Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Connecting JBL Flip 4 Speaker to a Chromebook

If you follow my other blog, you might know that I lately obtained a pair of JBL Flip 4 speakers. There were a few drivers behind that decision, first of all the sublime sound quality and secondly that a pair can form a stereo pair. While that was all find with my phone, my Chromebooks, while connecting, had troubles accepting the devices as audio sinks.

For convenience, I gave those things names, as this is possible in the JBL Connect App on Android. Maybe that was the cause of all troubles, I don't know.
The speakers, while working fine, refused to present the settings option on the JBL Connect App at some stage. Also, it turned out to be a hit and miss game when connecting the speakers up into a stereo pair.

So, I decided to reset the speakers to factory setting. This is done by pressing the "+" and "play" bottom, while the speaker is powered on, until the speaker powers off.
Of course, this removed my fancy naming scheme. Well, so be it!

As a result, the speakers are now recognized by my Chromebooks.
So, If you have trouble connecting your JBL speaker to a Chromebook, you might want to try to reset your speaker to factory settings.

As a side remark, you will still need your phone to setup stereo mode. Once that is done, you can connect with the Chromebook and enjoy a clean and neat stereo stage setup by really small Bluetooth speakers.


Saturday, May 18, 2019

Down Sizing My Computing

Most likely, I am not the only one who noticed that it is rarely a necessity to maintain high power computing equipment at home. For me, the last resort for this sort of demand would be video editing.
Most of my photo editing is done in the cloud by now, either by moving a finger across the screen of my phone of with the aid of Chromebooks.
While my Chromebooks do a great job, for some applications, I wished to have some other tools available.
So, after a longer struggle, I finally decided to "invest" in a Raspberry Pi. That decision came when I learned that there a at least 2 ways to boot the Pi from USB HDDs. Why is that important, I hear you thinking. Well, first of all I still got a bunch of spinning HDD in my scrap-box, and secondly, SD cards are certainly not the fastest medium in the world what read and write speeds are concerned, but they are the fastest storage medium in the world to wear out. Seen the RAM limitation of a Raspberry Pi, my regular use will heavily rely on swap, resulting in the foreseeable death of many SD cards in the near future.
While my Chromebooks wont be replaced any time soon, the FX-6100 and i7 4770k workstations will see a lot less work soon.
Presently there is a Pi 1 B+ and Pi 3 B+ in my possession.
My junk box further comprises a lot of old USB stuff, e.g. powered hubs, WiFi dongles, sound dongles, etc. So, there are a lot of options to build system around Raspberry Pi boards by recycling obsolete stuff. How exciting!

The Pipe Dreams Driven by Tubes

Dear reader,

please accept my apologies for keeping you in suspense over my latest projects for so long. 2017 was a very intense year for me. During said year, I changed my day-jobs twice, so, the radio hobby and the audio hobby had to take a break. Concerning jobs, I believe to have finally found the position of my dreams with a lot a really nice people in the company... I believe I have never been happier before!
Anyway, this is not about life, this is about driving tubes, PVC that is, with tubes, such as in vacuum.

My pipe dreams, as you know, are employing 3W (8Ohms) broadband drivers, which came with a super-cheap set. By now, I am convinced that those drivers were the most valuable part in the entire kit.

In search for a 2 x 3W class A amplifier, I came across a Chinese kit supplier (Douk Audio, cf. ebay), who sells single-ended class A amp kits based on 6N1 and 6P1 tubes. Said kits are comparably inexpensive and, while provide good quality parts, come without a mains-transformer.

My choice of mains transformer fell on a 100W transformer offered by a supplier in the UK, search for "big.daddy!" on ebay.

The combo works as a charm! The amplifier kit seems to be made for my pipe dreams.

As an audio source, I am presently using a professional grade table top DJ CD player by Numark.
In the future I consider to add a passive equalizer / tone control circuit to the setup in order to allow for compensating deficits from compressed digital audio formats. For now, I am pretty pleased with the raw performance from CDs.


Friday, May 17, 2019

Goodbye Hackintosh!

Yep, you read correctly, I am saying my goodbyes to OS-X and Hackintosh.
My daily computing needs are satisfied by Chromebooks anyways. For the random power-use, Linux and BSD to a great job. And finally, once in a wile, Windows hosts software no available under the previously mentioned systems.
While I still got a Macbook Air and a Time Capsule, I fail to see the need to maintain anything Apple for the time being. I might actually discard the Macbook Air and the Timecapsule in the near future.