Blackberry Storm Unofficial OS

Well, Verizon is just taking too long to get out an official firmware update and RIM has been pretty free with the "leaks" so I decided to take the plunge.

I ran across this article today and the reviews were good, so I just finished the upgrade to v4.7.0.103.

So far so good. Overall the phone seems faster. The lock/unlock process is quicker, which is great. Cannot tell much of a difference otherwise. VyMail is not working at 100% and that sucks, but it does appear to still function. Most of what I want to see is improvement when making/receiving calls. I'll report back after using it for a few days!

Is it OK to talk about Coffee Machine on a Tech blog?

I'm not sure, but if there has ever been a coffee maker worth talking about, this is it!

So, the short story is that I have been working from home for years and drink a pot of coffee every morning. I had a coffee maker that I loved, but it made sub par coffee to say the least. I thought it was the best I could do at home and it just made me enjoy my bi-weekly splurge for a large, black coffee at Starbucks.

A few months back, I read an article talking about all the crazy myths related to what makes great coffee and basically it all came down to the heat of the water as it goes through the beans. That is why Starbucks is so good and strong without being bitter, the water temp! Anyway, it ends up that there are only two consumer grade coffee machines that achieve this temperature as approved by the "coffee machine association of the universe" (I have no idea what group approves this crap). One of them is the Technivorm KBT-741, which rang in at a whopping $265. Seeing that my 8 year old coffee maker was going strong (not to mention that is cost $50), I filed that article away in the back of my mind.

Well, two weeks ago, that old girl died on me and I took the leap. I figure if it can knock out my bi-weekly Starbucks trip, I will have paid for it within a year. Lemme tell you, this thing is AMAZING!!! Very strong, hot coffee with none of the bitterness that you are used to from brewing at home. Very, very close to a hot cup of joe from Starbucks (maybe even better in a lot of ways). If I would have known I could have had a cup of coffee like this at home, I would have dropped the money in a second.

The moral of the story? If you work from home and you love coffee, this is the machine for you. I couldn't be happier!

HDMI Green Sceen

So, I have a JVC HD-52G786 television that I love. It is a low profile, rear projection, HD-ILA, 52" beast that I bought for myself for the Superbowl two years ago.

When I got it, HDMI wasn't really mainstream yet, so I never had a chance to use the HDMI input that it has. About a year later, I finally got HDMI output on my cable box, but could not get it to work (I just got a green screen). After talking to the Comcast tech and scouring the Internet, I figured that it was a problem with the HDMI output on the cable box being bad. Oh well. So, a little bit later, I got a new laptop which also had an HDMI output on it. Excited to use the HDMI input on my TV, I plugged it in and yep, you guessed it, GREEN SCREEN! Ouch. At this point, I figured my HDMI board on the TV was dead and there was no way I would pay for JVC to fix it seeing as it was out of warranty. That appeared to be the end of HDMI for this TV, which was too bad to say the least.

Now, because I love technology so much, and I believe I was bored at the time... a couple of weeks ago I started searching to see if the green screen issue was common place. It was. Then, I started to search on if it was common in JVC TVs. It was. Wow! I started looking up JVC TVs in my series and good god, I found some great info.

Apparently, because HDMI was so new when this TV came out and had so many bugs (remember USB 1.0?), JVC built in a secret way to reset it. Genius! Of course, JVC won't tell you how to do it, says you need a special maintenance remote, etc... Just trying to get you to pay for service. But, people being as smart as they are, someone (Cesar Maciel as far as I can tell) found a way to do it yourself. I just did it and everything is working perfectly! I have outlined the steps below, mostly so that I will know where to look the next time I need to do it. Woo Hoo!!!!

1. Turn on TV
2. Make sure the remote toggle switches are set to "TV" and "VCR" respectively
3. Press the "Sleep" button
4. Simultaneously press "Display" and "Video Status"
5. Press "2" (Self Check)
6. Turn off the TV
7. Wait for fan to turn off (30 seconds or so)
8. Unplug TV
9. Wait for 30 seconds
10. Turn TV back on

It should be obvious, but you need to be using the JVC remote for the TV to do this...

There is no one place where I found all of this info, but most of it came from this page and the links found within.