indiboi.com

Originally when I was getting everything ready for my Hamster I bought an 11″ Wodent Wheel. This was on Petsmart.com, so I wasn’t fully aware of just how big an 11″ wheel was. That was a moment of stupidity, really, 11″ is… 11″ ….duh. I ended up taking it back to the store and getting a 6.5″ Silent Spinner. It should be noted that I planned on getting a Syrian Hamster, not the Dwarf Russian that I actually have now. Either way, the 6.5″ is the most appropriate size for a dwarf, it’s actually a bit on the small side for a Syrian.

Phineas wouldn’t really use the 6.5″ wheel. I sort of figured it took too much effort to move something so much larger than he was. When I was at Petsmart to get credit for my ziplock bag full of dead Cardinals (they all died, shocker) I picked up the mini Silent Spinner, which is very, very small. Phineas used that one right away, it is by the way, the size he had in his home at the store.

The weird thing is that now he’s been using the larger wheel. It’s almost as if he needed to use the one he recognized from before to put it together that the big one was just that, a bigger one, and that it worked the same way. It’s a little annoying that I had to buy a second wheel so he’d use the first though, heh.

I had a problem with stale NFS handlers a little bit ago, the umount/mount trick didn’t work, so I rebooted.

Much to my horror the POST stuck on the “T” of “Memory Test” and nothing would work. I tried several times, took out each ram stick and tested individually, unplugged the drives, etc…. Nothing. I cleared the CMOS, remembered HP put a totally moronic banner up to hide the POST, and was even more screwed.

I called my brother David in my growing state of horror, still nothing. I arranged to buy his old computer from him… my budget just can’t afford everything for a new computer (considering pretty much nothing is usable from the old one at this point).

I then, forgetting to do it earlier, unplugged the USB hub.

It booted.

The Bluetooth dongle that I had moved from the front of the computer (the USB plug that is part of the card reader) to the hub (to get it out of the way)… when I removed that, plugged the hub back in…

It booted. The damned Bluetooth adapter kills the boot process of the computer, wtf? The computer boots without issue when it’s plugged into the front.

Now, unfortunately, the computer seems to think the CPU fan (which is infact non-existant) has failed. HP in their infinite wisdom uses the system fan to blow cool outside air over a big ol’ heatsink. The system fan still works, the sensor cable still works because the speed is read within the BIOS. Wtf?

The problem here is that unless the “F2″ key is pressed immediately upon the notice from the BIOS, the computer will shut itself down to prevent overheating. I can’t seem to find where to shut that “feature” off. Agh!

Anyway… who knows, I think I might end up swapping over to David’s old computer anyway, he’s asking $300, which feels like a good deal, it’s still better than this one afterall. It’s a AMD 64 2.8+Ghz or something, this is a P4 2.53Ghz; technically my CPU is faster on the clock, because of that whole weird not really the speed thing, but ahhhhhh!

So… my okay day turned into kind of a horror show. I guess everything is okay now, but that residual freak-out will last a long time.

Well, I found the little thing on the mainboard that says “cpu fan” and plugged the system fan into that, now it boots without moaning about the lack of cpu fan. This is really weird though, considering that the fan was plugged into the “sys fan” pins and it had worked without issue for years.

It should be mentioned that I bought this HP computer in an emergency years ago. The company’s server was going absolutely wacky, then my computer failed horribly. The amount of work necessary was beyond the scope of my little iBook’s 12″ screen… the HP has been a decent computer, but I did buy the most expensive computer that Circuit City had; major raping there.

I’ve wanted to establish a Personal Area Network with Bluetooth ever since I bought my Tungsten T in November of 2002. I never managed to get it working, but finally… Whoo!

Thankfully the state of Bluetooth in Gentoo has improved dramatically. Once I finally stopped reading the howtos (which are horribly out of date) I managed to get almost everything working properly. I can browse the internet on my Palm using Bluetooth connected to my workstation as an access point. It’s really mostly useless, but it’s just one of those “well, that’s cool” sort of things.

Apparently the /etc/init.d/bluetooth script starts up everything provided you’ve configured it in /etc/conf.d/bluetooth properly. The default is to not start everything, but one does need everything, along with the ppp package.

My Bluetooth dongle is based on the Broadcom chip, which was another world of annoyance, apparently it’s so ass-backwards that it needs firmware to be loaded onto it at initialization, without that it is worse than useless. It still doesn’t work properly if I plug the dongle in while the computer is running, but if I boot with the dongle plugged in, then Gentoo loads the firmware, etc, and all seems to be well.

Anyway, the whole point is that now I have that working, but I also have OBEX working too, along with syncing. I’m not sure why yet, but the gnome-obex-server won’t respond to sends from the Palm. I’ve found that the opd package does work fine though. I’m at a loss, because the gnome-obex-server accepts files just fine when I send them from the RAZR, and the RAZR accepts files sent from the Palm. There’s something weird between the Palm & computer.

Gnome-pilot version 2.0.15 (which is masked in portage) apparently has the patches necessary to allow for network sync using Bluetooth. I fiddled for hours upon hours trying to determine why it wouldn’t sync, when it was in fact gnome-pilot that was busted.

[Device0]
type=4
name=bt
ip=
timeout=2


That’s all that shows up in the gpilotd file, an apparently it’s enough, lol. I did put in the net:any that is required as the device for jpilot and pilot-xfer, but I guess it filtered out when writing to the file.