This job can be a little harder than it needs to be, especially if you are missing parts of your brain like me. Here is a list of things to watch out for.
Read the rest of this entry »
Notes on timing belt maintenance for 1990 Honda Accord
April 28th, 2015Rear Struts On 1990 Honda Accord: Not So Fast
April 27th, 2015One bolt and two nuts per side are all that’s between you and a smoother ride. How complicated of a job could it be? A little too complicated, it turns out, at least if your car has ever lived in an area subject to underbody rust. A seized bolt in the lower bushing can ruin your Saturday. Here are the steps to successfully complete this job.
Read the rest of this entry »
Just Your Average Linux WiFi Adventure
February 1st, 2015The goal seemed simple enough. An existing Linux router with a 2.4GHz TP-Link TL-WN822N v2.0 802.11N USB dongle in AP mode was serving a home network consisting of a mix of devices capable of 2.4GHz and 5GHz operation. Almost two dozen reachable 2.4GHz networks were nearby, a situation that took the blame for a great deal of wireless dropouts and sluggish performance. Since by comparison only a few 5GHz networks were penetrating the apartment, adding a USB Edimax EW-7822UAC was the goal, to add 5GHz 802.11AC capability to the router in a bridged configuration with the existing connection. Well, things always sound simple in concept… Read the rest of this entry »
Using DOSEMU with a DOS setup program that wants the disk changed
December 23rd, 2014DOSEMU does not have a facility to swap disks or directory paths on the fly, aside from using the LREDIR command, which is not possible to invoke during a program’s setup routine. Therefore, when the setup routine asks for “Disk 2”, there is no way to insert the correct virtual disk. Here is how to work around that.
Read the rest of this entry »
Setup Chromecast With Transcoding UPnP Media Server Located On A Different Network
August 30th, 2014Here are some notes on my configuration that allows the following:
- Chromecast on wireless subnet to play video
- Smartphone(s) on wireless subnet using Avia/BubbleUPnP to select video and control Chromecast
- Mediatomb Linux server, on a different network segment, transcoding any video format to Chromecast format in realtime
- Linux router at the center with wired and wireless connections
How To Debug WordPress Upgrade Failing Via FTP Or SSH
August 20th, 2014Here is a list of reasons why a WordPress internal site or plugin upgrade using FTP, FTPS, or SSH methods might fail. If your upgrade process is failing (either silently or with an obscure error message), investigate each of these reasons. If you cannot solve this problem, try to solve the filesystem permissions problem that is causing WordPress to fall back to this method instead of doing a direct upgrade on the filesystem. Or just force WordPress to use the direct method, if you are sure your filesystem permissions will allow the webserver to do it. Read the rest of this entry »
Why does USB lock up my system with the Intel Providence PR440FX motherboard?
December 10th, 2013In short it’s because the BIOS routes IRQ lines incorrectly in IO-APIC mode. Disable IO-APIC mode if you want to use the onboard USB on a PR440FX motherboard.
See the following links.
Matrox G200 (SE) in SR2600 server fails to start X server on CentOS 5
December 10th, 2013On CentOS 5 (and possibly the corresponding RHEL), the Matrox G200 driver fails when using an embedded G200SE on a SR2600 server. If you run the X server under gdb or look at the last lines of the Xorg.0.log output, you can see that the X server stopped loading due to the mga_drv.so driver module producing a segmentation fault. The segmentation fault is due to incorrect probing of the available memory size.
Using cgminer’s OpenCL interface with ATI HD 4850 video card
November 6th, 2013The problem: Older versions of AMD’s APP (Accelerated Parallel Processing) OpenCL SDK are recommended for use with older Radeon chipsets, but produce segmentation faults in string handling code or other inoperability when used with newer Linux distributions. Version 2.4 through 2.6 exhibit the problem. However, version 2.8 does not support, probably among others, the RV770 chipset used in the HD 4850.
The solution: Use version 2.7 of AMD’s APP when using cgminer with an ATI HD 4850 video card on current Linux distributions.
Upgrade Cisco Aironet 340/350 16-bit PCMCIA Card WPA Firmware For Linux
March 29th, 2013To get an Aironet 16-bit PCMCIA card working with the WPA-supported drivers, the firmware must be upgraded.
I found it was difficult to do this, so I put together a live CD that accomplishes it. It has a few bugs but will work. You will need a Windows 98 Second Edition CD handy in order to supply files that are not in the live CD image. The firmware will be version 5.30.17 which is not the latest but is good enough to support WPA with the Linux driver. (With an XP live CD you could install the latest 5.60.22 firmware, if XP will run on your laptop you are using this old 16-bit card on, and if you have some other media on which to access the drivers while the BartPE or other XP livecd is inserted.)