A few years ago for camping I wanted a box to hold a huge battery (12v 90Ah) so we had power for the whole week. This was for various items, mainly lighting and charging phones. However this box quickly became one of the focal points of the trips for everyone that had something to charge, be it a phone, camera or anything else.

The old power boxLast year, we burned out a dual port USB charger because we were all charging devices almost non-stop! With only 2 ports between 9 of us it was hardly surprising. To overcome this we needed a new solution, and this blog is the details outlining the improvements.

To begin with, I decided what we needed in terms of power. At the moment we had a 4 socket cigarette lighter splitter which we could plug numerous devices into. We also had a plug in USB charger which we burned out with a few days of the trip left. This of course wasn’t very good so we need a new solution to that. I also had a digital multi meter for monitoring the battery state of charge which was bulky and unnecessary, so a solution for that was also needed.

After careful consideration I decided on having 2 cigarette lighter sockets, 4x 1A USB sockets and an LED bar-graph style volt/state of charge meter. Each of the USB sockets will be powered separately and both cigarette lighter sockets will be on at once. The volt meter will be either push to make, release to break or push to make and push to break. As it turns out the switch I chose could do both depending on the pressure you put upon it.

 

USB and LED Volt Meter

After I decided on the specifications, I had to decide how I was going to make the USB ports and the LED volt meter.

For the USB ports I initially wanted to use the very simple and very cost effective LM7805 5v 1.5A regulator as this made everything very simple. However it turned out that these were simply too inefficient and got extremely hot without a massive heat sink to take away the heat. This made it infeasible to use. I needed another solution.

Eventually I found the LM2575, which is a switched mode 5v 1A regulator. This required additional external circuitry which was hard to find and a little expensive, but once built I realised how much more efficient it was. Virtually no heat was emitted from the regulator or the inductor that I had to use. The efficiency must easily have doubled. After careful planning and testing I eventually made the final board which is now used in the final product.

The final USB power boardThis board coupled with 2 voltage dividers per output for the data lines made the perfect USB charger. This part was the hardest to get working given the issues I had early in the design stage, but eventually I prevailed and it works flawlessly.The LED volt meter presented it’s own problems. It relied on an LM3914 bar graph driver, similar to the kind you see on VU meters on audio equipment. It works the same way but rather than being a logarithmic scale this one is linear.

Having operated solar equipment for years I knew the voltage range I needed for the volt meter to work in order to understand the chemistry of the battery and it’s state of charge. This range is 10.5v (totally flat battery) to 12.6v (100% full battery while resting with no surface charge). As the driver works with 10 LED’s I decided on 2 red, 2 orange and 6 green LED’s with 0.2v separation between each. The scale would begin at 10.7v and go up to 12.5v which would indicate a 10%-100% state of charge (while resting).

The LM3914 was a pain to get it to work. The documentation to me isn’t overly clear and it took weeks to get it working, but eventually I found a plan online to go by and now it works perfectly, though to be honest the 10k POT could do with changing to a 1k POT with a 1k either side of it. It’s a bit sensitive to changes in my design. Below are both designs so you can choose which to use.

 

This circuit works for a variety of ranges but the minimum and maximum values are around 2.0-2.5v from each other depending on your voltage range. You will need to experiment. For 10.7-12.5v the value from minimum to maximum is about 2.0v. The potentiometer adjusts it. To set it up, set your voltage to 12.5v and turn the potentiometer until the final LED just lights up. Now set it to 10.7v and it should extinguish all but the final LED. It’s not 100% accurate but it’s a very good representation and that’s all I needed for this project. If you want accuracy, buy a digital volt meter instead.

 

The Front Panel

Once the two hardest electronics parts were out of the way I set about with the front panel design. This along with knowing the battery dimensions and other items that were going into the box, allowed me to set a size for the box itself. This part is entirely up to you to set based on your battery and other components including your front panel design.

I first set out on paper but quickly realised this was hard when mistakes were made. In the end I switched to Photoshop and used exact size measurements of my components. This is great when using Photoshop as you can also print to the same size onto paper and it remains accurate. This was the key to making my front panel. I measured each component and made a graphic in Photoshop, duplicating where needed to make my layout. Below is my final panel design. All graphics were created by myself in Photoshop but you can feel free to copy.

 

When making the front panel itself, I quickly realised the USB ports weren’t going to fit correctly, so I used some 1.6mm thick plastic to mount them instead. The wood panel behind had a hole cut in with some overlap for the plastic to be fastened with nuts and bolts. This allowed for a cleaner look and for the plugs to fit into the sockets cleanly with a good connection.

 

The soldering of the parts was a major problem for me. I ended up ordering a new soldering iron as my little 15w iron wasn’t up to the job. One mistake I made was trying to solder to the tabs on the switches. Don’t do this, you’ll only ruin your switches as I did by melting them. Instead get some push on crimped connectors instead and use those. I melted 4 switches in an attempt to solder to them so it’s not worth the risk or the money.

Always remember to heat shrink tube your connections to avoid short circuit where you can, and most definitely don’t forget to use a fuse! I used a 15A fuse which should be plenty to include draw from the cigarette sockets. Remember to carry spare fuses too!

 

The Final Product

Here is the final product. It’s by no means perfect, the wiring is awful and there are cosmetic defects, but this was my first try and it came out better than I expected. For that reason, I’m happy enough!

Future additions will be the power inverter and some carry handles as it’s 30KG in weight!

The finished product

   

Images of the inside with the battery and the electrics (messy!)
Click the images to enlarge

I’ve seen this circuit around before, but it kept cropping up while looking at other electronics videos on YouTube. It’s called a Joule Thief, and it was designed as a simple solution to boost voltages from lower sources higher at the expense of more current draw.

This circuit is basically a DC to DC boost converter that uses a ferrite toroid coil and a transistor to oscillate. I’m not 100% sure on how it works yet (even though I built one but anyone can do that!) but there are two coils on the ferrite toroid which are connected in parallel. When oscillated they produce more voltage than went in as mentioned above at the expense of more current being required (remember the equation, power = volts * current (P = V * I). More double the current and half the volts is the same overall power). The transistor is what causes the oscillation by switching very quickly.

Here is a basic diagram I found on evilmadscientist.com.

You should be able to follow that quite easily. I would put a diagram on of the layout I used but I don’t have that picture to hand. Perhaps on my next blog on this I will put that on but a quick search should find you suitable images to work from.

Here’s the ferrite toroid I used (and a bunch of others next to a ruler for size comparison). I wound it myself using ~0.25mm magnet wire and held it in place with sticky tape. The diagram I found used 20 turns but I ended up with 26. It still works pretty well. In fact I would have preferred more turns as when the voltage got too low on the input the output also dropped, thus the LED light output dropped drastically.

When the coil is wound you need two strands, so one long length folded in half. When winding, leave a few inches at the joined end and wind the rest both strands at the same time side by side (as you can see above). The end that is joined to both strands will become your positive input for both coils. The others are then connected to the base (through a 1k resistor) and the collector of a general purpose NPN transistor. The emitter is where your higher output will be.

There is likely some math behind the number of turns the coil needs given your input to get the required output. I haven’t discovered or looked this up yet. If you just want to power a white LED from a 1.5v battery, then 20-30 turns will suffice. I worked it out as 0.1v per turn but this might be different between ferrite toroids.

The beauty of this circuit is that it will work at very low voltages and will extract all of the power from your battery until it’s completely dead, not like most applications which will drop off at around 1.0-1.3v. This still leaves a lot of power left in the battery (up to 40% depending on brand!).

Here is my setup, as messy as it looks. This was my first test and I will be building more in the future which will be on a circuit board (actually it will be on veroboard (stripboard)).

Wow, what a week it’s been for me. You’ll have to excuse the length of this post, there is quite a lot to say.

Anyone who knows me and has me on Facebook will have been following this (or perhaps not, maybe I annoyed you so much you blocked my statuses, who knows!). This has been the worst week of my life so far this year. Doesn’t sound bad really but for me it’s been a royal pain in the arse and a huge let down and disappointment.

So that new car I got just over a month ago? Well on Monday I hit a dirty great pothole which managed to snap one of my suspension springs. Sure these things happen and we get over it. Well, we usually do. This time for me however the garage has severely let me down. Let me explain…

Monday

On the way to work this morning I took the route as I normally do. I was minding my own business and navigating a round about as you do, when suddenly *BANG*. What the hell was that?! The car was still moving, I still had engine power and there were no odd noises coming from it. Then it clicked. That noise was the sound of a suspension spring snapping. It wasn’t a bang as such, more of a twang instead. I pulled over to investigate, but upon inspection I couldn’t see anything obvious. Regardless I took it easy all the way to work just in case. It might not have been a snapped spring. It could have just been dirty great big stone.

When I got to work’s car park, turning the corners I heard some rattling. That was the dead give away that it was the suspension spring. With that, I sent an e-mail to the place I bought the car asking them to book it in for repair. Later that day they told me to take it to the garage in the morning. I arranged with a guy at work to pick me up from the garage and get me to work.

Tuesday

After a careful journey home yesterday I had to make the same careful journey back towards work but diverting off to the garage. I made it in one piece anyway.

The garage called later in the day to confirm it was a broken spring and said they would order the part, but it wouldn’t arrive until the next day. That was fine, and I arranged a lift home with one of the guys at work for the cost of fuel. It also stated that their main mechanics wife had gone into labour so he would be on maternity leave for a week now. This left only a single mechanic to do the work which meant delays were possible.

Wednesday

The next day at about 2pm I got an e-mail to say the part was delayed and had not turned up in that days delivery, so it would now be the next day before it turned up. I was a little annoyed but there wasn’t much I could do at this point. I did however receive the news that my air conditioning was now repaired. Brilliant! With the weather heading towards summer temperatures shortly it’ll come in handy.

Thursday

By Thursday I was getting pretty impatient. They’d had the car 2 days now and it still wasn’t fixed. At about 11am I got an e-mail to say the car should be ready today as the part had arrived. Brilliant! I was feeling pretty happy by that point.

3.30pm came around and I received an e-mail to say I would not be getting the car back that day, but there was no explanation as to why. I was very annoyed now as I had been told it would be back today. Very annoyed, I accepted the fact and looked forward to the next day.

Friday

Finally the end of a very long and irritating week. Well, in 8 hours it would be anyway. I was looking forward to the long weekend getting out and going places again given I couldn’t go any great distance all week. 10am I received an e-mail stating that the garage promised I would get it back today. The owner of the garage had even said so (the guy who was off on maternity leave) and that it would be prioritised.

At lunch time my Mum messaged me asking for a lift out that evening, to which I said not to rely on me as I may not have the car back. Yes I’d been promised but some how I knew that was going to go wrong.

3pm

I got an e-mail saying it would be ready to collect at 5.30pm. Brilliant!

4pm

I got another e-mail saying it now would NOT be ready by 5.30pm. WHAT?! By this point I was absolutely livid. I went and made a phone call to the garage to try and find out what was going on because this was turning into one huge piss take.

I was on the phone for about 5 minutes in total. The words that were spoken were very concerning. I was told that the guy doing the work didn’t like anyone who worked there, and nobody liked him either. He had no regard for his work, didn’t stick to deadlines and generally couldn’t give a crap. Woah, stop. That is NOT the kind of person I want working on my car at all.

I asked what they were going to do. I was told it might be done tomorrow, it might not be. Not good enough. They’d had the car 4 WORKING days now. That’s 36 WORKING hours for a 2 hour job to replace a spring! I told them to make sure the car was in a condition where it could be given (i.e. not in bits) and I would collect that evening and take it somewhere else to be repaired. They agreed.

5pm

5pm came around and I got to the garage to collect the car. My friend who gave me the lift stayed with me to make sure I got it alright. While we were there he asked how long the 2 cars inside the garage had been there. The guy in the garage asked what he was getting at. Why are those two cars in there and not mine was basically what he meant. He replied saying they’d been in there hours, and that any work they do is, and get this…

Work is prioritised by the amount of money they will make!!!

I was shocked at hearing that. I couldn’t even speak to him any more so I left and headed to the place I bought the car. I had an air conditioning repair report to pick up and a conversation to have with them.

When I got there I was greeted with apologies, even though it wasn’t their fault. I told him exactly what he’d said and he was as shocked as I was. He said they would likely fall out over this issue, and to be honest it’s probably doing them a favour as well. After some general conversation he advised me to go to another garage to have the repair done, to which I agreed and had already decided to do anyway if they would not choose another garage themselves. I was paying for the repair anyway so it didn’t really matter that much since it wasn’t a warranty job.

The guy phoned the garage to advise them to give me the spring so I could take it to another garage and get them to repair it, that way it saves time ordering the part. However when he called, he was greeted with “I’m busy call back later” and then he hung up. He tried again from another phone and got the same again. He was obviously pissed off, with a customer, or both. He told me to go there anyway and ask, and tell them to put it on their bill for now. I’d pay them when the spring was fitted. I agreed, we left and I picked the spring up without incident.

I thanked the guy from work for his help all week. He’d been a life saver to be fair! He was totally OK with it and said he didn’t mind if I needed help again, which was good to know. But despite the offer I didn’t want to rely on his help, it’s not fair.

6pm

On the way home, driving slow like a granny, I went to the garage I intended to use for the repair. When I got there I explained the situation and they were dumbfounded by the whole ordeal. Anyway I got the car booked in for Tuesday afternoon straight after the bank holiday, which was fantastic. However, when I mentioned the fact I had the part, his face dropped and he shook his head. He told me they can’t use customer supplied parts because of insurance reasons. Alright, I was OK with that as I had heard a few other places do the same. I hadn’t paid for the new spring anyway so it didn’t matter. I asked them to order it and I’d bring the car in for repair.

It would cost me a bit more but at the end of the day if you need a job doing properly and in good time (and that was practically “same day” service if it wasn’t for the long weekend), then you do pay for it. Anyway, that’s where we stand at the moment.

Oh, I almost forgot, I had to let my Mum down as well. She was disappointed but it wasn’t a big issue. She got her husband to drive them there and they had to leave the car and get a taxi back, and then pick it up again the next day.

 

Well, this is the longest full text post I’ve made so far I think. I think I’ve been very patient waiting all week for this very simple job to be done. Any other garage would have had it done in no more than half that time even with the delay on getting the part. Still, we live and learn, and I will definitely not be using that garage that’s for damn sure.

 

Those who know me will know that I run a few websites, most of which I’ve designed myself over years gone by. What most of you won’t know is that most of these sites have gone through dozens if not more designs before I finally settled on one I actually liked. This is a common problem, and not just for me but for other developers as well.

Let me give you an example. BetaArchive, my main website of focus these days, is far overdue a new template and various other updates. Over the last 2 years I have tried to design something new that will give the site a new edge in it’s little corner of the Internet. Unfortunately I have what is called “Designers Block” most of the time I make designs. This is the act of designing something from an awesome idea but it never quite lives up to that standard. And because it’s not to the standard of the original awesome idea, you scrap it before it’s finished.

To put this in perspective, in 2 years I’ve come up with 9 designs, of which all have been pretty much scrapped. I’ve kept them in my archives because some ideas I could re-use, but the designs as a whole just don’t work. I’ve had this same problem with other sites as well, even this current personal site which took 3 designs, then I stuck with the “Facebook Look” site.

What can we do about this problem? It’s simple. You get a proper website graphic designer to do it for you. The company I work for specialises in many services and one of them is Web Design. We have people in that specifically design graphics and websites, specific people to code the designs and specific people to do the back-end coding. That way, the graphic designer just creates the look of the site to the clients needs, then it gets passed to the coders to break it up and create the template. All while the back-end coders (sometimes the same person as the template coder) works on the back-end functionality.

Now trying to do all of these jobs yourself is hard. You can’t be your own client, designer and coder, it just doesn’t work well. You know what you want but you can’t express it properly, and this is the issue I have. I’m one person with one set of ideas, but using the business model above you get the ideas and expertise of several people throughout the creation of the site.

What can you do to avoid designers block when you only have yourself to do all of the jobs? Well, if I knew I wouldn’t have designers block! However a quick search on the web brings up some valid points that anyone could try.

Design it on paper or in a graphic design suite first

Going straight to the coding is never a great first step. You might have the ideas in your head but unless you have something visual to work with your ideas can go off track. Make sure your ideas solid before you begin.

Find inspiration

Nobody can think up the best ideas on their own. Sometimes you need inspiration from someone else, just like the business model. The best way to do this is go and search the web for your theme and see what those site have to offer. You could find a design with certain areas you like the look of and can utilise (with modifications) into your own design. Never copy someone else’s design though, this won’t end well!

Time

Lets face it, if you want this design to work you won’t do it in a single day. Take your time and spread your work load over as long as it takes. Don’t rush any stage.

Take a walk

Walking is a great way to clear your mind and think about new ideas. Fresh air always does you a world of good, so give it a try.

Deal with it another time

No this doesn’t mean walk away and forget it all, just move away from that aspect of the design and onto something else. Come back to it later with a fresh set of eyes and fresh ideas.

Ask a friend

Asking friends for ideas is a great idea, but don’t overdo it. Friends are more likely to be truthful about a design, so don’t ask them what they think of the rest of the design just yet, just ask them to contribute ideas for a certain section instead.

In conclusion if you’re on your own you’re going to encounter designers block at some point. Don’t let this tempt you into giving up as this is only going to make it worse. Just find the courage to carry on and look for more ideas.

You probably saw the news today, fuel tanker drivers are going on strike again! Yay! Not… You see the problem with this is it disrupts the entire country when it happens. So you might be thinking why they’re striking anyway? To get back at the government for the stupid fuel prices? Oh no it’s because they want more money for themselves! They already earn an average of £45,000 a year, what bloody more do they want?! I know lots of people who would happily do their job for half that wage and not complain. If they don’t want their job they should give it to someone else, plain and simple, otherwise shut up and get on with it!

If this strike was over the newly proposed and accepted 3p increase in fuel cost coming in August this year, I’d be all for it. The government simply won’t learn. The UK fuel cost is over 150% tax on the price of the fuel itself. That’s how greedy our government is. They just tax things they know the UK economy just can’t be without. No fuel, nobody drives to work, so people MUST buy it no matter the price. Panic buyers have been out everywhere today filling their tanks. I was no different, I need my car for work too so I filled it up to the top at a ridiculous cost of £88, and it wasn’t even empty!

That £88 should last me about 600 miles at worst. I do 150mi/week to/from work plus a bit of leisure so we’re looking at 3 weeks tops I can last from that tank. Not a lot really but hopefully after 3 weeks the strike should be over and everything back to normal. The army is apparently going to step in and take over these lazy arse selfish self centred drivers jobs at a fraction of the pay so the disruption should be minimal.

Anyway, what can we do? Besides threatening to bomb the petrol stations or something stupid to get their attention, they’ll never listen. Tens of thousands of people take to the petitions etc. every time this happens and they get nowhere when they get to the people that can make a difference. They just slap another few pence on instead!!!

So yeah, we’re going to have to learn to live with it unfortunately. Our government are a bunch of idiots (and that’s the polite name for them). The sooner we get rid of them the better. We need Clarkson on our side, he’ll sort the bunch of idiots out!!!

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Right, my 2nd rant is about road works and how much they annoy the f**k out of me! I’m not talking about all road works, some I agree are required to keep the maintenance of the road, but the ones that annoy me the most are the ones where nobody appears to be working on it… EVER!

Take this example. Yesterday evening around the junction I come off at for work on the motorway, they’d laid cones out for some work they would be starting that day. Fair enough, but why was there ZERO notice that any work would be carried out? It didn’t affect traffic much that day thankfully but the issue still stood.

The next day (this morning) we were met by a 2 1/2 mile tail back from that junction because of these road works. All it was is a closed off lane, but nobody was doing anything on it! The actual work in fact was on an adjacent junction and they just wanted to “clear the traffic” for work they were doing. I’m sorry but the work that was being done was 400 yards further down that adjacent junction and it was on the pavement!!! What sort of crazy people think it’s acceptable to block off a full lane of a motorway slip road for that work?! They did the same on the roundabout by the way, one of the three lanes was blocked off.

This caused huge disruptions for a lot of people. No thought went into it at all. With any luck tomorrow will be different and they will have realised the disruption caused today, but I’m not holding my breath…

Rant over. I needed to get those ones off my chest as I can’t stand either of them!

OK so I didn’t have the best of luck with my new car and just 5 days after getting it I broke down (this was last Thursday by the way, it’s Tuesday now). In some ways it was good that it broke now and not further in the future. Let me describe what happened.

I was travelling to work as I do every weekday morning and everything was as normal. But as I was a mile or so from my junction off the motorway the car suddenly lost all power, it made a bong sound from it’s instrument panel and “engine fault” appeared on the display. That was it, car dead. I had just a few seconds to move from the outside lane to the hard shoulder before I lost too much speed (I was going up a slight incline too).

After pulling over I shut everything off and after a minute or so I tried to start it again hoping it would have reset the ECU. It didn’t, and it just cranked and cranked until I pulled the key. Great! First time in 4 1/2 years of driving that I’ve broken down. Thankfully I had AA cover, so a quick call and 25 minutes later they were there to rescue me. I got them to take me to the garage I bought the car from (phoning ahead so they knew) and get them to sort it under the warranty.

This got me thinking it might be the fuel injectors as it was on recall and was one of the things that can cause the engine to point blank refuse to start. I got the garage to diagnose it and they said it was an injector. They recommended I get in touch with VW, which I did, as the injectors would all be done under their recall warranty scheme. £3000 of work for free! I’m certainly not complaining. However the only down side was it would be 4 days before they could fit me in.

I hate being without a car, it’s like a lifeline to me. It gets me everywhere from work and home, to friends houses, etc. 4 days would be a long time! Anyway it passed and today I got the car back with brand new injectors and she runs really smoothly again.

Now the rant. Why can the car not run without a single injector having failed? Well I know it’s a safety feature to protect the engine and/or catalytic converter from damage from excess fuel being shoved into it etc, but at the end of the day I’m the driver! I should be the one to make that decision! The worst part is that it fails in the blink of an eye, no warning. You could be anywhere, I just happened to be moving at a speed that allowed me time to pull over safely.

So yeah, safety systems might be saving the engine but they could put you in one hell of a situation if it fails in the middle of a street! End of rant on that one anyway… Lets see if my luck changes and I don’t have any serious problems from now on!

It’s about time I got a new car, and since I finally had enough money to get one I went out hunting last weekend. I knew that I wanted a VW Passat for some time. 2 of my friends have got them and they’re highly reliable. Nobody else I know who has or has had one had much of a problem with them. I visited a few garages and saw a couple of them but this one caught mine and my friends eye.

Upon closer inspection it’s pristine in pretty much every way, both inside and out. One of my friends told me I’d be stupid not to go for it. For the price of £4690, ~92,000mi on the clock and made in 2005 it was a great deal. A little older than I wanted but despite that still pretty good. We had checked the usual stuff out and it was all good. It had a full service history indicating a new cambelt 5k ago and services throughout it’s life by VW. You couldn’t get any better than that.

I did a test drive (I mean who wouldn’t?) and I loved it as soon as it left the forecourt. We drove on a variety of roads and by god does it shift! So much better than the Peugeot 306! The 2.0L TDi engine produces around 140bhp and 250+ lb/ft of torque (much better than the 92bhp/155 lb/ft from the 306) and it shows too.

When we got back after the drive we headed to the pub next door and mulled over the cost and various other factors. After some persuasion by my friends I decided to put down a deposit on it. We sorted out the finance that I would need (1/2 of the price) and off I trotted eagerly awaiting the results from the finance company. Two days later (Monday) I heard back that I had got the finance (Woohoo!) and I could drive it away the following Saturday (today).

A few removals from the Peugeot (bits and bobs from the boot, the tracker and the radio), and it was ready to part exchange. They offered me £350 for it which was a great deal considering I paid £500 for it 3 1/2 years ago! I couldn’t say no. So today I picked it up and paid the remaining money on top of the deposit to pay for half the costs. Within 20 minutes I drove away a happy person!

We immediately went to the first garage and I filled up £50. Guess how much the needle showed after that… Can’t guess? Half a tank! HALF! Bloody expensive to fill that’s for sure. A day of random driving enjoying my new purchase shows an average of 44mpg or so which is mostly down driving. On the motorway I would expect I’d get a fair bit more, closer to 50 or higher.

Now this car is modern, which means a lot of things are electronic from the throttle to the very dodgy parking brake. I should point out by the way the parking brake has already failed once! It wouldn’t disengage after I wanted to drive away and told me to consult the manual. I did, and found nothing. I decided to play the old “turn it off and on again” tactic. What can I say except it worked. It retried itself and it disengaged. It’s been fine since, but I expect this won’t be the last time it will happen. We live and learn I suppose.

The other thing is the air con not working, but I suspect this is a simple fault that can be rectified (low gas, blown fuse, etc). I will contact the car centre as soon as I can to report the problem. Everything else is pretty flawless.

So do I like it? I love it! The power is a nice change, and the low end torque is immense but it does hesitate a little on the low RPM’s. That’s to be expected because of the hybrid turbo. It does judder a bit but I’ve been told at low RPM this is to be expected, however despite that I’m going to research it just to be sure since it doesn’t sound normal.

Anyway, I’ve posted some pictures on my gallery and I will add more as and when I get them. I’ve spent most of the day driving around so I never got chance to take pictures!

I started having signal issues a few weeks ago where my Optimus 2X would randomly lose signal in a seemingly good signal area. It wouldn’t get it back until I either rebooted the phone or I set airplane mode on and then off again. Obviously this is a real pain and shouldn’t need to be done.

After a little bit of investigation work I determined it wasn’t likely to be the phone itself. It’s either a SIM card issue or a software issue (more likely since I run a custom ROM on it). The easiest thing would be to order a new SIM card to I went ahead and did this through O2’s live chat. That went smooth as you could ever imagine so no complaints there. And kudos to O2 for offering such a service, it saves time and money.

Anyway the rep I spoke to assured me everything was automatic for the switch over, which I was happy about. I was told it would arrive in a few days.

On Sunday I got a message saying I’d get it on Monday. Great! Fast service! Come Sunday evening I was browsing Facebook just before I went to bed and suddenly I noticed the phone had no signal again. Great, so I rebooted but the signal didn’t come back. I tried a second time with the same result. Thinking nothing of it I put it into my old Sony Ericsson which reported “SIM INACTIVE”. What the hell?

So here I am wondering why this has happened, it turns out that O2 have turned off my current SIM in anticipation of the new arrival the next day. Well done O2, you’ve now cut me off for the next 18 hours. How? Let me explain. I work a 9-5 job like most others, and as everyone knows post doesn’t magically arrive at 7am in the morning so there was no chance I was going to have my new SIM until the evening of the next day. This makes no sense because it means I’m without a phone for 18 hours.

Now what they should have done is activated the new SIM the next evening and told me to put it in on Tuesday morning. That would have made more sense and would have prevented daytime disconnection. I have sent O2 an e-mail regarding their replacement SIM activation process but I’ve not heard back from them yet (not surprising, they’ll probably take a few days). I’ve suggested the above to them for their activation process for replacement SIM’s, so I hope they take it.

Had I been a business customer I could have potentially lost a full days business. Even being a regular consumer I could have missed important phone calls. What if I needed to get in contact with someone or them contact me? I was completely out of reach for the whole time. Had O2 told me this would be the case I would have been OK with it, but the fact I was not told and it happened out of the blue is what annoyed me most.

Anyway what’s done is done, and I’ve made the complaint to O2. Lets hope they follow it. And let this be a lesson to anyone who is thinking of a replacement SIM following similar issues, make sure you confirm with them what the procedure it. It will probably vary between providers.

If you do, check out this pepperoni pizza website. It has facts and history of pizza, and makes an interesting read.

I’m going to make a pepperoni pizza from scratch one day as it seems like a nice idea. I wonder if it will be any cheaper than buying one? Initial thoughts say not but from the results I’ve seen the look far more appetising!

OK so you’ve probably heard of MB and GB (MegaBytes and GigaBytes), they’re used on all sorts of devices from phones to computers. But what are they? Better still, what are MiB and GiB (MibiBytes and GibiBytes)? Well both are units for measuring memory size but they have differences. The difference is that one is calculated using base 2 and one is calculated using base 10.

For these examples we’ll stick to GigaBytes and GibiBytes for our sizes.

A GigaByte that we’re all so used to is base 10 (1,000,000,000 bytes to 1 Gigabyte).
A GibiByte that you may have heard of is in base 2 (1,073,741,824 bytes to 1 GibiByte).

Table taken from http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec.htm

So why does it cause confusion? Several reasons. Most sizes are referred to in Mega or Giga bytes so many people have been accustomed to this. For example in magazines or advertisements selling electronic equipment (tablet’s, digital cameras, etc.) and computers running Windows they’re referred to as this, but that’s where the confusion comes in, and a bit of a rant because of it.

The difference between 1GiB and 1GB is marginal, but when you increase this to several tens or thousands, it throws the scale way off. Not only that, Windows runs in base 2, but actually displays it using the prefix for base 10. So when you think it’s 1 GigaByte it’s actually showing 1 GibiByte instead but with the wrong unit! I have no idea why Microsoft decided to do this but it’s confusing as hell when you’re trying to work out the differences in file size on a program that really does show it properly. Gah!

The problem I had recently was on one of my sites, BetaArchive. I was trying to find discrepancies in the total archive size counter. It wasn’t showing the right size but we were adamant we had it right. In the end it turned out to be in the units.

Now I believe Mac and Linux use GigaBytes correctly and are also switchable from what I have read, you just have to find the option for it so Windows should have no excuse getting it right. Many people have complained to Microsoft but they’ve never done anything about it for some reason, so this problem continues to plague developers and people like myself trying to work out these discrepancies.

Suffice to say I wasted 2 hours trying to figure out where the missing data was. As a result of this cock-up I’ve even had to put a message next on the display on BetaArchive so people know it’s actually showing the right unit on the site but Windows shows the wrong unit!

I don’t doubt this will plague people for years to come as I doubt it will be fixed in Windows 8 either. I just find it hard to believe Microsoft have got away with it for this long.