chuma.org

Author: chuma

  • Steven F’s phonecam photos are great.

    StevenF’s mobile phone pics never fail to amuse. Here’s two of the most recent hilarious ones:

  • I can’t believe that was the solution!

    My missing / corrupted master boot record (MBR) issues continued after my last post. After a lot of tinkering and troubleshooting I think I finally found the culprit: a bad IDE cable. I replaced it with a new-in-bag one I had, and no problems as of yet.

  • Newton pages are busted

    I moved this site off of my crappy home DSL link and back onto a real webserver. Thanks Bill. A lot of pages are broken though, pretty much anything old that used server-side includes.

    Actually, lots of things are busted, because I no longer have mod_rewrite at my disposal. Feed URLs have changed as well as links to any pages. Ulp. Sorry folks.

  • Recovering data by the skin of my teeth

    Something happened while I was poking and prodding around inside my computer last night. My boot drive’s boot sector and partition table got b0rked. I finally traced it down to the bloody removable drive bay I was trying to install, it must have been doing something to the IDE signaling which was totally screwing up the works. Once I figured that out I had to recalculate my partition table values from scratch. Luckily that was easy since I only have one partition.

  • Jerky jerks who drive jerking cars

    You might remember that I think people who drive less than 2km to the GO station are stupid. I encountered a prime example of this behaviour this morning.

    About 10 houses up the street from me, and along my daily walking route, lives a husband and wife who leave for work every morning in separate cars, at about the same time that I happen to walk by in the morning. I’ve seen the wife’s car in the GO station lot often, and she usually takes the same train home as me. This morning I left the house earlier than usual and didn’t see them leave, but I saw them pull into the GO parking lot – both of them. The wife parked her car and then got in the other car with her husband and drove away. So, she doesn’t even take the train to work in the morning, but gets a ride to wherever it is, and then when she takes the train home her car just has to be there for her to drive home. Most days, I arrive outside her house on foot at the exact same time she is pulling into the street. If I could just shake some sense into people…

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  • Web MSN clients to try on the pepper

    • TjMSN: http://tjmsn.tomjudge.com/
    • MSN2Go: http://www.msn2go.com/
    • Imaginario: http://www.imaginarlo.com/

  • Old hardware… it’s what’s for dinner

    So I’ve had this ancient ISA modem for… well, a long time. It’s a 56k flash-upgradeable job with a Rockwell chipset, the RCVDL56ACFW/SP 56k ISA PnP 2 MB ROM DFS, and was made by GVC with the model SF-1156HV+/R19 56k Data-Fax-Speakerphone ISA PnP. Why am I quoting silly long model numbers at you? Because the information at modem-help.com about this card is wrong, and it cost me a lot of extra time.

    My card had the original firmware on it, which doesn’t support CID. I always thought it would be cool to log my CID info all the time, and of course all you need is a modem that supports it – when the phone rings, it will automatically decode and print out the CID info to the serial port. Problem was, my original firmware didn’t support CID – it was added in a later version.

    So after searching high and low I realized three things:

    • I needed Windows 95 or 98 in order to run the upgrade software. Windows 2k or XP won’t work, and my modem is in the only machine with an ISA slot, which happens to run Linux. So I found a spare crap hard drive and installed Win98SE on it, just to run the flash software.
    • The info on modem-site.com about this modem is wrong. This modem has a 2Mb (that’s mega-bit) ROM, not 1Mb. 2Mb flash upgrades are very rare, and in fact my manufacturer (GVC) never officially released one
    • The correct firmware upgrade to use is the one for the Zoltrix FMVSP56i3, which uses the exact same chipset. The Zoltrix firmware upgrader will warn you that it doesn’t think its firmware is suitable, but it works fine.

    So now finally I have a modem that supports CID in my server.

  • Pepper Pad Community Forums and WiFi upgrade

    Pepper Pad Community Forums – the official Pepper Pad forums are open now! Can’t wait for that SDK now…

    Also, apparently all new Peppers being shipped will have an upgraded Wi-Fi card, according to mypepperpad.blogspot.com. No idea yet if this is a B/G mode card or what.

  • Pepper’s Internal WiFi Adapter

    It’s a Gemtek WL-672, connected through a CF slot on the Pepper’s mainboard. It’s pretty damn clear in the photos from the FCC that I posted earlier.

    I can’t for the life of me find its POWER CONSUMPTION SPECIFICATIONS though! Argh!