TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Having upgraded the hardware, the software must follow, sooner or later.  The old Photoshop Elements wouldn't run on my shiny new SSD-equipped Core i7-2600K Win7 x64 machine.  Eventually it was time to upgrade, once PSE10 went on sale for Xmas. I liked Elements for the tagging and organization, but always hated it for it's slowness.  On my 'old' Latitude notebook, it would take at least 10 seconds to flip between full-screen photos - something Irfanview could do in milliseconds.  Tagging, importing, and all that was OK, but not being able to view the pictures to rate them quickly was a ball-breaker.  It got so unbearable that I stopped putting new photos in, figuring I'd fix it all on the new workstation. So I got Elements 10 installed, and it found and imported the old catalog (after performing some kind of 'conversion' that it never explained).  Unfortunately, it mangled the links to over half of my 10,000 photo collection, forcing me to the dreaded ...

The TI MSP430 Launchpad is absolutely great.  For a great take on the thing, watch EEVBlog #92 .  [Dave, you are great.  Sometime I hope I can do similar stuff, even if I can't be as good as you are.] I like the Launchpad too, but it has been a bit of a love-hate relationship so far. Every emulation tool has quirks.  However, I must be the only one having problems with the Launchpad, as nobody else seems to be mentioning it.  That makes me very unlucky, very inventive, or very dumb (or all three). Here's what I've found so far: "Failed to initialize" error:   can be caused by several things.  I've had a terrible time figuring this one out. Fixes so far: -  If you unplug the Launchpad while IAR EW is running, IAR may fail to reconnect.  Restart IAR. -  Oddly enough, rebooting the machine does actually help sometimes. -  In one case, the mini-USB connector was plugged in far enough to give power, but not fully engaged,...

I downloaded Camera ZOOM FX during the Android Market 10 cent sale.  Here's what I found out in the first 30 seconds: Good: Stable shot mode is cool. Macro focus.  Awesome. Zoom is fast. Bad: There is no exposure compensation.  Pretty piss-poor. FX settings are useless.  Seems to be the main claim to fame, really. Pressing the hardware camera button caused a crash.   Restarting it, it claimed it "could not connect to the camera", and suggested either a task killer (without suggesting which task to kill) or a phone reboot. Finally, on the Xperia X10i, Camera ZOOM FX is unable to mute the shutter sound.  The FAQ claims this is unavoidable due to operating system restrictions - yet, somehow, the native app manages to take silent photos just fine.  Obviously there is something there the CZF developers don't know (or don't have access to). The non-muting shutter sound is a dealbreaker for me, as I generally do not want people to know w...