Larry’s Things .net

This concert was awesome.    Listening to John William’s music in it’s true full spectrum analog form is waaay better than any 44.1 kHz sampled CD.   Definitely worth the ticket price, around $60 CDN for 301 level seats directly facing the stage - which in my opinion are the best seats to view it, as you have a full clear view of everything.

One thing that another person commented on another site was the number of kids in attendance, which to this person, detracted from the experience.   Here in the Toronto concert, yes, lots of kids were in attendance, but all in all, they were well behaved.   But step back for a minute…  Star Wars is a kids movie series, of course there’s going to be kids at this concert!   I mean, jeez, look at all the merchandizing and marketing from Kenner toys when Star Wars first came out… it was kids playing with Star Wars toys.   I’m not sure how the musicians are going to handle their punishing schedule, it’s practically every other day in a different city!   How the hell are they going to assemble and disassemble all the equipment that quickly.   My only guess is that they have two identical sets that leap frog each other and different sets of musicians.

Click on picture for full size

On one of our workstations, we started getting a word too long error from the labcshrc start up script, and hence unable to start the coot software.    The problem was that the setenv PATH was too long for tcsh to handle.   It looks like the sbgrid people tried to temporarily fix it by creating a link at /programs/l that linked to /programs/i386-linux , and in the shell script at /programs/i386-linux/linuxlabcshrc - all references to i386-linux was changed to l .   However,  there were some places in the script at /programs/labcshrc that set the path to i386-linux instead of just l , and it was using up valuable variable space.   Search and replace all references in labcshrc of /programs/i386-linux to /programs/l , and it should fix the “word too long” problem.

Seems to be much better than endnote, and it’s free!    Allows cross platform mac/pc access to your citations.

http://www.zotero.org/

squashfs

http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/

http://picocomputing.com/

Have an old Tungsten T that’s been on 24 hours, 7 days per week, when it suddenly had the backlight die.   Numerous soft resets and poking around did not fix it.   However, just a hard reset was all that was needed to restore the backlight to working order.   Hard reset on the Tungsten T is done by holding down the on/off button on the top left corner, then inserting something pointy (like the stylus) , into the back reset button, and hold for around 5 seconds.  

Cool website that lets you order ontario wines that are not normally sold at the LCBO:

http://www.winerytohome.com

We get a lot of laptops coming to us from people who’ve obviously not taken very good care of their computing equipment. There are a number of easy habits to prevent the most common laptop issues.

1) Snapped power connector: This is one of the more common and more expensive causes of laptop failure. A person would lift the front of the laptop and rest the entire weight of the laptop on the power cable. This unfortunately breaks the solder connections of the laptops’ power connector to the motherboard. The symptoms are that the laptop then runs on batteries until it’s depleted and the power adapter charger is unable to charge the laptop. You will also see that the charge light LED that usually shows up when it’s plugged in, does not light up. Also, if you use an another power adapter from another matching laptop, the symptoms are still the same (eliminating the possibility that the adapter is the failure point) . If you are lucky, jiggling or pushing/pulling the connector in a particular direction might put the soldering into contact again, which means that you could use an eraser, rubber band, duct tape, or whatever to hold it in place - either that or spend several hundred dollars to replace the board. If you happened to break it while it’s still under warranty, don’t mention anything to the laptop manufacturer about breaking the connector, just act dumb and accuse them of shoddy workmanship. This problem does not occur on the Mac line of laptops that use the “Magsafe” connector - since the connector just harmless falls off if excessive lateral pressure is placed on the connector.

2) Kinked cable syndrome: This happens due to repeatedly holding the charger cabling too tightly while winding the cables for storage. Eventually, the copper wiring inside breaks and you end up with the inability to charge your laptop. Make sure you hold the cable loosely in the hand so that the internal copper wiring doesn’t get twisted.

3) Hard drive click of death: This usually happens on computers over 3+ years. Unfortunately, the quality of hard drives has declined these past years, and the inevitable result are more failures. Only way to prevent this is to buy time by shutting off your computer if you’re not using it, or to activate the power saving features. Always make sure to make backups.

If the TTC goes through with the proposed 25 cent fare increase for tokens, $2.25 to $2.50 - an 11% increase. A 50 token roll costs $112.50 at current pre-hike prices. Post-hike prices, the token roll will cost $125.00 (par value) . From Nov. 6 to Jan. 3, are approximately 2 months. That means that your return is 5.5% per month. Buying 10 rolls for $1125 in November, means that you’ll gain $1250-$1125=$125 in 2 months.

Advantages - For a family of 4, 500 tokens can get used up quite quickly. Likelyhood of TTC tokens to become obsolete is pretty low, and there’s always some sort of 1:1 conversion service offered at the time the currency changes. The likelyhood of an increase in fare price is pretty close to 100%, and there’s very little chance that the token value can go down below current face value, or even more unlikely to zero. The gains are not taxable.

Cons - TTC tokens are not a very liquid investment. It’s not easy to convert TTC tokens back to cash, in fact, it’s probably illegal to resell tokens. Tokens are not interest bearing. There’s only the one time increase every 2 or so years. You can’t resell the tokens back to the TTC for cash.

An average commuter probably uses the TTC 45 times per month, meaning 588 times in a year, or $1323 in tokens.

Is the ttc metropass worth the money? Before the hike, a metropass costs $109. An average commuter needs to use the TTC at least 45 times in a month. So 109/45=$2.42 . That’s below the cash price of $2.75, but above the token price of $2.25 . You’ll need to use the metropass at least 49 times in a month in order to break even ($109/49=$2.22) compared to a token. At the hiked price of $126, you’ll need to use the ttc at least 51 times in order to break even with a token price of $2.50 ($126/51=$2.47). So for an average commuter, you’ll need to use the TTC 6 more times than usual in order to make the metropass worthwhile.

http://www.diylife.com/2008/02/02/show-pc-stats-on-analog-gauges/

http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/

Originally written by Confused Fishcake

HOW-TO Use LCD Smartie with any laptop lcd

Just to clarify from the title, this mod enables you to use any (WORKING) laptop as an lcd screen to print system stats to. I have managed to get a windows 3.1 laptop working with this method, but any windows OS should work, and I am sure a linux box would work with a little tweaking.

This guide is not complete, as at the moment the laptop will only display 4 X 40 lines of text. As and when I work out how to increase this, then I will update the guide.

These are the parts/software you will need for the mod:

2 X female 9-pin serial connectors
Enough wire to connect the serial ports (Only 2 pins are needed, so not much wire is needed.)

Tera Term Terminal emulator (For the laptop):
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html
I chose the version for win 3.1, but you may want a later version.

LCD Smartie (For the host pc)
http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/
I like this LCD software, but with a bit of common sense, any other software that supports serial lcds could be used.

First, the hardware:

Connect pin 2 of the laptop’s serial port to pin 3 of the host pc’s serial port.
Connect pin 5 of the laptop’s serial port to pin 2 on the host pc’s serial port.

These connections seem nonsensical, but they worked for me. I originally tried ground-ground and datain-dataout, but I found it only worked when I wired it up like this. If anyone has success with other wiring, please let me know.

Now onto the software:

Install LCD Smartie on the host pc, and configure it as follows:
Matrix orbital 4 X 40
Com port … (I used 1) 19200 baud

Install tera term on the laptop, and configure as follows:
Terminal size 42 X 12
Com 1 serial port
19200 Baud
Data: 7 bit
Even parity
1 bit stop
no flow control
Font (this is important) courier new size 24

Connect the computers together, and see what happens, if you get anything on the laptop (As long as Smartie is trying to show something) even if it is garbled, then the wiring went ok. If not, or if something catches on fire, check your wirings carefully. You will probably be able to read text at this point, but it will slant horribly down the screen. Here comes the fun part - displaying readable text. Disable all scrolling/bouncing in Smartie, and set all the refresh times to 500. To make sure that each line is refreshed at the same time, you need to make sure that something in every line changes at the same time. I used the in-built date/time setting. This doesn’t need to be shown, but it needs to be sent:

This is my 3rd line of smartie:

CPU Temperature: $Temp2 $Time(ss)

The total line length must be equal to or less than 40. I found that above 40, they display becomes garbled, and less than (around) 38, the time at the end is shown. Try for 40, but 39 is OK, if a value can change length .The time part at the end will not be displayed (it runs off the edge of tera term) but it makes sure that everything is refreshed at the same time. Obviously, if one of your lines is the date/time, then this step is unnecessary.
Make sure that the maximum length of each line does not exceed 40 characters, or the readout will flicker/slide down the page.

My camera isn’t working at the moment, but here are a few screenshots of both the laptop and the pc: (The laptop screeny only shows part of the screen, but it is there.)

http://palmorb.sourceforge.net/index.html

http://frankbuchwald.de/engl_v/serie_05_e.html

Here’s what I did in order to install Windows 7 on an OQO O2 that also has Win XP and Linux - with LILO handling the MBR.1 - make sure Vista OS is updated to SP1 - note - the windows update did not seem to install sp1 properly. I had to manually download and install the SP1 package.2 - use whatever means you feel comfortable to backup the MBR, i.e. DD in linux. use google to search for “backup MBR” . Make sure it is saved onto removable media that is accessible from either windows or linux.3 - install the windows 7 from the DVD . Factor around over 2 hours for the install to complete.4 - At this point the original LILO mbr has been wiped out. A huge caveat for those people using dual boot on an oqo with linux. The windows 7 upgrade will trash the LILO/grub boot sector! Make sure you back up your mbr/boot sector before upgrading to windows 7! Luckily, I’ve made a backup of it… It’s just a matter of restoring the mbr and things should be back to normal. What I’ll do before restoring, is to also make a backup of the current windows 7 installation and mbr before doing the restore, just in case things go horribly wrong. Boot using Knoppix or Backtrack Linux, and use the dd if=mbrbackup of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1 .After installation, the atheros wifi driver did not work. At first, the wifi needed to be manually started (enabled), which is strange. It seemed to connect to the wifi base station and also retrieved the dhcp address, however pinging the gateway did not work. The ethernet was working though, so I used that to connect to windows update and updated the atheros driver that was available from there. Once installed, the driver needed to be “enabled” , and it connected to the internet with no problems after that. So far, windows 7 on a standard issue oqo o2 seems to be a huge improvement over vista. Much faster response and usability speeds.Problems with Windows 7 on OQO O2Some issues I’ve found so far:- the Atheros AR500 wifi driver needs to be manually enabled after every reboot- the brightness controls work - however the original OQO brightness bar that used to show up is now gone- how windows 7 handles connections to wifi is maddeningly confusingUpdate:  Jan 5, 2009I waited until now before trying to install the OQO Manager software.   Some notes:   The trackstick stops working after installing the OQO Manager software…   the problem is that the manager software defaults the trackstick to “less” sensitivity.  The solution is to go to control panel –> OQO settings –> Trackstick , and move the slider bar to more sensitivity.    You’ll need to connect a usb mouse previously in order to do this though.