Point Element

A 200Rs usb-c to 3.5mm dongle works fine. Pain to keep track of the dongle but the audio is sweet. I also think I'll connect iphone to the Sony's via bluetooth. That cheap chinese bluetooth dongle for 3.5mm devices works great.

I have used iphone 15 for couple of weeks now. I have taken a bunch of calls, gone on a trip with the iphone, shot about a thousand photos and about a hundred videos, ran out of battery while doing all this a few times, had the phone heat up well enough, but did not cause any issue, I have used it for few whatsapp calls of 1 hour plus time, connected few bluetooth devices and overall used the iphone quite well. And I have found so many annoying things. It feels like a bunch of features are crazy well thought out and slickly done. At the same time there are some things which are quite annoying. Some things failed unexpectedly, and getting data out of the iphone was a pain. So I'll touch upon the good and bad things below. Maybe in future I'll edit the lists and update this article. Bad things(because people love failures... no, they like pointing out failures): * ITunes would not work for me to transfer local music to the iphone. * I ended up getting some third party software th...

I was facing this issue of sound clipping with the bluetooth adapter that I have connected to my Sony Speakers. Turns out it was due to interference from 2.4GHz WiFi connection. Thankfully my WiFi router has a 5GHz wifi SSID and I could connect the laptop to that and the bluetooth audio issue was resolved. Maybe it's time I moved on to 5GHz wifi. I'll have to check which devices don't support 5GHz WiFi and if there's nobody I can safely disable that SSID. Anyway less exposure is always better for security. Cheers!!

Wife gifted me an IPhone 15. Network Technology: GSM / CDMA / HSPA / EVDO / LTE / 5G Launch Announced: 2023, September 12 Status: Available. Released 2023, September 22 Body Dimensions: 147.6 x 71.6 x 7.8 mm (5.81 x 2.82 x 0.31 in) Weight: 171 g (6.03 oz) Build: Glass front (Corning-made glass), glass back (Corning-made glass), aluminum frame SIM: Nano-SIM and eSIM - International IP68 dust/water resistant (up to 6m for 30 min) Apple Pay (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX certified) Display Type: Super Retina XDR OLED, HDR10, Dolby Vision, 1000 nits (HBM), 2000 nits (peak) Size: 6.1 inches, 91.3 cm2 (~86.4% screen-to-body ratio) Resolution: 1179 x 2556 pixels, 19.5:9 ratio (~461 ppi density) Protection: Ceramic Shield glass Platform OS: iOS 17, upgradable to iOS 18 Chipset: Apple A16 Bionic (4 nm) CPU: Hexa-core (2x3.46 GHz Everest + 4x2.02 GHz Sawtooth) GPU: Apple GPU (5-core graphics) Memory Card slot: No Internal 128GB 6GB RAM, 256GB 6GB RAM, 512GB 6GB RA...

So my laptop has been working fine with Windows 10 to 11 with regular updates etc and nothing went bad for a good while. Then this morning I'm greeted with an update error. The problem was shown as "Hewlett-Packard - USB - 40.11.1109.1746 install error code: 0x800f020b" I had this stupid HP MFD and this had some leftover bits on windows. First thing I did was checked installed software list to see if I missed anything when I removed all the software related to this printer couple of years ago. Could not find anything. So went into printer list and checked if anything is left there. Removed couple of unrelated printer things related to one-note etc. And then restarted the laptop - because it's windows. Still the same error. Then did a bit of googling and realized the drivers are still there. Tried to find the drivers but thanks to Windows 11's half-assed under-development control-panel+settings stillbirth, could not find them. Took another google search to find the...

The redmi note 7 pro that my wife has been using recently got splashed in some seawater. Of course it was the death knell for it. After bringing the dead phone home I dried it with a hair dryer. Then when it still wont take any charge, so I went on to open it. Of course without proper tools its frame got butchered. But I was able to open it and clean the corrosion and salt residue with help of an earbud. But the bottom board was quite corroded with the usb port too in bad shape. I did clean it to the best of my ability and decided to use it for as many days it would run. I packed the rear using some T7000 adhesive for 200 bucks. And it workwd fine for about a week. Then one day it died on me and battery would not charge. I realized that finally it has given up. So today I reopened it and checked if things are even worse. And there's some more corrosion. Anyway now its too bad that Im just going to pack up and sell this for parts. I have seen people collect bunch of things when they...

Bought a Nucleo 144 embedded dev board for INR 4490/- with below features: Microcontroller features STM32F767ZIT6 in LQFP144 package ARM®32-bit Cortex®-M7 + DPFPU + Chrom-ART™ Accelerator 216 MHz max CPU frequency VDD from 1.7 V to 3.6 V 2 MB Flash 512 KB SRAM GPIOs (114) with external interrupt capability 12-bit ADCs with 24 channels (3) 12-bit DAC channels (2) USART/UART (8) I2C (4) SPI (6) General Purpose Timers (10) Advanced-control Timers (2) Basic Timers (2) Low-power Timers (1) Watchdog Timers (2) CAN 2.0B active (3) SAI (2) SPDIFRX 4 inputs SDMMC Camera Interface LCD-TFT USB 2.0 OTG HS/FS Random Number Generator (TRNG for HW entropy) Ethernet Nucleo board features Two types of extension resources Arduino Uno Revision 3 connectivity STMicroelectronics Morpho extension pin headers for full access to all STM32 I/Os On-board ST-LINK/V2-1 debugger/programmer with SWD connector Selection-mode switch to use the kit as a standalone ST-LINK/V2-1 ...

I have started a new github repository with a bunch of religious books. It's at: https://github.com/vaibhavsdlv/religious-texts . Right now I'm scouring the net for as many older religious texts that I can find. Obviously I am looking for Hindu/Sanatan literature since that's my religion. But maybe in future I'll add other stuff to other repositories as well.

Asus Vivobook X409UA Color: Transparent Silver Windows 10 Home Intel® Core™ i3-7020U Processor 2.3 GHz (3M Cache, up to 2.3 GHz, 2 cores) (Takes DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866, DDR3L-1600 ) Intel® HD Graphics 520 14.0-inch, FHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 aspect ratio, LED Backlit, 60Hz refresh rate, 220nits, 45% NTSC color gamut, Anti-glare display, Non-touch screen 4GB DDR4 on board 1TB SATA 5400RPM 2.5" HDD 1x DDR4 SO-DIMM slot 1x M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0x2 1x STD 2.5" SATA HDD 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C 2x USB 2.0 Type-A 1x HDMI 1.4 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack Micro SD card reader Backlit Chiclet Keyboard, 1.4mm Key-travel, Touchpad VGA camera SonicMaster Built-in speaker Built-in microphone with Cortana support Wi-Fi 5(802.11ac) (Dual band) 1*1 + Bluetooth® 5.1 Wireless Card 32WHrs, 2S1P, 2-cell Li-ion ø4.0, 45W AC Adapter, Output: 19V DC, 2.37A, 45W, Input: 100~240V AC 50/60Hz universal 1.60 kg (3.53 lbs) 32.50 x 21.60 x 2.31 ~...

Recently I was looking into heap-less programming topic using C++. Turns out the std::pmr namespace provides a bunch of useful stuff to create memory pools wherever you want - globally, on stack etc, and then you can avoid a bunch of new-delete calls. Below is some code samples I found in a paper at  https://www.rkaiser.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/embo2021-pmr-STL-for-Embedded-Applications-en.pdf I added some notes at the end about what I observed in my usage - especially the problem of bad-allocations which was different than expected behavior. But it could be the compiler too. Anyway I did found a workaround to safely handle that too. Cheers!! // --------------------------------------------- #include <iostream> #include <vector> #include <iomanip> #include <memory_resource> #include <array> int new_counter = 0; int delete_counter = 0; size_t allocated_mem = 0; void showmemory(unsigned char* buffer, std::size_t buffer_size, const char* headline); void ...

I had to search for car related posts and I found that I have never written anything about the various gadgets in my car. There's just one post about dashcam when I bought one - DDPAI a2. It has worked fine mostly. Although it did crap out and I got it repaired for 1000 Rs from their service center 25km away. So what other gadgets I have? Well, I got a Sony A416BT 1-DIN car-audio system and 4 Pioneer TS-R1651D speakers fit-in at the time of delivery itself. I added a Mi car charger too - it's fast charger port has since nuked itself. But the other one works fine so I have not replaced it. All this was enough for last 4-years. Remember this was a budget purchase and the car loan is still ongoing. But this year I felt I should upgrade some things. The most visible upgrade would have been an android head-unit and maybe better speakers. Then I realized my biggest problem is road noise on highway. Of course the original tires were getting worn and they were adding to it. So few mont...

Last week I ordered a Beaglebone black with a power supply, basic transparent case, a HDMI-D to HDMI-A adapter and a USB WiFi adapter. To complete the kit, I needed to use a usb-hub and keyboard-mouse. Plus I used the existing Samsung monitor with HDMI cable. I could not find my original USB-A Hub, so ended up using USB-C hub that I had bought for wife. Luckily I found a USB-A to USB-C adapter as well. Finally the case won't fit the HDMI adapter properly, so I adjusted the adapter clearance by scraping off some plastic and then it fit perfectly. I also needed to dig out my DLink router to connect the board via Ethernet. Trying to configure the router was a bit of a pain. But a reset and some finagling in the router settings quickly had it running as repeater to existing Tata Fiber router. That sorted finally the Beagle bone black was online. The Beaglebone black has following specs: Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 SGX 3D Graphics Engine NEON floating-point a...

Found Billy in some corner of internet. An amazing lightweight music player with gapless playback. It can load entire music libraries 2-8 times faster than any other music player. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WhUJjsS2kwOvQjBtYGRcBFGC2sBRMI7G/view?usp=sharing It's also available as archive at: https://github.com/zQueal/Billy Unless to say - it's no more developed anymore.

I wanted to search a term inside a bunch of pdf's and I earlier thought it's maybe not possible with windows search. So today did a bit of googling. Turns out till windows 10, you needed a separate IFilter to be installed and enabled to search inside PDF files. But with Windows 11, the support for searching inside PDFs is present already in windows. The option is "File contents" in Search options after searching a term. I found that it seems to work fine. Also with SSD's in place of HDDs, the search is not crippling the system. That makes me wonder, if whoever developed the windows search functionality - originally targeted SSDs only. That would make complete sense. And also reason out why windows 7-10 were bad on old hardware and why HDDs were such a bottleneck. Of course, one reason is also crappy laptop HDDs by western digital and Seagate, giving bad random read/write scores of few KBPS. Anyway seems like one mystery solved! Cheers!!

I bought a Raspberry Pi 3B way back in Jan'2017. I actually completely forgot when I bought it, that I had to search in my posts. This is June'2024, that Pi is still alive and it can run the latest Raspberry Pi OS. Anyway this hardware is more than 7 years old and it shows. I tried to launch the browser and it hanged. Turns out 7 years newer browsers need way more RAM than the paltry 1GB available here(907MB really excluding VRAM). Anyway so using SD Card was quite miserable. But thankfully the task for which I dug out the Raspberry Pi from hibernation, was soon done. Let me talk a bit about the task. I have some R&D work where I wanted to compile a set of libraries from our current product. And extend them using Raspberry Pi hardware. Anyway the first phase was configuring the Raspberry Pi toolchain and then compile the existing code. Thankfully a guy named abhiTronix on github had some readymade toolchain versions and a script for manually building the toolchain. Since I ...

Wife wanted a drone and after checking out a few options, we decided to get one from UK. My buddy RKD was visiting India, so had him order one and get it here. It's got 30mins flight time one one battery. The controller has a range of 10KM line of sight. The camera can record 2k video and the gimbal provides great stabilization. Some videos: Lonavla road: https://youtu.be/Ly_tAyhwu1s Lonavla Shivling Point: https://youtu.be/9KZ4MQzPpA8 Mulshi dam backwaters: https://youtu.be/T57bWqf_TAw Ranjangaon Mahaganapati: https://youtu.be/Hd0FpGXCI8k Bhambarde Mandir: https://youtu.be/wvSkjdeVV6I It needs a 30W usb-c charger, so got one from Amazon - Honeywell branded and it charges fast. Also found out power bank can also charge fast via usb-c. There are 4 spare-blades but we need to be careful when landing. I already landed it in a bunch of dust and one time on a small plant which got shredded. Thankfully the propellers don't seem to have any damage. Lets hope I don't crash it or dr...

Got this baby for 9000/- INR Specs: Unfold, snap-in, and start rolling. Osmo Mobile SE's lightweight foldable body and magnetic quick-release design make it easy to carry and capture at a moment's notice. With the newly added status panel, you can switch gimbal modes with the push of a button. An array of intelligent features helps to dynamically shoot and highlight moments, adding a creative flair to anything you want to capture. 3-Axis Stabilization Magnetic Design Portable and Foldable ActiveTrack 6.0 Easy Tutorials and One-Tap Editing Quick Roll It's a great gimbal for 9000 odd rupees. I would have liked one higher end, but seeing the amount of video shooting I do using DSLR, I thought better to spend less and get this one. Cheers!!