How driver installation for any hardware should be (and with ndiswrapper, is):
- plug in hardware (in this case, a SMC2862W-G USB wireless adaptor)
- wave magic wand at the driver
- enjoy your network
Category: computers suck
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ndiswrapper = teh roxx0r
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hung up, hanging on the line
On hold with Bell Mobility technical support regarding cell modem connectivity problems. Just as the tech person gets through, we get hung up on. I’m not going on hold again.
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45 hours, you’re spammed!
I placed a new and valid e-mail address on my blog on Friday, July 1st, 02005 at 13:55:59. On Sunday, July 3rd, 02005 at 11:03:43, I received a spam e-mail from MiddleEastTenders@tender234.com, subject Qatar Tenders. That’s a few hours shy of two days, from post to spam.
Those spammers certainly don’t hang around. I wasn’t expecting it to be that quick. Conclusion of this story? Don’t ever let anyone publish your e-mail address on the web, ever.
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epia = teh h0sed
I tried to replace the noisy fansink on the old Via EPIA 800 yesterday. Seems that the hints at the mini-itx.com project page. My board didn’t have the fansink attached with thermal grease, it used some kind of very sticky pad.
So, in (gently) wrenching the fansink off the board, the board now won’t boot. It feeps loudly every few seconds, but there’s no video output. Feh. At least I dodn’t pay anything for it, but I hope that the RAM’s not broken, as I have plans for a small, quiet SMB/print server.
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experiment
I’ll explain later…
olaf@scruss.com
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it lives … IT LIVES!!!
So my mini-ITX box arrived yesterday. Catherine was out this evening, so I set to building it. Can’t be too hard, I thought …
That was at about 19:30. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to fit all the gubbins a computer needs into a box about half the size of a shoebox. It didn’t help that the Travla C138‘s case fan cable is too short to reach the SP 13000‘s fan connector. It also didn’t help that the DVD adaptor’s audio cable doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen (or have to hand). And it really, really doesn’t help that the volume of internal cables in the box is only very slightly less than the total volume of the case itself; judicious squtcha, squtcha‘ing on the ATA cables was required to get everything in. I can tell you, there’s not an earthly chance of getting a PCI card in there, unless it’s a very tiny one that doesn’t mind getting bent out of shape.
With much apprehension, I turned the system on, and stuck the Ubuntu liveCD in. Wouldn’t you know, it all booted fine:
Sure, the resolution wasn’t great, and the timezone’s wrong, but I was expecting horrible POST feeping at best. All the hardware was found correctly, and the screenshot was transferred by USB key, which automounted to the desktop. Phew!
Thanks to Davey Laporte for the Ubuntu CD. It certainly saved my soy-bacon.
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not 2.6
Had to revert to 2.4 again, as the suspend-to-RAM only worked for a short while, becoming a suspend-to-RAM-and-sit-there-and-do-nothing. Gr.
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2.6
I finally got my IBM T21 usable under 2.6. I’m stuck using plain ol’ APM instead of ACPI, but it’ll now sleep when I want it to. Which was nice.
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very small PC
Okay, so only after months of humming and hawing, I’ve finally ordered a VIA SP 13000 Mini-ITX system from Koonline.
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Dissing the discmen
Victor Keegan gets the whole electronic media and copyright: Dissing the discmen
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more web file managers
I’ve previously written about PHPFileExchange, but it looks like it has strange installation requirements. Cwfm and Owl might do the happy thing, but neither looks quite perfect.
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windows is killing usability, pt. 314
Sent some urgent data to a client yesterday. This morning, a couple of frantic e-mails in my inbox: “Our IT dept has blocked zip files ‘cos they’re a security threat. Please resend!”
So basically, Windows now means we have to:
- create the zip file
- rename it to .zap, .zep, .zop, .zup, … or whatever
- send the file
- the recipient has to save the attachment, and rename the file.
Listen, I want to go to a sensible place today. How long will it be before those alternative endings are compromised (or that Windows gets a less lobotomised security model)?
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ooh, toy …
We liked playing with Paul’s new Edirol R1 solid-state recorder. It’s kewl.
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compose yourself!
Just one of the things that I really, really hate about Windows is its lack of a sane way of entering accented characters. People are forced to do is remember arcane character codes, like Alt+0235 to get ë. I’m sorry, but I don’t get why one should need to remember these numbers.
Suns have a Compose key, that works conceptually a little like backspacing on a manual typewriter. To get e-umlaut, you type Compose + “ (either together, or one after the other) then e. It’s a system thing, and it works in all applications. A table of compose key sequences shows the huge range of special characters you can access in this way. Most Linux machines support this too; I have right Alt bound as the Compose key.
I need the same facility for Windows. An MS tech staff blog entry basically hints that it can’t be done. But it is being done, admittedly half-heartedly, by MS-Word; if you search for accent in the Help, you can find Insert an international character by using a shortcut key. Word has done this for years, so why isn’t it in the OS?
Update, 2025: You need samhocevar/wincompose: 🔣 Compose Key for Windows
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the old laptop / a new kernel / a new laptop!
Upgraded the Thinkpad T21 to kernel 2.6. Fairly painless, and things look like they are moving more quickly.
Major annoyance is the T21’s built-in 3Com mini-PCI ethernet/modem. It seems to hate all the power-management goodies that ACPI gives, and will only work under the older APM. It seems the solution is replacing the 3Com board with the Intel PRO/100 SP mini-PCI board, and all may be well.
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the so-called alleged memory error
Scare quotes in a dialogue box? Who knew?! -
Industrial Flower Factory
Cool name, cool idea. Industrial Flower Factory make low power draw, small footprint, low noise computers. I reckon that my hulking old AthlonXP is one of the major power draws in the house, and it certainly creates the most noise pollution.
IFF’s machines are a little pricey, but when they’ll save so much of your hydro bill, that’s got to be good. They’ll also preinstall Linux, which make me happy.
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happy mailing : Blat online
need to send simple mail messages from the Windows command line, optionally with MIME attachments? Blat is your friend!
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bad data day
Sigh … -
sometimes I wish awk had a print-range operator
‘cos it gets tiring to do this:
awk -F, ‘(($13 > 202.5) && ($13 < = 247.5) && ($9 > 0.0)) {OFS=”,”; print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10,$11,$12,$13,$14,($5/$9);}’ infile
Too many $$s …