcome to OLD-COMPUTERS.COM ! - This is great, a real trip down misery, erm memory lane!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wimbledon serves Linux volley - very good! Thanks to Ben D in the office for spotting this one.

What with me working a lot at Root6's temporary workshop in Primrose Hill I needed a way to use my GPRS mobile 'phone (Orange SPV E200) to access the internet. I did blog an article from PCW last year that told you how to do it on an origional SPV (download it here) and it is still relevent. I've just done it and here are some notes:

• The modem initialisation string mentioned in the first column on page two didn't scan too well and so cut'n'paste this:
  +cgdcont=1,"IP","orangeinternet","",0,0
  
• The USB modem driver is on the E200 CD, but I've posted it here - USBMDM.INF
  
• VPN into Root6 doesn't seem to work
  
• The 230kBits it reports is not accurate!

Quadruplex Park is a great site that details old VTRs and is reasonably technical. I found it when I was trying to find out why on earth Sony have reversed the sex of the XLR connectors on the back of a 2000 model HDCam machine. Why fly in the face of fifty years of broadcast standards? My work chum Chris Bailey blogged it on AtomicLava - see here.

Weebl and Bob - Archives - I used to think flash animations were about as pointless as bad bananas. However, now folks have gotten past the technology fetish ("it's a Mac, it's a design classic, darling") there are some genuinely funny things out there - and these guys are brits!
I'm laughing myself silly, and now I know why my kids keep shouting "think of the germs"!

William Mahoney's Windows Media Player plugins - if you wondered how the "now playing" entry in the right hand content bar was done....
I've got all my PCs sending to it - now, if only I could get my SmartPhone to post to it.....

Got my webcam working properly again - see the link in the side bar - I've got so much cat5 running under my floors extending USB here and PS/2 there!

Windows startup sound - you hear it everywhere. Having been at The Production Show a few weeks ago you could hear it pumping out of PAs on most stands at the start of the day as people booted up their demo systems.
I was in a Thai restauraunt in Camden last night with my good chum Richard Drake (he is Mr Clublets!) and at one point the music stopped abruptly and after a few minutes the familiar "ding-ding-dong-ding-dong" preceeded the music starting - nice to know people are using MP3 jukeboxes, but it's a pitty they crash!

Enterprise Linux IT - interesting story about HP pushing Linux to corporate desktops; "HP says it has four or five enterprise customers that each could buy approximately 50,000 desktops, says IDC analyst Roger Kay, and the company plans to offer them an 80/20 deal -- with 80 percent being Linux and the remainder running Windows."

Why did I send Jason on a training course?! - today of all days! We had a rush fibre channel job come in and although I can drive the Tritec the young man Jason (my trainee) does it a lot quicker than me! So, having spent a day hunched over a hot fusion splicer and gone nearly blind in my left eye from peering down the microscope here are a few observations:

• You have to keep everything scrupulously clean - if you leave even fragments of glass on the cleaver (for example) you get a ragged cut and it never splices properly.
  
• The fusion splicer has a low power mode for cleaning the end of the fibre before you join it - but if you do it more than once before you fuse it seems to close the end of the fibre and you get a weak splice.
  
• You need to space the ends of the fibres by about ten microns before you fuse - any closer and you get a 'bulge' and any further and the joint is clearly tapered - in both cases the join is weak and breaks once it's out of the splicer.
  
• Slowly does it - the 204 micron strip tool for the bare fibres rarely breaks the fibre but the one for stripping the pigtails needs a bit of getting used to - I found (after working on some offcuts) that you need to make a determined cut and then as you pull allow the coated end of the fibre to slide through you fingers a bit (to avoid it snapping with the lateral tension).
  

Now I need a quiet evening - I believe I'm going out for a spot of supper with Rick (he runs Why? clublet - see my blog links right).

Animals on the Underground - for any Londoners this is quite a cute sight! It might even make your daily communte more pleasant!