chuma.org

Category: computers

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • E-Books on Pepper – not much yet, but promising

    I’m no expert, but on the surface, the Pepper Pad seems like a great machine for reading e-books. It’s got a nice 8.4″ 800×600 screen with easily adjustable brightness. It’s got a large built-in scroll wheel, as well as an arrow pad. It’s ruggedized too, with rubber edges and a rubber screen frame.

    However, right now the Pepper has a few shortcomings as a book reader:

    • lack of support for PDF and other e-book formats (but PDF is coming soon)
    • short battery life.

    Right now the only thing you’ll be reading on the Pepper is HTML and plain text files. Also, there’s no way to adjust the font size of a page on the fly, so you better make sure your files look decent before saving them. The one place where Pepper works well is in the “Keep” functionality – if you can view it, you can save it on your Pepper for offline viewing anytime. In my testing this has worked darn well for slurping and saving books from Project Gutenberg, for example.

    The Pepper makes every attempt to conserve power (ie. the external video is off unless plugged in, the speakers are powered off unless in use, etc) but the three biggest power draws are the screen, CPU, and WiFi, in that order. You can disable the WiFi manually to save power, and MontaVista Linux is supposed to support Intel’s SpeedStep technology on the XScale CPU, effectively lowering the clock speed and therefore saving power when the CPU isn’t busy. It’s hard to tell if it is though. I haven’t tested this at all, but personally I don’t think you can get more than four hours of uptime out of the Pepper’s battery, and that is with everything unnecessary powered off and with the screen at the lowest brightness.

    Pepper has said that support for formats like PDF and MS Word are coming in the “near future” – I really hope it’s sooner rather than later!

  • Web 2.0 + Pepper = very cool

    Turns out you don’t even have to wait for new apps to be written for Pepper in order to enjoy new functionality: there are a lot of free browser-based apps out there that work great with Pepper’s browser (thanks to its Mozilla roots). Here are some that I’ve started using:

    • eMessenger light: a web-based MSN Messenger client. I tried all of them and this one sems to work the best with the fewest ads too.
    • Meebo: another awesome-looking web-based IM client. Seems to support AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to login on my Pepper, but it works great in FireFox.
    • Blox0r: awesome web/XUL based RSS feed reader.

  • Looking for zip and unzip?

    There are zip and unzip tools already installed on the pad, however they are called:

    minizip

    and

    miniunzip

    respectively.

  • Take control of your world

    I just had an enjoyable time setting up my living room devices in Pepper’s Remote Control app. Unfortunately, the documentation in that app is very sparse… so I’m here to help you download remote codes. Personally, I hate teaching a “learning” remote — tediousness defined.

    1. Find the remote you need codes for, and note the make and model. Not the device model, but the model number on the remote itself.
    2. Open Remote Control on your Pepper, open the Web tab, and go to the list of remote codes at the Linux Infrared Remote Code site
    3. Browse to your manufacturer, and look for the model number of your remote. There may be more than one file for it, if so use the larger file (it probably has more buttons defined). Tapping on any file will download and install it into the Devices tab. You’ll also see a download confirmation message in the status bar.
    4. Switch over to the devices tab. You’ll see a new device under the manufacturer’s name that has no device type. Open it and assign it the correct device type, and some buttons should appear. Try them out!
    5. You can add new or change the assigned codes for the buttons by following the documentation.

  • Better way to enable services

    Sean who runs the nice looking but content-deprived Pepper Hacks website, offered up this tip:

    You can enable and disable services by using the

    initdconfig

    command. It behaves the same as the ‘chkconfig’ command for RedHat / Fedora Linux. Thanks Sean! So to enable the SSH server you just have to do:

    initdconfig ssh on

    at the root XTerm.