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You are viewing the most recent 15 entries.
14th November 2009
6:58pm:
To all people with EEE PC 1000HE's and 1000H, I think I've finally identified a source of big trouble. Yep, I believe I have figured out what is a: slowing them way down, and b: what makes them crash after they've had the lid shut to standby. Yep, it falls directly in the lap of the ralink wireless cards. Seems that these guys simply can't write drivers to save themselves, and the result even with the latest 2860 driver pack from their own page, the poor machine with one of these cards in it will be inherently unstable. If you turn off wireless lan, Notice the *massive* speed improvement and stabillity as well! If anyone knows of a fix, perhaps even really old driver versions that might work, I'd be glad to try it. but I'm considdering taking my poor old 701 that I really don't use much, and hi jacking the Atheros card out of it as a replacement for the rubbish! No wonder this string of these machines were so cheap on catchoftheday!!! The first 1000he I bought had an atheros card, and RF wise it wasn't as good, but at least their drivers don't destroy your stability!
Current Mood:  frustrated
Current Music: something robert's playing in the lounge
4th November 2009
2:51pm: Olympus DM520
I just had to blog about this, as I think they've finally done it! Yep, for all you TBRN people, I have just bought an olympus that is seriously worth looking at. The DM520 is considderably cheaper than the older ones at USD $199, and the sound is not bad at all! Of course, mine went streight into pcm wav mode, and manual levels, and then some recordings got done both with Wizzzo mics and the internals. Here are some things I've found so-far. I think my old Iriver h140 might have just met it's match certainly for size and battery life, but very possibly mic amp quallity as well. As for the Zoom H2, I think it's almost bin meterial!!! Some things I've already discovered It seems that for the best Hifi mic recordings, you put the mic sensitivity up high, and set to manual levels and then you can use left and right cursor while recording to drop the level to where you want it. Low sensitivity appears to have more amp noise than high, I think it must use a pre attenuater to do that. so for mic recordings in manual level mode, high is best. The other thing you can do that I don't think any of the previous Olympus recorders could let you get away with is set the mic sensitivity to low and then wind it back a fair way while recording in manual record with the left cursor, and the mic jack becomes a perfectly good line in jack. Ok, As we all used to bag out the olympus's for various things, they are IMHO all fixed now. 1: the menus all talk, perfectly accessible. I think with counting, you can also set the clock which has been a complaint, I'm still not sure how to do this yet, but the Pearse thinks it can be done without sight. It now has manual record level with fully variable levels. It can record in PCM .wav in 44.1 and 48K, Not bad! It has removable AAA batteries, No nasty in built Li-ion like the bloody Irivers Can all you 340 owners say "DIE" together? The previous Olympus's also forced you to use the inbuilt flash, which can in theory die at some point. This one has a micro-SD slot, so I'll be buying one of these cards pretty soon! If I really had to pick anything with it, the internal mics are a bit top-heavy, sort of churchish, but this could be fixed in soundforge, and would probably knock out any last vestige of amp noise if you did that. All in all, for about $300 AUS fully shipped, it's excellent! If you buy it through Pat Ferguson (See the review on blindcooltech.org), and a few people want one, combine the shipping, it's *way* cheaper that way! So, I think Olympus have Definitely got it completely right at last!
Current Mood:  impressed
Current Music: My eaves getting hammered
5th October 2009
12:52pm:
I Was on the phone With Craig last night, and we came up with a bizarly odd invention, but one that would probably take off like mad! I would certainly buy one if it existed! Basically what we had in mind is an MP3 player in the form of a cassette tape. So what you say? Well, this device could have some interesting features. First, It would obviously have a head in the front so the tape player could play it as if it was a cassette a bit like those 3.5mm to cassette adapters you find now and then. the spool holes could be used for cue/review, so the tape recorders RW/FF could rewind or forward it. Where the tape window is, you would have the display, and to be really clever, it could have circuitry that could detect record bias, and actually record to memory if bias was detected! It would naturally have a 3.5 headphone jack berried in the side somewhere for normal use as well, but it would just drop into any stereo system or car tape deck with no other FM or other devices required! Somewhere also, it would have a mini-A USB jack for charging and copying your music onto it, and some other buttons for navigation etc that would probably have to be accessed before it gets dropped in the tape deck for playing. Now, imagine the looks you'd get on a train in the morning at peek hour when you pull out a cassette tape, plug a headset into it and start listening! Then you start moving around your music by sticking your finger in the holes and turning the spools!!! Someone *must* make this now! If anyone out there feels like earning a nice little bit of money designing and building such a device, I'd love to hear about it!!! Heh Heh!
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Builders banging things next door
25th July 2009
12:49pm:
The Geek strikes again! Yep, I've beeten the patheticness of windows again, or, perhaps that should be the even vaster patheticness of freedom scientific! Clearly the latter, well, both really, company is much too busy forming litigations against any innocent company they can find to bother writing JAWS properly any more... OK, it seems that jaws 10, specifficly J10.0.512.exe appears to drop a butchered form of the visual basic runtime on your PC. Sadly, windows is getting the evils of Linux, where everything you install these days seems to depend on one or more of the following bits of system blote! dot net framework 1.1, 2, 3, No, they're all required, they aren't versions like you'd think, and of course visual C++ runtime. The outcome of this mess, is that many things that are installed after this event including any later versions of JAWS, AVG8.5, and probably un countable other things fall over screaming at install time, and don't give any valid reason for it. Fortunately, I did eventually, after hours of googling find the visual c++ problem mentioned berried up to the neck in some obscure AVG forum, and I have worked out a solution that fixed that, and Woohoo, also lets the newest versions of JAWS install as well. Ok, here it is for anyone who has had the problem. First, you have to get rid of the garbage installer references to Microsoft visual c++ runtime that freedom scientific have kindly dumped on your system. I used the windows installer cleanup program (msicuu2.exe), but I think c-cleaner and others have facillities to perge entries out of the install database where they can often be way more trouble than help! It usually solves the problem where you can't install or uninstall something because some file usually located in a rediculous place such as "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp" can't be found. These programs are so badly written, that they can't even get the data out of themselves to replace it even though it's come from their own installer in the first place! Anyway, to fix it, go into the installer cleanup util and remove the installer entry for microsoft visual C++ runtime, and exit. Then install Visual C++ redistributable, (vcredist_x86.exe) downloadable from Microsoft, again which should work this time, cross your fingers, and suddenly JAWS later versions such as J10.0.1154.exeand Late versions of AVG might condecend to actually install properly at last!
Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Bee Gees - Irresistible Force.mp3
1st July 2009
9:55am:
This is probably one of the most weered things I've had happen in computing, but I did manage to sort it out and the fix is bizarr and although it's repaired, I'm not entirely sure why! I tried to install sound forge on the new eeepc 1000he on a second hard drive, a 320gb Western digital I had lying around which had to be better than the 160gb provided. This had an XP pro system, another improvement I really wanted, on it that I'd made from scratch using my trusty old unattend bootable CD. My new Shintaro USB dvd burner from OO direct I got last week was also used to boot it and do the installing. Anyway, after convincing all the drivers and programs I wanted on there to work, No, I didn't put anything Norton anywhere near it, Thanks very much, it all appeared to be a perfect working system. That was until I attempted to get soundforge going! Seems the computer ID was changing at random which is, as you'd imagine, something of a problem! I decided to try the same thing on the bog standard system that was still on the drive that came with it, and ... No problem... So, what the hell was going on? Well, I made file cloans of both the default windows and my built one onto my desktop machine, deleted the stuff in the prefetch directory and cleaned out the hklm\system\mounted devices key in the registry which makes XP quite happy to be coppied onto any other hard drive if you ever have to upgrade one. Well, the tables turned when I effectively swapped the 2 encarnations of windows onto the other drives, and I now had the default one on my 320gb drive and the one I installed on the first partition of the OEM 160gb drive. Both booted up quite happily, but oddly, my built system now on the 160gb drive no longer had the sound forge problem. So, it seemed to be drive, not, system related! Of course, the OEM system on the WD 320gb drive started exhibiting the random computer IDS. Naturally my conclusion was that the WD drives do strange things with some ID field, and I decided to give up and just use the 160gb drive and to hellfire with it! That was fine until I then re partitioned, built a quick and dirty unattend install of windows on this 160gb drive, I didn't want it in 4 partitions, to make it all bootable, and then copied my xp pro files onto it. Guess what, the computer ID went random again.... F**ck it!!! Ok, so it isn't WD drives being weered at all, it must be something to do with the partition table, but what! Well, I don't know, and probably never will, but what I did in the end was to fire up good old GRML linux off the CD vier USB and DD the first few sectors of the OEM 160gb image I had carefully kept onto the 320gb drive. I then used linux's fdisk to delete the 4 partitions and re made one big one which I then set to type 7, set it active, and wrote it back. I then put this drive in my sata doc, (every geek should have a couple of these) and let XP on my desktop format it to NTFS. I then coppied the built XP pro system back on yet again, crossed fingers, held breath and waited to see what would now happen! Miracle 1: it booted! and..... Miracle 2: Problem solved. Now sound forge, and probably any other app that uses hardware info to stop you enjoying their product registered and works! So, there's something about the partition table that comes with the EEEpc 1000he and probably other models, that is different from whatever the windows install CDs make during the install. Also, I had tried the following: dd-ing /dev/zero over the partition table(MBR) to make it look like a brand new hard disk. then partitioning the drive from fdisk under linux and formatting under XP on the desktop. This was a complete failure and I think that was because the MBR didn't have the mucrosoft Id, and wouldn't even boot. so it had to all be based on an fdisk edited version of the OEM partition table that Asus provide out of the box. What I'm not entirely sure of is just how many sectors are involved here. so I tended to be safe and splat about 64 of them from my backup image onto the drive just in case! I wanted to document this for my own purposes, but if it helps someone out there, good! I certanly got no joy from googling at all when I tried! so if this go's up, that should, in theory, change!!! W
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: bulldozers on the building project next door
4th June 2009
11:16pm: This would be hilarious except it's dead set true!
Good Day and welcome to a brand new edition of :
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Anyone can play, provided they don't already hold a valid Australian Passport, and you only need one word of English:
'ASYLUM'
Prizes include all-expenses-paid accommodation, cash benefits starting at $800 a week and a chance to earn thousands more begging, mugging and
accosting drivers at traffic lights.
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buy a ticket to Indonesia
And catch the first available boat.
No application ever refused - reasonable or unreasonable.
All you have to do is destroy all your papers or burn your boat once you
Enter Australian waters and remember the magic password:
'ASYLUM'
A few years ago, 140 members of the Taliban family from Afghanistan were flown Goat Class from Kabul to Indonesia’s gateway where agents were on hand to
fast-track them to their boat trips to luxury accommodation
They joined tens of thousands of other lucky winners already staying in hotels all over Australia
Our most popular destinations also include the Baxter’s reef and the world famous Christmas Island resort> If you still don't understand the rules, don't
forget, there's no need to phone a friend or ask the audience
Just apply for legal aid.
Hundreds of lawyers, social workers and counsellors are waiting to help.
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It could change your life forever .
So play today.
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Current Mood: cynical
19th May 2009
6:21pm: Solar power in Australia
For anyone who cares, I now have about 1020w of solar panels on the garage! This is an initiative of the government,
which is going to run out or more accurately change for the worse at the end of june.
( cut for the sometimes fragile sanity of those on my friends list! )
I'm still yet to figure out what exactly the government gets out of all this investment, but I'm not complaining!!!
Current Mood:  contemplative
Current Music: bulldozers, drils...
10th May 2009
11:22am: sound cards in eee pcs
Well, It seems contra to my previous suspicions, that the eee pc, in fact any of those realtech type sound cards in laptops can record line in and what's more, do it rather well! I, of course also tried it as stereo mic in which it indeed is, although the noise is a bit much, about the same as my zoom H2. The frequency response is very nice, however, and I really couldn't pick anything much between an mp3, and its copy made from my eurolab mp3 player running into the eee pcs mic in and then re recorded with sound forge. The realtech util lies and claims you're changing between mic in or line in. Line in doesn't exist, so the only option is to turn off the mic boost in advanced, of course turn off all the echo and noise cancelling rubbish, and take the mic level in record to about 25% The noise floor go's down to a pretty low level in line in mode, definitely good enough to sample books which is what I'd originally had in mind. Don't try mic record with the power plugged in, Humm Badness!!!
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Al Stewart - Year Of The Cat.mp3, .wav, .mp3, me dropping a keyboard... Bugger!
8th February 2009
6:54pm: Hell Saturday
Sat, one could say was one of those days that probably happens 3 or 4 times in a lifetime, and the people caught up in it would, it could be said, be exceedingly glad of the fact! In melbourne it reached 46.4c, a record for any capitol city ever... in Australian weather history. There have been several particularly nasty bush fires which have as of now, claimed about 65 lives and 850 odd houses. I didn't get much of it here, not really even the smell of smoke, but I do have a couple of family and friends who got a pretty big scare! I had my own tiny personal battle to keep the air conditioner able to run on about 200v and in at least 46C which I achieved by aiming a tiny spray of water from a hose at the condenser of it. Oddly, it not only ran perfectly, but way more efficiently, so I'm now inclined to try and build something to do this with the water that naturally runs out the back of the thing. I think some new models do just this, but mine's too old for that idea! Certainly makes them way more efficient and it's designed to be out in the weather anyway, so I can't imagine any problems doing it. Today's much cooler, but fires are out there, still out of control!
Current Mood: tired, I didn't sleep much
Current Music: Lots of choppers flying around
20th July 2008
9:45pm: StarStuffed
This is something I've been meaning to post about for a while, but I do think it has to happen, and may google latch on to it and carry it all around Australia! It seems, in a quest to elevate the collective stupidity of Australians, the ABC have decided to scrap one of the remaining few interesting science based programs they run (StarStuff). Little doubt, it'll be replaced with mind-numbing rubbish like footbrawl thugby or something else guaranteed to keep the audience wallowing pathetically in the single-digit IQ range! I mean, Goud-forbid anyone might actually want to know what the phoenix probe is discovering on Mars or any other interesting things going on outside the bloody MCG! They can't even find the effort to keep putting up the pod casts even if they can't spend the radio time to interrupt the lesbian mud wrestling, or the program on the artistic representation of the society for land wrights for gay whales. That along with this governments screwing down of the CSIRO, is setting us up for 3rd world status asap! Someone needs to get all the collective football boots and other hard blunt sport-related objects that we hear about adnorsiam on their radio and TV channels and boot the Management of the ABC firmly up the Koit, where, Alas, most of them will probably enjoy it!
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: some Really weered Safeway Add on the tv Robert's watching
4th July 2008
10:42am: Telemarketers: Vermin of the telephone
Well, if there was any doubt that telemarketers are un adulterated scum, here is the clinching proof! This details a call I received veer my recently deceased Aunts phone line which is diverted here in case any loose ends have to be tied, I.e. friends businesses she dealt with etc. As you'd expect, she has, along with most of those unfortunate enough to maintain a home landline in Australia, a plethora of calls that I personally, try, sometimes unsuccessfully to screen out. I have, of course, had to somewhat relax this screening process in case something is actually important that should be addressed. So, Yesterday in comes a call from a pretty sus looking number:0385541115 It had, according to my caller ID unit, called 6 times, so I braced myself and picked the phone up to of course, be asked for my aunts name. I explained that she had passed away 4 weeks ago. There was the briefest of "I'm sorry to hear that, and then on with the spiel about diabetes Victoria and Raffles and christ-knows what else! I interrupted and said: "I'm sorry, She's dead!" to which she replied, so, you can't help us? I replied, "Errr, No, I don't think so!" Somehow, I managed to refrain from giving her a real blasting, (Wrongly perhaps), but I have firmly voud that diabetes Victoria will certainly *Not* ever get donations from me, my friends and family in the future, and the event will be published for you Dear reader to judge accordingly!!! Personally, I think we should all automatically black ban any charity that uses the phone to make un solicited marketing calls anyway. they have wormed their way around the joke the Howard government called a "do not call register" in order to continue their barrage of harassment of unfortunate victims, the public of Australia! Don't give to any of them! If you leave me any comments of interest, I'll post details of my method of using my answering machine to both annoy them and screen out their calls.
Current Mood: angry
Current Music: something went bang up the other end of the house, and I don't know what it was!
6th February 2008
4:24pm: Computing gets Ugly sometimes!
I honestly never thought I'd ever find a software package that does more damage to an instalation of windows or put rubbish into more parts of the registry than the symantec/Norton products! Well, I have! Welcome to vmware! Specifficly vmware6. Getting rid of Nortons is like deleting a dos program compared to cleaning up this thing! I made the decision the other day that seeing as I wasn't using it for the forseeable future and that I could always put it back on if I had to, I did what anyone would do and went into add/remove programs and asked it nicely to uninstall. "Oh No" said VMware, I'm going to screw you because you didn't guard the file: vmware workstation.msi with your life! it had apparently been placed in a very safe location on my hard drive, somewhere where no cleaning util or me included, would ever dare to touch: docs and settings\usernsme\local settings\temp. Now, We never clean up temp directories do we??? Disk cleanup never does or c-cleaner or any other program you like to have the infernal gaul to use to slow the rate of natural windows style bloating and degradation! so, by some bizar devine intervention this little bit of cryticle data was gone! "No," said vmware, "I'm not doing a damm thing to help you, not unless you have that file!" "but I don't have that file!" "Well, tough!" I then tried installing it again to see if it would put itself right for an uninstalation. That normally works with most windows software. Not Vmware, Noop, same erroer and no way to repair it or get past it. Clearly the only option left was to manually rip the rubbish out by the roots. First I deleted all the related directories I could find involved with it. Then I ran c-cleanerThat smashed 550 odd broken registry entries. I did a second pass. That removed another 250 odd. Finally it declaired itself clean again. I then ran registry distiller which is a bit more thurrough and it made a backup reg file that was 250k in size, I shudder to think how many more entries were cut out into that! I then went into services and manually smashed out about 7 or 8 entries for the various bits of vmware that put hookers into your network, keyboard, usb etc. That was fine until I removed the keyboard one and promptly lost use of the keyboard. Even a usb keyboard wouldn't give me access! Oops! So, out with the old 40gb hard drive in the super rack on the floor for the alternative xp for this machine and a usb restoration of a backup registry on the main c: drive. Rule 1 always keep backups! Then I rebooted it with keyboard returned and of course repeat all the above steps minus the keyboard service! I also had to manually search for vmware registry entries and rip out a good 1000 of those by hand in places that the cleaning programs aren't game to venture. So, that's about as far as I've got, I've pulled out every reference to the garbage, but any attempt I make to see if I can convince it that it's never been on the system and do a clean install still fails! Anyway, the system runs twice as fast as it did with Vmware installed and would probably be slightly better if I could figure out what exactly to do to restore the propper windows keyboard service without the vmware .sys file being pulled in. BTW: It managed to break Kursweel somewhere along the way so it had to get re installed too! So, a word of warning for any Cavi students or anyone else thinking of installing vmware, I suggest building up a windows that you really don't care about and can afford to throw away at the end, or just never use anything to clean your system until you've uninstalled vmware again! Of course, that doesn't make any guarantee that the uninstalation will condecend to work even so! One thing I know, It'll probably never let itself be reinstalled on this system again! One day I might see if anyone can give me a copy this vital MSI file and see if I can fix it, but then I bet the uninstaller will leave thousands of garbage registry keys behind that I'll have to clean out all over again so maybe I should just forget it!
Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Skyhooks: Why Don't you all get Fucked!
11th January 2008
8:55am: My latest toy
these are cool! I had not really bothered thinking about getting one of these until, link khoath, (Ahhhhh, sucked in!!!) was talking about these in his LJ so I had to take a look! so a bus trip to office jurks whith a (Do we have time for this?) Zoe, convinced me that they really were pretty damm good value for money. I had to go slightly on faith, as half the keyboard was covered by hard metal shop security, No, In office-works, you are not a customer, you are a (probable criminal intent on steeling their stock), so prepare for a security setup that just about makes the average airport look slack! Anyway, I bought it and Nutts and I had a play with it later, and did the rounds of the linux-based system that comes standard on it before, for accessibillity reasons, smashing the lot and putting XP on it. They have a 4gb flash drive, which has some rather interesting internal remapping algorithms in it that continuously move often rewritten parts around so are supposed to keep ware and tair even over the entire chip. I hope it works, as the chip is well and truely soldered to the board in this model. One story I heard re this flash chip is that even after 10 re-installs of XP, it had only overwritten the whole chip 3 times, so I don't think we have to worry about it too much! Anyway, we have Xp, jaws, and skype and other things I regularly use in it and all seams good so-far. Do a google search on Asus EEEPC if you care, but for $488, I don't think you can go too far wrong. I do, sometimes find myself cheating and plugging in a full 101 USB keyboard though.
Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: soft chirping of internal DC to DC converters
8th January 2008
6:50pm: test, 1, 2, 3!
Hello and welcome to, what, I really don't know yet! I suppose most of you won't see this as there aren't a whole lot of friends yet! I'll trawl for thOh, this edit box kind of sucks! I think I have some hacking and buchery to be done! Please excuse the mess. more soon. ose once I find my way around this thing!
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: 3 computer fans
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