indiboi.com

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.

A few weeks ago I noticed that my iBook power adapter started glowing orange again. You see, the adapter is supposed to glow orange when it is charging the battery, but mine stopped doing that years ago. It’s green all the time, regardless of charge status.

Originally I thought somehow the computer/adapter were fixed, but unfortunately this marked the start of a continually frustrating greater problem. Now, if the adapter is glowing orange it actually means the adapter isn’t working and the computer is actually on battery only. There is some sort of short in either the adapter or the connector, so I have to fiddle with it constantly to keep it working.

A new power adapter would probably solve the problem… for something like $80, at least that’s how much the current one cost when the original adapter fell apart. I don’t think I’ll buy yet another one, particularly now that the design has changed and it’d be useless with a future computer. I sincerely hope that the new adapters don’t require replacement every year and a half, heh. The fact I had to replace it even once means there was a design flaw… which explains the new design… a few thousand people with busted adapters later.

Unfortunately, I really don’t use my iBook enough to justify throwing down $1100 for another one. This is mostly because I don’t have anywhere near that sort of budget anymore. My iBook has given me four good years, heh, perhaps for another $80 it’ll give me a couple more, but it is annoying slow for most things anymore. So, bleh, a new iBook is on the list, but it’s pretty low on the priorities. I’d much prefer a new desktop first… and before that the 75 gallon aquarium. Oh, and the digital SLR, that’s so far down on the priority list it’s almost invisible… lol. The new TV is invisible… I’ve lost all reason for wanting a new one, maybe someday, but priority for that is simply too low.

The desktop computer has been fine, but suddenly the multicard reader quit working. I thought it was a screwy udev update with Gentoo, but before I put too much blame on that (or wasted a crazy amount of time) I booted into Windows and to my horror and surprise it didn’t work there either. Well, that assures a hardware problem… it might just the cable, but I doubt it. I broke down and just went ahead and ordered a new one from Newegg. It’s kind of sad when you have to weigh $30 against just buying a whole new computer. I think that’s because my “high end” computer isn’t so much anymore, but *sigh* it’s still pretty good, heh.

It seems that most of my technology fund goes toward replacing broken things these days. When I moved my file server downstairs it wasn’t on an UPS, because its UPS died and I had it sharing the one for my desktop. Well, that turned into an incredibly frustrating experience… the power goes out A LOT more than I ever realized. Granted, it’s probably because of all those mcMansions built up the street…. $400,000 houses made of cardboard with well water and no yard. Of course, the RAID that I had to resync every day was a result of the other drives failing and losing data on them. Just another instance of replacing broken technology.

This like most everything is more frustrating than it needs to be.

I’ve endured poor quality black and white printing from my laser printer for quite a while. The pages would always come out lightly dusted with toner making them appear as though it was black text on gray paper. When it first started happening I discussed it with a friend and he said it was simply the toner running out. Since I’d never owned a laser printer before I wasn’t sure if that was actually the case, perhaps we weren’t on the same wavelength in terms of diagnosing the problem.

The other day I went to Staples to buy a new office chair, about time really. I found this nice high backed microsuede ‘manager’ chair a month or so prior, but didn’t really feel like spending all that money on something that I didn’t actually need. My patience, if you want to call it that, was rewarded because it was put on sale for a hefty $40 off. I really like the chair, it has great lumbar support, padded arms, and a headrest that actually works.

The point of mentioning the chair was because during that process my receipt was printed on one of their fancy colour laser printers, oooh… I realize that I’m ashtonishingly weird because I get excited over things like print quality. Anyway, seeing crisp printing on that receipt really annoyed me, in the sense that my laser printer was putting out total shit.

I’d held off on buying a new toner cartridge because they were retailing for around $70. That’s really not too bad, I suppose, except that the price of mono laser printers has come down so much that, well, we’re getting into the “free printer with purchase of toner” situation, just like inkjet printers are in… except of course it’s “free printer with purchase of insanely expensive ink.”

I decided to actually look online for the toner and found that newegg.com had it for almost half the price of the local b&m type office shops. I opted for the 3,000 page toner versus the 6,000 page one, mostly because of cost, but the price difference ended up really just being that 6K was twice the 3K… made sense to just get the smaller one instead (two 3K = one 6K costwise, etc, even playing field).

The new toner cartridge fixed the print quality problem, huzzah for that. I have nicely crisp text again. I really like laser printers simply because of the cost per page being so low… even if the initial investment is higher. The chances of running out of toner when you need it are so much lower than that of running out of ink with the inkjet printers… You won’t find a 3,000 or even 6,000 page inkjet cartridge. In this case the toner was actually cheaper than buying ink for my (unused for two years) inkjet printer which managed practically nothing before running out of ink.

I’m still very interested in a colour laser printer, but the main thing holding me back, again, is the high initial investment. Okay, so perhaps $500 for a ‘personal’ colour laser isn’t so bad… and I’ll get thousands of pages before I need to add more toner, but when you have four cartridges to replace that each cost $100… ouch! We’re pretty much back to the ‘free printer with toner’ situation, and it’d be better to just buy a new printer, heh. This is certainly true when it comes time to replace the fuser, opc belt, etc, which comes around 60,000 pages. I found some idiotic person bitching about having to pay $400 to replace the OPC belt on her $500 printer after six months. Well, uhm, if you’ve printed 60,000 pages in six months… just buy a new printer and quit bitching. You’d never get 60,000 pages out of even four inkjet printers before they’d disintegrate. All types of printers have consumables, toners, inks, belts, etc… It’s just on ‘throw-away’ printers, well, the companies realize that it’s pointless to sell those parts. The plastic case the parts are in costs practically nothing, but the guts of the machine wear out… and the OPC belt, and fuser are some pretty damned important parts to a colour laser printer.

I think I found one that meets my needs, while it isn’t the best, the price is almost right. I think, whenever I get around to wanting it bad enough to actually pay that much for printing, I’ll be getting a Brother HL-2700cn. It’s compatible with *nix, Mac, & Windows (very, very important), it’s network-ready (important, and helpful… no need to buy an extra printer server)… relatively fast, and all around not too bad. I dislike the lack of bypass/manual feeding of paper, but honestly I rarely ever use it on my current (also Brother) laser, and the reviews indicate the graphics are ‘fair’ …but hmmm, it isn’t like you actually print photos with this sort of printer anyway. To get into the higher quality graphics pretty much doubles the cost, and well… I can buy disposable inkjet printers if necessary. When it comes to photo printing it is much better and more economical to just have a minilab at a pharmacy, walmart, etc, print them, at least in my learned opinion. ;)

I’m not quite sure how my mother can stand it… the noise of her computer. That thing, built by my brother David, sounds like it’s about to launch into orbit. Now, my file server is a bit noisy, one of the reasons I’m thinking about moving it out of the office… but it has four hard drives in it… while they’re all fairly quiet, the noise is cumulative. Her computer is a hand me down, just like her monitor is… I think it’s time to change all of that.

I mentioned, vaguely, the idea of getting her a tiny computer to go with the LCD panel I’d probably be getting her for Christmas. She wasn’t totally enthusiastic, but… I guess she just doesn’t understand that computers don’t need to be huge and loud. My workstation is virtually silent, unless under heavy strain, then the fan speed increases. It is a bit warm, with only one fan… but I really think the six or so fans in her computer is overkill.

I took inventory of her system just a bit ago, it’s not terribly behind in technology, but it isn’t exactly cutting edge either. She has 512MB of memory, all the usual stuff basically, with an 80GB PATA drive.

Essentially, for $155 I could get her an AOpen EZ18, in either white or black without having to buy anything else — her cpu, ram, drive, etc, all fit in there without issue.

I think she’d like it… I’m sure it’d be considerably more quiet, smaller is always better, plus it would be much more visually appealing too. I think I might just get that for her birthday next month… and then the LCD for Christmas.

Oh, and it looks like Shuttle has released their SN26P barebones… I have little to no interest in SLI, but I really like the violet front panel, it looks so hot, haha.