Sharma Family Journal

Got a Ooma telo device yesterday. The device looks beautiful, easy to setup etc. But it’s not really free as advertised. You still pay $3.47 per month in regulatory fees, which is much worse than the $11 per year after the first year deal Ooma offered before April.

In fact they still offer the deal if you got a pre-April retail box. But it’s hard to tell. And retailers are even more slimy. All of them still advertize the “Free calls anywhere within the US” without the fine print that is on Ooma’s own website.

Trying to use voice recognition on my android phone might make my blog exceed 140 characters.

There you have it. The app actually works. Punctuation done manually.

Motorola H15 is a headset with not so bad reviews – so I decided to get a “New OEM in bulk” piece from buy.com. It looks like motorola is dumping a bunch of refurbished headsets as “OEM in bulk” and “new”.

These things arrive in a plastic pouch, with bare minimum stuff. But they don’t really work. I’m pretty certain that these are products returned by other customers as non-working.

Motorola customer support: 1-800-331-6456 takes you to a eastern european country and the customer service rep disconnects the phone line after taking down my name and phone number.

Buy.com: Won’t return money, but is willing to send more broken bluetooth headsets.

If you’re curious about the problems:

First one: the mic would work only with the headset near my mouth. Didn’t pick up sound when it’s on my ear.

Second one: continuous beeps every second when paired. Motorola doesn’t document what this means.

My 1080p capable LCD monitor was not playing nicely with a netbook (Acer 1410) HDMI output when running Ubuntu 9.10.

Turns out that I had to run

xrandr --prop

Apart from telling me what X thinks about the hardware, it also gets my monitor to start working properly. Thought I’d blog it, before I forget about these useful little things.

If only I can teach my macbook to do this via the monoprice mini display port to HDMI adapter.

Typical problem: disk storms after sleep/wakeup, slow startup and generally weird behavior from windows7 after the vista to w7 upgrade. Looks a lot better after upgrading the BIOS from 31xx to 3302.

I wonder why folks like Buffalo even bother to write their own firmware. They should just ship their stuff with DD-WRT and save us a bunch of pain.

I made the mistake of trying to use their web GUI and spent 1.5 hours which I could’ve spent with my kids instead.

My WD passport drive boots from the USB port nearest to the SD card reader. Try booting from any of the other USB ports – things don’t work. Totally undocumented weirdness. HP folks: would you care documenting this next time please?

It almost looked like my disk was going to die. My OS was giving me disk errors and the disk was making horrible clicking noises.

Turns out that I need to connect the disk to the USB ports on the left side of the HP dv5t laptop, rather than the ones on the right side. It seems to be related to some USB ports being able to provide more power to the disk than others. Whether the laptop was running on battery or AC also seems to make a difference.

All seems to be well now!