Results tagged “Computers” from Kazza the Blank One

Formatted my C: drive last night and installed Windows 7 proper.  Copped plenty of flak at work for buying it retail, but now that I come to think of it, it's probably the first time I've *ever* paid full price for an operating system.. The last couple have come with the PCs and before that it was all uni stuff.  

Something weird happened with the electricals tonight.  First there was silence from the right side of the room.  Then the UPS started beeping.  For about a second I wondered why my computer hadn't been booted.  Then it died.  Then it all kept tripping in and out and computers kept restarting.  I disconnected power to mine until everything settled.  Discovered that all the power points in the house had lost power.  So went out to turn back on the safety switch.  

Lifehacker posted a utility a while back called Exif Date Changer.  I used it to great effect on Sandra's Japan photos last night, to add 17 minutes (actually to remove 43 minutes from actual time) to bring all her photos into sync with the rest of ours.  

• Perl at my hosting provider, which has broken my captchas, which has broken commenting on my blog
• FTPing in Windows 7
• Printing in Windows 7

Had a crap crap crap day today. 

A simple oversight (basically from me not RTFM) caused hours of stress while I tried to figure out why something wasn't working :(  Complete waste of time, and it was all my fault :(

The computer shop didn't have a screwdriver capable of opening the faulty Seagate disk (enclosure).  This is a disk that was dying with bad sectors so we took it back to Officeworks where we bought it, but they said it was fine and gave it back to us.  It was *not* fine, and subsequent attempts to format it resulted in all sorts of horrible noises coming out of it.  But because Officeworks is a pain in the rear end to get to, and we'd left it so long, and we hate that sort of thing, we never ended up getting it replaced.  So just want to rip the thing out of its enclosure and replace it with something else.  If we can get the screws out.  Have left it with them, they are going to see what they can do.

Spent the evening fighting with hard drives and computers.  Discovered I could have actually mounted the external hard drive with a writable ntfs mount.  If I'd done that it would have been much easier to get the files off it now.

Basically a grumpy crappy day :(

• work was very unsettling this week
• had to go in to rebuild a server last night.. was very sleepie, but at least the overtime money will be good
• on call again.  One week in three is too often IMHO
• watched STIV: The Voyage Home tonight.  One of my favourite Star Trek movies.  It was more similar to the book than the other movies had been, but there was still more detail about some things in the book
• house is a mess, hope to clean it up somewhat this weekend
• cooked a yummy pasta dinner tonight with these scrummy portabella mushrooms
• we need a real server that we can attach the skype phone to and have decent storage
• Stu needs new batteries for his UPS
  

Cause I'll never remember them next time.

• SNMP is part of add/remove programs or whatever the equivalent is in Vista
• SNMP is configured through the services control panel
  
• You have allow computers you want to connect to SNMP in the security tab of the SNMP service properties
  
• You have to allow your firewall software to allow the connection from the other computer (in my firewall this was in at least two places grrrr)
  

Useful link

Stoopid computer crashed tonight while trying to watch a YouTube video.  Well it didn't actually crash, it just stopped displaying anything other than the cursor arrow.  All the usual tricks didn't work so ended up having to kick the thing.. sigh!

ok so maybe you can get some good deals there.  But I've been to all of two or three computer fairs in my life, and the last two (this year) have been epic fail.  Not the fairs themselves.  But the products for sale therein. 

First there was the usb hub.  $12.  Works intermittently.  Will work for a while, then things will just drop out.  Device has to be disconnected and reconnected.  Since it's way up the back of my computer/work desk, this is too impractical for words.  Pulled it out and now it's gathering dust.  Epic fail!

Then there was the VGA to DVI converter dongle.  $9.  Makes the monitor not be able to display white, no matter how much I fiddle with the settings.  Pretty sure this monitor worked perfectly on my last computer.  Probably epic fail!

The rack-mountable patch panel we got that day actually seems to work.  Win!

The airwolf remote-controlled helicopter.  $28.  Bought batteries for it yesterday.  The remote control console doesn't even switch on!!  Epicest fail of all!!!

There's also a ps/2 to usb mouse dongle I got for $3, but haven't tested that yet.  I'm guessing with three out of four failures so far, the probably of it not working are pretty high.

Which is why I will never again waste $3 on computer fairs.

It was most depressing waking up this morning.  My weekend was definitely too short. 

The downstairs room is somewhat more organised, although had to sacrifice my model bookshelf to do it.  Guess the models won't be coming out of storage for a while longer.  And a trip to Ikea will be necessary pretty soon. 

Having trouble copying files from our vista machines to the old w2k box.  Not sure if is problem with the old machine itself (although Skype seems to work quite happily) or some weird interaction between vista and w2k.  Wouldn't surprise me if it was vista...

Have had D&Y over for the past week so I've been totally slack at keeping up my blog, cause it's just all too hard..

*yawn*

Cool news for today - we got a rack setup in the garage, with patch panel and everything.  Now we just need a rack mountable gigabit switch.....

A *very very* long time ago (read: 1996), Guy introduced me to Laserwar.

Well it never worked from Windows 2000 onwards, so I haven't played it in a *very* long time. 

But was I was backing up my computer tonight I noticed it again and asked Stu if he had dos 6 on disks anywhere so I could setup a virtual machine to play all my old games.  He said just use dosbox.  So I did!  And dredged up the memories of playing this rather fun little game...

We bought a toy with our wedding present money... a little Asus Eee PC.  This was to replace the Windows 98 (!) laptop that I've been dragging around for years.  While the 98 laptop works ok, our new Sandisk 8GB Cruzer micro disks won't work with it, and it doesn't have wireless.  So on an impulse two days before we left, we got this.  And then swapped it with Yvonne who wanted a pink one but couldn't get it (and we could *only* get pink).

I have to admit I fell in love with it very quickly.  The keyboard is a bit hard to type on, the screen is microscopic, the drive is tiny (4gb)... *but* it's solid state so very little chance of the hard drive just dying, wireless just works, it's unlikely to get viruses, it's small and light, devices just work with it.

Of course Stu also likes it, so it's been a bit of an ongoing battle to get to use it ;)  He thinks we shoulda gotten two.  Which isn't *such* a silly idea.. hehe