Bad camera file names, glucose meter errors and laptop refurbished for cpu overheating with novel cooling techniques

I didn't want to write three different blog articles so I have written about 3 different topics here. The first is about how bad the JEITA camera file names are, the second is about errors in glucose meter measurements of blood sugar levels in diabetics and the third is a very exciting and wonderful new way of laptop cpu cooling and design proposals which I do hope will revolutionize the laptop designs and the industry from Intel, AMD to HP, DELL, ACER, ASUS, ..

A wide range of T-shirts for men and women. Fitted Cotton/Poly, Unisex, Hoodie . . . Now include Tote Bags, Mugs and Stickers.

Bad digital camera directory and file names in SD cards

Honestly, I do not understand how JEITA came out with a useless standard for digital camera file names. They have file names such as DSC00012 . . . and video file names such as C0095 . . . etc. What a genuinely useless system this is. If you format your SD card the numbering system is reset to 1 and then you will have duplicate file names when you try to copy them from your SD card to you computer. Worst still if you change your card. From my experience the numbering system follows what is on your card.

The problem with that is if you change your SD card the file names change too. If you reformat your SD card the file names are reset to 1. If you move a card from one camera to another there may be more problems in the file names.

If you have two or three cameras then all of them will generate the same file names and you will probably end up with duplicate file names on your computer.

The simpliest solution is to have a filename system that follows the date and time and has a camera identifier lable. For example:-

sonyA5100-3-20200630-0050
or
3-20200630-0050

Immediately you will know that the file was generated from your 3rd Sony A5100 camera on 30th June 2020 and is the 50th photo for the day or 50th photo taken by that camera, depending on how you set it up. The dashes in the file names makes it easier to read and understand the information in the file name. Wouldn't that be more informative filename?

I wonder why the cameras cannot store the filename information withing the camera just like f/stop, shutter speed and other camera settings.

Please see my video on "Camera directories and file names are awful, awful, awful" as shown below.

Blood sugar levels glucose meter errors

Since I am a diabetic I have been testing my blood sugar levels every morning before breakfast. Over the years I noticed that when I am undergoing low blood sugar nervous tremors my blood sugar readings would be around 6.4 with several types of glucose meters. Only the Braun B blood glucose meter showed lower blood sugar level of 5.3. See blood sugar level ranges.

I noticed that several meters would have different readings for the same drop of blood. Actually tested for this at my doctor's clinic. We used different glucose meters and had different readings form the same drop of blood. My meter read 7.2 mmol/l (129.6 mg/dL) and his read 9.0 mmol/l (162 mg/dL). That got me thinking about errors in the instrumentation.

Then recently I decided to check the battery voltages of the meters and found that I was getting blood sugar levels of 7.2 to 7.7 just by changing the battery of the glucose meter. This has happened with another meter too. Further test revealed that the glucose meter batteries voltages ranged from 2.8V to 3.2V resulting in blood sugar levels of 7.2 to 7.7.

What does this mean? It means that sugar levels are measured with respect to the battery voltage. The higher the voltage the higher the measured blood sugar readings.

What is the solution to this variation? We cannot assume that the battery is a constant voltage source and the circuitry within the meter has to have a built-in reference constant voltage source so that whatever the battery voltage is, the voltage within the measuring circuit will always be constant.

Please see my video on "Can blood glucose meters show wrong blood sugar levels?" as shown below.

Novel cooling techniques for improved laptop CPU temperature and overclocking

After much experimenting and analysis I am proposing a double decker laptop with a novel fan cooling method, through the CPU pins or leads, that could speed up laptop performance comparable to desktops.

I started this analysis because my 10 year old Samsung i7 2630QM laptop was taking a long time to process my video edits. Honesty, that Samsung laptop was truly superb as it hardly gave me any problems. I had upgraded the C:\ from hard disk to SSD drive, increased the laptop ram to 8GB, repaired the mic and headphone jacks and that was it. I bought it ten years ago as it had a non reflective screen which was very important to me as a programmer as I would spend 10 to 14 hours each day developing technology at the laptop. After 10 years it is still working well but had slowed down a little.

When I had the laptop refurbished, I found out that the heatsink paste had deteriorated and was not effective anymore. Then I noticed that there were differing performances at the air con shopping mall which was at 26˚C (80˚F)and my home which was at 32˚C (90˚F). I suspect that it was 25% difference in speed. It was faster in air-conditioned environment and slower at home. That was when I tried different air cooling methods to bring the CPU temperature down so that the CPU could overclock and run faster. I tried cooling the CPU through the pins or leads instead of the standard method of cooling the pin grid array package. I managed to double my CPU speed when comparing the old Samsung using an Intel core i7 2630QM laptop performance before refurbishment without fans and after refurbishment with fans.

I tried CPU temperature monitoring with HWmonitor and TechPowerUp GPU-Z but when I did that Cinebench R20 showed a very much slower CPU speed score. And that was the reason I could not run temperature and CPU clock frequency monitoring programs together with Cinebench R20. I could not improve CPU overclocking very much as the maximum CPU frequency was locked at 2.6 GHz or 2.9 GHz for the i7 2630QM CPU. I managed to push it to 2.6 GHz and will try to push it to 2.9 GHz.

I really enjoyed running these experiments on how to speed up a laptop. I have documented the results and proposals on my video "Double decker design and novel cooling techniques to speed up laptops" as shown below. The video covers changes in airflow and a double decker laptop design which should allow for higher CPU speeds and more USB and other connectors and more drives both external and internal. This double decker design would require cooling fans on the solder side of the motherboard. I guess there would be some necessary changes to either the CPU pin grid array packaging and or the solder side of the laptop motherboard to take advantage of this type of cooling.

Please do watch the whole video as then you will get a better understanding of what is CPU pin or lead cooling and how I tried to implement it.

- Dr. Peter Achutha, 1st July 2020

Please do show me your appreciation of this article by Buying me a coffee.

And do get the "I Won" t-shirt