Latest Posts by techscales-blog - Page 6

Wega studio 3230 hifi, 1975. Germany.

René Blaser, poster On the Sony side - Sony Hi-Fi Radio TV Phono Video, 1975. For Seyffer & Co. AG, Switzerland. Via eMuseum

15 years Repairing Electronics Here: With Liquid Damaged Electronics, DON'T Use Rice, Instead Use A Fan (explanation inside)

I’ve spent nearly 20 years repairing liquid/water damaged electronics. More specifically, cell phones. In the old days, we’d open the phones up, clean the corrosion, resolder, etc. Recently, they’ve (the manufacturers) moved away from local repairs and moved more towards warranty replacements, swap outs (FRU = factory replacement units) & insurance. Now if you want your electronics repaired locally, you have to visit 3rd party independent people since you can no longer have it done in a corporate-ran store.

I know rice is the go-to recommendation for water damaged phones and other electronics, and it works, to an extent. It will passively absorb moisture. Unfortunately, you don’t want to passively absorb the moisture, you want to actively remove the moisture as quickly as possible.  The longer the moisture is sitting on those circuit boards, the higher the risk of corrosion. And corrosion on electrical components can happen within just a few short hours. If the damage isn’t severe, we’d take contact cleaner (essentially 92% or better rubbing alcohol, the higher the percentage, the quicker it will evaporate) and scrub the white or green powder (the corrosion that formed) with a toothbrush to remove it. If that corrosion crosses contacts, it can cause the electronics to act up, fail or short out. The liquid itself almost never is directly responsible for failed consumer electronics, it’s the corrosion that takes place after the fact (or the liquid damaging the battery, a new battery fixes this issue obviously).

Every time I see someone recommend rice I kinda twinge a little inside because while it does dry a phone out slightly better than just sitting on a counter, it really doesn’t do much to prevent the corrosion that’s going to be taking place due to the length of time the liquid has had to fester inside the phone or whatever.

What you want to do is set the item in front of a fan with constant airflow. Take the device apart as much as you can without ruining it (remove the battery, etc) so that the insides can get as much airflow as possible. Even if it’s not in direct contact with the air, the steady air blowing over the device will create a mini vacuum effect and pull air from inside. It’s just a small amount but it’s significantly better than just allowing the rice to passively absorb the evaporated moisture. True, rice can act as a desiccant, but a fan blowing over whatever is orders of magnitude faster.

I personally will take apart a piece of electronics completely, and put those items in front of a fan, and if you have the relevant knowledge, I highly recommend doing so as well. But if you don’t, it’s not that big of an issue. What you want to avoid at all costs, however, is heat. Do not put your phone inside an oven or hot blow dryer, heat can damage electronics just as bad as liquid, sometimes more so. Heat, extreme cold and liquid are bad for electronics & cell phones. A fan (lots of airflow) is 99 out of 100 times better at removing moisture quickly than rice. I would say 100 out of 100 but I’m sure there’s going to be some crazy situation or exception I haven’t thought of that someone will come in and point out. I’d like to remind people that exceptions are just that, they don’t invalidate the rule.

Sony’s first “Discman”, released in 1984. The company canned the name and replaced it with ‘CD-Walkman’ in 1999. Via theverge

From a flyer for the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show.

Packaging of the Nintendo press kit given out at the Consumer Electronics Show 1994.

Why mess with rest, come see the best in electronics here. Your gateway to the best in electronics.

www.tech-scales.com

After the launch of Super Mario Run in December, Nintendo plans to deliver  Animal Crossing on smart phones (iPhone and Android) before the end of March, 2017

PSA For Those Wanting a Cheap Way to Film From a Real Tripod.

$5 selfie stick from Wal-Mart

With a nifty secret

That screw the bracket goes on is a standard-size tripod mounting screw which means if you have a smart phone… (I’m using the first old one I could pull out of my phone drawer so I can take pictures with my actual phone)

Considering smart phones are often better for low light (due to built in LED lights that trigger when filming in darker conditions) and often better quality than cheap camcorders this is a mighty fine way to make an instant video camera for something like a webshow.

Helps me because I don’t have any lighting solutions to use my real cameras like my digital handy-cams or Rebel T3 right now.

After the launch of Super Mario Run in December, Nintendo plans to deliver  Animal Crossing on smart phones (iPhone and Android) before the end of March, 2017

I have nothing against artificial intelligence, except when it claims, with its universal calculation, to absorb all the other forms and reduce mental space to a digital one.

Jean Baudrillard (via inthenoosphere)

Want to download the highest quality version of an Instagram photo? View the page source on desktop and find the line titled "og:image"

Instagram tries to make it difficult to save photos outside of the app, but there’s a pretty easy workaround.  

Let’s say you want to save this image to your desktop: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTO_dCkhxdQ/  

Load it in it’s own browser tab (I’m using Google Chrome), right click and select “View Page Source” (Ctrl+U): http://imgur.com/a/T45dd  

Then in the page source search for “og:image”. That URL links to the raw file. Copy and paste that image URL into a new tab and do with it as you wish! http://imgur.com/a/LWWQl

“IBM MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR DATA TO BE STORED ON INDIVIDUAL ATOMS”

 Scientists at IBM have figured out a way to encode data on individual atoms, which would be the most compact information storage ever achieved.  The common thinking amongst hardware designers is that as digital storage continues to get smaller, the basic unit of information storage is also shrinking as well. Eventually the amount of atoms required to store data will become so small that storing a single bit will someday require only a single atom.  This is what IBM researchers have brought to life. Using holmium atoms embedded on a magnesium oxide base and a scanning tunnelling microscope, they have managed to encode data on an atom and managed to read the same data right after.  Since the atom has a special characteristic called magnetic bistability, it has two different magnetic spins. Using the microscope, the researchers applied about 150 millivolts at 10 microamps to the atom. This electricity acted as a sort of lightning strike that caused the atom to switch its magnetic spin state (one state represents 1, the other 0 in binary code).  "To demonstrate independent reading and writing, we built an atomic-scale structure with two Ho bits, to which we write the four possible states and which we read out both magnetoresistively and remotely by electron spin resonance. The high magnetic stability combined with electrical reading and writing shows that single-atom magnetic memory is indeed possible,“ the abstract read.

Read more about this fascinating story at: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/08/storing-data-in-a-single-atom-proved-possible-by-ibm-researchers/

Quantum RAM: Modelling the big questions with the very small

Griffith’s Professor Geoff Pryde, who led the project, says that such processes could be simulated using a “quantum hard drive”, much smaller than the memory required for conventional simulations.

“Stephen Hawking once stated that the 21st century is the ‘century of complexity’, as many of today’s most pressing problems, such as understanding climate change or designing transportation system, involve huge networks of interacting components,” he says.

“Their simulation is thus immensely challenging, requiring storage of unprecedented amounts of data. What our experiments demonstrate is a solution may come from quantum theory, by encoding this data into a quantum system, such as the quantum states of light.”

Einstein once said that “God does not play dice with the universe,” voicing his disdain with the idea that quantum particles contain intrinsic randomness.

“But theoretical studies showed that this intrinsic randomness is just the right ingredient needed to reduce the memory cost for modelling partially random statistics,” says Dr Mile Gu, a member of the team who developed the initial theory.

In contrast with the usual binary storage system - the zeroes and ones of bits - quantum bits can be simultaneously 0 and 1, a phenomenon known as quantum superposition.

The researchers, in their paper published in Science Advances, say this freedom allows quantum computers to store many different states of the system being simulated in different superpositions, using less memory overall than in a classical computer.

The team constructed a proof-of-principle quantum simulator using a photon - a single particle of light - interacting with another photon.

They measured the memory requirements of this simulator, and compared it with the fundamental memory requirements of a classical simulator, when used to simulate specified partly random processes.

The data showed that the quantum system could complete the task with much less information stored than the classical computer- a factor of 20 improvements at the best point.

“Although the system was very small - even the ordinary simulation required only a single bit of memory - it proved that quantum advantages can be achieved,” Pryde says.

“Theoretically, large improvements can also be realized for much more complex simulations, and one of the goals of this research program is to advance the demonstrations to more complex problems.”

Griffith University

If a product has a review score higher than 4, go through the reviews. If there are lots of 5s and lots of 1s, it's probably a fake review score.

How to deal with Ransomware

Yo, my guys. With the recent Ransomware scare, there is more need than ever to back up your computer data in the event of infection. Recently, it’s forced me to create a back up point for my computer, and it took a bit of digging. So hey, why not outline the relatively simple process here. 

The reality is, Ransomware is extremely hard to deal with once you have it. And by extremely hard, I mean basically impossible. Your best bet is to just backup your stuff, and restore it all if you get infected.

Note: Make sure you read this through at least once before doing anything.

Quick background:

Ransomware is malware that will lock you out of your computer by encrypting all of your data. It will prompt you to pay them in exchange for the decryption key, however 9 times outta 10, the won’t actually decrypt your data. So never actually pay them.

This process will create, on an external hard drive, a copy of all your OS settings from your current computer. You can then use this to reformat your computer to it’s current point

Because of the way this malware spreads, it’s vital that you keep your backup disconnected. This means you shouldn’t use a second hard drive on your computer, or a network drive. Doesn’t matter where, just not on, until you need it, or the malware has passed on.

The process goes like this, for windows 10. 

Make sure you have an external hard drive, or USB plugged into your computer. Make sure the storage device you want to back up to has more free data than your normal hard drive has used data.

Go to Control Panel

Change the ‘View by’ field to 'large’ or 'small icons’

Click 'File History’

on the bottom left there should be a little shield with “System Image Backup” next to it. Click that

On the left again, there should be a shield with “Create a System Image” next to it. Click that.

A window will pop up asking you where you would like to save your back up. On the drop down menu labelled 'On a Hard Disk" find your external drive. Click it, then click next.

The next page will ask you to select which drive you want to backup. By default the two you need to back up for this are selected. Just click next.

Finally you’ll come to one last screen asking if you want to confirm your back up. Make sure that the two that show are the ones you’ve selected in the previous page. If so, click 'start backup’.

Now this should take a little while to complete. This will depends on whether you have an SSD, or a HDD and also how much data you’re backing up will influence it. if you’re worried it’s taking too long, give it an hour and come back. Failing that, you can always stop the back up.

Once completed you’ll be prompted to create a system repair disk. If you don’t have a USB or DVD with Windows 10 on it, this is something you should create. Otherwise, it’s not necessary. 

Now, that you have a spare hard drive with your backed up data on it, make sure that you keep it in a safe place that it won’t get knocked around in. Hard Drives are quite fragile, and too hard a knock could kill it. Additionally, despite all this stuff on it, the drive is still a functional drive. It will now just have a folder in it with all the data. It’s not advised you use it, as it’s still susceptible to infection, but the option is there if you need it.

In places with free 30 minute WiFi(airports and hotels), you can clear the cookies on your browser and register again to refresh the timer.

You can also go in incognito mode, so your phone doesn’t store cookies. Free WiFi for all!

If Word crashes or shuts down and your document didn't save, search ".asd" in the file Explorer under "This/My PC". It should be there.