hints & tricks in no particular order
24/05
I have an installation of TFS 2012 bound to a SQL Server 2012 instance. They were both trial versions that I registered today. TFS went down and refused to work for a very good reason: the TFS databases were down on the SQL Server machine. SQL was stating that Database 'Tfs_Configuration' cannot be started in this […]
16/05
I wanted to replace the standard TFS compare/merge tool with WinMerge, especially since the Visual Studio trial I was using expired. It was not possible for me to configure TFS from Visual Studio as it refused to start. Fortunately a one liner allowed me to do it (in a Developer Command Prompt for VS2012) tf diff […]
10/05
I got my hand on a 2005 computer which needed some fresh OS and a bios upgrade. The PC didn't have a working floppy drive but could fortunately boot on USB (which is not a given on older computers). The trick was to get a USB stick with a bootable FreeDos on it. It was quite easy! Use gparted to create a single FAT16 […]
13/04
I got problems with a linux machine with a very small /boot partition. It wouldn't install any updates anymore and would complain about boot partition being full. I found out that many kernel versions were stored in this partition, and I did a bit of cleanup -- which turned out quite bad because I deleted the active […]
13/04
Beware when creating files with Linux on a Windows partition! Some characters which are allowed in Linux are forbidden in Windows, making those files unavailable. Chkdsk would even treat the files as corrupted and will rename them and put them in a LOST.DIR. So, forbidden characters in Windows are NUL : and \. Some […]
17/03
I've got a JVC HD camcorder which uses a proprietary MTS container. It is however quite simple to re-mux those videos into MKV (without re-encoding, which is also possible but of course much slower): ffmpeg -i input.mt2s -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f matroska input.mkv An a bash script to automate that: […]
15/01
Same story as before, but on Windows 8 instead of 7. It has been a bit more difficult to install the ATI driver. What I did: Download the ATI Legacy drivers (x64 | x86). Install them, going all the way until they fail. Download the ATI MobilityModder and install it. When it is finished, copy the mobility modder patch […]
25/11
Note that you will need flac and lame for this to work. Run the following line in the directory where the flac files are: for file in *.flac; do flac -cd “$file” | lame -h – “${file%.flac}.mp3″; done You can also make lame create the mp3 files somewhere else. Take the following line: for file in *.flac; do flac -cd […]
24/11
24/11
I quite broke Android on the Mele today, and the easiest way to fix it (without opening it or reinstalling it entirely) is to boot an alternative linux distro. I tried: Linaro 12.07 by CNX-Soft Image name linaro-precise-alip-20120724-274 Needs 4 GB SD Card Display is laggy, but access to internal file system, fine for […]
24/11
The Mele is really a nice mini computer but Android is sometimes a bit weird; when connecting a hard drive through the embedded sata port, media players are reluctant to scan it, making it difficult to launch movies or music from it. I tweaked Android a bit so that it thinks that main storage is the hard drive. This […]
17/11
I recently installed a PC running Ubuntu in an encrypted drive. The next step was to use a VPN provider to anonymize it a bit. I first used the Network Manager to configure and run the VPN, but I was a bit confused by the GUI, and wanted to customize the VPN a bit more. Moreover Network Manager stores its settings […]
17/11
I recently reinstalled Ubuntu 12.10 from scratch on a PC with a nvidia GeForce 9300 embedded. The only particular thing is that it was connected to the monitor through VGA. Unfortunately, the display was stuck at 1366x768 instead of the native resolution 1680x1050 no matter if I used the nouveau or the nvidia drivers. […]
11/11
24/10
As said in my previous post, Android 4 on MID8127 is not ready for prime time. But going back to Android 2.3 wasn't as easy as I expected: Install RecoveryTool.apk package Copy update.zip (Clockwork Mod) to your "internal SD card" (might be /sdcard/tflash) Open Recovery Tool app, and then choose update.zip, it will […]
20/10
I got a MpMan 827 Android tablet for cheap (60 €) but it was Android 2.3 Gingerbread only. MpMan 827 is just another name for the Coby Kyros 8127, or MID8127, and Coby Germany released Android 4.1 Jelly Bean for this one. Granted you cheat a bit with the serial number (took 101110010XXX with 3 last digits being the […]
03/09
Tried to use Nero to convert and burn an audio CD. It would always giving me a "incorrect parameter" error and refuse to do anything. It turned out I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 recently and didn't use Nero ever since... Fortunately I could a find an answer to this problem: sudo mkdir /usr/lib64 sudo ln -s /usr/lib/nero […]
30/07
30/06
I noticed my system was using IDE (and not AHCI) and it is highly recommended to use AHCI for SSD drives. Ubuntu won't complain if mode is switched from one to the other. However, Windows 7 is a bit more picky as the AHCI driver is disabled by default (to gain a few seconds at startup) and thus won't boot in AHCI mode. […]
24/06
Bought one, was with firmware 1.5 / Android 2.3 -- Works good, doesn't need much power. Current main issue: no sound over HDMI for .mkv files (with .ac3 or .dts tracks it seems) Will try to update to Android 4.0 -- this is not an official build (yet) but there should be soon an official Android 4 for Mele: wget […]