teemu – Page 9 – Teemu's blog

June 22, 2011November 3, 2015

Saunalahti Prepaid and MMS

I recently got a trail camera with GSM, namely a Scoutguard SG550M. It is a weather proof camera with movement detection and option to send photos as MMS messages, to a mobile phone and/or an e-mail address. I decided to equip it with a prepaid SIM card in case it gets stolen or the camera software goes grazy and sends zillions of MMSes getting me bankrupt. I got a Saunalahti Prepaid. It should have had MMS right from the beginning, but it didn’t work. After a bit of Googling, the problem has always been there and still is. Some of the Prepaids just don’t have MMS enabled. It is odd that they have not bothered to fix this. Obviously their calculations show that it is cheaper to not bother. Of course they enabled it after calling to the customer service (and getting to the 3rd level “expert” who knew what I was talking about), but that is very annoying. Well, cheapest cannot be perfect.

May 24, 2011November 3, 2015

Elgato EyeTV DVB-T USB hardware failure

I am running a Mac Mini as a HTPC in my living room. It has, among other things, Elgato EyeTV 3 software and an Elgato DVB-T tuner USB stick. All that worked fine for about a year, then EyeTV started to fail to tune into channels; the USB stick just “disappeared” from the USB port. The only cure was to plug it out and plug it in again. Then it worked for some moments, to be disappearing again. Lately, just changing a channel a few times was enough to kill the stick.

Of course I suspected software, as both the Mac OS X and the EyeTV 3 software had been updating on several occasions. So I tried all the old versions of EyeTV, reinstalling, clearing out all cached things, installing again, trying different settings, reading about USB, trying to find a way to debug USB etc. etc. I never thought the USB stick would break so that it would work perfectly for some time, then just die. Then work again after replugging. Well, that is what happened. Hardware died just a bit after the warranty became void.

Solution: I bought a new EyeTV Hybrid. I will need the DVB-C in a month anyway, so no big harm done. And now it works perfectly, just like the previous one a year ago. Hope it lasts a bit longer!

May 24, 2011

Win XP and IE 6 – WTF?

Looking at the stats of this blog, the most popular OS by far is Windows XP and the browser is IE 6. What is wrong with you guys using that old software? Do you run Windows update, ever? Have you heard of the word “security hole”, ever? Virus? New features? Come on, you’re so anti nerd that you don’t have a life either!