Really annoying.

Here’s how I diagnosed and fixed it…

Firstly I just tried power cycling the thing, hoping it maybe was some kind of glitch cured by the standard fix.  No joy.

A quick Google brought up no immediate suggestions, but the overall consensus was that vertical lines like this are either caused by bad pixels on the CCD or a fault in the calibration.

Faulty pixels seemed unlikely to me – the line down the pages that were being scanned was a couple of millimetres wide, and detail was visible within it, but everything was just a lot lighter.

I figured it was therefore calibration that was the issue.  From the little I’d read from Googling the issue, it appears that the scanner does some kind of “white balance” before each scan.  Maybe there was dirt on wherever the scanner CCD was calibrating?

Getting into my scanner was easy – disconnect the mains (of course), three screws on the back, two at the front and the top pops off reasonably easily.  Looking underneath the top, I could see that the glass extended a little under the case, at the top, where the CCD normally sits when it’s not scanning.  There was a piece of white plastic or card under the glass (not visible from the outside) where presumably the CCD did its white balance calibration before each scan.

And lo, and behold, there was a little blob of dirt, which looked exactly lined up with the vertical line on the output.  Quite how it got there was anybody’s guess, as it was sandwiched between the white plastic and the glass.  And the glass is glued into place.  Maybe it was always there and just recently shifted.  My theory was that scanner was calibrating itself, and the CCD’s exposure was bumped up on that section because the dirt was making it think that that section was underexposing.

So as the glass was glued in place, I figured my best bet was simply to stick a white strip of paper along the top of the glass where the CCD comes to rest, obscuring that pesky piece of dirt. Worth a try, I thought.

Problem solved.  Reassembled the scanner, no vertical lines at all any more.

New features include direct upload from the application to a Garmin device (Windows / Mac only I’m afraid, owing to Garmin’s requirements), a full “undo” system, auto-routing between points, elevation details and charting and more.

The new version is right where the old one used to be: www.marengo-ltd.com/map2/

The open source drivers for the machine don’t support compiz effects, which I’ve come to rely on for genuinely useful task switching, inverting the colours of windows, and magnifying. So I used the proprietary ATI fglrx drivers. All worked well apart from a really annoying several-second delay each time a window was maximized or resized.

I couldn’t find anything relevant on the interwebs until today. Apparently this issue is widespread, and is the result of the xserver “back filling” any maximized or resized windows to prevent momentary display corruption within that window. This goes really slowly!

There is now a patch – basically just an xserver which abandons the back filling. The appropriate repositories can be found here:

https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/xserver-no-backfill

So how to fix it?

The Eee comes with two SSD drives – the 4GB system drive and the other SSD (in my case I ordered the 16GB one).  The secondary SSD is much slower than the system SSD.

Typically (as in my case) when installing Linux, you’d mount root (/) on the 4GB system SSD, and /home on the bigger (but slower) SSD.

Firefox’s settings directory is stored under ~/.mozilla.  It writes a lot of stuff there – caches, phishing checks, offline storage etc.  And apparently Firefox 3 does a lot more of this than before.  So the obvious solution, given this information, is to move your ~/.mozilla directory onto the faster system SSD.  Here’s how I did it:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/my_stuff

sudo chmod 777 /usr/share/my_stuff

cd /usr/share/my_stuff

mv ~/.mozilla .

cd ~

ln -s /usr/share/my_stuff/.mozilla .

My .mozilla directory is now on the faster SSD and the Firefox jitter has disappeared.

(source: http://xkcd.com/488/)

Why is it so hard to legally obtain DRM-free music in the UK?  Amazon, in the US, has offered DRM-free music downloads for a long time now.  However their UK site doesn’t (and they don’t let you order music from the US-based site unless you are a US citizen).  Tesco (www.tescodigital.com) offers some DRM-free stuff, but the site requires Windows clients and is slow and poorly designed.  iTunes did start to offer some DRM-free stuff, but (a) it was more expensive and (b) the selection, when I last looked, was pitifully small.

Edit or create the file /etc/wvdial.conf with the following content:

[Dialer defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB1

[Dialer three]
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99\#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
username = username
Password = password
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud =466600
Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","three.co.uk"

You can then dial out by issuing the command “sudo wvdial three”

Note that Firefox assumes that if you aren’t connected via Network Manager, then you’re not online and starts up in offline mode.  Uncheck the option on the file menu and you should be OK.

Note also there seems to be some bug in Three’s DHCP stuff… if you see that on connection you are set up with a DNS server of 10.11.12.13 then it’s wrong… drop the connection and reconnect (or edit your /etc/resolv.conf file manually)

Everyone seems to have to overtake.

I decided (as I’m tired) to take it easy today, while on my fixie on my ride into work, in London, from Chelsea to the City.  As I wasn’t trying to keep up with traffic as much as possible, I vowed to try and just go with the flow.  I noticed the following:

• Cars would overtake and immediately slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front
• Fellow cyclists would undertake me (because I prefer to NOT hug the kerb) at lights (forcing me to overtake them two seconds later)
• Moped and motorbike riders regularly use the bike lanes to creep ahead at lights
• I won’t even mention the scum that cycle through red lights (oops! I just did!)

Most of these road users got absolutely nowhere compared to my relaxed riding today; I’d meet and / or overtake the same people over and over.

Why are we so obsessed with overtaking on the roads in the UK?

Firstly, I have to say that I really wanted to like this unit.  I’d put it off for a while because — at £250 (GBP) for the base model (plus street-level maps) — it was two thirds of the cost of my new fixed-wheel bicycle.  I’d had some great usage out of the old Garmin, my 205, but this offered extra benefits.

The extra benefits I liked:

• Colour display
• Expandable with micro-SD card – store lots of routes on it
• (With optional routing): Full European road maps

When I first unpacked it, I was slightly disappointed to find that it’s grown since the 205/305 days.  I remember likening the 205 to a small mobile phone.  The 605 is more blackberry size.  Just large enough to look wrong on the bike.  A minor point.

The display is great, so long as you have the backlight on.  It’s hard to read without.

But here’s the kicker for me… true to form, the Garmin software is quite oddly crap.  In this case, it’s the navigation.  The unit will do navigation, but you wouldn’t want to plan a ride with it.  It’s slow and fiddly, and you have no control over which route you’ll take.  I was sure I’d be able to make it do what I wanted to though!  Whip up a custom GPX route file with the Marengo Route Planner, upload it to the device, and follow that.

Er… no.  If you upload a route you want to follow, it doesn’t direct you to your waypoints, it sends you down roads it thinks you should take to get to your waypoints.  Sometimes quite bizarre ones.  It tried to get me to do a U-turn on Chelsea Embankment, and take a couple of laps of Parliament Square.

It has the option in the settings of saying “don’t follow road”, and “navigate off-road”, and turning off the street maps, but still it insists on taking me down the roads it knows are in the area.

It has other stuff, like training facilities, but, for me, the ability to plan a route, and following what you’ve planned is what I want.

Verdict: if you’re like me, and you want to ditch the paper map, plan a nice route, and let a GPS unit guide you round it, then stick with the Garmin Edge 205.  The navigation facilities of the 605 might be useful, on occasion, if you’re lost, but they’re pants for planning a route.  Avoid.