Archive for the 'Tech' Category

We’re not being paid for this…

Published
by
Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Rants, Tech and Whining
. 0 Comments

Ok, so I do a lot of free support at communities, and it makes me wonder sometimes if people even try to help themselves before running in for a hand holding session…  Usually I’m fine with it, but after a while I have to just think they’re just being lazy…

So, I have a small rant, and hope you all bear with me through it…  It’s not directed at any one user (ahem) and not at any specific community…

Ok, we’re here for free, we don’t ask for anything in return; we’re here because we understand the solutions to the problems and want to (in most cases) help everyone to make any situation work for them…  We do this to help the admin’s of the sites that we enjoy; because without them we’d not be able to do what we enjoy.

Now, when you come in, and ask a million questions about the most basic stuff that could be learned by spending 5 minutes either reading through previous posts or poking and prodding the product, you’re taking our time away from users who actually have valid problems that they cannot figure out…

Utilities are built and put in place to help you lookup things like language file locations, styling on cells/sections, they’re there, we look things up the same way you do…  We’ve all been in the newb position, but we learned to think for ourselves and look for items vs sittig and whining for the most basic crap…

Then you ask for help with things that aren’t even related to the product…  Sorry, we’re not the w3c, we’re not PHP.net, we’re not going  to teach you how to code… And we’re certainly not going to do it all for you all of the time…

Please, for my sanity (or what is left of it) please learn to help yourself!  That is, unless you’re paying me to do it…  In that case, you can take this post and put some honey mustard on it and I’ll eat it ;)…

Tips to extend your cellular battery life…

Published
by
Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Entertainment, Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

Ok, so I spent several days going through reviews on the Nokia 6555 cellphone, listening to people whine and whine about how the battery only lasts a day when they don’t run anything special…  Well, news to you, you are…

Cellphones are delivered to you with every feature enabled…  All of them…  And all these nifty features kill your battery life, so unless you charge your battery every night, you need to disable some things…

First, turn packet data to “as needed” instead of “always on”; this will only connect to the network when it’s needed (like when you want to use the internet with your phone); otherwise you have a constantly connected connection to the internet with your phone, which just zaps your battery.

Second, if you’re not using it, consider turning off bluetooth…  Bluetooth is the wireless utility hwich lets you use a wireless headset with your phone… And it uses a LOT of your battery to have on.  Consider this, only enable bluetooth when you need it…  You can enable it during a call on most phones as well.

Third, turn off your screen saver!  Just let your phone standby the screen when it’s not in use; your nifty looking analog clock screensaver will just be using the screen at all times instead of turning it off when it’s not in use.  I highly doubt you can even see the analog clock while it’s in your pocket ;)…

My last tip of the evening…  Which isn’t even power related…  Set your own PIN on your phone, for crying out loud, your tech support at your cellphone company doesn’t want to hear about your kids locking you out of your phone ;)…

The DVR Mission, PT2 - The future and beyond!

Published
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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

Ok, so with my DVR I have the Hauppauge 350 card; it’s not a dual tuner card like the 500, but I specifically wanted the radio, a hardware decoder, and the IR remote receiver (Even though I also bought the “White Box” Firefly remote from BeyondTV)…

So, what do you ask are my plans?  Well, I’m still deciding…  I want to be able to stream the radio, but at this point it doesn’t look like there is a upnp option for that, so I’m probably going to install BeyondTV again once I get a decent SVideo/Composite switch… Ideally I’d like one that I can use a remote with (I have an 8 device learning remote, EVERYTHING is in it, including the wall fan… scary).

I also plan to buy a media extender for my Hauppauge 350, it has headers for it, which means the one card can read in two streams… Which means I can have both my VCR and Satelite dish streaming into the DVR…

Also, my mom said she’d buy me the IR Blaster for my birthday, but it hasn’t gotten here yet…  Which will be nice as I will be able to have the computer capable of turning the satelite dish’s channels…  Which will be smoothe ;)…

Other than that?  Not entirely sure… Definately open to sugguestions though ;)

WMC for WXP, the mission that finally was…

Published
by
Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Tech
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Ok, so on my previous posting I talked about getting Windows Media Connect working on my Windows Media Center PC (DVR), but I also wanted to get the same software running on my desktop that I had been using as a media dump for the last 2 years…

Well, I did a simple google search, “Windows Media Connect” and wham, instantly found the Microsoft page… This was too easy…  I go to the page, and what?  Yeh, it was too easy… “This package is no longer availalbe for download, instead, upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 and share from there!”, well, that’s all fine and dandy, and I do have WMP11 on all of my computers… But I like this utility, and its UI is perfect… And I don’t want WMP running ALL the time just becuase I want to share some files…

So I search around, and around, and around, and FINALLY find an install package for WMC2 for WXP, I download it as fast as I can and go to install it…  It bogs, it dies, the install just dies!  I go to the directory and look, and it did create several files, but the important ones are 0byte…

So I look and find an article on the XBox360 site talking about the method of manual install for WMC! YEY!…  So I follow the instructions and FINALLY get it installed… And it works flawlessly…

I wrote up a small batch file to do the install process, and I have the files… All of which will be published to UGN Security within a few days… (what can I say, I have a lot to write up, and it’ll be a busy weekend…)

The DVR Mission, PT1

Published
by
Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment, Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

Ok, so a while ago I bought all of the equipment for a DVR, and I got fed up with it… I took everything apart and put the disk on Sam’s desktop and just said the hell with it and left everything in a big pile of expensive parts…

Well, since the XBox360 now supports DIVX and I can stream media through UPNP I decided that I need to get back on track and work to make things how I initially wanted… You know, being able to stream movies, music, and my favorite tv shows to my tv through the xbox, screw the svideo problems i was having before…

So, I piece everything back together, ensuring I have the best secondary hardware in the house in the machine (yes, I was a jackass and compared my mom’s hardware in her desktop to that of what is in my DVR, but I already had the good stuff…). After failing that mission (well, I think I passed since it was mother superior!) I got to work…

I decided that I had wanted to go with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, so I got to work and got to patching, moving things around, and after getting pissed at a black screen on windows setup and referring to google, I got windows installed and MCE running…

A quick “what was” for those wondering, when you run the Windows Installer when you’re installing from running a Linux distribution (CentOS/RHEL in my case) you’ll want to use a disk fix utility to just blindly format the drive to NTFS, I used the Ultimate Boot CD. What happens is that the Windows Installer cannot read the Ext2 partition and dies, leaving you with 0 information on what happened…

So, now that I had WXP MCE installed, I decided to work on hardware and see what I could get to work with my Hauppauge 350 multimedia card (hardware decoding baby!)… So I get all my drivers installed, and I load up MCE… It doesn’t like the radio function of my Hauppauge… Moreover, it doesn’t even recignise that it’s plugged into a media source… Nor does it utilize either through the media center connection to the XBox… Such a let down… (I will write another entry on setting up the XBox360 to a media center, so be patient for a next entry)

So, here I am just waiting for an answer, so I visit the xbox360 website and look for more options… Well, one option was to use Windows Media Connect (WMC) to connect my XBox to my PC… Well, this uses uPNP to make a connection… What have I been using before? Same crap, different program… BUT, this one doesn’t keep a library, it seeks all data live, when you look for it… So no need to make updates every time I add a new file…

So I get it all installed, set my media folders (Digital Camera, Digital Camera Corder dump directory, etc) and I go to the XBox and look for new devices… WHAM, “DVR - 1″ is a new device on the network… So I connect looking for video, and what do I find? All of my video! 0 problems!

So, I have a working DVR now, so I can ease off of Sam’s computer… Well, not really, I have a lot of stuff there too… Next posting? WMC for XP a pain to find…

Another server migration…

Published
by
Gizmo
on March 22, 2008
in Business, Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

Sad to say, our Dedicated Server is gone now, or rather it will be soon… HostNuke’s moved us back to a VPS, though we have about the same spec’s as we did before, only I’m assuming its newer hardware than the older stuff we had ;)…

CentOS5 as usual, Webmin/VirtualMin as before, PHP5/MySQL5… Email still served through Google lol… Our RDNS should be set out of the box, but will need to validate IP’s against spamhaus and check that new registration emails are being sent/received…
All that fun stuff! lol…

One heartache though, I went to upgrade Gallery to the latest build on www.corthell.net and the damned thing choked, so I sat here for like 3 hours trying to do a simple upgrade… The bafoon who responded to my forum posting on their forums said I’d have to delete everything and start from scratch…

The fix you ask? The versions.dat file was empty for some reason (likely due to the botched upgrade prior in the night), so finding a “recovery” posting in their FAQ did wonders to getvme back up… Took about 2 minutes to patch the file and run the upgrader… And best of all, I didn’t have to purge and start anew… As I would have cried lol…

I have a lot more to patch and upgrade on the new machine, and loads more to look up; so wish me luck, it’ll be a fun task… not like I needed another after what heartache’s this last month brought me… More on that, and more on the server migration later…

XBox Memory Issues…

Published
by
Gizmo
on December 2, 2007
in Entertainment, Gaming, Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

Well, I bought the Sandisk Cruzer 1gb drive which matches the stock feel of the XBox Core/Premium system, and I have a standard key (which I didn’t think was working) for my XBox360… Turns out, ANY USB device cannot access saved games or
XBL data…

So, what’s the problem? Well, I bought them so I could copy my XBL account to Walter’s XBox (and vice versa) so that he doesn’t have to bring his over all the time so we ca link systems to play together on our respective accounts…

So, now I have to buy the XBox Memory Card to do this… I found several of the 512mb’s on EBay though for under $20 (after shipping); and I can supposedly use them as storage devices (vs media devices) in the xbox. So I should be able to store downloads on there, such as game downloads, like Halo1 should I choose to blow 800 points on it ($10~).

So, a word to the wise:
USB Devices - Media Devices, music, pictures, video.
Memory Devices - Game Saves, Downloads, Storage.

Usage fee?

Published
by
Gizmo
on September 27, 2007
in Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

So we look at the Qwest house line bill today, $75… Wait… It’s usually $56 you say? Well it turns out they’ve found yet-another way to nickle and dime us… The Usage Fee…

The usage fee charges us per minute of how much we use our phone, we’ve never signed up for this “service”, nor would we… Why would I want to be charged per minute to talk on my landline phone to people in my area code (there is no LD on this line)… Idiots…

We call in, and supposedly we’ve “always” had this… Funny, I’d know if I signed up to be gang raped… So they’re issuing a credit, but their not sure “how far back” it will go, joy…

I find it funny, that i moved my second line to Vonage, and am contemplating moving the main line to Comcast… Why you ask? Because this crap is costing way too much…

We have 3 cellphones, 1 house line, and 1 VOIP line; I have no problem having two VOIP lines ;)…

Google for Domains - Domain Recovery Woe’s

Published
by
Gizmo
on September 27, 2007
in Business, Tech and Whining
. 0 Comments

Well, I’ve moved all of my domains over to Google Apps for their email services as they’re a hell of a lot more reliable over there than what I ever could be… Not to mention that their spam filter is bar none (and added with MY local spamfilter i get like nothing bad)… That is, all domains have been moved over but one…

One of my domains already belonged to a user account, which isn’t mine… So I can’t add it… So, I email Google’s support desk (or lack their of, the dolt I have to deal with is quite moronic), and am told that basically I’m an idiot and that another user of my orgnization has already assigned the domain to their account… Well that’s all fine and dandy, except for the fact that THERE ARE NO OTHER USERS OF MY ORGINIZATION!

So, after jumping through hoops, and them finally realizing the issue at hand, and me having to validate myself like crazy, I am finally told they can release the domain from the owners account… What they didn’t tell me is that there are several ways of going about this, and the one they chose takes 30 days to move, and then 5 days to ensure deletion… There is no way to take my domain out of this status, even if the old owner is willing to email them on my behalf (yeh I know, I should have emailed the old owner first via his “click here to contact the admin” link on the gmail for domains login page)…

So, bottom line? Well, my domain can’t be added until October 26th or so… So, I get to sit here and twiddle my thumbs until then…