October 22, 2008
October 21, 2008
New Car Key!
I won’t bore you with the details, but to provide the background; I snapped my car key in the ignition. It was the spare. Cue much anguish. Fortunately Jules at Dent Security has some skills, managed to take the pieces and cut a replacement. Legend.
October 9, 2008
Palestrina Text
In retrospect, I could have at least used the word ‘music’. I’m an idiot at times.
A long read, but worth it.
Happy 17th birthday Linux.
In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson.
October 8, 2008
Mozy Online – Free, secure storage
Mozy online is a free storage depository, that uses a lightweight program to sync files on your computer.
It’s easy to configure and runs pretty much by itself, and comes with 2GB. If you fancy using it, use my referral code and we both get an extra 256MB of storage.
October 7, 2008
Disabling MSN & Live Messenger
There are quite a few guides on how to disable this viral little program. Sadly blocking it’s default port rarely works, because doing so causes the program to switch to port 80, which for most would mean blocking http traffic too.
Several ways to do this on the internet involve editing the registry, this is something that doesn’t appear to work any more.
The only way I’ve found that works is to edit the computers group policy (start > run > gpedit.msc). Under Administrative Templates and Windows components, you’ll find Windows Messenger. Simply set “Do not allow windows messenger to be run” to enabled.
Thats it.
Update: This doesn’t work for Live Messenger, one method I have found that uninstalls WLM completely is to run a command prompt (as administrator), and simply type: msiexec /x {B1403D7D-C725-4858-AACC-7E5FA2D72859}.
Invalid Dynamic Disk – Windows Vista
How to solve this irritating problem!
I recently upgraded to Windows Vista Home Premium. “Why?!” I hear you all cry. Well, it was simply to take advantage of being able to use more then ~3GB of ram. Which I am now doing, having wacked in 8GB of some rather shiny OCZ pc8500 memory.
A few issues abounded once I’d installed, one rather annoying one being that my 500GB second hard drive (I run a 74GB Raptor as my main disk) had been marked as ‘Invalid’ in disk management. Not being willing to switch the disk to another machine, copy the data, format, copy the data back and then reinstall the disk in my windows computer, I needed another solution.
Which was found in the rather excellent disk utility TestDisk.
After extracting the TestDisk archive to a folder, run the program, select the relevant disk, analyse it, set it as a primary partition and then reboot.
Thats it.
Nvidia, Forcedeth and Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)
If, like me, you are a fan of Ubuntu and a fan of keeping up to date, then you will have [fairly]recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, or Hardy Heron.
If, like me, you have an nvidia chipset, and networking drivers on your motherboard, chances are you will be using Forcedeth drivers when booting a fresh install/upgrade. This can cause problems with the ethernet controller, rendering your NIC non-working.
Based on a motherboard running the Nvidia Nforce2 570 chipset.
Here is a fix:
Open a terminal and set:
| $ sudo su
# rmmod forcedeth # modprobe forcedeth msi=0 msix=0 # /etc/init.d/networking restart |
This will hopefully get your network up and running (if you’ve had problems). This works on the current session.
However, who wants to type that in every time you boot your computer? A few options here: You can either put it into a boot-time run script, or you can edit your config to automatically set it when the kernel runs it, which is what I’ve done:
| vi /etc/modprobe.d/options |
added the parameters line:
| options forcedeth msi=0 msix=0 |
and then made the changes to the system (assuming you are still logged in as root, otherwise sudo su/password):
| root@Macgyver: /etc/modprobe.d# update-initramfs -u Terminal returns: update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic |
Thats it.
