personal weblog of Leo Sauermann
I am making blinking light art using ESP8266/WemosD1Mini + WLED + ws2812/sk6812.
As this protocol is very simple, I realized I want to see it on my fathers analog oscilloscope. It is the only protocol I actually use in my daily life which I can fully understand down to the physical layer.
We just wanted to scan using our great HP C4700 Scanner/Printer at home via network. But the damn thing wouldn’t scan.
It gave an Error code of “8,[(1,0,-2147221502)]” and something like “das HP Bildbearbeitungsgerät wurde nicht gefunden. “
The obvious solution recommended by the help and internet is
As I am too lazy for that just now, I used the WEB INTERFACE to my scanner. Yep, behold. Your HP Network printer/Scanner has a web interface. Just find out the IP address (for example, by printing the network information, the printer has an option to do that) and enter the address in your browser. In my case, that would be : http://192.168.1.42.
This will let you scan via your browser, and you don’t have to install any drivers and such. You can only scan JPGs, but … better than nothing…
I only blog this here because poor souls facing “8,[(1,0,-2147221502)]” and too lazy to reinstall software may benefit from it.
Thats what I call Mathememtics: 2+2=2.5
If you know me, you know that my Lenovo T400 ThinkPad is quite slow. I have a slow disk and my 2GB main memory were not enough, so today I went to the shop to buy a whopping extra 2GB.
Directly in the shop I expectingly used my sweaty joyful hands to put the new thinking space into the machine and voila: Task manager reported:
2520 MB Physical memory
WTF? I had something like 1900 MB before, adding 2GB only results in 600MB more space?
Of course of course, you will now say: But Leo, you forgot that Windows 7 32bit can only address 3.5GB ram – silly you. But behold: thats still a GB short of my 2.5 GB.
I had no choice but to look for that missing GB. Note of sillyness: a 2GB RAM module costs 21€. As my windows lost 1GB I thought I may just go for the 1GB module to save a whopping 2€! – yes, the 1GB module was sold for 19€. So I rather decided to search for the missing GB.
So where is it?
Apparently, Lenovos have 2 graphics cards and once you upgrade, they decide to grab the extra mem for personal satisfaction.
User, I am your almighty graphics card. I appreciate your ridiculous sacrifice of 1GB ram to appease me, but you must give me your firstborn virgin daughter as next sacrifice.
This would be no problem would not be the other graphics card:
User, I am your almighty onboard graphics card. I take another 500mb of your RAM as sacrifice and take your second born virgin daughter. And bring some beer when you come home.
Ok, thats enough. Thanks to the great advice found on the internets I was finally able to get to 3066MB physical RAM on my Lenovo T400.
Boot, go to bios using the blue ThinkVantage button. I turned off switchable graphics and also switchable graphics detection and set the mode to “discrete graphics”. This allegedly costs more battery but I don’t have to reboot and tweak the BIOS if I want to play Starcraft II.
Funnily, it won’t work after the first boot. I did set it in the BIOS and booted and it had 2554MB physical RAM. Then it installed some graphics drivers – it seems that fumbling in the BIOS activates a graphics mode formerly unknown – and after booting again it suddenly had 3066MB RAM.
The very motivating end of this otherwise very very well invested time (yeah, wtf, the first computer that did NOT have more ram when I put in more ram) is that I ended up with 3066 MB whereas the other folks on the internets only were able to squeeze 3065MB RAM out of their 4GB Lenovos. I feel so proud.
p.s. it seems that now my battery life is halfed. First, the extra RAM of course needs battery, and second the almighty windows cannot switch now between graphics cards to save power and I have the great opportunity to reboot and tweak the BIOS another day to find out how to do it. Time to buy a bigger battery? Well…you can guess yourself what a double-sized battery will do with a Lenovo…2+2…..
Damnit, modern bargain hardware. When our previous Canon s450 died and we went to the shop to get a heir for it, we were surprised by the low prices of consumer printers/scanners. So Ingrid and I went for a HP Photosmart C4780 printer/scanner (C4700 series). It is a nice wifi-enabled printer/scanner.
And today I had to print a contract and scan it and the damn thing did not suck the paper in. “Kein Papier mehr” – “No paper”. Googling for the problem did not give an answer so I humbled myself calling the HP hotline for Austria. After 5 minutes of “whats the serial number, whats my name, whats my phone number, here is your HP customer number” the answer was: it seems the thing is older than a year, if not, scan the invoice and do this and that to talk to a technician OR pay 20 EUR credit card to talk to a technician”.
OK, if the internet does not know it, HP seems also not to know. But I found notice that the “papierwalze” could be not “rauh” enough, meaning that a roller has not enough friction to suck in the paper. The printer did rattle and chunkle as usual when I pressed “print”, so that was a good lead. I opened the back and saw a small wheel touching down on the paper. When I put my finger on it, the paper suckin-process worked.
So I made my printer suck … paper by sticking a cardboard clip on the roller. If the printer wants to suck in paper, a gentle pull on this clip will help. Only trouble is: you have to press “OK” and pull at the same time for every page.
In German for other helpless googlers:
Wenn dein HP Photosmart C4780 “Kein Papier mehr” anzeigt, obwohl da Papier drin ist, dann kann das daran liegen dass die Papierwalze nicht rauh genug ist oder das sie nicht genug Druck auf dem Papier hat um es einzuziehen. Mit “Papierwalze” meine ich jetzt das kleine schwarze Rädchen was etwa 3cm von Rechten Rand weg am Papier liegt. Dann einen Kartonstreifen mit doppelseitigem Klebeband auf die Unterseite der Papierwalze kleben – wenn man an dem Karton zieht und gleichzeitig “OK” bei der Fehlermeldung drückt, druckt er wieder.
Its not pretty, but my printer sucks now again…the paper.
Weird errors when copying files? Do svn commits not work anymore? “Unable to move file”? I am using Windows 7 and NTFS, and my filesystem is quite weird. I copied my files from another windows machine using cygwin and rsync and this (-a) tried to preserve as much security details as possible. In the end, it fucked up my NTFS permissions in most folders with permissions for some {9898234234-234234234-23423432} users or “none”.
Anyway, there are plenty of ways how you can fuck up Windows file permissions. All I wished was my folders to NOT have any permissions BUT the inherited permissions from the parent folder. Btw, this is where ext2 really sucks for me, that you can’t have inheritance in the user:group and access rights. I often wished that when setting up shared folders for samba. I wanted to reset the permissions to the default access rights any folder in my Windows documents directory has. Looking at the zillions-of-popup-windows-on-top-of-each-other-unintuitive-user-interface to change file permissions, I googled for help. And, luckily, found the command line to reset windows NTFS file permissions of a folder to that of the parent folder:
icacls your_bad_folder /reset /t
use this command inside the parent-folder, the your_bad_folder is the folder giving you trouble.
Ein glitch in der i18n von Google Calendar 🙂
Ich würde nicht ablehnen sagen, sondern “schließen”. Ist wohl auf English “dismiss” gewesen.
Today we bought a HP Photosmart C4780 printer, the best deal in ages. It has scan, print, wifi, and it connects itself to our network – for only 80 EUR! Charm. Part of the software installation is a trial for Adobe Photoshop Elements. In my endless path to enlightment of “being a bozo customer” I of course clicked “yes, I want to try that 30 day trial”. As part of being a CEO of a web startup, I need to learn how professional marketing is done and this bundling deal sounds like a good marketing plan – I just bought a printer, and using Gimp for the rest of my life will cripple me mentally anyway, so why not try Photoshop Elements.
WARNING: the rest of this article contains words such as FUCK, SCREW, SHIT. This is because I am really disappointed now. If you are offended by this, go see kittens. If you are from Adobe and wonder why I am so negative, please reconsider how conversion funnels and conversion goals work for normal companies (well, companies which are not gigantic) and that I expect as customers that your trial version really drags me in and not shoots me out. Or go one reading this really long rant & bug report.
So, back to the trial. I click “yes, hit me with your trial”.
First fuckup: they embedded the internet explorer ActiveX control into a much too small window, so the page at Adobe looks like 1995 scrollbars, and these fuckers did change the properties of the win32 window to “no resize, NAHAAAAA, you have to scroll around dumbass user, we will not give you the “full size” button. I am a ubercool haxor and know how to do borderless non-resizable window and I work for Adobe/HP/bigenterprise so user, you suffer now by scrolling around“. Ok, I admit, you dear funny developer lover of scrollbars, you are right to screw me and having me to scroll. I didn’t scroll in the web since 1995, but ok.
But anyway, I am a bozo customer, and you can’t stop me now, so I press that “get the free trial” button next to the “buy product now for $80”.
Path to enlightment, here I come. I am a trial user, I want to be entertained, give it to me…!
Then I am greeted with the worst thing you can do to a trial customer: register before download.
WTF? I was just convinced to do a 30 day trial. I have bought a printer. I didn’t want to trial this PS elements thingy. I just clicked this button casually. Actually I wanted to go to bed, its late. Or I want to get a beer from the fridge. But no, you fuckers really think someone will now enter his email address etc… OK, NEXT REASON TO LEAVE THE CONVERSION FUNNEL: I WILL NOT REGISTER. I WANT TO DOWNLOAD. NOT REGISTER ARGH!!!. Anyway, my path to bozodom, the numbed customer is steep and high, and I register. I even use my real email address, because I still love you, Adobe.
Then – WTF? I press the download button, a popup window comes, but IT CLOSES. In lightning speed. Without a notice. Nothing happens. If I were the normal bozo customers I would go whining away now, probably printing some pictures of happy puppies and kittens on my new HP printer and immediately forget about that bad bad Adobe website that just disappeared after I filled their long, long registration form. WTF? But not me, I am bozo on way to enlightment. Down the conversion funnel, it can only be a click away to make me a happy trial user. By fumbling around in the Internet Explorer Active X control (the old trick: right mouse click, page info, copy url, open in IE) I am able to open the same page in Internet Explorer. Horray!
I click download again and then – BOOOOM – it wants to fucking INSTALL AN ACTIVE X DOWNLOAD MANAGER (to further run anything they want on my machine?). And thats it.
WHAT THE FUCK!!!!??? Did nobody never quality-assure this “get a free trial” window?? I am a normal bozo user. I did not change the Internet explorer Settings. The free trial window could have never worked on my machine because the Internet Explorer ActiveX control of course did NOT allow any 3rd party download manager activeX to be executed. Of course not, and that is good. So I was never ever able to download this trial with the default path – clicking through this “get the trial” window that was shipped. On CD. To millions of people. Great. The only way I found out that the ActiveX download manager is the problem was by cleverly right-clicking on the ActiveX and finding the link to the real page and copy-pasting it into Internet Explorer and … ARGH!
Ok Adobe, I give up. I can’t really click an ActiveX download manager, this is against even my bozo-path-to-enlightment faith here. Not even the dumbest bozo should click “yes” on ActiveX controls. Please give me the HTTP link to the trial for download. I have to leave the path of enlightment and refuse to go any further down this screwed up conversion funnel of the Adobe Photoshop Elements trial download.
To sum, up the things that make me whine are:
ah, good, now I feel better. Rant over. Thanks internet. I go watch kittens now. Maybe I print some kittens on my new Awesome HP Photosmart C4780, best deal in ages!
Ingrid gave me the great Tevion IWR 394 as a christmas present.
We named it “Adam“, our iPod is called Eve, so they are a good pair.
Adam has UKW FM radio, playback of mp3s on USB drives, internet radio (the first station I listened to is, of course, slay radio), management of favorite radio stations via the wifiradio-frontier.com webservice, Wifi connectivity, LAN RJ45 connectivity, playback of your own media collection using microsoft windows media player 11 media sharing, and he also has an alarm clock.
See it in action:
now the problem is of course: how can Adam playback my iTunes library from my Apple iBook G4 “Eden”? I have a backup of this iTunes library on my linux home server “Franse” – so hosting some magic server on Linux should do it, right? right.
My device is a Tevion IWR 394. I can’t find anything about it in the interwebs (crazy?! nobody bought this before?), so it is probably a branding of an asian white-label product. The menu shows a software “ir-mmi.arts.ven6-jupiter6.1_V1.5.6.21635-1A19”. It connects like a baby to a breast when using UPnP and my Windows XP laptop. FM/UKW radio, usb, also work easily.
Background: accoring to microsoft help of windows media player 11, the following ports should be opened to have media streaming working:
1900 UDP, 2869 TCP, 10243 TCP, 10280-10284 UDP. There is a wikipedia page on the Media_Transfer_Protocol which is to connect your media library to your USB device. For network media streaming, UPnP_AV_MediaServers seem to be the right place. There is a upnp server comparison table on wikipedia also.
My own requirements:
How they meet this:
ok, having found mediatomb as my “easy way to go”, I try
sudo apt-get install mediatomb-daemon
fine! I see it installs it as daemon on rc2.d also, so it will start on system boot.
The various install instructions (ubuntu, official) go on:
sudo nano /etc/mediatomb/config.xml
hm, seems I don’t have to change anything in config.xml, that looks fine as it is. The password and username, ok.
I go to my server using
http://franse:49152/
(franse is my server name. it won’t work at your place)
Ok, I see a very minimal user interface, fine. Somehow I find the folder I want to share and click “+”, it starts indexing. That makes the mediatomb process jump to 80% cpu time on “top” for some 10:50 minutes. good.
But – most amazing – the files show up on my Tevion IWR 394. Life is good!
It does not read/interpret my itunes playlists, though. Googling for itunes playlists in mediatomb does show an empty graveyard. Ok, but its possible to convert an “iTunes Music Library.xml” to several .m3u files using itunesexport, a java tool (here java bytes me again). Sadly, the ericaugherty sf version causes an out-of-memory even with -Xmx300m, so thats a bit annoying. There are zillions of shabby scripts out there to do it, but most don’t work, maybe this one does, as the author says. It does! But it needs some tweaking for folder names, which is done using the “-d” parameter. So the command is something like this (note the trailing shlash at -d) which I put into updateplaylists.sh
#!/bin/bash
python /home/leobard/local/bin/itunes2m3u.py -d “/home/media/music/iTunes/iTunes Music/” /home/media/music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml
(at this moment, my newly discovered and totally weird emap.fm internet radio station plays the amazingly happy disturbing song “It’s so chic to be pregnant on christmas“, greetings to the pregnant-women-we-know B+S)
It seems importing m3u playlists into mediatomb is not out of the box. It goes something like this:
So to sum up: it would be good to have a DAAPD and upnp server in one, which could read iTunes playlists. BUT I am equally happy with my Tevion IWR 394 “Adam” and mediatomb.
Giving praise to the Nokia E70 must never stop. Since it appeared on this planet in May 2006, it is the killer of all. As thebestpageintheuniverse says: “Your iPhone is a piece of shit and so is your face” compared to my E70, which could probably even revive Michael Jackson.
Here the grafik stolen from bestpage:
What I achieved today reaches a solid 1000 on my personal geekness scale. I bought joikuspot which is a – legen-waitforit-dary WIFI HOTSPOT for symbian os. Yes, it uses the builtin Wifi functionality of the E70 (rocking, eh? wifi in your phone 2006!) as a hotspot instead of a client. To be precise, as a wifi p2p connection.
Alas, I am now sitting with my Apple laptop here, my phone next to me and enjoying a zeroconf-like connection to the internet. No bloody bluetooth, no labyrinthesk setup of modem over bluetooth over serial over your grandmas bra. Just plain old “wifi network name, WEP key, GO”. That includes you, my friend. next time you drop by and need web with your laptop but don’t have one ready, I am there for you.
OMG OMG. I mean, the last years, all these days when we did street art and mobile clubbings, permanent breakfasts, etc – now with that access point – multiple people can upload shit to the web in parallel. everywhere. This was what I always wanted: a small battery powered device you put into a room, press a button, say “this room now got internet, welcome to the future”. With no bloody WIFI UMTS usb dongle. Next thing, they will implement beaming for the E70.
Ok, but the reason for my enthousiasm is, that next, I am going to buy the amnazing http://www.eye.fi/. That is, a whopping SD card with Wifi client – get the picture? Take a picture, press “protect” on the cam, the SD card uses TCP/IP to connect to a service at eye.fi, which then uploads the pic directly from the fat32 filesystem of your camera to flickr. awesomeness, here I come…
I bought a FALK navigation system, the M8 2nd edition. The thing as such is excellent! It is very easy to use, has a good navigation, fits nicely into the car, excellent hardware.
My problems started with the software. They suggest you to also buy a map update to get updated maps every few months.
Done that, downloaded the new maps. To get the maps from the PC to the Navigation System, you need to install their “Falk Navi-Manager”. I wonder why, the bloody thing has a mini sd card reader and it could just read the maps from this. Anyway, installing the Navi-Manager includes installing the Microsoft ActiveSync client. Done that.
Now wanting to synchronize, on connecting, an ActiveSync problem pops up:
“cannot verify the version of activesync on your device. A program such as a firewall may be blocking a port ActiveSync uses to connect to the device, or you may need to upgrade to a more recent version of ActiveSync on the PC.”
Lesson learned: The telephone support was good and they offered to help me as far as they could (“ok, then send us the thing …. grml…”)
But if you fucking want to sell navis, you better NOT the fuck use ActiveSync as your technical base but provide something that works out of the box on all machines. And on MacOs. And on Linux. Something like USB, something like my Digital Camera does: plain simple USB drives. And you better provide your customers a real online forum or they will need to find help on the web, publicly sharing their agony of having wasted a lot of money in a piece of hardware that is obsoleted in a year without updates which are blocked because of Microsoft ActiveSync being a mess with fucking “go to hell” error messages.
Next thing I will try: get a new computer and update the navi there, if that does not work – send the thing to falk.
Argh, I hate computers. Thats why I bought this hardware the first place…