Panasonic Inverter Microwave

The old Samsung seemed to be on its way out (no light, and really noisy fan), so I bought a new Panasonic Inverter, thinking this is better tech – no more on and off boil over then do nothing kind of low power.

The inverter variable power is fine, but as far as the U.I. is concerned, I’m missing the old Samsung.

• No  one button, one minute on full power
• Can’t change the power level while the thing is running, or even when it is stopped. To change power you need to cancel, set new power, set new time, then start again.
• Can’t add time while its running. Eg. this looks like it needs another 30 seconds, add them. Again, need to cancel, set power level again if it is not 100%, then set new time, start.
• It has a 12 button keypad, but the buttons are labelled 1 to 12.  They can’t be used to enter numbers for time or power.
• No way to turn off beeps for every button press.

I can’t think of any excuse for this brain-dead lack of features.  I just assumed they would be available…

So what should a power user’s microwave oven interface look like?

One idea: two vertical touch strips, one linear power 10% to 100%, the other logarithmic time.  Touch the power to set power,  touch the time to set time and start the cooking.  The controls have lights behind to show current power setting and remaining time.  Any time, just touch either control to change the power, or increase or decrease the time.  That’s all.

Navman S35 GPS

My lovely brother gave us a Navman S35 GPS navigator for Christmas.  Cool!  It works great in the car (its intended purpose).  However, he suggested we might enjoy some geocaching.

Hmmm. Not so fast.  On the surface this thing has some serious shortcomings for non-car navigation

• small battery (<3 hours runtime away from the car)
• Has the “feature” that it shows your position on the nearest road, rather than where you actually are.
• Apparently the GPS has ’static navigation’ turned on, which means position is not updated unless the unit is moving faster than some speed.  Makes it hard to get an exact fix when you are stationary.
• Need to use windows software to load waypoints

But all is not lost. This thing is running a cut-down version of windows CE, and with some tweaking http://navmanunlocked.wikispaces.com/ other software can be loaded and run.

The S35 appears as a usb memory device when connected to my GNU/Linux laptop.  However, the default settings result in corrupt files when writing to it.   So the first thing to do is set up a script and udev rule to perform

echo 64 > /sys/block/sdb/queue/max_sectors_kb

I’ll attach the files when I figure out how.

So far NoniGPSPlot is the best freeware GPS software I have found that runs on the S35. I’ve even got it to show maps from OpenStreetMap using taho.pl to download the map tiles

Bemoaning

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like without these time-wasters we call computers.  I plan to bemoan the various things that I just can’t get to work, despite spending hours frigging with them.  And now I can add blogging to the growing list of fruitless endeavours.