Posts Tagged ‘technology’

As promised the other day, here’s the rest of the photo’s of my grandson visiting his granddad :) Not sure what he’s doing in the second photo, but he’s cute anyway…heh In that age they make a lot of faces and still manage to look sweet for some reason :) And it seems that he’s trying to get out of the buggy…or his legs just got mixed up, not sure which :D There are larger versions if you click the thumbnails as usual :)

We have a sunny and warm day for a change. During the past couple of weeks we’ve been reading about heat records, people dying from heat strokes and terribly high temperatures pretty much everywhere…while we had rain, high winds and rather chilly. Today it’s just perfect :D

Since yesterday I’ve tried to upload a new profile photo on Twitter without any success. I went to their help section on the site and found a post where you could in the comments give them the location of the picture you want to use, the size of the file and the file format and they would fix it for ya. Obviously this doesn’t affect all Twitter users. So I uploaded my photo to TwitPic as I was told, signed into support and put the information down in a comment and pressed submit.

And guess what.
I had an error back saying that something went technically wrong! There’s no darn glue left on their site any more. Twitter itself works when it wants to and now their support is falling apart too. Isn’t that charming?
I’m tempted to set up my own stream and get off Twitter.

Anyway…I got my hands on their support over Twitter itself this morning, so hopefully they can help me with my profile.
It seems that when one thing after the other keep breaking down you should set aside a team to work on a new model of the site. Something to replace the entire system with instead of trying to patch it together. That way they could make it more secure, rewrite the bits that are full of bugs and keep breaking down today and in the end move everything onto something that is more stable. To run something like Twitter on a platform that isn’t even stable is crazy.

But, it’s easy for me to say :p
Anyway…I hope you have a bit of sunshine as well today, and even though it’s Monday, have a great one :D

When I found this Linksys WCF12 CompactFlash Card for £10 on eBay I really was a happy bunny :) The old card seems to have turned invisible and I just can’t find it. For those of you who don’t know what you use this card for, I can tell you that it is a wifi card that makes it possible to connect pretty much any PDA to the Internet.
Now, this card was newer than the card I had before, but there was plenty of drivers online so I didn’t think it would be a problem. And was I wrong :p

I spent most part of yesterday afternoon and evening trying to get this to work. And so did Robin. By now I doubt there is a driver available that we didn’t download and installed.
Finally I had to give up. The green light at the top right corner on the card seemed dead (they usually flash when you put the card into the slot and start searching for a network) since it never came on at any point. Instead it kept asking for the name of the card since the iPaq couldn’t identify it no matter what drivers I installed.

What should have happened is this: You install the drivers, do a soft reset and then put the wifi card in the slot. It will ask for the name of the card and depending on what drivers you’ve got you name it after that. In most cases it’s the name of a dll file to begin with.
When that is done you set up your connection and at one point in that process you are told that after this point your wifi card will have a different name that it will remember the next time you use it.
And that’s where things went wrong. Every time. As soon as I disconnected the card and put it back in again, the iPaq acted as if it never seen the card before.

So when I wrote to the guy who sold it to me late last night I didn’t have any big hopes to solve this in any way. Since it said in the listening at eBay that the seller would not accept any returns on this card or give a refund, I decided to ask him if he had any drivers that worked, or if he had any similar problems when he tried it out.

This morning I had a reply from him. It was a while since he tested it and at the time it “just worked”. Which is a phrase I saw in a lot of forums yesterday while I was searching for a solution to this. And that is an experience I’ve had with the older version of this card as well…the one I can ‘t find :p
But since I’ve spent so much time trying to get this to function he said that the card might be faulty. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but he took the blame for any problems that might have occurred in between his testing and sending it out to me.

So he offered the money back :) And I don’t even have to send the card back to him. However, I’m not really comfortable keeping it, so I think I will drop it in the mail anyway. Since he’s been a real good sport about this and trusted me, it’s the least I can do. He can have a faulty CompactFlash card back. There’s enough junk around here as it is ;)

It’s a bummer, but it’s not much I can do. Except from the fact that the green light on the card never came on, the hardware I’m connecting are like light years apart. My PC is running Windows 7, which complicates installations that are dated back to 2003 and 2006. Win7 is very good when it comes to solving compatibility issues in software, but these installations simply won’t work once you’ve gone through the hassle to run the installations as a different OS.
Then it’s the iPaq. Mine is a HP iPaq h2200 running WinCE 4.20. Steampunked, as u can see in the picture here :p HP made only one version of this iPaq and there are no updates for the OS and it’s not very forgiving when it comes to compatibility either. There is no way I can run anything that wasn’t made for it since the next version that HP made of this PDA was completely different.

So it’s a mess just putting those two together and try to sync them. ActiveSync, which is a software that came with the iPaq, won’t work on Win7, but built-in to Win7 there’s Windows Mobile Device Center and that works just as well. However, yesterday I think that it did make a difference for some installations I tried to do.

It doesn’t matter much. I will have to turn this place upside down and find the old wifi card. Doesn’t seem to have a choice.

Today I’m alone and unsupervised most part of the day. Got some stuff to do, but since it’s Friday and everything it won’t be in a fast pace :p The sun is shining and the rain we had last night is gone. Was really nasty out there for a few hours last night.

I bet that I’ve already posted this photo, and if that’s the case you have to forgive an old and senile fool :p They are both pretty anyway and to me they are both in the same age too…heh And for those of you who doesn’t know, it’s my son and grandson :) So there.

Anyway… first of all the domain name for this blog and steampunkbox.co.uk are currently being transferred from one domain registrar to another. They were both registered at Weycrest Limited, but for one reason or another they lost the possibility to “tag” .co.uk domains. So yesterday I had an email from Nominet where they told me what happened and that I had to transfer both domains to a new domain registrar as soon as possible before they got “detagged”. If that happened, the info that connects the domain names to the server where this blog is living and where Steampunk Box can be found, would vanish. To make a long story short, the URL here would not exist any more.

So right now at this moment these domain names are being transferred to another domain registrar where a couple of other domain names of mine are living since yesterday, and that are suppose to be more reliable.
Domain names that ends with .co.uk is really nothing but a hassle to deal with and the only domain names that needs a “tag” to function.

Unless they lose the IP address for the server on the way while doing this transfer, it shouldn’t be noticeable at all. But you never know.

Other than that I’ve set up my old HP iPaq again. Since sleep is something that happens on rare occasions after the sunset with me, I might as well have something to read and play with while in bed. To listen to Robin snoring gets old after a while. And I really don’t want to get in and out of bed several times a night either unless I have to. During the past years I’ve left the PC alone even if insomnia struck. Days need to end somewhere.

The iPaq is a Pocket PC for those who doesn’t know. I’ve also bought a wifi card for it so I can use the broadband to connect to internet that way. A Twitter client is trickier to find for this version of handheld computers however. The operating system is Windows CE 4.2 and it’s buggy as any other Microsoft OS tend to be. Needs upgrading, but HP doesn’t provide anyone with that sort of upgrades any more. In this throw away society we’re living no one wants you to use a handheld device for almost 6 years :p You’re suppose to buy the new stuff.

I might be a geek, but if I don’t need a new version, I rather spend my money on something else.
In the end I might just install Linux anyway :p

But, it means that I’ve got ebooks to read, games to play and in a few days also an internet connection. Besides, its a lot easier to use than my cell phone when it comes to the mobile web. Easy as that.

And that’s about it for now :D
Have a great day/evening :))

I’m so behind in the updates on what happens with my grandson, it’s a shame really. A couple of days off the blogging and I’ve got millions of things to catch up on….well, sorta. And in between that I’ve got nothing to write about :p

But anyway…

Sometimes Mr Sandman is taking over and knocks you out before the food is served, and that’s what happened with Alexander in the first photo in this post :) He simply fell asleep in his high chair while his mom was preparing lunch. Good thing that the chair’s got that little table in the front even though it must be terribly uncomfortable…heh

And then the other day they went down to a pizza place in town together with some friends who came for a visit. Alexander had pasta with ham and of course he was smiling and waving at the camera…hehe

He’s also learning how to walk on his own very quickly right now. There’s a video below that his mom took a few days ago where he’s taking a lot of steps on his own, so practise is paying off :D

You know…what’s being said about parents wanting their toddlers to walk as soon as possible, and then later sometimes wish they were back in the cradle again is true :p I know that his mom wants him to walk and get around on his own as soon as possible, but I also know all too well that when he finally does he will be fast as the lightning :p And he’ll be everywhere :p

During the evening yesterday it started to smell a bit burnt in here. At first I thought it came from the outside since the landlord tend to burn down whatever he can get his hands on during the summer months, but when I peeked out the front door the air was clear and fresh.
Back indoors again I noticed that the closer to the desk I was, the stronger was the smell. The reason that I never considered my PC to begin with was that it’s not even 2 years old yet…and of course our landlord and his match box :p

I shut down the PC since I wasn’t sure how well filled our fire extinguisher is any more. After 10 minutes the smell was gone but I decided to leave it off for another hour or so to allow it to cool down.
When Robin came home I turned it back on again and it was fine. For a while. But as soon as I started to render in Poser the smell was back again. I also noticed the first time that the USB port where my Wacom tablet was hooked to simply fell down and died. The second time my second USB port did the same thing (I’ve got 2 ports in the front and 4 at the back), and later when I tried my tablet in the ports in the back, it was dead. Not the ports, but the tablet.

The second time I shut it down we removed the side panel to take a peek inside….and man…hehe…it was DUSTY :p I spent probably almost an hour just cleaning it all out with the vacuum. The fan was clogged with dust, which explained the whining sound it always made as soon as I did something that took a bit of CPU power. It used to sound like I had a turbine under the hood or similar…heh

The USB ports at the front are dead though. Couldn’t do much about that by dusting it off. There are no visible burns on the inside and it’s been working fine since I put it back together again last night. I did however turn it off during the night. It’s rare that I turn it off at all, so it’s a darn miracle that anything is working :p From now on I won’t leave it on though :p

But my Wacom tablet died. The cord gave up, which is one of the most common problems on any tablet like that. Unfortunately it happened very sudden and I haven’t got a new tablet planned in the budget. Not even in the emergency budget :p Silly, but for as long as it worked I never gave it a thought.
This means that it might take a while before I can afford a new one…and the result of that is that there won’t be any new paintings in a while. I do have one more update for Paperbag Designs to do on that girl I was painting…but that’s about it. And it’s far from ready.

Oh and I actually checked my credit rating yesterday after that thing happened with O2. There was a time when not borrowing any money was a sign of healthy finances, but that’s not the case any more. I’ve got no debts, no loans of mortgages and I’ve been on this address for nearly 6 years, no overdrafts on my bank account and I’ve got very good references from the bank overall….but I STILL can’t get credit.
No one wants to be the first to take the chance….and when it comes to O2 that’s just outright silly since I’ve been a customer with them for nearly 2 years now. And I’ve never missed a payment with them. We’re going to give them a try today again since the application yesterday went through just fine with one of their guys at their call centre, but not with the other. So stay tuned.

Now it’s time to do something else :p We got a carpet to put into the living room and we also need to get outta here to pick up a local paper.

Be good and don’t forget to have a nice day :D

Alexander’s mom was 21 years old yesterday and the present from my son was a camcorder :D Which means that there will most likely be more moving pictures of my grandson in the future :D Can’t say that I’m complaining if that’s the case. He’s a sweetie and I can’t get enough of him…heh

Anyway…the video above is of a very sleepy Alexander, but he’s waking up before the video comes to an end, showing off his brand new teeth…hehehe And if he’s this smiley on a regular basis when he wakes up, well…in that case he’s not like his dad :p He was a real lemon in the morning or whenever he woke up :p
But anyway…

Our broadband’s been a real challenge today. Been coming and going….but most of the time it’s been totally gone :p Hopefully it won’t get any worse and we are connected right now (obviously since I’m blogging…haha), but no one knows for how long. So I thought I’d post this before it drops again.

Hope your day’s been as sunny and warm as ours :D