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TPS Report

February 5th, 2011

We are prepping a minor update to Maquarium for the Mac App Store which resolves a couple bugs and modernizes the codebase. We also have a couple features we’d like to add after it’s accepted to the app store.

On the Bookit front, it’s been slow going. 4.0 is working in-house, however we aren’t happy with how fragile the Firefox 3 bookmark format is. It’s a database which is overly complicated and can be easily screwed up. To that end, we are exploring Firefox 4.0′s new sync API. With a supported API we’re hoping we can create a bookmark sync solution we can be happy with.

Those are the happenings around these parts.

Blog Updated

March 30th, 2010

We’ve migrated our blog over to WordPress from Blogger after Blogger dropped ftp publishing support. If you run into any problems, please drop us a line on our support page.

thanks, will

Chrome

December 13th, 2009

Bookit 4 todo:
[snip]
- Chrome Support (done)
[snip]

A Quick Note

June 23rd, 2009

Just wanted to let you know we’re still alive and kick’n. The last 4 months have been pretty crazy around here. My wife and I unexpectedly bought a house after our landlord decided he wanted to sell the house we were renting. We found a house after an intense 3 months of looking and moved in just 2 days, with some major help from our friends, about 3 weeks ago. To top that off, my wife is also 9 months pregnant. We spent the last several nights working on patching cracks in the plaster in our nursery so we can get it painted and set up in time; we’re down to the wire here!

Wade has also been staying quite busy has well with his new little one who is going on 6 months old.

We are truly trying to wrap up a beta of Bookit 4, but as you can see, we’ve been busy so it’s taking longer than we’d like. Thanks for your patience.

cheers, will

9 Comments »

A Little Audio Hackery

January 13th, 2009

Hi All,
Well, I just wanted to share a bit of nerd fun I had tonight. For Christmas I received a Griffin TuneCenter Pro (whew, that’s quite the name). I’ve been pining for a way to navigate my iPod on my TV and until now have been too cheap to buy anything. Well, the TuneCenter has been discontinued (rightfully so it turns out) so instead of being $130 dollars it was $17. I read reviews saying it was terrible but I decided to risk it. I told my step brother I wanted one and he delivered.

I hooked it up and all was great until I was listening to some Radiohead at moderate volume and noticed some distortion in the song “Videotape”. If you’re unfamiliar with the song, the piano is quite dynamic as the track itself is very quiet. When the piano played, it distorted badly. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining this problem or not, so I plugged my iPod directly into my stereo and presto, no distortion. I was bummed, but not surprised as I’d read the TuneCenter has problems with audio distortion and general audio issues. Griffin may have bit off a bit more than they could handle with this project, which is probably why it’s dead. I removed the dock from my system and threw it in my computer junk drawer…oh well I thought.

That leads us to today. I went to work and told my co-workers about the problems with the dock but that got me thinking. What if I cracked it open and by-passed the audio processing of the dock and just ran the iPod output audio signal directly to my stereo. I would loose the ability to stream music from the dock but I doubt I’d ever use that feature anyway so no loss. I’d have to solder wires to the dock connector audio out inside the case but it seemed like it might be doable. What’s the worse that could happen, it could end up back in my junk drawer.

Tonight I dissected the dock and found the audio out from the dock connector. It was running through the PCB out the bottom side where the left/right channels were connected to a couple of resistors. The ground was also in the same general area and had a couple through holes I could solder onto. I broke the original 1/8″ pin output jack off and ran a new 1/8″ jack out the back and ran the lead wire through the old hole. A bit of splicing tiny wires and I had a new 1/8″ output jack soldered to the PCB board. I then de-soldered the left/right resistors to disconnect the audio signal path from the TuneCenter so the dock pins now go directly to the 1/8″ output I routed through the back.

I hooked it back up to my stereo and success. No more distortion! Turns out I might end up with my on-screen navigation after all. This has been a night in the life of an audio junkie and a nerd.

cheers, will