Category Archives: Hardware

Scythe Kama Connect 2

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Ok bought the Scythe Kama Connect 2 device from Quiet PC yesterday.  Took delivery and at the same time as ordering it bought a Samsung 500GB SATA 3Gb/s hard drive to connect to it.  The reason for buying this little baby is that I hate opening cases everytime I want to configure a new drive. 

Before buying looked everywhere, did my research to see if any compatability issues with SATA and didnt appear to be so bought it.  Open it all up out of the box, nice little device plug in the Kama Connect 2 and power up my PC which is a shuttle running VISTA ultimate 64bit.  Straight away doesnt recognise the drive !!!  Scour the manual and finally find above the SATA diagram

“This product supports the reading/writing for S-ATA and S-ATA II devices, but not supporting the optional functions such as NCQ or 3Gbps”

great, looked back on the Quiet PC site to see if they had any mention of this none says supports SATA !!!

Next day got onto Quiet PC (Paul Lee) who were very helpful, got one out of the box and it worked for them so what was I doing wrong.  Borrowed another drive off my client and still couldnt read that.  Then thought about it a bit more and noticed there was no light on the power supply brick then looked at the two pin plug and the converter.  Thought about it for a minute what an idiot I had only plugged the plug into the earth socket ie. vertical rather than horizontally into the converter.  Switched it round and all worked as it should.  The disclaimer above about the 3Gb/s is just that it cant get to those speeds due to limitations on USB 2.0, I just thought it meant didnt support them full stop.

It really is a good little tool to have.  I fully recommend it and because Quiet PC were so understanding and helpful (as usual) I even recommend that you buy it from them

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/components/kama-connect2

 

Vista, Palm Treo 750v and Windows Mobile Center 6.1

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Since upgrading to Vista have had a few problems syncing my Palm Treo 750v with the mobile center.  Read lots of places that upgrading to Mobile Center 6.1 helped well I dont think thats really the problem, the problem seems to be that the (or at least mine) Treo seems to have a mind of its own and gets stuck doing things ie. the bluetooth sometimes doesnt connect as the mobile is busy this seems to be the same with the syncing one minute it syncs the other it doesnt.

I normally find that once I have soft rebooted (taken battery out) the mobile it works fine whether it be mobile sync center 6.1 or 6.0

I run Vista 64 bit here as well for the record, just waiting for Birdie Sync to be compatible with vista 64bit then all will be good as I tend to run a mixture of windows and linux, prefer not to use outlook and use thunderbird instead as it has better support for IMAP.

Trouble with that Pesky Mouse

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Not This Mouse

Vista, A Microsoft Wireless Mouse And Intellipoint

Ok since I installed Vista Ultimate about 2 months ago my microsoft wireless optical mouse 2 and keyboard has behaved strangely.  I run dual screens and when clicking from one screen to the other it would sometimes have to be a four or five times double click before it recongised that I wanted to change focus.

After much trawling and swearing found this knowlegebase article – 321122 from microsoft.

After I did the above it seemed to cure the majority of my problems although I must say its still a little twitchy sometimes but mostly it is fixed. 

Visual Studio 2005, Pushok and CVS on Vista / Linux

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Ok I previously blogged how to get visual studio 2003 talking to cvs using putty and pushok.  This is an update to that, which can be found previous to this entry.

Pre-cursor to this is that you have putty working with your linux / unix machine and that you can open a session using ssh without using a password.

I downloaded the version 1.3 of the cvsscc from pushok, I believe thats the one for unix as they have split their programs from unix and windows cvs since I last bought software from them.

I then opened visual studio 2005 and clicked open from source control which presents you with a cvsroot options dialog in the cvsroot just type :ext:paulfarrow@cvs_server:/500gb1/cvsdata now ext depicts the protocol and the pushok program knows to use putty which you should already have set up and running in the tray with your certificates etc (not covered in this blog entry) and then the userid @ the putty saved session, you can see mine is called cvs_server and then the path for the root here mine is /500gb1/cvsdata.

then once you have put that in click check and it should authenticate against the linux server.  You should then be able to clicke elipse next ot cvs module and it will give you a list of directories / modules in your cvs server.

Glad I got that going took me a little while, my next quest is to upgrade to svn and try the pushok plugin for that, will keep you all informed on how it goes.

ah forgot to mention one thing you need an environment variable to point to plink.exe which comes with putty that is CVS_RSH just set that to where plink resides in my case thats CVS_RSH=c:\ssh\plink.exe then pushok knows to use that for the ext protocol.

Quick Plug For FEL Communications and Nick Roast

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Right was after some 3.5 mm socket savers for my media center and found FEL Communications in Sunbury.   Think they are about the only people that do them as couldnt find anything like it else where on the net.  Very nice chap and collected them personally from his house which incidently was down the same road my friend from Brooklands Technical College used to live – Adrian Turner.

Right so the website is http://www.felmicamps.co.uk.

Thanks again Nick

Accessing Vista with smbclient

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Just bought a new machine and decided to put VISTA on it.  Now biggest problem was accessing the shares via smbclient or Samba.  Hunted high and low on the net couldnt find anything not specific for VISTA and smbclient.

I then looked for windows xp and smbclient and found a post about changing a registry entry.  Up to this point I had tried everything everyone else was saying like enable file sharing, private sharing etc and couldnt get any of that too work at all.

Probably works via another vista machine but not from linux or my apple.

I upgraded samba to the latest version before doing this.  I then added a registry entry in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy which a hexadecimal value of 1 and bobs your uncle you should be able to access shares and admin shares such as C$ on the vista machine from smbclient or mounting it in the fstab.

Hope that helped you, it helped me no end as I was getting very frustrated about it.  And samba is key to my machines here.

 

Just got into the VOIP world here….

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Right this is the what I got up to on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
 
Looked at vonage http://www.vonage.co.uk and asked them twice before launching into it if I could use my own hardware and both times yes and yes.
 
Bought my own hardware which is a Cisco ATA 186 £80 ish trade price.  Then signed up for vonage and they then said oh no you cant use your own hardware as its chipped especially for their network !!   I must say be afraid of this company all customer services in America and tech support is either India or America and its a real pain trying to ask them anything.
 
so ummed and arghed do I just get their router etc and thought no I would cancel it, luckily I did as after 14 days you have to pay to get off their subscription service.
 
So then found sipgate http://www.sipgate.co.uk and that was good especially as they have a 1/2p a minute plan but couldnt make any outgoing calls to the pstn network.  Still ongoing with them as they are not sure its them yet, but something is funny.  Just email support which isnt that hot.
 
So then looked up gradwell http://www.gradwell.co.uk and all worked out of the box first time no probs crystal clear but they charge 1.25p a minute and after initial 3 months its £4 a month which isnt too bad.  But you can ring these guys up and talk over any support issues which is excellent.
 
Oh one other thing I couldnt get my old bt handset to work with the cisco kit so bought a new bt phone and that still didnt work so then as I knew our bang & olufsen worked bought another of them at £200 but it just needs a phone that has power on the line as the bt phones get their power from the analogue line, I think thats what the problem was.
 
And thats it, then your in the voip world