hints & tricks in no particular order
21/04
Already got the issue in the past on my Asus P6T Deluxe V2, solved it and forgot about it. But a recent Clear CMOS operation (to retrieve full USB 2.0 ports that were somewhat downgraded to 1.1, weird issue) brought it to light again. After checking this post High Pitched Noise Coming From Vertex 2 60GB SSD, it became […]
12/11
11/09
I want to be able to start XBMC Live remotely. XBMC being based on Ubuntu, it was not so hard to achieve, once I understood I should follow the Ubuntu tutorial rather than the XBMC one. You may need to install the ethtool package sudo apt-get install ethtool You can then try to enable WOL manually sudo ethtool -s eth0 […]
11/09
21/07
By default, a domain controller use its BIOS clock as a reference, making all computers on the domain synchronizing on this not so reliable time service. To change that, you can use the Microsoft Fix It 50395 patch or edit the registry directly. Using Fix It, you just need to give it a reliable NTP server. In the […]
13/07
I dislike MP3 but less than I dislike WMA :-) Anyway, my car CD player wouldn't want to play WMA. So: 1. Install Medibuntu repository in 1 line sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && […]
16/05
I had to fix a computer with Vista Family Premium 32 bits installed where browsing the internet was nearly impossible. Any loading of a web page would take minutes, because of a very slow DNS resolution. After investigating for a while, I found out that buggy IPv6 implementation in Vista was the culprit. Hundreds of […]
17/04
Turned out to be quite easy, as long as you have a firmware <3.55 to start with. It is also recommended that the PS3 doesn't have access to the Internet. Download the original 3.55 firmware from a trusted source Copy it on a USB stick formatted in FAT32 under a folder tree called PS3/UPDATE Start the PS3 with the […]
17/04
Extract audio tracks out of a video DVD appeared to be a one liner in Ubuntu. Command line power! for i in {01..11}; do mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast -ao pcm:file=output$i.wav -chapter $i-$i DVD://01; done The previous example extracts audio from chapters 1 to 11 and store them is wav files called outputXX.wav
02/04
02/04
It looks like Windows engineers forgot that other OS can coexist with the beast. As a result, the SP1 installation can fail (error code 0x800F0A12) if the Windows partition is not marked as active. Here is a soft fix: search Disk Management and run it. Find any partition which has 'system' flag, mark it as active. […]
23/03
12/02
12/02
I got myself a very unexpensive laser printer bundled with a third party toner. The printing industry being quite conservative when it comes to refilling, the printer didn't accept the toner in question. I had to flash a modified firmware so that the printer wouldn't complain anymore. Note that the following procedure […]
22/01
I had no network connection during the installation of XBMC Live, and this is why it was disabled at runtime. It was not very difficult to fix: Edited /etc/network/interfaces and added the ethernet interface -- I do not need the wifi (wlan0) and didn't add it. # Loopback interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # […]
16/01
XBMC Live is based on Ubuntu and can be installed permanently just the same. In the future, OpenELEC might surpass the official XBMC build, but it is not there yet. It worked just fine; however I ran through a weird issue with HDMI sound output that I wanted to document here. By default, even if HDMI video output is […]
15/01
I went trough the cumbersome exercise of cleaning up my Pictures library, which consists of more than 20 000 images. Needless to say it's completely impossible without a good tool. I usually use fslint under Ubuntu, but there are not so many options. Under Linux, one can do quite powerful tools in a one line bash code. […]
31/12
Nostalgia... I recently got a good old Amstrad CPC+ to play with, unfortunately without monitor. The Amstrad monitors also act as power supplies. I therefore need to find a power supply and a SCART cable. Power supply is easy: the CPC+ only needs 5V and 2400mA (the 12V line was necessary for the first generation of […]
30/11
As of DD-WRT v.24 SP1, it is now possible to set up DD-WRT as an OpenVPN server. Which is a pretty good thing, because I needed to setup one of these beasts! I used Windows as a client, but also to generate the various configuration, certificate and key files. Initial setup First, install OpenVPN for Windows. At the […]
27/11
After the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 I noticed the Ubuntu theme was sometimes reverted to the default Gnome one, meaning fonts, icons, toolbars are all reset. I tried a clean reinstall but the same bug raised up again. It seems to be a race condition appearing on higher hardware (combination of SSD + core i7). The […]