Archives for 2011

Portal 2 Plush Turret w/ Sound

2011/12/25 By staze

When I first saw ThinkGeek advertising the Plush Portal 2 Turret, I thought it sounded extremely cool. I waited patiently for them to come into stock, and promptly ordered one for early December. Upon receiving it, I thought it looked extremely cool, but was a bit disappointed with the performance of the motion sensor. It basically required shining a flashlight into the “eye” (which is actually a small black tube opening below the glowing eye). The motion part worked great, and knocking it over resulted in various sayings from the game.

A quick examination of the “eye” found a stray piece of plastic in the opening, but still lousy performance. A quick email to ThinkGeek resulted in a prompt response of “seems defective”, but alas, they were out of stock. Rather than ship the old one back for a refund, I decided to wait until they had them back in stock, which was about 2 weeks later. At that point, I contacted them again, and they promptly shipped out a replacement, and rather than having me ship the old one back, just asked me to toss it. Cool! The new one arrived a few days later, and low and behold, it worked great. It could “see” me walk by in the hall, and would respond to other motions. Examination of the newer unit did seem to indicate they had made minor adjustments to the “eye”, in that the black “straw” that directs light back to the sensor was shorter, which would no doubt allow more light to get to the sensor.

All and all, the product is great, and ThinkGeek’s service was exemplary.

[xrr rating=4.75/5]

Overdrive Media Console Runtime Error

2011/12/06 By staze

Since there is next to NO support for this software anywhere, I thought I would share the fruits of the last hour of working. Coworker brought in their PC (Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit) that whenever they tried to launch Overdrive Media Console, they’d get a Runtime C++ error. Uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t work, but oddly, the software would run under another account.

Solution makes me want to kill MS, or Overdrive, or someone. Anyway, there was a temp file in /Users/UserName/AppData/Roaming/OverDrive/Media Console.

Obviously if the software isn’t running, there shouldn’t be any 0KB temp files. Deleting it fixed the problem. Guessing the software crashed at some point, and didn’t clean up after itself on the next attempted (and thereafter) launch.

Filtering X10 and TED signals

2011/11/28 By staze

I’ve talked a bit about this subject before, but with a new experience under the belt, I thought I might add to the collective knowledge out there.

I recently (week or two ago) installed a 12V track light system that obviously uses a transformer (in this case, electric) to step down the standard 110V household current to 12V. It’s not on the same circuit as my TED, or even the same phase, but immediately when turning on the lights, my TED signal drops to 0. It must be that this transformer is putting out so much noise on the system, that it’s going all the way to the transformer at the street, and then back along the second phase. Really, no idea.

Anyway, after discovering I couldn’t move it to a different phase, I started looking at filtering options to remove all the noise it was causing on my power system. At first I thought I would just filter the offending light, and looked at X10 XPNR‘s which seem like they’re added to the offending device, and remove the noise. But THEN, I stumbled upon this! Holy cow, an actual “official” solution. And while they have them for less than $10, shipping was almost as much as the product itself. So, I went back to my trusty supplier, and got one here, for a total of $16 with shipping. When it arrived late last week, I was a bit surprised by it’s size. Yes, it says how big it is, but you don’t quite get that until you have it. It’s pretty darn big. But, using the directions posted on the TED site, I was able to wire it in (using pigtails for the red and white wires, since all three wires were far too short), and fit it in my breaker box. And afterward? TED works like a charm. I’d imagine my actual signal reliability will be higher with the filter since everything else in the house is no longer causing dropouts. The only other thing I could do would be to create a REALLY dedicated circuit for the whole TED, but that just seems excessive. Maybe if I upgrade to a 5000 I can put it all on it’s own circuit.

I’m approaching another year with the TED, so I’ll be posting back for the new year with new numbers comparing to last year, analyzing this year, etc. Stay tuned!