New Gadget: ASUS Transformer Prime
This week I got my new Asus Transformer Prime, and it is awesome.
There are many professionally written reviews all over the web, and all found it to be the best android tablet on the market right now. There has also been a fair amount of press around reported short comings and failures.
When reading xda-developers prior after making my pre-order and before it arrived, I was beginning to get a little nervous with reports of dead pixels, DOA units, units without serial numbers preventing updates, wifi being hopeless… seemingly many people were unhappy.
However, the thing I clung to was that all those professional reviews couldn’t have messed up, if the thing had real serious issues it would never have had such glowing write up.
When my unit finally arrived, I waited patiently to play. I was at work when the package arrived, and knew that if i opened the box to play I would get nothing done. So I waited.
Eventually the evening came and I opened up the box and plugged in. I did immediately try to power up, but got no response. So I left it to charge. In total it took about 50 minutes on charge before there was enough juice to respond to attempts to power up. I realised that most (all?) claims of ‘DOA’ were likely people freaking out that it didn’t respond once plugged in, not realising the amount of time that might be required on charge before it would respond.
Of course the first thing I checked for was dead pixels, and was relieved to find one. Then I checked serial number and that was fine to. I let it download all my apps (I have an android phone so it synced all the apps installed there to my tablet)
Once that had finished I went checking for the Android 4 update (Ice Cream Sandwich) and found it waiting, so pretty much immediately I hit the upgrade path and picked up the new OS level, and a camera driver update.
After the update and reboot, I was playing wth ICS to see what was what, when I realised that the wifi did keep dropping out on me, and re-establishing. Perhaps this issue was a real one, and at the rate it was happening it would have been a pretty serious issue. But then it occurred to me that I’d had no such problems pre-upgrade, and my instincts said to try a clean power down and back up. (my phone sometimes has the GPS go mental, tracking my position about 100 yards offset from my position, a reboot always clears it up) As suspected, a reboot cleared up the problem, and a week later I can say I’ve had no issues with wifi dropping. Some say the range is poor, I can’t say I’ve noticed, I get a good stable connection everywhere at home and at work, so I guess it’s good enough.
After a week of paying I can honestly say I love it, all the awesomeness of a tablet, but with the addition of a keyboard (on which I’m typing this) which is a little small, but pretty good for writing long form content without messing around with the on screen keyboard. Also the battery life is at least as good as claimed. I have to say I’ve not pushed it that hard, I charge it every night, since that is the habit I’m in with my phone. However today, I sat in bed this morning reading engadget’s distro magazine, my wife and I watched the 2 hours of ‘star wars uncut’ (pretty cool, check it out) and now I’m writing this. The tablet shows 82% charge and the keyboard is at 52%. if I tried this on any laptop I’ve ever owned it would be on its last legs by now. And my phone would likely be looking in serious need of a top up after that much video played, and streamed over wifi.
One complaint that all the reviews made, was not specific to this tablet, but rather the continuing issue with all android tablets is ‘not enough tablet apps’.
I can now appreciate what they’re saying, but I think it’s not what you might think. Every android app runs, and just expands to fill the screen. For many that is fine, I’m using noteeverything right now, and it works great at tablet size. However when you use those apps that are ‘tablet optimised’ you do feel like you get such a nice experience, that it is a little disappointing using apps that don’t make the most of the large area and resolution. So it’s not so much that you can’t get apps to do stuff, just that some of them leave you wanting more from the interface once you’ve seen how good it can be. I guess as those reviewers noted, it’s just a case of time.
Obviously you can’t really give a fair review of any device like this based on just one week. time will tell. However so far I love it, have had really none of the
reported issued, and find it to be every bit the amazing device that the early reviews reported. If you are on the fence, get off it and go buy one, you won’t regret it.
CraftSuppliesUSA artist’s sketch pencil
I wrote this post entirely using the wordpress for android app on my phone, which then decided to lose everything I’d written ;-( So here I wrote again thinking that I may never trust the android app again.
Previously I wrote about having made an oak book stand for my wife’s Christmas present. In addition to that I also decided to make her an artists sketch pencil.
We originally saw these at a craft faire in Winchester, as part of a large selection of pens being sold by a woodturner. Kat and I were both drawn to the unusual nature of these sketch pencils. Basically the mechanism is a 4 jaw ‘chuck’ which you operate by pushing the end plunger to open up the jaws. They take a 5mm lead in various colours, and when released, the 4 jaws grip the lead securely.
The guy selling them mentioned that you can’t get the kits in this country and they have to be imported. I forget now much he sold them for, but they were not cheap. I often feel a little pang of guilt at this kind of time, since I’ve normally shown quite an interest in the goods being sold by a woodturner, but only ever out of interest to go away and make them myself, never to actually buy them.
Having remembered them I did a little search and found them sold by Craft Supplies USA Woodturners catalog, unfortunately having to get them from the US makes things a little costly due to the shipping, so I ended up buying a couple of those sketch pencils and a couple of their ‘tool box’ variants. The tool box variant have little hex ‘nuts’ at the centre and plunger end in order to stop the pencil from rolling around when put down.
In construction I had a couple of mishaps from not really reading the instructions on drilling the blank (how hard can it be to drill a hole through piece of wood?) Basically I had the drill speed way to slow, and didn’t leave enough spare length on the blank to allow me to stop without drilling all the way through. So on two separate blanks I managed to blow out the base of the blank as I got to the end of the drilling (the bottoms literally exploded into fragements ;-() This left me not very happy. However after taking a little more time to read up on it, I sped up the drill, made myself a better jig for supporting the blanks, and went more carefully and all was well.
The tool box variant was a little bit strange, in that the rear hex nut is not a push fit into the barrel, rather having turned the barrel you need to trip a few mill off the rear end, back down to the brass tube, then glue the nut onto the brass tube. This also means that there is no snug fitting around the plunger (as there is on the artists variant) The finished product is still cool, but I feel it would be nicer with a push fitting that provides something close to the rear fitting of the artists sketch pencil.
I think this made a really nice gift and I was happy with how it turned out. A colleague at work expressed an interest in them, but I think the cost shipping would make them quite difficult to make and sell at a reasonable price. That said I do also have my eye on the soft touch kit for making stylus’ that work with capacitive touch screen tablets (my transformer prime should arrive tomorrow) so maybe I could order another batch of kits. If I convince people to buy them from me I might offset the cost of making my own…
Adjustable oak book stand
This christmas my wife and I agreed that we would make our gifts for each other. Given we made the decision a month or so before christmas it allowed plenty of time to figure out a plan, order supplies, and have some weekends to actually start making..
Very quickly I knew I wanted to include some artistic element, and obviously I wanted to make it personal. A few months back Kat had drawn a design of her name such that it had rotational symetry (looked the same upside down) and it struck me that taking that design and somehow rendering it in wood was a nice idea.
For a while I toyed with various thoughts about simply cutting the design out and mounting it as a purely artistic piece, but I really prefer to make functional things. I like the idea that what I make will enter every day usage filling some role.
Then I had a flash of inspiration, Kat often writes longhand in notebooks, then later refers to them whilst typing into her computer. She once made a comment about the slight inconvience of not having the book leant up so it was easier to switch views between monitor and notbook. So I decided to make a book stand, with her name design embossed on the front.
Here it is
It supports 3 positions
The last one maybe a little too upright since a heavy book pulls it over forwards, but for a few sheets or something light it’s fine.
The notches in the feet were cut on my bandsaw whilst they where still a single piece of wood, then I split it lengthwise to get the two feet.
The dowels were hand turned on the lathe to be the right diameter to drill convienient holes for them. They are not yet glued in place as I thought I might want to be able to adjust things, but actually it might be better to just fix them so they stay centred.
There are two little retaining arms that can swing up to hold pages back. That are just held by a nail, the head of the nail is a tight fit in the arms, and a slightly loose fit in the base of the stand to allow them to turn.
The patern on the front was created by first cutting out a stencil, then drawing around that onto the wood in pencil. Then I used a burn tool to scortch the outline, before finally using a burr tip ina rotary tool to make the texture. It was my first attempt at texturing like this and I’m not altogether happy with it. It looks ok at a distance, but it might have worked better if I had coloured it. I did consider doing so, but lacked a fine brush and didn’t want to ask Kat for one since it would have given away elements of the gift.
It’s finished in woodwax, which I like for things intended to be handled. Hopefully it will last well, and live up to it’s intended use to make it easier to reference notebooks whilst typing.
New workshop!
So I figured it’s about time I wrote about my new workshop. In truth I’ve not spent a huge amount of time building or making in it yet. I’ve mostly been doing setup stuff to get myself in a position to make something.
When we were looking for a new place to live, I was the cause of some serious complications. I was in a house with a large garage (a little under 7m x 4m) and whilst I did keep the car in it, there was plenty of room for me to have a substantial workshop. This meant the only places even open to consideration to move to required a garage, and even a single garage ran the risk of not really being enough.
When we were looking around this place, I knew it had a garage in a block, and a shed. As we were shown around the house I was favorably impressed, but still wondering about the workshop possibilities. First we saw the garden and the shed. It’s a fairly large shed as far as such things tend to go, not terribly tall, and in need of a little TLC, however it did have power and I was musing about whether I’d be able to make a workshop out of it. When the previous tenant (who was showing us around) said ‘Well of course there is also the *double* garage’
oh…it’s a DOUBLE garage in a block…well, suddenly things started to look more promising.
And so it was, whilst it is in a block, and there is no power directly to it, it is close enough to be able to solve that problem with a long extension lead. Obviously the extension was picked for its ability to handle the load placed by my machines, and with thermal cut off etc.
The double garage is almsot exactly 5m by 5m, and this time there was plenty of parking around so I had no intention of wasting space with the car 
25 square meters of workshop space… but what to do with it? when we moved in all my stuff got summarily dumped in random ways into the garage, filling the space, such that it was impossible to get around it all.
Before really starting to move everything to clear the space I decided to make a sketch of roughly how I could lay out the room.
With the sketch in place and a reasonable idea of where I wanted things to end up, I set to shifting everything around to try to get a sense of order. It took a lot of effort to bring sanity to the space, but eventually I’d cleared most things off to the edges of the space, shelving filled and tools setup. Leaving just the central islands (lathe and workbench) to complete.
However before that I’d need light!, I had been relying on sunny days and leaving the doors open to get things moved around, but a quick test with my 1 angle poise lamp with the doors shut showed that it would not be anything like enough, even with a few I figured I really needed to install some strip lights.
In the absence of a permanent power supply, I decided to buy 2 strip lights and wire everything as you would for a regular lighting circuit, with 2 lights spaced evenly on joists over the 2 main working areas of the workshop, I wired both into a junction box, linking in a single switch and power supplied via a regular plug with a 3Amp fuse which just plugs into the extension. These two lights make a HUGE difference, immediately I can close the doors and feel like I’m in a workshop rather than just a garage with tools in.
That done I turned my attention to my two planned islands in the middle of the workshop. Where as in my previous garage I bolted my workbench and lathe to the wall, here I didn’t want to do that, partly to avoid too many holes in the walls that I merely rent, and partly because bolting to the wall has some serious limitations.
Yes you get stability, a rock solid surface to work with. (Though the lathe still caused vibrations through it’s mounts when turning an uneven/off-centre piece.) However you can’t work with large items on the workbench, and whenever I tried to do hollowing on the lathe, I was butting my chisel handles against the wall, limiting my movement.
So I was keen to have both as islands in the centre of things, with supporting machinery arrayed around the outside.
Another benefit, particularly for the lathe has been the ability to create a clamp to hold my dust extractor hose in place behind the lathe bed, positioned to capture as much dust as possible in turning and sanding operations. This is really easy then to switch back and forth between the lathe and the bandsaw.
So far I’ve not done any serious operations on either the workbench or the lathe, so I can’t see how much either will move/vibrate. I’ve put in a few bracing pieces to stiffen the structures of both, but it’s possible that the workbench will be too light, under the force of certain activities may be inclined to move. Only time and use will tell.
I’m really happy with the workshop, I feel like I’ve got lots of space to work in, I also found enough space to set up my dart board, which spent the last 6 years gathering dust. So when I’m waiting for glue to cure, or just in need of some contemplation time I can throw a few darts, listen to a podcast. Generally chill out in my man-cave 
BT #FAIL – Computer says no…
Ok, so I’ve waited a little while to record the saga of getting my BT internet connection here at my new house. I do now have the connection, and for the record 33Mb is awesome.
However, to get to this point I went through a considerable amount of hassle and spent a couple of days really very angry.
The story begins on the 11th November, they day after we moved into our new house. BT was due to send an engineer to connect our phone and our internet. The email they sent confirming this most definitely states that an engineer will visit, and that the actions due to be completed are phone connection, and internet connection.
However, it turns out this is slightly misleading. They don’t mean ‘an’ engineer, they mean ‘two’ engineers, one for the phone, and the other for the internet.
As it happens, I was not here on the day, as I had to return to the old house to pick up the cats. So when I finally got back at 6.30 I had just found out that one engineer had arrived earlier in the day, had connected the phone line, but been entirely none the wiser about any need to connect the internet. This was a surprise to my wife, since we had been given the strong impression that ‘an’ engineer would be doing both. Just after hearing that the phone was connected, but not the internet, I received a call from another engineer. He was due to come and connect the internet, however the system had not notified him that the phone line had been connected, and he was not able to do anything until that was the case. I told him it was now connected. However it was apparently now too late, instead he asked what time I he could return tomorrow to connect me. Given that I had planned to conduct an interview via Skype at 10am the next morning, I asked that he be here by 9.30 to get it all connected. ‘no problem, see you tomorrow’
12th October…10am arrives and I conduct the interview over the phone (which was worth it since we went on to hire the candidate) by 11.30 I phone BT to find out what is going on. To be told that there is no booking for today, it has been rescheduled to the 26th October. Obviously I was pretty unhappy, this is completely unacceptable. However I’m told that there is ‘no way to move the appointment earlier’ ‘it simply cannot be done’ This confuses me, surely a simple phone call to an engineer that to get them here would work. Apparently the computer said no.
What they could do was give me a userid/pwd for btopenzone that showed some signal in my neighbourhood. As it transpires, if I sit in my lounge window, I can just about get a connection, which is at a speed somewhat equivalent to a dial up modem.
I was very annoyed, and told that a complaint would be filed on my behalf, however I would just have to wait until the 26th.
26th October, another day off work, since I have no internet connection to use to work from home. First thing in the morning I ring BT to check on things, realising that no one told me what time to expect an engineer, just the date.
“There is no booking on the 26th october, ‘it shows as 7th November”,
–I am almost lost for words, what do you mean no booking? I was most definitely told today.
“ah yes, I can see it *was* for today, but the system shows your phoneline isn’t connected yet, so it’s been rescheduled. is your phone line working?”
–Yes it is working, I’m speaking to you from it right now, If the system says it’s not right, why was this not spotted 2 weeks ago by the person that told me it was booked for today?
“I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can sort out the system to show the right status”
–And then send an engineer?
“Oh, no we won’t be able to do that now”
–I want to speak to your manager
..
..
..
And on it goes. Basically it takes BT over an hour, just to make the system reflect that my phone line is in fact connected. And because I played the manager card, they are able to move me to a ‘premium booking’ for the following morning 8am-10am. I find this interesting, since the first call claimed that no force on earth could bring my appointment forward now that it was reset for 2 weeks hence, and yet now apparently I am angry enough to break through this cast iron limitation, and get a new booking. But sadly no force on earth can make it today. I am still bemused as to how a company that fundamentally pays for engineers to do a job, is entirely unable to just call an engineer and tell them they have an extra emergency job, because someone screwed up. In my line of work, there are many reasons why I, or my team might be asked to work late to accommodate something, and it would rarely be a problem to do so. But apparently BT engineers time is strictly controlled, all booking made back to back and weeks in advance with no spare time, and no possible way to suggest that someone work a little late.
Weirdly BT are happy to knock a few months line rental off my bill for the inconvenience. I would rather that took the equivalent money and offered it to an engineer to tack and extra appointment on the end of their day. but this of course is madness to suggest, no force on earth could prompt a phone call between two human beings to just arrange something to happen, the computer says no.
Incidentally when offered months line rental for free, I raise the point that the day of holiday I just took, and wasted, waiting for an engineer that hasn’t come, is worth somewhat more to me than a few months line rental, I would rather send a bill for my time. At which point ‘Martin Plant’ tells me that BT’s liability is actually limited to the cost of their service for the time between the initial booking and when it is finally connected. That the ombudsman will back that up, and that they are actually being much more generous than they are required to be given the particularly poor service I’ve received.
Turns out that is all lies. Though I have not pursued the matter (life is too short) I did read up a little in the ombudsman guidelines, that merely states that any award they make will not be punitive, and will reflect a fair value considering the damage/inconvenience caused, and be limited to 5000 pounds. Which sounds to me like me claiming back for my lost day of holiday at my rate of pay would be entirely fair, and not in excess of the limit. But I digress.
27th October 9am, I decide it’s time to call BT now that I’m half way through the slot I was given.
“The person dealing with you case is on the phone, she”ll call you back as soon as she is off it”
10.01 am I call again…
“She is actually just on the phone dealing with it now, I’ll get her to give you a call when she’s off”
–”No that’s ok,.. I’ll hold.”
5 mins later I get to hear the story…
“I’ve been on hold to <some other dept> since 9.30, and I’m still on hold trying to find out about an engineer for you”
I continue to hold, whilst she continues to hold, and an engineer continues to not show up.
After some time she convinces me that she has been promised a callback within the hour, and there is no point me holding.
What takes an hour!? you call, you ask a question, you get a response. what the hell takes an hour to find out? it’s not like I’m asking them to perform differential calculus, or write some custom software to solve the problem. just tell me a freaking engineer is on the way. (I was really very angry, not just about the lack of an engineer, but the absurdity of a company that has no idea what it is doing, and is apparently unable to find out in anything under an hour for any given issue)
Just under an hour later I get a call…
“For some reason the order on their system failed, so an appointment was not made, I’m escalating as high as I can go and saying this is unacceptable but it will be this afternoon before I know more’
–What takes until this afternoon? you employ engineers, phone one, tell him he has a job. I don’t understand what takes time to solve here
“it just doesn’t work that way, but we’re trying very hard (at what?!)”
–I have to go to work now, and I simply can’t be here this afternoon, so i want an engineer waiting for me when I get home at 7pm
“We can’t do that, the engineers stop work at 6, and they have all their jobs already planned, but when would be the next convienient time to have an engineer’
–The next convenient time is 7pm today, how about instead of offering me money off my bill, you offer that money to an engineer who I’m sure would be glad to take a little overtime
“we can’t do that”
–Then Saturday morning
“I’ll see what I can do, but I won’t be able to confirm until later this afternoon”
–when you get back to me, I want to know the name of the engineer, and his mobile number. So that I know this is actually arranged, with an actual person who knows he is due at my house on Saturday morning
“We can’t do that, we can’t get that information, the system only allocates jobs on the morning, so we don’t know until then
–I don’t care what the system ‘normally’ does, at this point that system has failed utterly to work 4 times already
“well I’ll see what I can do” -this was a lie just to get me off the phone
So basically this has been a string of ‘computer says no’ and even for the things that theoretically fit within their ‘process’ they are unable to determine answers in anything short of a few hours. What the hell is there to ‘find out’ I still fail to understand how they can be so out of touch, that in a situation where they have now had 4 appointments made and failed to keep, they can’t just make a call, sort it out, and be back with confirmation in 5 minutes. My frustration mostly stems from the knowledge that even when I worked for IBM, a company with 300,000 employees all over the world, if a customer contacted me out of the blue with a query (which was not any part of my job to deal with) I could mostly have them an answer in a few hours. And that is for someone that would not expect to ever deal with customer queries. How can a group whose whole purpose is to sort this kind of thing out, need such elapsed time to figure out something that is so core to their business?
Sometime much later that day I get a voicemail left saying that an engineer should be with me on Saturday morning between 8am and 1pm.
29th Oct – Finally an engineer arrives, and connects my internet, totally none the wiser that there has ever been any problem with the booking.
So it took 18 days and 5 appointments, but finally BT managed to achieve the apparently complicated and unusual request of giving me an internet connection.
It is a wonder that they are able to stay in business at all, For all the hassle my account has a credit of about 200 pounds, and despite that, if a company came along providing good broadband speed with unlimited download, as an over the air service, I would drop BT, phone line and all, in a heartbeat.
It seems odd that we have certain businesses, that have such a monopoly on essentials that their customers can hate them, but still have no choice but remain customers. For most businesses, if they were this incompetent at their core business, they would be out of business pretty quickly as customers would just go elsewhere.
Thankfully after all this trouble the actual internet connection is 33Mb down and 5Mb up and it rocks. Just a shame it took so much effort to achieve.
