Category Archives: Hardware

SPV C500 replaces my old SPV E200 on an Orange Tariff

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I saw a couple of weeks ago that Orange are now doing the new SPV C500 Microsoft Smart Phone as a free upgrade, so thought I would take advantage of that when my plan was up for renewal.  Initial thoughts on the new phone is that it is lightweight and bulk free compared to the other phone and it seems not to eat batteries. 

Bad thoughts are that there is no desk holster available unlike the E200 which is a little bit of a pain but there is a usb cable so it can plug into it.  Other downsides are that the SD has to go in under the battery and this is fiddly and took me a little while until I got to work out exactly how it slots in 🙂

Other than that upgrade was seamless and it certainly does feel good.  Here are the shots of it.

 

After using it for a couple of months, I would even say its one of the best phones I have ever owned !!

Voice Over IP

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A friend of mine just recommended using Skype which is a voice over IP product. 

Had a go and I must say it works very well, I have used other products which are similar and run across the internet and are very choppy but this has fantastic quality. 

Plus they have hooked up with telecommunications companies to provide access to the normal phone network which means from your computer you can call a normal telephone number in the world for just over a penny a minute.

Fedora Core 2 installation patch for Epia Mini-ITX

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As you may be aware the original Fedora Core 2 installation will just keep rebooting on an Epia Mini-ITX machine.  There are many newsgroups articles about this subject but I believe that they are all a little confusing so here is what I had to do to install Fedora Core 2 on to my Epia Mini-ITX CL600 machine.

First download the patch from http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/c3boot-2.iso and burn it on to a cd, then boot off of the new burnt cd.

The next set of instructions assume the text version of the installation

  • Go into the text installation by typing linux text at the prompt
  • Keep going through the installation until you get a warning message that the fedora disc is not in the drive, swap the original Fedora Core 2 disc 1 back into the drive.
  • Go through the normal installation steps for Fedora Core 2 until it says the installation is complete, then remove the CD then type Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a console window.
  • The original Fedora Core 2 disc had already ejected so replace that with the patched CD that you burnt before starting the installation.
  • I then made a directory in /mnt/sysimage called source.
  • I then mounted the patched cd onto that directory [Note: the cdrom device is in tmp on my installation not /dev like other instructions say]  mount /tmp/cdrom /mnt/sysimage/source -t iso9660
  • Then chroot /mnt/sysimage
  • rpm -Uvf /mnt/sysimage/source/kernel*
  • once that has finished type Ctrl-Alt-F1 to go back to the original installation
  • Reboot as per original installation and it should boot into a working kernel

Coolermaster Cool Drive 3 : FORSALE

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Ok put my five Coolermaster Cool Drive 3 enclosures on ebay as they are now cluttering the bedroom.  If your interested in buying these or any other bits I have in the gallery under “bits for sale” please drop me a line.

Not sure how these will go as they again are a specialised item.  Selling at a good price though £3.00 each as these retail at about £18.00 a go.

POP3: unable to scan $HOME/Maildir?

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Ok I run qmail here and funny thing was outlook wasnt logging into it. Thought I had been hacked or something. To see what the problem was I telnetted into my qmail box using

telnet mail.farrowcomputing.com 110

port 110 is the port designated to pop3, then put in your username

user  “username”

then password

pass “password”

and on my system was then seeing “Unable to scan $HOME/Maildir” looked into it and had 6000 spam messages, now the limit I have for mails is quite low so you either need to up it or delete some of the messages from the linux box running qmail or you will need to put the softlimit up, ie.

Try to increase the softlimit for pop3d which is found in your pop3d run script such as /var/qmail/service/pop3d/run (for e.g.): 

blah blah… softlimit -m 2000000 to higher value.

 

Samba and a Windows 2003 domain

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If you were getting permission denied while mounting a w2k3 share onto a linux box then here is a suggestion to get around that

• On the Win2K3 server select Domain Controller Security Policy from the Administrative Tools menu
• Navigate to Local Policies|Security Options
• Disable “Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always)”
• Since FC2 you will also need to disable “Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (if client agrees)”
• You can wait for the policy to propagate or run gpupdate from a command line

 

🙂

Printing on Glossy Paper using a HP Deskjet 5850

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Any tips guys for printing on glossy brochure paper using the HP Deskjet 5850???

I have been tasked by the wife to print a message on the back of a glossy brochure and wasnt having a lot of luck.

Basically the best quality was to set to print on brochure matt finish (although it was gloss) and to use maximum dpi (so the printing was fairly slow allowing the ink to dry) and to put the ink volume on its lowest, this then gave its best results.

Any other settings just smudged all the time.  Any one else have any tips for this printer.  Photos, and all other types of printing seemed to have been fine, perhaps its the dodgy brochure paper.  Its a rather good network (wired and wireless) printer would recommend it all be it for this little mishap.