Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Bit of a drama earlier in the week – our digital set-top box got fried by its own power supply.

I have a Topfield TF5000PVRtMPB (5000 Masterpiece) digital set top box and PVR, and apparently this model has a known problem where the power supply sometimes puts out a much higher voltage than it is supposed to (not sure why). This will on occasions cause some components on the motherboard to be damaged - in my case, it fried the digital tuners. The symptoms were that when I went to upgrade the firmware I could no longer scan for new channels – it simply didn’t find anything because the tuners no longer worked.

I called Topfield, they suggested I bring it in so they could check for me what the problem was and give me a quote on repairing it. They are only over in Lidcome, so I drove over that afternoon.

They confirmed the fault and offered to replace the motherboard and the powersupply – which they did in about 15 minutes and charged me $220 for including labour. Given that it would cost me around $500 to buy a replacement for it – I thought it was worth spending the money to repair it.

The only problem now I have is that there is a known bug with the version of the firmware I’m using where it sometimes fails to fire the timers for recording shows. I’ve already had problems with this once (very annoying – I missed the final of Scrapheap Challenge on ABC2) – so I’ve uploaded a hacked version of the firmware which may (or may not) help with this bug – I’ll have to keep a close eye on things to make sure all the timers are working.

I have a couple of Thecus N2100 NAS boxes (Network Attached Storage), which I use for bulk data storage and backup purposes. They are basically just hard drive enclosures with a built in computer to handle file serving requirements – not much larger than two 3.5″ hard drives. They have two drives so you can either run them as one large drive (or just a bunch of drives), or you can run them in RAID mode which mirrors the two drives – if one drive fails, you have a duplicate of the data and can recover (naturally, if both drives fail at the same time, you still lose everything – which is why backups are still important). They also have gigabit ethernet, so it’s very fast to transfer large files around – but only if you have a gigabit switch to connect all your devices!

I have two of these drives – and one of them (my backup drive) has now been running for over 450 days non-stop.

I only mention this because I plan on shutting them down while we’re away – no point running automated backups when there’s nothing to back up. I would normally leave the drives and my backup server running (the backup server also controls my digital set top box PVR), but I figure it’s a bit too long to leave them unattended – and I don’t want to risk electrical problems causing a fire (not that would I expect this to happen).

The fact that I’m also taking my backup server with me when we go away isn’t actually all that relevant … in reality my backup server is a “virtual” server. I have my T41 ThinkPad running VMware Server – with the VMware image stored on network backup drive. I could easily install the VMware Server software on one of my other machines and then just fire up the VMware image across the network and my backup server would be running again … but I don’t want to leave any of my other machines running either – so I’ll just shut them all down.

It’s a pity I won’t get to see how long I can leave the drive running without requiring a reboot!

Having major withdrawal symptoms at the moment – a Telstra tech cut our phone line yesterday afternoon while in the process of trying to fix a long running problem with our next-door neighbours phone lines. Unfortunately he couldn’t fix ours – we now have the same problem our neighbours do. Apparently we share the same cabling up until it almost reaches our house … it is all very old and brittle, and has broken.

I’m currently sitting in the car park of McDonalds in Cremorne using their Telstra WiFi hotspot – but only because Gloria Jeans in Crows Nest only has free WiFi until 7pm. I might have to go in there tomorrow and use it for a while.

It was supposed to be a busy week getting things finished before Christmas – but I can’t get any work done without a phone line or internet connection!! I would buy a wireless broadband card, but it’s way too expensive to justify for the rare occasions I would use it.

Telstra have promised the line will be fixed by midnight Thurday at the latest … aarrrgghh … 3+ days without connectivity – how am I supposed to run a business like that ?????

1. download latest video drivers from ATI
2. download DriverHeaven’s DH Mobility Modder.net tool and follow the instructions (as summarised here)
3. uninstall current drivers supplied by IBM / Lenovo
4. install new drivers – this step will most likely fail, but should at least copy the driver files to the computer
5. unzip Mobility Modder zip file and run the MobilityDotNET.exe file
6. point the modder tool at the directory where the drivers were installed and let the tool do its magic
7. run the video driver setup program – it should now work and install the drivers!
8. you might need to install the monitor definition files that came with your external screen as well

The only thing I haven’t got working yet is to get IBM’s Presentation Director to recognise the new resolutions available on the external monitor – although I did work around this by configuring the screens directly using ATI’s Catalyst Control Center and then using the “Capture” facility in Presentation Director to set that as “My Normal Display Settings” (which unfortunately you cannot duplicate to generate multiple configurations).

A bit of background:

My parents are staying with us at the moment, and Dad brought his IBM ThinkPad R50 with him. He decided to buy a new external monitor so we went to the local computer store and he chose a new Samsung 20″ widescreen LCD monitor (1680×1050 resolution).

Unfortunately, when we went to connect it to his R50, the laptop wouldn’t recognise the new widescreen resolution. I tried loading the monitor drivers that came with the screen, but that didn’t help. I tried updating all the other laptop drivers (especially video) from IBM, but that didn’t help either … the laptop simply didn’t recognise what resolutions the screen could do.

After some searching on Google, I came across the DriverHeaven website and their DH Mobility Modder.net tool.

Apparently ATI deliberately prevent OEM machines (eg laptops with ATI chips embedded like the ATI MOBILITY RADEON 7500 in the ThinkPad R50) from downloading and installing drivers directly from ATI – they expect you to get them from the PC manufacturer (which is normally good enough) … however, when the laptop manufacturer fails to include support for new monitor resolutions running on the external VGA display – it becomes an issue.

Fortunately DriverHeaven’s tool will trick the installer into thinking it’s just a regular PC and not an OEM model, and so will allow the drivers (which generally work very well) to be installed, with all the support for the new screen resolutions available in modern monitors.

Once installed, I was able to use the Catalyst Control Center to configure the external screen – and it worked a treat.

I’ve noticed an annoying beep that happens sometimes when I type. It’s always happened at random times with many of the ThinkPad’s I’ve used, but I’ve never found out what was causing it. It has become extremely annoying with my new T60, because the beep (which sounds like a plain old “system beep” kind of sound), is actually really really loud – especially when I have my headphone plugged directly into my laptop … the volume control doesn’t seem to make any difference either.

So, I decided to try a Google search to see if I could work out how to turn off this system beep … there didn’t seem to be any options in the ThinkPad Configuration application.

I quickly found the reason for the problem and the solution (Google to the rescue again !).

It turns out that for some very strange reason, there are certain keys on the ThinkPad keyboard that when you press three of them at once, the system beeps. I have no idea why they would do that.

It seems that I (like some other people who have reported the same problem), type so quickly, that the laptop considers that we are actually hitting three keys at once (or it may be that we are hitting two at once, with the third being a key hit accidentally at the same time).

According to Greg Hughes, if at least two of the keys “4567rtyufghjvbnm” are pressed, along with any third key in the same row at the two that were pressed, the system will beep. Hmmm – why would they do that (only thing I can think of is some undocumented system diagnostic tool ?)

Anyway, Greg linked to Elliot Lee who provides the surprisingly simple solution – there happens to be a “Beep” driver that can be disabled. The trick is that it is hidden from the normal list of drivers.

The solution (for Windows XP … unsure about other versions):

1. Go to Device Manager … Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager

2. (the trick !!) Show Hidden Devices. (Look in the menu … View -> Show hidden devices).

3. In the “Non-Plug and Play Drivers” section, you will find a “Beep” driver … double click on it to open the properties – then click on the “Driver” tab in the properties dialog.

4. Click on the “Stop” button to turn it off now, and set the Startup Type to “Disabled” to prevent it starting again.

Simple huh ? Thanks to Greg and Elliot for the answer (and to Google for letting me find them easily !).