The ELP laser turntable reads LPs with lasers -- the manufacturer claims that the lasers can read "virgin" parts of the grooves that haven't been touched by needles and produce a better sound, and that the five laser read-head lets you skip forward and back across or within tracks as you would with a CD.

Two Tracking Laser beams are directed to the left and to the right shoulders of the groove of the record. Only the part of the beams that reach the groove are reflected to two PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) optical semiconductors. The part of the beams that fall on the land area of the record are deflected and not picked up by the PSD devices. The signals are sent to a microprocessor via analog to digital converters, then to servos to maintain the reader head position directly above the groove.

Two additional laser beams are directed at the left groove wall and the right groove wall just below the tracking beams. Modulation on the individual grooves is reflected to scanner mirrors and onto left and right photo optical sensors. The variations of the modulated light cause the audio sensors to develop an electrical representation of the mechanical modulation of the grooves. The entire sound reproduction chain is analog.

Link

If you're looking for a unique way of pouring beer at your next soirée, here's a dispenser that has just the right mixture of geekitude and originality on tap. There are precious few details about this boozy case mod, but we're hoping there's a radically overclocked liquid-cooled computer inside, chilled by the same mechanism that keeps the brewskis cold. So is it a computer that looks like a kegger, or is it a keg disguised as a computer? You be the judge.

 

If you get warnings from IE about mixed security in your HTTPS pages, check this link below:

http://gemal.dk/blog/2005/01/27/iframe_without_src_attribute_on_https_in_internet_explorer/

I would have been stuck on this for hours! Thank god for blogging!

[edit: setting src = javascript:false; also works.]

For several days now I've been struggling with a problem involving Installshield 11.5 integration with Visual Studio 2005. I have been converting some C# projects over to .NET 2.0 and was also having to update their installers. I was using an evaluation copy of Installshield 11.5 which meant that every time you opened the solution it prompts to enter a serial number or continue the trial. I could live with that for 30 days whilst I tested it out. Things were going fine until one day every time dialog appeared Visual Studio would just hang.

To cut a long story short, it was not Macrovisions fault (no apologies though - you have plenty of other bugs to fix) at all, it appears that installing the latest security patch for Internet Explorer causes the problem. And from what I can tell its broken a lot of applications out there. The work around is to uninstall the patch (kb896688). You can do this via Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel (you might have to check Show Updates) or if you cant find it there manually by using the spuninst.exe found in the Windows directory under the folder with the patch name in it. ($NtUninstallKB899688$) for instance.

God damn - security. If its not hackers damaging boxes thru lack of security, its Microsoft breaking stuff by patching up the holes.

Now I need to update our automatic patching server to stop it spreading this diseased patch to every body here.

The excellent anti-spam tool called BlueFrog nows protects your web based email as well using a FireFox extension. Grab it here. My spam mail has dropped by about 60% since I started the fight back. Be active! Fight Spam. MAKE spammers leave you alone.