Sunday, February 12, 2012

A fire alarm that feels cold

I am not sure if anyone has seen this before, but we have a smoke alarm that consistently makes twitching noise when the temperature drops below 65 degree F. Every morning about 5 AM, the alarm starts making this noise till we get up run the heater and the temperature of the house rises above 65 degrees.

I first found this funny thing when I painted my kitchen cabinets and the house was very smelly. That day the temperature outside was quite less and windy, but I had no choice but to open the doors. Soon after, this funny alarm started making this noise every few seconds. I was like what :- you don't like cold wind?! And soon after it has become a daily occurrence. Every morning like an alarm it will go off till we get up and switch on the heater.

An avid googler, I started googling to find the cause and LOL here it is:

"When the temperature drops the voltage to the battery reduces which will cause the unit to chirp. As the temperature rises so the chirping will cease. This behavior normally denotes that the battery needs to be changed but this could also happen on cold nights when the house is unheated". So, the next thing for us to do is change the battery and see what happens...

Friday, February 10, 2012

Want to make a video tutorial of your desktop screen?

http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/10-free-screen-recording-softwares-for-creating-attractive-screencasts/

After seeing this list, I started with CaptureFox and the message was "This add on is compatible with a firefox version that is not released yet"
Then I moved on to my next choice webinaria. Although the final download page led me to a warning message by the site advisor of suspicious behaviour. I downloaded the software nevertheless. I installed this software, but in the end it asks you to click next so that it can send information to everyone in your contact list to buy related product. Another undesirable feature of this one is it needs adobe flash player which crashes in my system every now and then. In any case, I went on to install adobe flash player and the program finally opened. But is asks for opening a video file. LOL, I have not even created one, how can I open one? So this is again ruled out as an option.
Next thing I did was moved on to wink. The same fate. The installation itself is faulty and asks for connecting to some potentially dangerous sites.
Next I downloaded and installed CamStudio and that seemed to work. Although my problems with flash player still exist, but I can see this recording something.