Posts filed under ‘Tech’

If you had read the earlier article I posted, you would have know that last Sunday, the 29th, there was an online record attempt to have the most players online in a first person shooter. I myself was sick and woke up only few minutes too late to join in, but I think I would have had to been ready to click the button to join for hours as MuchDifferent filled all their slots fairly quickly, only shy of 1000 players during the duration, but well past the amount needed for a record. The CEO Christian Lönnholm had this to say, “It was amazing. We did not imagine the amount of interest that this game would generate, so the system went down shortly after we had reached the peak of 999 players. Within minutes we were able to adjust it, and the battle continued for about two hours more. Almost until the end we were averaging around 980 players at any given moment. It was a blast! Obviously, this would not have been possible without the players, so I’d like to send a special warm and loving ‘thank you’ to them! Thank you for bringing such creativity to both the battlefield and to the chat. You had me laughing, giggling and spilling coffee throughout the event!” It just goes to show that I missed out on a great event, but I look forward to seeing who picks up and uses their server technology in future games. They say it can be used in any game engine, but I wonder if any console developers would ever plan to use it. Here’s hoping!

While I agree that spreading the word about SOPA and PIPA is a great idea, I definitely do not agree with a complete blackout of the most widely used reference site. If I were running Wikipedia, I would have made it so users would have to click a button to continue to their information. Wikipedia itself has said that this is not a total blackout, as they are still making the site completely accessible to mobile users. Of course, who wants to look up that information on a tiny screen? (Unless you have a tablet of some sort.) Sort of changing information in Firefox to access the mobile version, I stumbled across a much easier way. I found it on a Dropbox users page and the site is HERE. However, here is the jist of it. Wikipedia is just using some CSS to cover the page you need. With a little javascript, that CSS can be blocked. So you just drag the javascript link on the DropBox site into your booklet or bookmarks on Firefox, and when you get to the wiki with a SOPA/PIPA blackout, just click it and it takes care of the hard work for you!
Enjoy, but do not forget the dreadful, evil thing that is hanging over our heads.

So it came to pass that I had to do another G450 install on a Windows 7 machine, and when I went to Matrox’s web site, I still did not see drivers listed specifically for Windows 7. I did do some digging however, and found that this non-WHQL driver package works perfectly. It was listed as supporting “Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows XP x64, Windows Vista x64, Windows Server 2008 x64″. If it supports Server Win2k8 R2, it should also support Windows 7.

As luck would have it, the install went smoothly and I have a pair of the cards working in a brand new Core i5 machine as I type this.




Good luck!

The Sangean HDR-1 is a HD tabletop radio which supports digital radio & hybrid signals and RDS functions on FM stations. Other features include dual alarm, IR remote control, multicast capability and Program Associated Data service. Overall, a pretty nice unit. But certain productions runs of this radio had a problem. The radio would quit powering up for no apparent reason. Lets see why.

Continue reading “Sangean HDR-1 Repair” »

I came across an odd problem just the other day that caused the visual editor to go haywire on a brand new WordPress installation.

Whenever I tried to write a post, the visual editor would load, but then the buttons would disappear. On top of that, none of the text I typed would show up either. A “select all” showed that my text did in fact exist, but it was displayed as white text on the visual editor’s white background. Stranger still, the HTML editor worked just fine.

I tried working through all sorts of solutions offered up online including a reinstall of WordPress, troubleshooting plugins, and even checking file permissions on the wp-includes and wp-admin directories.

None of these solutions worked, but as I dug through the blog’s admin pages, I saw something strange. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), the WordPress and Site Address fields both show a colon appended to the URL. The problem is a strange result of how WordPress was installed as well as how the web host has configured our account. Removing the colons fixed the problem immediately, and will likely remedy your issues as well.

As a final note, this fix works on WordPress 3.2.1 but should apply to any past or future releases of the software.

• Go ahead and hit: Alt + F2

• Type: update-manager -d
• Perform any additional required updates before install
• Enter your password, agree to upgrade and such

I did all that, then waited for 45 minutes -  now it is say Error: Forbidden 403, WHAT THE HELL?!

It’s terminal time my friends.

• type: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
• click replace in the search menu
• Replacehttp://us.archive.ubuntu.comwith

  ftp://us.archive.ubuntu.com
  

• Restart your upgrade. Don’t worry no time was lost since it kept all the downloads even though it reverted the installation. Ubuntu so smart.

Have fun and remember.

Last year I upgraded form a Gigabyte board that Jim sent me the previous year, to a Biostar G31-M7 TE.  Along with that, I threw in two larger pieces of memory.  For a long time, I had a mysterious problem with the system.  Every time I would reboot the system, it would only display a blank screen and require the CMOS to be reset in order for it to boot once again. I found this odd, as I had an Asus P4 system that exhibited similar symptoms, only it was fixed by power cycling. Not so in this case. Several months passed with me accepting this error as a daily challenge in life to avoid system reboots. Max uptime was my goal. Most searches into the problem led to video errors or motherboard errors, but as I had a working system after I cleared the BIOS settings, I knew something else was at fault here. I even considered building an external switch to clear the CMOS, I was resetting it so often.

Continue reading “Fixing Mysterious Motherboard Issue” »

So you started drinking early and put some regrettable images up on Facebook, or really spoke your mind on Twitter.  You could just bury your head in the sand and avoid all those people you said nasty things about, or you can make them appear as if it never occurred with “Last night never happened“.

This “morning after” iPhone app will automatically scrub your Facebook and Twitter account, removing pictures and posts for the time period you specify. It won’t completely save you from your drunken rantings, but it’s a good start.

[via Gizmodo]

Our good friend Marissa’s Dad over at Marissa’s Bunny is at it again.  Due to the fact that he hit his fund-raising threshold,  he was given an 11” Macbook air with 1.4 ghz core 2 duo, 2 GB of RAM, and a 64 gig SSD to giveaway.  That is a great machine!

Even if you would never have bought a Mac for yourself, surely you would feel no shame in winning one.  Would you?

[CLICK HERE TO GO TO HIS SITE TO SIGN UP]

When installing the software for my new Logitech C910 web cam, my computer started to randomly blue screen, then reboot. During one of these blue screen dumps, I managed to see which file was faulting before the computer restarted.

For some reason, ks.sys was causing the computer to crash, and upon looking into it, I discovered that ks.sys is related to the computer’s sound card. That made sense to me, as the Logitech installer was adding its own microphone drivers to the mix. What didn’t make sense to me was the actual reason behind the blue screens of death.

Upon further investigation and poking around in the Logitech support forums, I found that my Western Digital SmartWare was the culprit. I have a WD Passport drive, which requires the SmartWare application in order to access the hardware-encrypted data on the drive. It seems that the associated services cause the ks.sys fault, for some unknown reason. The only solution that anyone has seemed to come up with is to stop the Western Digital services while the Logitech installer is running, then restart the services afterwards.

So, I did just that, and my installation went off without any more problems. If you are experiencing the same problem, stop the following services before installation, and then restart them afterwards:

WD File Management Engine
WD File Management Shadow Engine
WDDM Service