by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 12, 2007 | Usefull Things
Nxsy mentioned that he is using Google Bookmarks and GMarks to access it from Firefox and I thought I’d give it a try since I’m really not liking del.icio.us at all anymore.
The problem with del.icio.us isn’t just that the name is untypable and unpronouncable it’s lack of good integration with Firefox just spoils it completely. Yeah they have an extension of their own and there are some others that compliment it, but really it’s a pain. I ended up not using my bookmarks because I couldn’t be bothered with the UI.
So I exported my del.icio.us and imported it into Google Bookmarks, re-tagged everything and now using GMarks I think I’ve used my bookmarks more in the last 2 days than in the previous 3 months combined. I love the home-home quicksearch box,the sidebar is marginally useful – mostly for editing/managing the bookmarks, the drop down list of bookmarks I am not fond of, but the quicksearch and convenient in-browser-ui for managing bookmarks makes this a winner.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 7, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’m running a combination XP and OS X machines at home linked together using Synergy. I’ve been contemplating moving away from XP so thought I’ll give Ubuntu another go.
My drives are pretty full except my OS Boot drive, lots of space there so I thought I’ll resize it and put Ubuntu at the end in a small partition while I test things out. It sounded like a good idea at the time but it turned out to be pretty disastrous.
I used the GParted LiveCD to do the resizing after first running a defrag on the drive. On the surface everything went fine but the XP wouldn’t boot.
I admit not reading up enough about the process but it turns out after doing the resize with GParted you’ll need to force chkdsk the boot disk, the only way to do this involves using the XP Setup CD and it’s recovery console.
My machine has a SATA drive that isn’t directly supported by the XP Setup disk so I need to use a Floppy driver disk, I don’t even have a floppy drive anymore so I was pretty much stuck.
I installed Ubuntu 6.10 in the free space, it worked a charm and I soon had at least something back up to get going but still needed to chkdsk the XP partition. I knew the files were there – Ubuntu mounted it on the Desktop – so it was all good, except something small somewhere causing grief.
I was faced with either buying a Floppy drive and Floppy cables, and finding blank floppies somewhere or finding another solution. Solution came in the form of VMWare Server.
VMWare supports mounting RAW partitions into a VM, so in theory I should be able to create a virtual instance that boots my XP Partition, I tried this and ended up with a Blue Screen and immediate reboot. The problem being that my SATA drive shows up as a SCSI drive in XP under VMWare and my XP did not have the right drivers to load the drive and boot from it, so still I needed to chkdsk the drive.
I took my XP CD, downloaded the VMWare Server drivers and mounted that as a floppy into the VM, booted from the CD and loaded the drivers into the CD, ran the recovery console and got a C:\ prompt. Here I was able to chkdsk the stricken partition and eventually boot right into XP, problem solved.
I took this one step further by creating a new hardware profile in my XP box once it was running, loaded in the VMWare SCSI drivers and now I can boot my XP into fully working state under Ubuntu using VMWare.
So, the short of it, yes you can resize your XP Pro Boot disks, even NTFS ones using Open Source tools, but you need to be 100% sure you can get your recovery console up and running to run chkdsk afterwards, my machine is now happy again and booting Ubuntu and XP.
VMware Kicks Arse.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 4, 2007 | Uncategorized
For yonks now I’ve wanted to do proper 2 way sync of my iCal on my mac and pretty much anything, it’s thus far been a virtual island and therefore useless.
I’ve it syncing with my Windows Mobile 5 devices using The Missing Sync which is ok, but not all I want yet, since I am not always by my phone. It also does not answer the sharing problem, I want to have a shared calendar with my SO and thusfar it was just not possible.
Today the fine people at Spanning Sync opened their public beta of a tool that syncs – bi-directional – Google Calendar and iCal. This means I can have my Google Calendar, share it with my SO and use Spanning Sync on both macs to sync to iCal. iCal is a much better interface to use for her than the web interface so this way everyone is happy.
Spanning Sync is still in Beta, final pricing is not finalised yet but judging by the influx of people to their systems and my own experience I’d say they hit the jackpot.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 22, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’ve a number of machines that needs memory upgrades, I didn’t want to turn them off to see what is inside in order to plan this. Under windows it’s pretty easy, just download and run CPU-Z and you’ll know all there is to know.
I did a lot of searching etc and eventually came across dmidecode, you just run it as root and it parses through /dev/mem and loads the DMI tables, parses them and prints them in human readable form.
It shows a lot of useful information, on my IBM HS20 Blade it shows model, serial, hardware numbers etc. Here is a sample of the memory section:
Handle 0x0017
DMI type 16, 15 bytes.
Physical Memory Array
Location: Proprietary Add-on Card
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 16 GB
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Number Of Devices: 4
Handle 0x0018
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM1
Bank Locator: Slot 1
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x0019
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM2
Bank Locator: Slot 2
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001A
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM3
Bank Locator: Slot 3
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001B
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM4
Bank Locator: Slot 4
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous |
Handle 0x0017
DMI type 16, 15 bytes.
Physical Memory Array
Location: Proprietary Add-on Card
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 16 GB
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Number Of Devices: 4
Handle 0x0018
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM1
Bank Locator: Slot 1
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x0019
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM2
Bank Locator: Slot 2
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001A
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM3
Bank Locator: Slot 3
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001B
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM4
Bank Locator: Slot 4
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
So I have 4 total memory slots, each slot has a 512MB DDR module in it, this means I’ll be throwing it all away and buying new RAM.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 18, 2007 | Front Page
I bought a Nintendo Wii, it was not easy I’ve spent hours trying to source one eventually the guys over at Stocknetwork delivered the goods, they notified me by email that the someone would have stock the next morning and managed to get it in the 10 minutes they had stock.
I bought a few games apart from the Wii Sport. I got Need for Speed Carbon, Zelda and Call of Duty 3.
The console is totally addictive and I wouldn’t have thought it but the Wii Sports package is the killer. Call of Duty totally disappoints due to the difficult controls, Need for Speed is fun I like driving with the nunchuck it’s the first driving game that I actually manage to play well since before I was stuck with keyboards and xbox controls, neither great for driving. The most time though is spent in Wii Sports so far.
The appeal of the Wii Sports is its simplicity, I tried as an experiment to get my girlfriend into playing something on the Xbox – we tried Gotham 1 and 2, Unreal Tournament and The Suffering, the controls were just no good but she immediately got the hang of the Wii controls and is totally into playing tennis. My 2nd set of controllers are on their way then we can play against each other which should proof fun but might ultimately convince me to get a bigger tv for the split screen.
While its simplistic it also has some depth, Tennis is the best of the lot and you can really control the ball well, put on some spin, control the power of your strokes etc, all this without the added hassle of maneuvering your men since the console takes care of running to the balls for you. I think these party games are going to be the genre that dominates, I’m already dying to get my hands on Wii Play.
Anyway, this console kicks arse, if you’ve got one my Wii number is 1405 1552 0430 8836. Drop me a line with your console number and be sure to enable Mingling! If you don’t want your number out in the open just say so when you leave a comment here and I won’t approve it.
