Back to year 1996, you might not care about the quality of low-speed USB 1.0 cable, now it's 2016, with the new standard coming out - USB 3.1 Gen 2, Thunderbolt 3, and more, you are looking at the entire different world of the new interface and protocols comparing to the 20 years ago.
The old USB 1.0 or 2.0 or even 3.0 cable that has Type-A/B on both ends are pretty easy to implement nowadays, well, probably not USB 3.0 cable since it is pretty high speed data transfer rate. However, the newer invented - Type-C interface, is facing huge challenge which is introduced by combining power delivery, and displayport video protocol.
The worst case of the bad type-A/B cable is to cause data lost. But what about Type-C cable?
If you get a bad quality of Type-C one, you may potentially damage your devices and computers or smartphone. Seriously? oh... YES. Remember, it combines Power Delivery and Data all together in one cable. If the cable does not follow the specification, it would do the terrible thing.
Take a look at one of my favorite Engineer's reviews
https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts
his FAQ:
https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/HakwCMmd346
and also his co-worker, Vincent Palatin, in Google's USB-C team
https://plus.google.com/104418487150595555391/posts
and CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/05/technology/usb-c-cords/
Benson from Google has done amazing jobs, in fact, I am wondering why he has so much free time to review those crappy cables :)
Benson, you should spend more time with your kid :) Just kidding.
I have an access to both Apple MacBook 2015 and Google's Pixel from my friend who sold me as a refurb one. Cable makers or device makers are welcome to reach me for the reviews. I will also post the results here.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Device getting hot? Good or Bad?
Heat is the death to your valuable device! Keep it cool! But HOW?
Back to year 2001, I had a chance to work with some project with some top mechanical engineers who had been working on several big projects. I actually learned some interesting things from them. They totally changed my wrong idea of the ME design. One is the "overheating device" where most people believe it's bad but in reality, if you feel the chassis or enclosure or housing is pretty warm, that means your device housing is "proactively" dispense the heat that generated from the logic board and chips, or at least it's trying to pass on the heat to the enclosure then to the air.
In other word, if you put two identical logic boards side by side but with different enclosures around, one is plastic and one is aluminium, they would have slightly different life-span that caused by different heat-dispense methods.
The warmer aluminum housing is actually a better design v.s. plastic one where you may feel just slightly warm or nothing. The heat would be circulated inside the plastic housing much longer than the metal housing, which is a bad thing to your board and components on the board. The aluminum enclosure on the other hand could proactively dispense the heat and pass it on to the metal - as long as it does not burn your hand, you should be happy to get a metal case. Moreover, if you have properly housing design, you can pass heat to other objects that have proper contact to your enclosure. For example, heat can be passed on to not just the air, but to entire table. Using a overheating logic board without any heat-dispense design is not smart at all.
In EE world, the higher transfer rate would introduce more heat, thus, designing a proper housing to cover around the board and provide an efficient way to dispense the heat would be critical to the product.
Back to year 2001, I had a chance to work with some project with some top mechanical engineers who had been working on several big projects. I actually learned some interesting things from them. They totally changed my wrong idea of the ME design. One is the "overheating device" where most people believe it's bad but in reality, if you feel the chassis or enclosure or housing is pretty warm, that means your device housing is "proactively" dispense the heat that generated from the logic board and chips, or at least it's trying to pass on the heat to the enclosure then to the air.
In other word, if you put two identical logic boards side by side but with different enclosures around, one is plastic and one is aluminium, they would have slightly different life-span that caused by different heat-dispense methods.
The warmer aluminum housing is actually a better design v.s. plastic one where you may feel just slightly warm or nothing. The heat would be circulated inside the plastic housing much longer than the metal housing, which is a bad thing to your board and components on the board. The aluminum enclosure on the other hand could proactively dispense the heat and pass it on to the metal - as long as it does not burn your hand, you should be happy to get a metal case. Moreover, if you have properly housing design, you can pass heat to other objects that have proper contact to your enclosure. For example, heat can be passed on to not just the air, but to entire table. Using a overheating logic board without any heat-dispense design is not smart at all.
In EE world, the higher transfer rate would introduce more heat, thus, designing a proper housing to cover around the board and provide an efficient way to dispense the heat would be critical to the product.
A lot of new technologies nowadays claiming very fast speed and high bandwidth, no doubt that they all would introduce heat, such as PCIe SSD, Thunderbolt 40G, 10Gb, 100Gb Ethernet, even the Cloud server room that accumulates lots of lots of HDDs, SSDs, CPUs, Ethernet controller, Routers, Switches are taking heat as the BIGGEST challenge, thus, choosing a good enclosure is important.
I have seen some products on Amazon selling the identical products with different material of housings. I would choose the metal one which should have better heat dispense if the board and chips generate heat continuously.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Basketball Passes...
Do you know there are three different kinds of passes to pass the basketball to your team member?
It's the "bounce pass", "chest pass", and "overhead pass".
CHEST PASS
The chest pass is named so because the pass originates from the chest. It is thrown by gripping the ball on the sides with the thumbs directly behind the ball. When throwing a chest pass, the players should strive to throw it to the receiver's chest level. Passes that go low to high or high to low are difficult to catch.
BOUNCE PASS
The bounce pass is thrown with the same motion however it is aimed at the floor. It should be thrown far enough out that the ball bounces waist high to the receiver.
OVERHEAD PASS
The overhead pass is often used as an outlet pass. Bring the ball directly above your forehead with both hands on the side of the ball and follow through. Aim for the teammate's chin.
It's the "bounce pass", "chest pass", and "overhead pass".
 |
| 3 different passes |
The chest pass is named so because the pass originates from the chest. It is thrown by gripping the ball on the sides with the thumbs directly behind the ball. When throwing a chest pass, the players should strive to throw it to the receiver's chest level. Passes that go low to high or high to low are difficult to catch.
BOUNCE PASS
The bounce pass is thrown with the same motion however it is aimed at the floor. It should be thrown far enough out that the ball bounces waist high to the receiver.
OVERHEAD PASS
The overhead pass is often used as an outlet pass. Bring the ball directly above your forehead with both hands on the side of the ball and follow through. Aim for the teammate's chin.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Thunderbolt interface that was invented by Intel and perhaps Apple?
So Apple likes to combine interfaces together to make device and computer smaller. Intel happened to have so called Lightpeak on hand that was evaluated by Microsoft back to 2007-2008. Microsoft did not adopt to Lightpeak as it is just another Ethernet concept but with some converged network capability. Apple found such new toy and worked with Intel and improved Lightpeak to become a real product that is good for the general consumers. Here you go Thunderbolt! So what is Thunderbolt exactly? it combined PCIe and DisplayPort protocols. Pretty neat huh? what's even more interesting is it can do daisy chain, yeah, daisy chain... who doesn't like the old FireWire daisy chain thing to make your desktop cleaner? :)
The third version of Thunderbolt now has USB protocol included. Well, in a way it is. The real and technical way to see this is: the new Type-C connector is adopted by USB-C / USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3. In other word, Thunderbolt 3 is not compatible with Thunderbolt 2/1. (Oh..yeah... who does not like all the new convertors and adapters? some vendors sis going to make some money.., and you as a loyal Thunderbolt users must pay extra fee for the converters, in result, you will have all the different convertors and adapters all over the places, Thank you TECHNOLOGY !)
So do you really need Thunderbolt1/2? well, depends. If you want something really fast, Thunderbolt 1 and 2 are capable to give you speed up to 1GMB/sec, to be more specifically, it's 1375MB/sec, on the data transfer. Take LaCie or CalDigit's RAID as an example, with Thunderbolt 2 computers, you can reach 1375MB/s from their RAID unit. Is that cool? well, of course, big time saver.
The following Thunderbolt storages are capable to let you reach that magic 1375MB/s, if you use SSDs in them. The HDDs would be slower but fast enough for you to do anything you want.
OWC ThunderBay 4 0GB 4-Bay Professional Grade Enclosure w/ Thunderbolt 2
LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt-2 Portable Hard Drive 1TB SSD (9000477)
CalDigit T4 Thunderbolt 2 Professional RAID 0, 1, 5, JBOD External Hard Drive (T4R-20000-US-150)
Do you need Thunderbolt 3 device? the answer is, YES and NO. Why? because remember, Thunderbolt 3 now can do USB. Who has bigger domain? USB of course, at least in the next 5 years. That being said, even if you have Thunderbolt 3 computers, you will be able to use any kind of USB devices that you have been using for the past 20 years. Plug & play as Intel has promised.
The good thing about Thunderbolt 3 is that more and more PC desktops and laptops are forced to adopt to Thunderbolt 3 as Skylake from Intel has Thunderbolt 3 builtin. Free of charge. Thus, you will probably buy a Thunderbolt 3 computer or laptop without knowing you have the latest and perhaps the fastest external interface in the world.
So how fast is Thunderbolt 3? Intel says, double of thunderbolt 2. What does that mean to you? well, it would probably mean nothing to you as you do not really care about Thunderbolt 3, but USB 3.1 10G. However, if you are willing to dive in to a faster domain, bite the bullet and buy an expansive Thunderbolt device, you will see the big difference especially on the SSD or Docking station.
Remember, Thunderbolt is PCIe hence being an external PCIe dock v.s. USB dock is huge different. PCIe in Thunderbolt 1/2/3 has 4x lanes, each lane can talk to a dedicated controller, for example, USB, or Ethernet or SATA. The USB dock on the other hand can only do the conversion job from USB to SATA, USB to Ethernet, or USB hubs. That would definitely slower down the performance, no dedication channel.
So if you want a real good Docking station, perhaps Thunderbolt is way better than USB.
Another cool improved thing from Thunderbolt 2, is the Power. Thunderbolt 3 can do power delivery and can charge your laptop or device at 15W. Thanks to Type-C connector. This same power delivery also applies to USB-C, so it's not unique to Thunderbolt 3.
Likewise, Thunderbolt 3 can also do Display where it is identical to USB-C since both are using Type-C connector.
Thus, aside the 40GB/sec bandwidth (Data and Video), Thunderbolt has same DisplayPort and Power Delivery functions that USB-C has. And of course, Thunderbolt 3 can do higher bandwidth and data rate on the transfer, that means you may have dual 4K monitor output from it where the current USB-C Gen1 5G or 10G can only do 1x 4K.
Bottom line is, it's your call to choose either Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C, just to make sure the cable selection would not kill you right there as the cable would be huge messy in the future. Label them correctly and nicely to prevent confusion. I would think of the easiest way.... only buy Thunderbolt 3 cables, but use it along with USB-C devices. LOL.
The third version of Thunderbolt now has USB protocol included. Well, in a way it is. The real and technical way to see this is: the new Type-C connector is adopted by USB-C / USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3. In other word, Thunderbolt 3 is not compatible with Thunderbolt 2/1. (Oh..yeah... who does not like all the new convertors and adapters? some vendors sis going to make some money.., and you as a loyal Thunderbolt users must pay extra fee for the converters, in result, you will have all the different convertors and adapters all over the places, Thank you TECHNOLOGY !)
So do you really need Thunderbolt1/2? well, depends. If you want something really fast, Thunderbolt 1 and 2 are capable to give you speed up to 1GMB/sec, to be more specifically, it's 1375MB/sec, on the data transfer. Take LaCie or CalDigit's RAID as an example, with Thunderbolt 2 computers, you can reach 1375MB/s from their RAID unit. Is that cool? well, of course, big time saver.
The following Thunderbolt storages are capable to let you reach that magic 1375MB/s, if you use SSDs in them. The HDDs would be slower but fast enough for you to do anything you want.
OWC ThunderBay 4 0GB 4-Bay Professional Grade Enclosure w/ Thunderbolt 2
LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt-2 Portable Hard Drive 1TB SSD (9000477)
CalDigit T4 Thunderbolt 2 Professional RAID 0, 1, 5, JBOD External Hard Drive (T4R-20000-US-150)
Do you need Thunderbolt 3 device? the answer is, YES and NO. Why? because remember, Thunderbolt 3 now can do USB. Who has bigger domain? USB of course, at least in the next 5 years. That being said, even if you have Thunderbolt 3 computers, you will be able to use any kind of USB devices that you have been using for the past 20 years. Plug & play as Intel has promised.
The good thing about Thunderbolt 3 is that more and more PC desktops and laptops are forced to adopt to Thunderbolt 3 as Skylake from Intel has Thunderbolt 3 builtin. Free of charge. Thus, you will probably buy a Thunderbolt 3 computer or laptop without knowing you have the latest and perhaps the fastest external interface in the world.
So how fast is Thunderbolt 3? Intel says, double of thunderbolt 2. What does that mean to you? well, it would probably mean nothing to you as you do not really care about Thunderbolt 3, but USB 3.1 10G. However, if you are willing to dive in to a faster domain, bite the bullet and buy an expansive Thunderbolt device, you will see the big difference especially on the SSD or Docking station.
Remember, Thunderbolt is PCIe hence being an external PCIe dock v.s. USB dock is huge different. PCIe in Thunderbolt 1/2/3 has 4x lanes, each lane can talk to a dedicated controller, for example, USB, or Ethernet or SATA. The USB dock on the other hand can only do the conversion job from USB to SATA, USB to Ethernet, or USB hubs. That would definitely slower down the performance, no dedication channel.
So if you want a real good Docking station, perhaps Thunderbolt is way better than USB.
Another cool improved thing from Thunderbolt 2, is the Power. Thunderbolt 3 can do power delivery and can charge your laptop or device at 15W. Thanks to Type-C connector. This same power delivery also applies to USB-C, so it's not unique to Thunderbolt 3.
Likewise, Thunderbolt 3 can also do Display where it is identical to USB-C since both are using Type-C connector.
Thus, aside the 40GB/sec bandwidth (Data and Video), Thunderbolt has same DisplayPort and Power Delivery functions that USB-C has. And of course, Thunderbolt 3 can do higher bandwidth and data rate on the transfer, that means you may have dual 4K monitor output from it where the current USB-C Gen1 5G or 10G can only do 1x 4K.
Bottom line is, it's your call to choose either Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C, just to make sure the cable selection would not kill you right there as the cable would be huge messy in the future. Label them correctly and nicely to prevent confusion. I would think of the easiest way.... only buy Thunderbolt 3 cables, but use it along with USB-C devices. LOL.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Epson 4900 $1000 off at B&H but wait.....
Epson 4900 $1000 off at B&H
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=epson+stylus+pro+4900&N=0&InitialSearch=yesDont know why, but this is absolutely CRAZY !
But wait, some one is even more crazy!
Epson 4900 $1149 at Atlex!
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide - online book
I was setting up a new Linux box, OpenSuse 11 the other day, and was about to install some third party driver on this box. I was busy and did not get any chance to go any further. I have been absolutely swamped lately :( so, when trying to install module, I found that there is no ko file, instead, they shipped me source code and let me build them myself. It's no pain at all, but I could not remember how to compile and make linux kernel module. I know, I dont like Linux at all, but I am so glad it's an opensource project to keep everything open and freely. I found an excellent online document for not just making/compiling kernel module, but also how to start do kernel programming -
http://tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/lkmpg.html
Thank you Peter Jay Salzman!! very well done!
http://tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/lkmpg.html
Thank you Peter Jay Salzman!! very well done!
Thursday, August 12, 2010
how to customize icon for the drive or folder...
I know it's not easy.... but here you go -
1. Use Icon Composer (under Developer/Applications/Utilities) to make a new icon if you do not have one.
Lets say you make a new icon named 1.icns
2. Fire up terminal and transfer this 1.icns to the target drive/volume. For example "USBFW300"
you will also need to change this icon name to ".VolumeIcon.icns"
In terminal type in:
cp 1.icns /Volumes/USBFW300/.VolumeIcon.icns
. is the hidden file indicator to tell OS this is a hidden file from Finder, that being said you will not be able to change 1.icns
name to .VolumeIcon.icns if you plan to do that from Finder. Must done in Terminal.
If you have the developer tools installed, fire up a terminal window and type:
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a C "/Volumes/[volume name]/"
For example, for the volume "USBFW300" the command is
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a C "/Volumes/USBFW300/"
then in terminal, type in
"killall Finder" --> this command is to refresh Finder then the new icon will show up.
1. Use Icon Composer (under Developer/Applications/Utilities) to make a new icon if you do not have one.
Lets say you make a new icon named 1.icns
2. Fire up terminal and transfer this 1.icns to the target drive/volume. For example "USBFW300"
you will also need to change this icon name to ".VolumeIcon.icns"
In terminal type in:
cp 1.icns /Volumes/USBFW300/.VolumeIcon.icns
. is the hidden file indicator to tell OS this is a hidden file from Finder, that being said you will not be able to change 1.icns
name to .VolumeIcon.icns if you plan to do that from Finder. Must done in Terminal.
If you have the developer tools installed, fire up a terminal window and type:
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a C "/Volumes/[volume name]/"
For example, for the volume "USBFW300" the command is
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a C "/Volumes/USBFW300/"
then in terminal, type in
"killall Finder" --> this command is to refresh Finder then the new icon will show up.
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