9 Jan, 2007
Today I was taking some cute shots of my youngest daughter as she was jumping on the trampoline with her hair full of static, but when I wanted to show my wife the pictures I took, my camera said, “No image” with a error code displaying “Err 02.” Having never seen this code, I thought the worst. Will I need to get my camera serviced? I have a first generation Digital Rebel, so I looked on Canon’s site to find out what that error meant and their site really didn’t help matters. It simply said, if normal troubleshooting didn’t work for this error code, I would need to have my camera serviced. Worst case come true? No. I decided to try another card and see if it was able to write and read using the camera and it had no issues. All was good with my camera, but I was still missing those pictures. Having accepted the loss, I decided to reformat the card using the camera’s interface. When I went to the format screen in the menu, it showed me that I had 22MB used on the memory which sounds like a small load of pictures, right? Right!! The filesystem on the card was corrupt, but using an application on my Mac (also available on Windows) called PhotoRescue, I was able to do just that. I recovered all of the photos I thought I had lost forever, and actually pulled a photo from a few years ago that I hadn’t seen since then. This software was very very easy to use and only cost $29, but that cost seemed smalled considering how often this might happen. I think I was fortunate to go this long without having this issue before.
http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/
1 Oct, 2006
About every six months or so I like to post my current computer lineup which is very basic information about the computers and most importantly, what operating systems I’m running on each.
Mac Mini Core Duo (2GB RAM) - Mac OS X 10.4
AMD64 3500+ (1GB RAM) - Windows XP –> soon to be SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10
HP 1.4GHz (1GB RAM) - Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)
Sony VAIO Notebook (256MB RAM) - Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)
AMD 2600+ (1GB RAM) - Windows XP
This is not looking good for Microsoft. The only remaining machine with Windows on it is the one my daughters use for gaming. However, I did purchase Cedega last year, but never got past the install stage. Cedega should allow me to run all/most of their Windows games under Linux. I may try that in a couple of months. They’ll be due for a reformat of Windows by then anyway.
19 Jul, 2006
For the past week, I thought my Mac was starting to crap out because I couldn’t connect to the MSN network using CyberDuck Adium, which worked fine weeks prior. Everytime I launched it, I got the ‘just crashed’ screen. Well today I setup Gaim on my Ubuntu box and tried to connect to the MSN network only to have Gaim autoclose itself.
Is this a case of being blocked by Microsoft since I’m not using a supported version of Windows Messenger? At the moment, I don’t know, but it really is bothersome.
Anyone has ideas for me to try to test this?
UPDATE:
I ran gaim on my Ubuntu box with debug turned on and noticed that everything was fine until it loaded the Encarta Answers contact. I removed Encarta Answers from my Contact List and it launched without problems. Seeing as this is a Windows Messenger only feature, I don’t think removing that contact will ever be a problem.
5 Jul, 2006
I try to get my hands into everything computer related so I have a good range of machines. I’m not really into gaming, so I don’t have any suped up rigs. The good news is that all of my OSes are legal versions. The bad news is that I need to get rid of some of these machines. My electric bill is probably impacted greatly by this computer lab I have set up in my office.
- Mac Mini 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM (Mac OS X 10.4)
- Custom AMD64 3500+ with 1GB RAM (Windows XP Pro)
- HP Pavilion 7965 1.6GHz P4 with 1GB RAM (Ubuntu Linux 6.06)
- Custom AMD 2600+ with 1GB RAM (Windows XP Pro)
- Sony VAIO 1GHz Pentium-M Notebook with 256MB RAM (Windows XP Home)
- eMachines W1640 AMD 1600+ with 768MB RAM (SuSE Linux 10.1) - For sale $100 plus any applicable shipping costs. Photos and specs available upon request.
28 Jun, 2006
I never gave it much thought until today when I tried to capture my Remote Desktop screen to my remote desktop. Obviously this will work if you need it on the computer you are on, but suppose you are working on graphics. If you capture the screen locally, you’ll end up with the compressed-for-terminal-services image, which is likely not what you really wanted. I haven’t fully played with this ‘feature’ because of lack of time and the knowledge of other keyboard functions that do not work through Remote Desktop, but by hitting CTRL with the usual ALT + PrintScn, then screen was captured to the remote clipboard. Problem Solved!
26 Jun, 2006
I was thinking this morning that of the people I know, and surround myself with, only one person (podious) shares the same interests when it comes to the Internet. Percentage wise, this is very low. Here are some things I use often that would qualify anyone as a web geek (IMHO):
Can anyone think of other things that qualify someone as a web geek?
21 Jun, 2006
I have a legacy VB Script that regularly parses XML files, then suddenly stopped working. It gave the error that I was denied access using the msxml3.dll. What I later found out after discussion, was that .NET 2.0 was installed on this machine which upgraded the version of the XMLHTTP object. So here is the breakdown:
< .NET 2.0 use Microsoft.XMLHTTP
Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
= .NET 2.0 use Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0
Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0")
4 Jun, 2006
These are items I need to get worked out before I can move to my Mac Mini fulltime.
- get Mozilla Thunderbird configured and showing all mail from previous Profile (Thunderbird on Ubuntu Linux)
- find a good DVD Copy program that works without a hitch
- get my music stored off on a larger hard drive. I’m currently approaching the limit on my 40GB hard drive. I was thinking of getting a MiniStack v2 and putting the spare 120GB I have in it.
- get my iTunes setup as it is on XP with my music and podcast subscriptions.
- get my photo collection moved over from XP
- get my DiVX movie collection moved over from XP (BTW Handbrake is an awesome app that is very easy to use and can even crop out letterboxes!)
- get all of my FTP Sites setup in CyberDuck.
I believe that is it. Some of you might be wondering why I even posted this. The answer is because I needed to checklist for myself and this just happen to pop into my head when I was looking at my blog.
10 May, 2006
I’m usually not too keen to running Windows software on Mac hardware, but I was curious of one thing. Since Apple likes to claim they can better support their systems because of hardware uniformity, then has someone created a SlipStream install of Windows XP that will work flawlessly on Mac Hardware since all of their hardware is the same?
I think Mac hardware is great, but their bread and butter is their design team especially when it comes to their UIs. I’m waiting for the day when Mac OSX becomes available for the standard x86 machine. I would buy 4 copies Opening Day! Meanwhile, I’ll be tempting myself with the new MacMinis.
Here is a pic showing XP Running on a MacBook Pro.
28 Apr, 2006
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.
Figure 1
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.’
Figure 2
15 Apr, 2006
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.
27 Mar, 2006
Linking to a PDF on a web page is easy enough:
<a href="mypdf.pdf">This is my PDF</a>
Not until Acrobat 7.0 came out could you link directly to a page within a pdf, such as sending someone to page 4 of the PDF to skip straight to the pertinent content.
<a href="mypdf.pdf#page=4">This is my PDF</a>
Note: This feature only exists in Adobe’s Acrobat product, but I don’t see it being much longer before an Open Source PDF Viewer will implement this feature.
