John's Blog

(this was written some time ago but placing it here for posterity) I had acquired a 1987 325e in the summer of 1999 with 73k miles, fairly low mileage for a car of that vintage. It had been fairly well maintained with a few outstanding issues. The first indication of this problem was the first snowstorm of the winter of 1999-2000.While driving home during a late night snowstorm, the car went into a strange mode where it would not stall, but it would only produce 1000 rpm even if the accelerator pedal was pressed to the floor. The car would make progress at 5 to 10 mph, even going up gentle hills.I parked the car just glad to have made it home. The next morning it started up and drove fine. The problem was quite unusual and I planned to speak to my mechanic about it. When I did have the conversation,the mechanic was not able to shed any light on the problem. Over the next 3 years the situation repeated itself, something like 10 or so times. Most dramatically, it would happen ...

(insert mental picture of South Park's Mr. Mackey here) Smolts Profile is here . Fedora Core 14 x86_64 dual boot with Windows 7 ASUS P7P55D-E Pro Intel i7 processor 3ware 9650SE RAID card ATI Radeon HD4350 PS2 Mouse and Keyboard Things would work great for about 5 or 10 minutes and then the system would lock up. Mouse cursor freezes Keyboard has no effect Can SSH into system and shutdown gracefully I found that the best stress test for this problem was a vigorous game or two of minesweeper - very mouse intensive that game! The various Linux message boards are full of descriptions of this sort of thing and most folks thing that this is a mixed bag of problems - similar symptoms but perhaps a large variety of causes. Hard to say without having a definitive analysis of each instance. There are lots of "home remedies" - changing kernel versions, changing video drivers, changing the boot parameters for the kernel, changing xorg.conf, etc. but again, t...

Click on picture to enlarge. I have a Dogtra 3500NCP SuperX shock collar. Without it my Dobie would not get any exercise because he'd play "keep away" whenever I threw his favorite ball for him to fetch. With a little "gentle reminder" he comes back and the cycle can begin again. The collar worked well for about a year and a half but then the transmitter part wouldn't hold a charge any longer. A replacement battery can be purchased and they offer to do the replacement for you but that would entail a service charge not to mention shipping it there and back. So I ordered a new battery? How hard could it be to change a battery? Answer? Very hard. Very hard indeed. The 6 screws that attach the back of the case to the case itself are CEMENTED into the plastic. Or might as well be. With a screwdriver that was just the right size I was able to back out four out of the six with a fair amount of difficulty. The other two (i.e. the bottom left two in the picture) w...

We hear new expressions from teens and twenty-somethings all the time - and they usually get real old real fast. But there is one semi(?) current expression that I like a lot - it's where kids say - often as a sing-song chorus - " AWKWARD " - in response to someone else describing a situation that is, well, awkward. Well, even though I basically do networking for a living, I'd never heard of "awkward" mode as applied to a Network Interface device like an Ethernet adapter. Promiscuous mode, yes. But awkward mode no. That is until yesterday. Here's what happened. My dual boot machine (Win7, Fedora Core 14) was running Windows 7 and there were some Win 7 OS updates that I said yes to. I was later able to verify that one of these updates did include a driver update for the Realtek PCI Gigabit Ethernet onboard NIC. Things were working fine, I left and I guess the updates installed themselves. When I returned there was no network connectivity. Not i...

Mine's a C8180. Everything looks fine. You print a test page and the rollers spin for ten seconds or so and then a non-helpful message appears on the printer saying you're out of paper. Except you're not. You RTFM. No help. You go online to HP's troubleshooting guide for this exact problem and they have a detailed list of things to try except none of them fix the problem. I figured this one out myself but if you look here somebody else did too yoofah says: 30/08/2010 at 04:43 Another possible issue not identified in the video: these printers are equipped with a blue “photo tray” in the main paper tray area. If this is pushed in, it’ll try to draw from that instead of the main train tray, causing this same type of error. The solution is to reach your head in, and pull out that blue tray until it is flush with the main tray. Yeah, you need to pull that little blue photo tray back a few inches and - voila - the printer prints again. (I don't thin...

My current linux installation is Fedora Core 6 (FC6) running on a motherboard with an AMD processor and integrated graphics. It could do the usual resolutions if they had a 4x3 aspect ratio (e.g. 1024x768). I had been running with a huge Sony CRT monitor that was great for in its time, but that time was now 10 years gone. I had picked up a pretty reasonable LG monitor at a big box store - an LG W2053TX monitor that has a native resolution of 1600x900. When I tried to configure FC6 to support this resolution it became clear that it could not do it (with my current HW setup). The video driver was the "via" driver and if you tried to add a 1600x900 resolution to the xorg.conf file, the logfiles would indicate that the driver could not/would not support this resolution. A little bit of web research and from talking to people it seemed that if I wanted 1600x900 I would need a dedicated video card - the integrated graphics and the via driver were just not going cut it. The problem...

Every time in the past that I've tried to set up SSH with public key encryption, it's always seemed like I'm doing it for the first time. There are, of course, a lot of HOWTO's on the web and I've made good use of them. This time when I went through the exercise, however, a few things struck me, and I thought it was worth capturing a few simple points. The Setup: I have a linux box at home to which I'd like to be able to SSH to from a variety of other hosts - both linux and PC's. The hosts are as follows: The same linux box on which the server was running (just as a test). A PC that is on the same LAN as the linux box. (Client is Putty). A PC work laptop. (Client is Secure Shell). The unix environment at work. (Using the usual linux/unix clients). One observation is that the client list is heterogeneous both with regard to OS as well as to the specific client implementation. A second observation is that unlike most config tasks you do as a lin...