Tuesday, June 30, 2009
A: What can't vinyl tape fix?
The button board had been acting flaky for awhile, and often to set the clock I'd just open it up and short the accumulator pin to adjust the time. It turned out that the material between the buttons and the board itself had dried out over the years, thus squishing instead of depressing as expected. I tore it out and used some tape in its place.
(to Antony: this is the same one I modified earlier. Why buy a new clock if I can just fix up what I have?)
Sunday, June 28, 2009
I can't help but feel that something's going on that we don't know about, when Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and now Billy Mays die when the news had just days earlier been covering a bloody protest in Iran, and North Korea is threatening to fire a missile at Hawaii on the Fourth of July. It's discomforting to consider that the deaths of these high-profile people could have been caused by some larger entity's will to get that news off the networks, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since Friday.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Here's something I've been working on this past week:
Questions, comments, concerns, yells at my lack of originality, or anything of the sort?
Thursday, June 25, 2009
While on my way home from the post office today, I found a relatively new-looking ViewSonic LCD sitting out on the road, so I picked it up and carried it home with me. I plugged it in and, surprisingly enough: "No Signal" flashes on the screen for half a second, then the entire thing shuts off. With a computer attached: "No Signal", and again shuts off half a second later.
I find it interesting that, of the six or seven CRTs I've found in this manner, only one hasn't worked. By contrast, the three LCDs I've found, this one included, have simply refused to work, despite being much newer. Adding to that: Mark and I both use a set of three Dell Trinitron monitors, all six of which are still in like-new condition despite being ten years old. But as far as LCDs go?
- 1994 laptop LCD: Backlight shuts off intermittently.
- 1997 laptop LCD: Red line down the side as of 2007.
- 1998 laptop LCD: Flickers uncontrollably as of 2006.
- 2000 laptop LCD: Backlight is turning red as of 2007.
- 2002 desktop LCD: Died in 2005.
- 2003 laptop LCD: Let's not even go there.
- 2006 laptop LCD: I just had it replaced last week.
Just yesterday, I helped install a DTV converter box for my friend's mum, who thought her 23-year-old Hitachi CRT had finally seen its day. Not only does it still work, but it has vastly better color quality than their 2000s Toshiba CRT downstairs. A real testament to how well TVs and monitors used to be built.
UPDATE: I took apart the monitor and was able to get it to work. Apparently somebody spilled Sprite or some other clear, sticky liquid inside - how is beyond me. It looks like something that would have cleared itself out given a few days, so I think whoever threw it out jumped the gun a bit. Of course, being impatient, I cleared it out with a hairdryer instead. Not sure what I'll do with it just yet.
Monday, June 15, 2009
I just got a call from HP's tech support. They asked me when I was going to send in my laptop - and of course, I shipped it FedEx Overnight Guaranteed (thank you for prepaid expensive postage, HP) two days ago. So far this doesn't bode well for the turnaround time.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
I figured I'd get Linux running on my P1/MMX laptop just so that I'd have something to carry around while my other laptop is in the clutches of HP Tech Support. Debian 5 now includes LXDE in the main repository, so setting it up is a breeze: apt-get install lxde took care of not only LXDE but the installation and configuration of the entire X server, and I did a net-install so no CD burning was required.
The next order of business didn't go so well: getting Wi-Fi to work acceptably well. This particular laptop has trouble with Plug-and-Play on the PCMCIA slots in both Windows and Linux, so I have to disable the "Plug-and-Play OS" option in the BIOS, which makes hardware installation difficult. I have an old Orinoco card which is very well supported by Linux, so using modprobe orinoco_cs worked fine.
It took me about two hours to get NetworkManager installed properly. The system service portion of it worked fine, but I couldn't get the nm-applet utility to run in LXDE. There turned out to be a D-Bus permissions nightmare that took almost two hours to sort out, before I could start nm-applet without being root.
After finally getting that to work, I found out that the orinoco_cs driver doesn't support WPA out of the box although the card is capable of it. I tried the HostAP driver instead but found out after an hour of messing with config files that it doesn't support the earlier revision of the card I have (it works with the later Prism2/2.5/3 chipsets whereas I still have the original one with the Hermes-I chipset - there was a Hermes-II and I believe a Hermes-III in the mix of chipsets, too!).
My next idea was to use ndiswrapper and the Windows WPA-enabled driver to do things instead. I got ndiswrapper to install the driver fine, but couldn't actually get the kernel to load the ndiswrapper module. Another hour later I figured out that this was due to there being no ndiswrapper kernel module in the Debian ndiswrapper package - defeats the purpose of having it, I'd say. It seemed that the only way to get the kernel module was to build it from source, and I wasn't about to do that on such a low-spec machine.
Finally I found out that you could use the regular orinoco_cs driver along with alternate firmware to enable WPA, and managed to pull the firmware from a Git repository I found on the Ubuntu forums. I saved it to /lib/firmware and dmesg told me that I still had no WPA support. I did a lot of digging and found something in the pcmcia_cs mailing list, where the drivers included in Debian 5 were actually outdated and didn't support loading firmware from a file, and I needed to build a new kernel. Ugh.
Thankfully I managed to get a proper, pre-built i486 kernel image (Debian doesn't do i586 builds) from Debian's "experimental" repository that included the updated driver. Booted into LXDE and it worked beautifully - configuration with nm-applet was a bit slow, but that's to be expected with something this old, I suppose.
Epiphany ran too slow for my patience, so I found a slightly faster Gecko-based browser called Kazehakase. They haven't hit a version 1.0 yet, but they're in Debian's main branch (Debian typically doesn't move things out of experimental unless they're solid), so it should be alright. I'm using other lightweight apps like AbiWord and Ayttm in place of bigger things like OpenOffice.org and Pidgin. Here's some relevant statistics with LXDE, LXTerminal, Kazehakase, and Ayttm open:
donhh2k@ascentia:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 158676 155736 2940 0 144 65236
-/+ buffers/cache: 90356 68320
Swap: 524120 2976 521144
donhh2k@ascentia:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 1585184 976964 608220 62% /
tmpfs 79336 8 79328 1% /lib/init/rw
udev 10240 76 10164 1% /dev
tmpfs 79336 0 79336 0% /dev/shm
I'd say having the entire system fit into 160MB of RAM and less than 1GB of disk space is pretty nice. It's amazing that I can still suck some life out of a 13-year-old laptop.
I dropped my laptop off at the FedEx store today for shipping back to the HP repair plant. Some of you may remember some of the problems I had last time around, where my laptop took a month to come back after getting lost in Costa Rica, so I'll be interested to see how long it takes this time around. Antony seems to think that last time was a one-off incident, but I have a feeling this will take awhile.
In the meantime, I'm stuck using my Pentium 3 box at home, and I'll be taking my Pentium laptop around as needed. So in other words, this is going to be a very slow month.
Friday, June 12, 2009
I've already had a few requests for a copy of the crowbar image I was using while my blog was down, so here it is:
The FCC is shutting down full-power NTSC television broadcasts today, freeing up about 414MHz (69 channels * 6MHz/channel) of the airwaves for other uses. So, as I did a year ago when the FCC killed off the AMPS cellular band, I figured I'd stay up until midnight to see what would happen.
Strangely enough, the same thing that happened last time repeated itself: those channels are still broadcasting after midnight. Waste of my time, indeed.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
I'd like to someday compare the efficacy of an hour of the expensive Antony-sanctioned Wii Fit to the cheap Don-sanctioned method of taking a 4km walk while wearing a 15kg bag.