BCK-08 AD2P

I wanted a blue tooth headset I could use to watch movies on the TV through the computer while in bed w/o disturbing Jen. They are prohibitive expensive though, so when I saw the BCK-08 on deal extreme for 12 bucks I wanted to give it a shot.

Deal extreme is a pretty amazing site, that has cool electronics for ridiculously low prices. The BCK-08 is an AD2P stereo receiver and hands free headset. At the same time I purchased a blue tooth adapter SKU: 11866. I did not have much luck with the adapter though.

Fortunately, I did have another larger adapter which I was able to get the headset to pair with. It works pretty well, I am impressed. The distance is plenty for my purposes, the only issue is if the laptop gets in between the two it breaks up.

Setting up PXE boot

This was done on a Ubuntu install.

1. Create /tftpboot directory
   
2. Copy pxelinux.0 from /usr/lib/syslinux to /tftpboot
3. Statically assign an IP address to the MAC of the ethernet adapter (192.168.1.200) (I use tomato on my router so it is pretty easy).
4. Create a pxelinux.cfg directory in tftpboot.
   
5. 192.168.1.200 is C0-A8-01-C8 in hex notation so add the following 0 length files(use touch) to the above directory:
   C
   C0
   C0A
   C0A8
   ...
   C0A801C8
6. Also "touch" a file with the MAC address of the client adapter. Prepend 01-... For example: 01-23-55-03-34-09-11 (use you MAC address)
7. Add dchp-boot=pxelinux.0,,ip of tftp server - to the custom dnsmasq configuration (again in tomato advanced->DNS).
8. Enable the TFTP server.
   

If you start your client computer you should get to a boot screen. If you try to boot, there won't be an image there yet. Will get to that in the next post.

Reference websites:

• PXE Boot with Tomato
• PXELinux
• Setting up a PXE Boot Server
• Myth diskless frontend

My web domain

Recently my contract with my hosting service came up. The cost is $190 for 2 years, which seemed high, since new contracts were going for less then that.

Well a couple months ago, they recommended switching my email to google apps which was pretty painless and much better then their mail app.

So I was thinking, I don't do much on that host anymore so could I get rid of them. Turns out I could and save myself $190 a year. I am now using dnsexit.com for my dns purposes, which will freely take care of DNS for mail and sub-domains on your domain. And Google Apps for the website I use, and email (plus calendars, docs, ect for gratis).

Only cost (6.99 / yr) will be if I can't figure out how to forward the mail domain from my router to google as well. But even requiring a www at the frontend isn't that big a deal.

Some interesting posts

From: As a programmer what perks do you get?

Wavicle 18 points 2 hours ago[-]

I work for a fortune-50. We get:

• Free overtime! We can work all the overtime we want without it impacting our salary.
• Your very own laptop with VPN. Excellent for getting all that free overtime.
• Customized bureaucracy. Each org unit within the company gets to make its own!
• On-site cafeteria with prices just slightly above nearby restaurants and food almost as good.
• Annual stock option grants of constantly declining share value! I can buy hundreds of company shares for just a modest premium over market value!

Suck it, small-timers!

I like where this is going.

• We were growing by leaps and bounds for the last 3 years and the board said that instead of giving employees bonuses they'll use the extra money to grow even more. Now that our sales volumes have dropped and we're in the red, the board generously mentioned that part of future profits will go towards bonuses!

• In the interest of making management's job easier things like telecommuting are being discouraged and taking time off for personal reasons is made more difficult.

• I've been instrumental in the data design for our new productivity tracking system except half of my suggestions are noted but eventually forgotten. Then when it's brought up later on they ask why they didn't get around to this sooner. Or they'll give credit to someone else on the team for suggestions I made months ago.

• I have the privilege of paying for basic medical coverage. I opted out of the extended medical plan though since i don't really need to pay extra from my paycheck for prescription eyewear, massages and dental. I just cough up the cash when i visit the dentist.

• When I come in hung-over I need to stop over at 7-11 first since they got rid of the powerade from the vending machines.

gaoshan 32 points 6 hours ago[-]

My company offered to let us buy coffee cups, with the corporate logo on them, for a special employee rate of $6.99. I thought that was a pretty sweet deal.

deong 13 points 5 hours ago[-]

Tickets to our company picnic are $10.

Interesting Comic

Books to read...

Lord of the Flies.
Catch-22

Questions you probably don't want to ask in Church...

windows and linux

In case you ever get a "command not found" error when trying to run a script as such "./command". Which I encountered today, try running dos2unix on it. Damn ^M.

ATI card and Westinghouse TV

So I bought a Zotac motherboard with an integrated Geforce 7100, I thought this would be enough to play hd-dvd and blu-ray movies, since I have a 6600 quad core. I was able to connect to my 52" Westinghouse TV and it would display fine, however hd-dvd movies would stutter a bit... Bummer.

Enter the Apollo AP-HD4350 from newegg. Cheap card made especially for hd movie playback. Install it and it displays on my 1280x1024 lcd just fine, install the latest and greatest drivers (catalyst 9.4) and hook it up to the 52" Westy. Of course there are problems, nothing ever works out at first.

First there was the LCD Overscan that defaulted to an 8% reduction in screen size, no biggie, fixed in the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). But the screen flashes to Black about once every 3 seconds, it is sporadic, but about that. I tried to playback a hd-dvd and it plays back fine now w/o stutter, but with the flashing to black...

Tried going back to the driver on the disk included, same problem. Tried bringing the computer up so that the hdmi cable was much shorter, nothing doing. Tried many things. The thing that ended up working was to interface to the DVI port instead of the hdmi port. Put a DVI to HDMI adapter in the mix and that seemed to clear up the flickering.

However, then the display was jumping up and down by about 1 pixel multiple times per second. Looking through the CCC panel I found an option for vertical timing and adjusted that to be on all the time, instead of application specific and that seems to fix that problem.

In conclusion, I should be able to play hd movies on my big screen now. But is was not w/o quite a bit of bug fixing along the way, and obviously the disadvantage of not being about to use the hdmi audio component.

Great picture

New egg order on 3/36

D-Link DGS-2205 10/100/1000Mbps 5-Port Green Technology Switch - 34.99
MASSCOOL 8W553B1M3 90mm Ball CPU Cooler - 9.99
Link Depot 16 ft. HDMI TO HDMI - 9.99
LG Black LG Blu-ray/HD DVD-ROM GGC-H20LK - OEM - 94.99

The reason I am bringing this up because I wanted to talk about the intel q6600 I purchased awhile before this. I am running it on a Zontac motherboard (which I think was $35...). Anyways, my processor would idle at 45-50C, which seemed quite bad, so I ordered the Masscool above. I thought I had seated the intel cooler on the CPU reasonably well, though it was quite a hassle to get on.

I received the above order and played an hddvd, when I checked the core temps they were in the 90C range, big problem. Then installed the Masscool and the idle temps dropped to the high 20C and while playing an hddvd (for a short period) the temps went up to 50C. Acceptable I figure. Of course, this is with the old thermal paste still sitting on the CPU and just the stock paste on the Masscool. But I don't have an interest in overclocking, so it should be fine. Actually I wouldn't mind underclocking it, but the Zontac motherboard is quite barebones...

Great...

Dubia in the news.

The dark side of Dubai - Middle East, World - The Independent

Kinda makes you want to cry

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

Great cartoon on the Credit Crisis

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Sweet article on the Game of Life.

Dr. Dobb's | An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time | April 1, 2006

Baby Names

My wife and I are thinking about possible names for the bouncing baby boy we are expecting in May, we have put some of our options in a poll. Help us out by selecting your favorites.

Updating XP to MCE

I used a XP to MCE converter. I didn't follow the directions exactly in that I didn't burn the disk to a CD and boot it, but rather just ran the CD off of MagicIO. The problem occurred when I went to do the Step 4 Roll Up. It claimed it will only run on a verion of MCE, which I wasn't...

Turns out you have to modify a registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\MediaCenter\Installed <ref> and change it from a dword to a string... (at least for my setup, installed XP from a VLK build...).

Well of course you can't just go into regedit and change it. So I had to dl Offline NT Password and Reg Editor. Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it did eventually work. I had to delete the existing key and create another one with the same name, but a String. Then edit the value to 1.

It appears to be working now, yeah!

Baby names and politics

Couldn't help but put this up.  Pretty interesting correspondence, not that surprising though.

Red and Blue Baby Naming: Inauguration 2009 Edition | The Baby Name Wizard

Good advise on resume writting.

Make your resume not suck!

Vadim's Wedding

Recycle bins at a responsible company

hddhackr 120gb drive for xbox

Purchased a 120 GB drive for the XBOX and used hddhackr to modify it. Very nice software. Had some issues though.

First I had to boot to DOS from a usb stick, used this tutorial to do that: Link. I ended up downloading the ODIN 2880 version... Not sure what the differences are between the versions.

Ran into the problem where it was displaying: Error in the DJ mechanism!
Found this solution: http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/newsitem/173.html

Then I ran into the problem where hddhackr wouldn't find my drive. Solution is in the readme of the hddhackr. Had to change the I/O ports that it was using to find the drive. Got to use a hex editor wow.

After that it worked. I haven't attached it to the Xbox yet, can't find my srewdriver set at the moment...

Install WinXP x64 from USB

I recently purchased a new motherboard and CPU for an old computer, and was looking forward to trying it out. However, I recently gave my parents my only DVD drive (I might have others, but they are packed away at the moment). So I looked for alternatives. Seems like there is pretty good support for installing OS's from flash drives now.

Looks like I closed the website I found this program on, but it is called WinSetupFromUSB. This is a great program that has everything you need integrated into it. I am not sure what the other options do.

I just mounted a winXP x64 iso, put that in the source, and selected my USB drive and hit GO. It warned me that the iso didn't look right, but it worked.

Then I had problems with my BIOS booting the USB, it wouldn't do it from the boot menu, I had to change the boot order so that USB was first. But then everything went normally... Pretty cool.

This is pretty funny, too bad there isn't a picture...

Oh my fucking God. I just spent the best 20 dollars of my life. On a bet, anyway.
After school, me and my friends went to the drug store.
And my friend brought a box of condoms to the counter.
And she scanned them.
And he acted like he didn't have enough money.
He was like, "Shit, I'll be right back."
So he puts the condoms back, and comes back with a bag of rubber bands in one hand and a box of plastic wrap in the other.
Oh my fucking God
Until the day I die
I will never forget that lady's face.
haha
Best bet I've ever lost.