HTC Care

Posted by HELiX

And so, my Dad brought my phone to the Manufacturer’s service centre today. Some ‘HTC Care’ at Keppel Bay.

I wasn’t there, but my Dad had gave a rough account of the story.

Like every IT-related customer service, the employees there were horrid with their attitudes. Maybe it’s what all IT companies tell their customer relations personel to be like.

Ok, he, some young guy which my Dad got really angry at, said:

1) It was my fault that the screen cracked, so can’t use warranty.

And my Dad argued, it was a defect. Of course he said a cracked LCD screen isn’t defect, but the user’s handling, but my Dad said he can’t prove that it wasn’t a defect either. And the young guy gave a huge load of crap, including one which says that ‘if it were a defect, the entire LCD screen would have cracked’.

Okay, after a while, he gave up on that point and said:

2) LCD screen is NOT covered by the warranty.

Which my Dad didn’t believe. And that was a sensible thing to do, because WHY THE HELL DOES A TOUCH SCREEN PDA PHONE HAVE NO WARRANTY FOR ITS SCREEN???

That’s in the same league as an LCD monitor without warranty for its LCD screen. Or a mouse without warranty for the laser or tracking diode.

My Dad asked for evidence, in paper form, that says the warranty doesn’t cover the LCD screen. The guy searched the documentations that came with the phone, among other stuffs, and couldn’t produce anything.

In the end my Dad just told him something along the lines of "Look, I came all the way here, waited 45 mins for this poor customer service, and now I can’t do anything with this broken phone? What am I going to do? Throw it into the bin right here?"

So somehow he forced the phone into the guy’s hands, asked him to get it fixed. Like that.

But… ehh… I just read online, that yes, people had to pay whenever their LCD got spoilt, with warranty or not. Depending on the servicing and labour, it costs between $150 to $360.

And also, because my Dad just forced the phone to the guy, he didn’t get any word about the phone returning. Nothing about ‘we’ll call you when it’s ready’ or ‘please return in 5 working days to collect your phone’.

Oh man, this sucks.

Comments(0) 11:08 PM 7 July 2007

No Screen; No Phone

Posted by HELiX

Somehow, today, my handphone’s screen cracked.

That’s right. I don’t remember knocking into anything, or dropping my phone, or anything else equally apocalyptic that has occured to me and my phone over the past day or two, but during Physics lecture I realised my phone’s screen had a nice long line carved across the screen.

I thought, perhaps it’s just a deep scratch over the plastic screen protector, easily replaceable. But no. It was internal. The screen protector didn’t have a single scratch. The crack was with the LCD touch screen itself, beneath the screen protector.

Incredibly, the screen displays perfectly fine.

But alignment is totally gone. Like, if I were to click any spot near the crack, it detects it as another location. I couldn’t send any smses (clicking the keyboard results in sending the message right away) or listen to MP3s or even read Harry Potter.

Ah well, warranty time. 2 days to 1 week without my phone, that’s pretty sad.

))):

Comments(0) 8:14 PM 7 July 2007

Harry Potter and the Magical Internet

Posted by HELiX

The Internet is fascinatingly amazing.

I still remember a couple of years ago, a week or two before the release of Book 6 of the Harry Potter series, this warehouse somewhere in Europe (Germany I think) got broke into by professional burglars. They didn’t give a shit to the other more expensive stuffs in there, and took a mere book away. These burglars were extremely good-willed to put it up on the internet a week before the book was even released, and sold extracts to newspapers and tabloids for thousands of dollars.

That was how geeks found out Dumbledore was going to die before the bookworms did, so all bets were won by them. Woohoo~

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows releases in Singapore in about… 7 hours.

Because of the previous incident, the publisher (Scholastic) spent about US$20 million this time round, arming delivery trucks with GPS systems, securing the books with alarms and other stuffages that are old to the Geeks.

So, pretty tough for the burglars, but on Wednesday, 3 days before the release, it still got LEAKED OUT. That’s pretty good improvement compared to the 1 or 2 weeks.

This genius somehow got a copy, and I suppose he’s in a rush, so he simply used a digital camera and snapped every single page. Yes, all holy 781 pages of the magical book. I’m amazed how he has the patience to flip through every single page and snap every shot.

I downloaded it on Thursday night, and it was so incredibly difficult to read that I took an hour or two to cover 20 pages or so only.

Geeks were ahead, and on Friday, we’ve got the full READABLE e-book, in perfect PDF text format, out on the web. A group of guys who have painfully read the book through the 781 pages of camera photos, decided to TYPE out all the words BY HAND. I’ve read about 1/5 of it only, and e-books aren’t exactly the best format to read books without killing your eyes. I think everyone’s preference still remain as the solid hard copy book, or due to the iPod generation, audio books.

The publisher and MPAA are trying to sue this website, that website, with cease-and-desist letters, soon including this one because…

www.helixated.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows.pdf

And here we have it, 7 hours before everyone wakes up at an obscene hour of 6am, queuing up to know that… moody, dobby, fred, wormtail, hedwing, snape and voldy all die yay spoilerz HAHA. Plus, some unknown lame professor from hogwarts at the start, so… at least 8 fatalities.

It’s justifiable for me to spoil it ‘cos none of you reading now are true fanboys/fangirls anyway, because (1) they should be asleep already anyways, cos they gotta wake up at 6am tomorrow to queue for the book (2) even if they bought and returned home and read this, that’s not a likely scenario because they would spend the entire weekend reading it finish before reading this blog, or even eating their next meal.

Harry didn’t die :(

Comments(0) 12:30 AM 7 July 2007

Ask not what you can do to your blog

Posted by HELiX

But ask what your blog can do to you.

John F. Kennedy was a genius. Kinda.

…

I never thought this would happen, but it did. Murphy is such a genius as well.

I’ll be intentionally vague in this entry.

Whatever happened today, was simply…

Un. Be. Lievable.

Changes were inevitable; changes are being requested; changes will be made.

As much as I firmly stand by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

I am unfortunate enough to be living in Singapore, as such, I shall comply with our laws which does not comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Some entries will be made private from now on. I tried it once before, but that was solely for fun and testing purposes.

I guess, anyone who I know personally can read, if you just ask.

But all in all, I’m pretty sure I’ll blog less about these things now, but will do so in a password-protected entry if the emo monster in me has to wander free.

:)

Comments(0) 11:42 PM 7 July 2007

Lab@Home: First Light Review

Posted by HELiX

Ok, here goes.

Measured the diameter of the toroid discharge terminal, compared it to the spark length in the photo, and estimated it to be a 8 cm.

As I do not have access to any feasible method of measuring the extremely high voltage, let’s make some rough estimates.

In an electric field (generated by the toroid-shaped discharge terminal), the electrical breakdown of air corresponds to roughly 30,000 V/cm.

The 8 cm arc photographed is therefore about 240,000 V. This is, of course, quite inaccurate as the value differs with many factors such as electric field, shape of electrodes, atmospheric conditions, etc.

In theory, it is also possible to work out the voltage by calculations. This will only give the maximum output voltage only, which I hope to achieve after I’m done tuning the coil.

Using, V_max = V_cap * (Eff * L_sec/L_pri)^0.5

Efficiency of the coil is taken to be a reasonable 85%.
Inductance of secondary coil, L_sec, is calculated to be 8.38mH = 8380uH.
Inductance of primary coil, L_pri, is calculated to be 13.05uH.

V_max = 21200 V * (0.85*8380/13.05)^0.5
V_max = 495,300 V

This formula somehow gives my coil a poor max spark length of 16 cm. When using another formula(available in my first ever entry on the tesla coil), worked out to be 91.64 cm.

Oh well, I guess we’ll see.

Comments(0) 9:41 PM 7 July 2007

Lab@Home: First Light!

Posted by HELiX

It’s been awfully long since I last mentioned about Lab@Home, because my Tesla Coil has been idling one corner while I attempt to catch up with the schoolwork.

I bring myself good news, today, because I’ve caught up with the major subjects.

I bring all my dear readers good news, today, because my Tesla Coil is finally UP AND RUNNING AND KICKING ASS!!

…

Over the past few weeks or even months, I wasn’t exactly really idling.

I tried out the Tesla Coil a couple of times, and still encountered problems. After spending so long, constructing everything, I expected it to work on its first trial run, and even after more than 5 full setup trial runs, there were no desirable results. I gotta admit this, but, it was really depressing and discouraging. My interest for it fell significantly, and I found myself forcing myself to fix some stuffs over the weekends, but in actual fact I did it fortnightly. So really, don’t start a Tesla Coil project without strong motivation and dedication.

After the runs, I’ve tried to locate the problems and did these fixes:

1) New primary tap! The old one produced sparking, probably due to bad contact. The new tap fits much tighter but it’s still quite loose.

2) Wirings are all insulated with fish-tank tubing. The fish tank tubing my Dad bought were slightly too small, so I would have a really hard time threading the wire through. I simply cut open the tubing along its entire length, fit over the wires like a jacket, and scotch-taped them up. As of this moment my Dad already bought the larger tubing, but I went ahead to test with the current insulation first.

3) The number of turns on my secondary coil was too large, almost a 1000 turns. This gives too high of a form-diameter-to-coil-length ratio of 6.67. The recommended maximum ratio is 6, which I’m way above. I decided to spent a while uncoiling the turns to give a 18-inch coil length from 20-inch. I also redid the termination, such that it extends longer, allowing more flexibility to connect to the ground.

4) The most frustrating part. In one of the test runs, while keeping the setup to conclude the day, I dropped the Spark Gap. It broke quite badly, looked like it’s a goner. I spent over a whole afternoon and probably more on that spark gap, something like 6 hours continuous technical work which was real tiring, and seeing it break was a totally… sucky feeling.

I had to build another, but I’m like "no way not another 6 hours of drilling, sawing, etc" and so I improvised. Came up with a new design, and with it, had a chance to made things better.

I found these L-shaped metal pieces somewhere in the house, and came up with a idea. I asked my Dad for more, and he took out an entire box of it.

And I bought 2 solid plastic rulers to act as the support, and it also provides precise measurements for the distance of the spark gap.

Alright, so I had everything set up today in the backyard, with the mindset that it’s-gonna-be-another-trial-run-with-problems-which-I-have-to-fix…

The spark gap was not tuned at all, but I fired up the full setup anyway. Primary coil was tapped at turn 7.

It was quite late, about 8pm+, but I needed the darkness.

…and POWER UP!

The spark gap was sparking very loud; dangerous thing to stare at as it produces ultraviolet rays. But the awesome spark at the discharge terminal is much, much more beautiful.

A zoomed-in image.

Wonderful performance! Finally, first light from the discharge terminal! I’m measure the distance of the spark another time, but it’s about 10cm, maybe less, but that’s about a 100,000 Volts already (that’s right, 4 zeros).

I had to go dinner so I kept everything. Now that I know it’s working, I’ll build a proper stand for everything, and tune the Tesla Coil further.

With proper tuning, I’m pretty sure it’s performance can maxed out at about 3-5 times of this trial run’s

More to come in the following weeks! :D

Comments(0) 1:08 AM 7 July 2007

The Tetris Incident of 2007

Posted by HELiX

Because of the mysterious lack of eventfulness in my life, I shall do another picture entry.

…

Let’s call this, the Tetris Incident of 2007.

That’s as good a way as any to pack containers onto a ship.

…No actually, that’s a real incident of a ship going through a storm.

Comments(0) 8:26 PM 7 July 2007