Truck me

Finally, my search for a 4×4 is over.

Just got to get it registered, get some sort of a cb radio, tire mount and possibly new tires and I’ll be ready to go bush with my brother. He has had his patrol almost 12 months and I have enjoyed going 4wding with him.

-= Comments
1. Mark | February 23rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Cool as.

There’s some great 4×4 tracks up where I live in the Yarra Valley.
I crashed my car not long ago.. I’m driving my sisters old little yellow astra’s at the moment.

Keen to get a new one, but i’m poverty sticken.
Remember not to speed - you’ll stand out like the dog’s proverbial. My patrol driving friend has lost hist license twice now.

Long time no fly

It has been bothering me for about two and a half months, that I haven’t flown my helicopter.
For a while I was looking for the right material to repair the skids with but gave up and just used some super glue.

I have tried to do some hovering indoors to see if I could get the hang of the controls but it doesn’t want to hover. It’ll bounce on the floor or it will take off.
I can’t let it take off for obvious reason inside and you learn very little from bouncing.
I fear the next time I fly it I will make it fly a fair way off the ground, zoom around for a little while and crash it spectacular fashion :|

iTunes fun

I was just wondering if there was someone out there with an iPod video that would be willing to do a test for me.
* Find an mp4 file that plays fine on the iPod.
* Rename the file so that it has -.mp4
* Import into iTunes and try to sync your iPod.
I spent a couple of hours transcoding a file and ended up frustrated when it wouldn’t sync. I noticed that no other video I had previously had a - in it so I tried removing it and everything was happy again.
I really can’t believe that this could be a problem in software today and I would love for someone else to confirm this problem (or if it is just my machine).

Hardware problems just arn’t my thing

So the Dell guy arrives. In and out in 40mins. Doesn’t do any checking of his on. Just comes in with the new motherboard and procedes to take my laptop apart.
The first time he turned it on I instantly new that it was working ’cause the hard drive light be flashing. Check the bios (were he has to re-enter the service number) and the bios reports the hard disk is installed. The thing booted, but I screwed with the logical volume (so I had to fix that later).

I like software, I can fix the problem (most of the time).

-= Comments
1. Zooba | January 29th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
It’s probably cheaper to replace 10 motherboards a day than to diagnose and possibly fix 2-4 issues. (Especially when you consider the difference in the training required)

Hang on, Dell is on its way

To alleviate the problebm of a laptop that won’t boot because it doesn’t think it has a HDD, I called Dell since I have 180 odd days of Next Business Day on-site cover.

They’ll be here on Tuesday or Wednesday with a new motherboard. Hazaar.

Somedays, I just hate computers

So I wanted to resume my 64bit laptop from suspend today and check out a few things.
I’ve had a problem with wireless resuming from suspend but it has never really worried me because I can restart a few services and all is well again.
Except today.
I ran the script twice and there was no sign of life from the wifi light. So I rebooted.
My laptop decided it was not going to pick up the hard disk. It didn’t consider it to be present. Like it had packed it's things and left for the day.
Gar.
So my first goal was to work out if the disk is ok. I plug it into my external IDE/SATA enclosure (and for all who want to know, SATA in a laptop is the same as SATA in a desktop) and check the disk. At first I thought there was a problem, but I had forgot to plug the other end of the USB connection in. Disk is fine.

Since I have two similar laptop models (A Dell M1710 causing me problems and Dell Inspiron 9400 running fine currently), I thought I would take the HDD out of the 64bit model and try it in the 32bit model. It detected the harddisk but wouldn’t boot (stating that you can’t run a 64bit os on a 32bit machine). Cool
Tried the other way around, take the disk out of the 32bit machine (which had already been done thanks to previous test) and place it in 64bit machine. Turn it on and it still doesn’t like the disk.

I have tried some cardboard “modifications” to see if I could lift the disk slightly up or down to see if it was just a connector problem, but I haven’t had much luck there. I’m not prepared to put too much in there in case it gets stuck.

Tried compressed air down the HDD bay to see if I could dislodge possible dust but that hasn’t improved the situation.

I haven’t taken the whole computer apart, but I have started hoping I could see something wrong.

The red circle is where the HDD connects to the board.

I was hoping to upload some high resolutions shots of these just incase someone picked up something I didn’t. I’ll try to upload them later when my brother isn’t playing CS:S.
Basically I’m looking for ideas. No hitting it with a hammer jokes please

Lego Star Wars - Problems with wide screen

A little while ago I bought Lego Star Wars to join my other copy, Lego Star Wars II.
There were initially some problems getting the joystick to play nice, but after removing the override settings in the joystick configuration and deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file, everything was sweet.

Until I noticed issues with the screen resolution. You don’t actually get to select what sort of wide screen you want to display, some how it just picks it up for you. I would set the screen detail to max (1600×1200), quit, start the game up and somehow, it was displaying 1920×1200. I could tell because it wasn’t shifting my wallpaper on my second screen like some low res games do (Starcraft for example).
You would think this would be alright. Except the next day when I would play the game, it wasn’t wide screen anymore. It wasn’t even 1600×1200. It was back to the simple 640×480 mode. When I set it back to 1600×1200, quit and re-open: it would be at 1600×1200. I was missing out on the wide screen.

Solution
After deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file a few more times and making sure that it was reproducible (at least on my machine) I worked out that I could copy a certain version of the SWLEGO.BIN file (when I had changed to 1600×1200 for the first time) and it would start up at the right resolution with widescreen. I was about to head over to the Batch file section on the wiki to write me a script that would do the copy automatically (not much really) when it dawned on my *make the file read only*. In the process, I was concerned that if the program was writing to this file on startup, a read only config file may cause it to barf. But it didn’t. It’s great. As long as I don’t have to change anything else I should be set.

Finding help on the game has been a little difficult, as the official website http://www.legostarwarsthevideogame.com/ doesn’t seem to be configured.
The first time I visited http://www.eidos.com/ to see if there were any patches or forums I was running into trouble on a) how to find the game and b) where are the on the page are the downloads. On second viewing (when writing this post), it seems a little more accessible.

One thing I found funny in the readme

Make sure you do not have any Anti-Virus utilities (like Norton’s AntiVirus) running resident prior to playing LEGO Star Wars.

Is this really the sort of things that professional companies should be pushing?

Anyway, I hope that someone else finds this interesting. I’ll see if I can raise a bug with eidos or possibly decode the binary file to find out why it is forgetting the screen resolution.