Archives for April, 2006
Printer that won’t delete in XP
If you’ve ever configured more than one printer or swapped printers, you may run into the issue I had here. You try to delete the old printer, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Reboots won’t help and Safe Mode doesn’t show any printers. In most cases what has happened is the printer was changed out or went out while you had documents in the print queue. This basically ties the printer up until you clear those out. Notice the the number circled in Figure 1. This is the number of documents this printer is waiting on.
If you right-click on the printer as seen in Figure 2, and click ‘Cancel All Documents,’ your printer will either delete itself (from previous delete command) or will be ready to delete via right-click ‘Delete.’
Endothil-CR, the non-steroid
About a month ago, I read an article in Maxim Magazine that covered a new supplement called Endothil-CR. I was skeptical at first, but read on to find that this is not a steriod. A steroid is more for excelerating muscle growth through hormones while Endothil helps shorten the time it takes for your muscles to recover after a workout. Essentially, you would work a muscle group to exhaustion, then the Endothil would help the muscle rebuilding process between workouts. If your muscles can rebuild at a faster rate, then it allows you to tear them down again and rebuild again in a fraction of the time. Originally this drug was targetted to people with muscle atrophy to help them rebuild the muscles to allow them to function again. Most nutrition retail shops will carry Endothil and it is typically sold in one month supplies (30 tablets) for about $60. GNC usually has price breaks if you inquire about them. I bought some yesterday and will give them a try starting today. We’ll see in a month if they live up to the hype.
More information can be found at the official website.
Hardware failure… Again!
Yesterday, I was pleasantly greeted with the following error on boot:
Hardware Initiate Failed. Please check device!!! The BIOS does not be installed.
I won’t go into Engrish humor here, but we’ll say it doesn’t translate well. Ultimately what is going on here is my RAID Controller is the first thing to load to get the SATA drives up and going to start the Operating System. Somewhere along the way, the RAID Controller didn’t start so no harddrive was detected, which as anyone familiar with computers knows, no harddrive means no workie workie. I did the usual Google research and found that many many, did I say many? many people have had the same issue. Some people have had their drives fail and others have had their SATA cables fail. Being the optimist, I switched my SATA cable for a spare one I had and booted the computer. This time it booted up as if nothing had ever happened. I love it when they do that because the whole time the thing is not working, it feels like the computer is working your last nerve, then at some point you realize this is not a person and hardware will fail from time to time. I just hate it when it is MY time. Perhaps it is because this same computer failed last weekend because of some other issue. We’ll see how long it goes before I post another issue.
I’m feeling the temptation. I want a Mac Mini. I’ll supress that urge for now, but soon, I will make that purchase. 
Cleaning your CompactFlash Card
The other day I thought it necessary to pack an extra CompactFlash card in the event my current one would fill up while on the road. I didn’t ever need the extra, so I left it tucked away in the pocket of my jeans. Today, I began to wonder what I ever did with that card because it was now needed. I searched high and low and then it occurred to me that it may be in the pocket of my pants, but which pants? I looked through all of the pairs I could find before my wife suggested looking in the clothes dryer. There was my CF Card right where I left it in its little plastic case in my jeans. By that time, it had gone through an entire wash and dry cycle. I had no faith in the card ever functioning at that point. I tested it and not only did it work, but it maintained the 2 photos I had stored on there already. I’m not sure it would have worked had it been completely submerged. My washer is a front loading Whirlpool which only fills about 1/3 of the way with water and tosses the clothing through the soapy water.
Lessons Learned: - Empty pockets before removing pants - CompactFlash cards are water-resistant
Windows XP hal.dll missing or corrupt
During a DiVX encode yesterday, my Windows XP box bluescreened and rebooted. It continued to reboot 3 more times before I actually interrupted it with a keypress. Only at that point did I have any idea what had happened. I still don’t know what the cause was, but I do know that I haven’t backed up my data often enough.
C:\Windows\system32\hal.dll missing or corrupt
After a few minutes of research on Google, everything pointed to the boot.ini being corrupt. Microsoft had several solutions here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314477, but getting into the Windows XP Recovery Console was a trick of its own. I’m only using SATA drives, which came a while after XP’s release so RAID drivers must be installed for the Windows XP install disk to even recognize the hard drives. I had to hunt for the drivers on MSI website, then hunt for a working floppy disk. It took longer to find the disk than it did to find the drivers. So I followed Method 2 of Microsoft’s solution and everything works now. In fact, I’m writing this post from my recovered XP box.
Inside the Philips HDD070 GoGear
I recently found this guy who had issues with his GoGear unit decided to remove the covers to see what was underneath. Check out the details and pics here.
Thanks, A Day in the Life of Lynx.
Getting Ink off of your LCD Monitor
Okay, this weekend my youngest daughter decided that paper wasn’t good enough for her scribblings, so she decided to give the LCD monitor a try.
After careful disciplining of the child, the task began for cleaning up the monitor. I tried damp cloth, but it didn’t really get much. My wife remembered that we had some Mr. Clean Magic Eraser pads so we gave those a try. I was reluctant at first because these pads contain some pretty powerful chemicals, that can remove finish from wood, but we proceeded since the monitor was all but ruined with the ink across the front of it. After about 10 minutes of elbow grease, the ink was gone. Everyone should have at least a two pack of these pads around the house.
Maintain one Wishlist
If you are like me, you may find things all over the Internet, and you would like to let others know you want ‘just in case’ a special occasion is coming up. Some sites have wishlists, such as Amazon.com, but these are limited to only the items they carry. I know Amazon has a lot of stuff, but they don’t have everything. To prevent users from having to maintain multiple wishlists all over the Internet, this side up, a UK-based company has created a site called GiftTagging.com where users can consolidate their wishlists into one single location that can be easily shared to friends and family (and strangers, if you are good). Another key feature they have is associating tags for each item which makes it easy for your friends to filter down to a specific category of gift. The site is still in beta form, but appears to be working nicely. Here is my wishlist so far, and by ’so far,’ I mean it will probably grow tenfold knowing my usual tendency to want everything. I’m bad, I know.
NVidia vs. Ubuntu
I’ve had a horrible time of trial and error getting my NVidia drivers running under Ubuntu. I’ll start by explaining the original setup, the problem, then get to what I did to fix.
Original Setup: Pentium 4 with the Riva TNT Pro64 32MB
The default install of Ubuntu detected my card and installed the nvidia-glx drivers which appeared to run as a legacy driver and didn’t perform well with the Compositing enabled. I decided to purchase a GeForce FX 5200 with 128MB assuming the extra horsepower would handle the Compositing without any issues.
The Problem: Upon install, I noticed the card performed even worse than the old card with each window redrawing itself very slowly when minimizing and maximizing. I downloaded the NVidia drivers from their website and installed them. The only true indication I could get that I did something right here was the NVidia splash screen that displayed just before starting X Windows. The NVidia Settings tool I found doesn’t seem to have any helpful tools for setting up the card, rather is more for fine tuning little features like Cursor Shadow.
What I Did: I searched the Internet (Google really) and found ways to check which driver was running and it showed AGPGART was running instead of the NVidia driver I had installed. I then added nvidia to the /etc/modules and blacklisted agpgart. I added modified my xorg.conf to have the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "NV34 [GeForce FX 5200]"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "true" # Disables nVidia's logo on start-up
Option "NvAGP" "0" # Tries internal nVidia AGP drivers first
Option "RenderAccel" "true" # Duh Option "CursorShadow" "true" # Adds an alpha-shadow to your cursor
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true" # Mostly used for cool effects
EndSection
When I had NvAGP set to 1, the gnome-panel (top and bottom bars) wouldn’t load, but setting it to 0 allowed them to load. I’m not completely sure the NVidia drivers loaded because the status I ran earlier only output AGP Disabled, but the screen rendering seems to be much better. I may post an update in the future once I have time to figure out what is happening here.