The first thing you do when you upgrade the hard drive on a PS4 is - you just snap the cover off of the top of the left side of the console. There aren't any screws to take the cover off - it just slides over. Then you take a Philips screwdriver and take the one screw out with the Playstation symbols on it and then slide out the disk caddy. Swap the drive for a larger one - SATA, at least 5400 RPM. If you have the 500G unit now, a 2TB drive will quardruple your available space. (It may be hard to find one larger than 2TB that meets the criteria of being smaller than 9.5mm high.) Then, all you have to do is reload the Operating System back on to the PS4 from a USB stick (It's only around 1G in size), log back into Playstation Network, and then reload all your save files that you either already have on the cloud if you have Playstation Plus, or you needed to have saved them via USB...
OK, wait. The first thing you need to do when you upgrade the hard drive on a PS4 is to back up all of your save games to a USB drive. You need to be logged in as each user before you do that, and all your save games will take under a gig even if you have save files for a dozen games or so. If you have users like your kids that don't have a PSN accounts, then you will have to make them a PSN account...
OK, now really, the first thing you need to do when you upgrade the hard drive on a PS4 is to make sure all your users have their own PSN account. You need a unique email address and a password...
Now what do you mean you have kids in the house that don't have their own email addresses? OK, so then the first thing you need to do is make sure all of your users have email addresses, since after they sign up for PSN they're going to have to verify their accounts.
Also, if they're a minor, it's going to take a while to set up that email account since you have to verify them and give permission for them to use certain services.
It's OK. I can wait.
Showing posts with label computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computing. Show all posts
Friday, October 7, 2016
Saturday, October 1, 2016
An odd bit of computing.
On my Ubuntu desktop machine I had finally gotten over the fact that every time a semi-large update comes across I have to type:
Make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe 8812au
to reinstall my wifi driver, because I picked a Wifi device that isn't well supported.
If the update is _really_ big, I have to type:
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge
to clean up the OS because the /boot partition is just that - a partition with limited space.
If it really bothered me, I could just save all my documents and wipe the drive and reinstall the 16.04.1 LTR from scratch, and I don't think the boot sector nonsense would be as much of a problem, but then the OS wouldn't ever properly clean up after itself and would slowly grow larger over time unchecked.
What really fries my bacon is that the Espon printer driver quietly failed while I'm busy doing the other stuff. So, I will have to hijack one of my kids' Windows 7 machines to print something. And, no I didn't make them upgrade to Windows 10 even though it was free.
(I suspect that a portion of my readers aren't laughing or amused because printing stuff is like, so ten years ago.)
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
USFIV, slideshow version
I tried to add a Street Fighter video to my Youtube channel, but it was more like a slideshow. I was thinking that it could have been because I was connected via wireless, but apparently I'm not the only one with the problem.
Here you go anyway, if only for humor's sake and for subsequent comparison.
Ken's Ultra reaches a little farther than expected, both in the first and third rounds. Done out of total desperation on my part, that Evil Ryu player should have eviscerated me.
Here you go anyway, if only for humor's sake and for subsequent comparison.
Ken's Ultra reaches a little farther than expected, both in the first and third rounds. Done out of total desperation on my part, that Evil Ryu player should have eviscerated me.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Why stuff has to work seamlessly.
For a while, I was starting to get the impression that the idea that things have to work correctly nearly 100% of the time with respect to computing was a ridiculous standard. I thought it was some sort of outcropping of the behavior of spoiled kids. The first times I really heard it mentioned specifically were Jobs talking about the new macs, about how they needed to 'just work', and in Zuckerberg's comments about how facebook needed to be up all the time or that people wouldn't come back to it.
I later realized that this is not a progression of vanity or of unreasonable expectations, but merely an expression of trying to keep up with an existing standard.
Clay tablets and stone chiseling might have been unforgiving media, perhaps. They did give us a media where data could be archived for far longer than a human lifetime. We have learned substantial things about languages no longer spoken and mathematical systems no longer used merely from clay tablets and chiseled stone. They are a bummer to carry around, but that's why you invent the library, and then thousands of years later you invent the steel-toed shoe.
We've had paper and pencil for a decent amount of time, and it's still a functional system. If the power goes out, you can still read it. If they make a new kind of paper, you can still read the old paper. You have a visual indication if a pencil is about to fail. You can feel if a piece of paper is about to rip when you're writing on it. Large amounts of paper can be bound together to make books, holding more information than tons of stone and clay tablets can. If somebody found something interesting, you can make notes in the margins, or perhaps scrawl an idea or reference between the lines of text. If you mess something up, you can erase it and then recheck your work.
In the early days of computing, input was done via mechanical means. At that time, that mechanical input usually ended up being punch cards, since those were used for automated machines from the previous era.
The next step in local computing was the keyboard, an outgrowth of the existing typewriter. With the keyboard, we also got what we commonly refer to as the command line. It's just a prompt for us to type something into the computer, and the computer can act on that single command, or the command can ask it to start a larger program with hundreds and thousands of commands in it. If a single command failed, our feedback was immediate, and usually the failure was located somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. The syntax - the organized system of how a computer expects input in this case - can be tricky to memorize, but if needed we can also ask the computer what the syntax it expects is.
My personal all-time most common ones were "fdisk /? and chkdsk /?" since you didn't want a catastrophic failure or a gigantic waste of time after messing up the syntax. Never hurts to check.
As computing got larger, the need for standard libraries became apparent, since nobody wanted to reinvent the wheel every time they built a program, and there are lots of functions that people wanted that you weren't just going to build into the hardware or rewrite into the program every time - but this is where a lot of computing starts getting difficult for the users - and this was about the time we had a big influx of people using computers that weren't programmers of any sort. Having a library interfere with the program running or the operating system because of an unforeseen interaction is what caused the infamous "Blue Screen of Death" in Windows versions 3.1/95/98 most of the time, leaving a using wondering when the Feds were going to come get them for performing an 'illegal operation'. While the information provided on those error screens were of great use to people familiar with troubleshooting Windows problems, it left the average user feeling frustrated a lot of the time because you don't know if it's because there's something wrong with the program, the data, or the hardware (or any combination thereof). Apple has done a good job historically in mitigating a lot of these problems by allowing fewer hardware configurations, but it can't protect them from the problems that happen subsequently.
Once you get to large scale distributed computing, you've almost separated the user interface from the program. The user interface is a little tiny part of the program that the user's machine deals with, and it gets data from and sends data to the actual program, wherever that may be. For most of us, a lot of the web is this experience. Facebook, Amazon, Google, Mapquest, eBay, and the list goes on and on. For some of us, the programs we use at work are like this. In larger companies, all of the ordering and inventory management are done on offsite computers that local offices just call in to. Your printer in your office can let someone halfway across the country that's in charge of your company's office supplies know that it's out of toner, and place an order that's automatically routed onto a delivery truck and email you a tracking number so you know when it's going to show up. Your checkout terminals at a store can tell a corporate warehouse when you've sold the last copy of the new Beyonce album or the last piece of furniture from the collection that you're no longer going to carry.
When these things fail, however, it usually goes back on the people. Nobody waiting at the customer service desk wants to hear "Well, the computer said we had one..." when it would be easy enough to go out to the shelf and check, and no manager wants the employees having to rush around and personally check every inquiry when they're spending big bucks on a presumably good inventory management system. Nobody wants to show up to an establishment with cash in their hand and the product there available and get told "Well, we can't sell it to you, all the computers are down. Not only can we not record the sale, but we can't be 100% sure how much to charge you for the item." It's not because they don't understand anything about computing, since computing has infiltrated the lives of a large portion of the world, but it's because the old way used to work just fine and didn't have a failure mode like this. If the customer has cash, you can ring him up. If you weren't sure how much to charge, you could open up your ledger and either check the previous sales, or figure out a fair price from the cost of the item when it was purchased.
Now, though, we have 'middleware'. It's not the input, and it's not the output - it's all the stuff happening under the hood on the way from A to Z. That makes it the stage where you really don't want to have problems, and can't afford to have problems, because it's the sort of thing that can turn a customer away from a product or service fairly quickly. Customers are far more likely to be forgiving with an inexperienced employee standing in front of them than they are to be forgiving when a computer error makes a simple transaction for a couple of items take half an hour.
On a related note, I had a chance to try out a wireless mouse/keyboard combo from digital innovations just recently. The keyboard works well enough, even if I didn't entirely like the feel of the keys. The mouse had an odd habit where left clicks were not registering all the time. How many times can you left click with a mouse on a computer (oh, I'm sorry Apple users - just ignore the word 'left'...) to no effect and put up with it? Since it's a wireless device, you wonder if there's an issue with where the receiver is placed, but then you remember that you were typing just fine a second ago, and rolling the scroll wheel and moving the pointer just worked. You think, could it be the batteries? But there again, the other things were working. Maybe you hadn't pressed firmly enough? If you felt the 'click', you would think that you had. I wasn't even going to address the issue of drivers, since I'm not sure that it had asked me to install them in the first place and Windows rarely asks for them for basic functionality any more. (A left click counts as basic functionality, right?) Each of the kids had tried it on their machines (one XP, one Win7) with similar issues with the left click and no other issues. I thought it would do better or fail entirely on my Ubuntu machine if it really were a driver issue, but it exhibited pretty much the same behavior. Everything worked find except the left click. So, it's probably a mechanical failure and we'll have to tear it down and see if we can fix it. It's not going to get much use in the meantime, though. I don't actually remember having this sort of a failure with a mouse before.
After switching keyboard/mouse setups around a bunch of times in the house to get everyone to try it out, I ended up short on the Linux machine again so I found something that I really like that was only $30 (and I'm using it right now.) It's the Logitech K400r, which is a wireless keyboard that has a trackpad where the number pad would usually be. Ubuntu didn't have any issue with it at all. The track pad is smart enough to know if you're using two fingers, so you move the pointer with a single finger, but scroll with two fingers, similar to other multi-touch devices. It also had no problem doing the 'zoom' in the browser gesturally. My only actual complaint seems rather petty in that the right Shift key is located in a strange spot and I've hit the up arrow by mistake quite a number of times.
One of the other unusual features is that in addition to tapping on the track pad and using the dedicated left button on the bottom of the track pad, there is a button at the top left hand corner of the keyboard above the escape key that also functions as the left mouse button.
I guess somebody realized how important it was for that to work.
I later realized that this is not a progression of vanity or of unreasonable expectations, but merely an expression of trying to keep up with an existing standard.
Clay tablets and stone chiseling might have been unforgiving media, perhaps. They did give us a media where data could be archived for far longer than a human lifetime. We have learned substantial things about languages no longer spoken and mathematical systems no longer used merely from clay tablets and chiseled stone. They are a bummer to carry around, but that's why you invent the library, and then thousands of years later you invent the steel-toed shoe.
We've had paper and pencil for a decent amount of time, and it's still a functional system. If the power goes out, you can still read it. If they make a new kind of paper, you can still read the old paper. You have a visual indication if a pencil is about to fail. You can feel if a piece of paper is about to rip when you're writing on it. Large amounts of paper can be bound together to make books, holding more information than tons of stone and clay tablets can. If somebody found something interesting, you can make notes in the margins, or perhaps scrawl an idea or reference between the lines of text. If you mess something up, you can erase it and then recheck your work.
In the early days of computing, input was done via mechanical means. At that time, that mechanical input usually ended up being punch cards, since those were used for automated machines from the previous era.
The next step in local computing was the keyboard, an outgrowth of the existing typewriter. With the keyboard, we also got what we commonly refer to as the command line. It's just a prompt for us to type something into the computer, and the computer can act on that single command, or the command can ask it to start a larger program with hundreds and thousands of commands in it. If a single command failed, our feedback was immediate, and usually the failure was located somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. The syntax - the organized system of how a computer expects input in this case - can be tricky to memorize, but if needed we can also ask the computer what the syntax it expects is.
My personal all-time most common ones were "fdisk /? and chkdsk /?" since you didn't want a catastrophic failure or a gigantic waste of time after messing up the syntax. Never hurts to check.
As computing got larger, the need for standard libraries became apparent, since nobody wanted to reinvent the wheel every time they built a program, and there are lots of functions that people wanted that you weren't just going to build into the hardware or rewrite into the program every time - but this is where a lot of computing starts getting difficult for the users - and this was about the time we had a big influx of people using computers that weren't programmers of any sort. Having a library interfere with the program running or the operating system because of an unforeseen interaction is what caused the infamous "Blue Screen of Death" in Windows versions 3.1/95/98 most of the time, leaving a using wondering when the Feds were going to come get them for performing an 'illegal operation'. While the information provided on those error screens were of great use to people familiar with troubleshooting Windows problems, it left the average user feeling frustrated a lot of the time because you don't know if it's because there's something wrong with the program, the data, or the hardware (or any combination thereof). Apple has done a good job historically in mitigating a lot of these problems by allowing fewer hardware configurations, but it can't protect them from the problems that happen subsequently.
Once you get to large scale distributed computing, you've almost separated the user interface from the program. The user interface is a little tiny part of the program that the user's machine deals with, and it gets data from and sends data to the actual program, wherever that may be. For most of us, a lot of the web is this experience. Facebook, Amazon, Google, Mapquest, eBay, and the list goes on and on. For some of us, the programs we use at work are like this. In larger companies, all of the ordering and inventory management are done on offsite computers that local offices just call in to. Your printer in your office can let someone halfway across the country that's in charge of your company's office supplies know that it's out of toner, and place an order that's automatically routed onto a delivery truck and email you a tracking number so you know when it's going to show up. Your checkout terminals at a store can tell a corporate warehouse when you've sold the last copy of the new Beyonce album or the last piece of furniture from the collection that you're no longer going to carry.
When these things fail, however, it usually goes back on the people. Nobody waiting at the customer service desk wants to hear "Well, the computer said we had one..." when it would be easy enough to go out to the shelf and check, and no manager wants the employees having to rush around and personally check every inquiry when they're spending big bucks on a presumably good inventory management system. Nobody wants to show up to an establishment with cash in their hand and the product there available and get told "Well, we can't sell it to you, all the computers are down. Not only can we not record the sale, but we can't be 100% sure how much to charge you for the item." It's not because they don't understand anything about computing, since computing has infiltrated the lives of a large portion of the world, but it's because the old way used to work just fine and didn't have a failure mode like this. If the customer has cash, you can ring him up. If you weren't sure how much to charge, you could open up your ledger and either check the previous sales, or figure out a fair price from the cost of the item when it was purchased.
Now, though, we have 'middleware'. It's not the input, and it's not the output - it's all the stuff happening under the hood on the way from A to Z. That makes it the stage where you really don't want to have problems, and can't afford to have problems, because it's the sort of thing that can turn a customer away from a product or service fairly quickly. Customers are far more likely to be forgiving with an inexperienced employee standing in front of them than they are to be forgiving when a computer error makes a simple transaction for a couple of items take half an hour.
On a related note, I had a chance to try out a wireless mouse/keyboard combo from digital innovations just recently. The keyboard works well enough, even if I didn't entirely like the feel of the keys. The mouse had an odd habit where left clicks were not registering all the time. How many times can you left click with a mouse on a computer (oh, I'm sorry Apple users - just ignore the word 'left'...) to no effect and put up with it? Since it's a wireless device, you wonder if there's an issue with where the receiver is placed, but then you remember that you were typing just fine a second ago, and rolling the scroll wheel and moving the pointer just worked. You think, could it be the batteries? But there again, the other things were working. Maybe you hadn't pressed firmly enough? If you felt the 'click', you would think that you had. I wasn't even going to address the issue of drivers, since I'm not sure that it had asked me to install them in the first place and Windows rarely asks for them for basic functionality any more. (A left click counts as basic functionality, right?) Each of the kids had tried it on their machines (one XP, one Win7) with similar issues with the left click and no other issues. I thought it would do better or fail entirely on my Ubuntu machine if it really were a driver issue, but it exhibited pretty much the same behavior. Everything worked find except the left click. So, it's probably a mechanical failure and we'll have to tear it down and see if we can fix it. It's not going to get much use in the meantime, though. I don't actually remember having this sort of a failure with a mouse before.
After switching keyboard/mouse setups around a bunch of times in the house to get everyone to try it out, I ended up short on the Linux machine again so I found something that I really like that was only $30 (and I'm using it right now.) It's the Logitech K400r, which is a wireless keyboard that has a trackpad where the number pad would usually be. Ubuntu didn't have any issue with it at all. The track pad is smart enough to know if you're using two fingers, so you move the pointer with a single finger, but scroll with two fingers, similar to other multi-touch devices. It also had no problem doing the 'zoom' in the browser gesturally. My only actual complaint seems rather petty in that the right Shift key is located in a strange spot and I've hit the up arrow by mistake quite a number of times.
One of the other unusual features is that in addition to tapping on the track pad and using the dedicated left button on the bottom of the track pad, there is a button at the top left hand corner of the keyboard above the escape key that also functions as the left mouse button.
I guess somebody realized how important it was for that to work.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Intentional Fail, FTW.
So is it a viable strategy to fail on purpose?
Maybe you wanted to win some money from "America's Funniest Home Videos" and you set up a scenario to hilariously injure yourself while a stationary camera recorded it?
Or, perhaps you're a ninth-rate celebutante that was sort of famous for doing some thing on that commercial that was banned in six counties in California but not so much these days so you 'accidentally' let a sex tape leak out? (Wow. 'Leak out' sounds horrible in that context.)
So maybe that wasn't what I was talking about. How about this one? How long can you be a name-brand company selling products in the US and have horrible customer support? I'm not even talking about the recent list of much-maligned retailers. In a way it's worse, since I'm talking about a brand that's been sold in Walmart, Kmart/Sears, Target, Office Depot, Staples, some drugstores, all over Amazon, and even legitimate camera stores.
We're talking about the low-price digital camera brand Vivitar. The actual people that founded Vivitar are long-gone, and the company's past success revolved around a rather popular and functional flash unit, the Vivtar 283, that worked better than most of the more expensive units on the market at the time.
As far as I can discern, they haven't had a consistently working email address for customer support in the last seven years. (Scroll down to the 2/8/2007 post where they describe an email to support@vivitar.com getting kicked back with a 'permanent error'.) Since Sakar has only owned Vivitar since sometime in 2008, I suppose we can give them a pass on 2007. But, digging around on the internet, you can find people perpetually having issues with them, and a consistent theme that I noticed was that people were not always able to email customer support. It's not like they've changed any of their literature - it all still says that support issues are to be mailed to support@vivitar.com. Having tried it myself, I got emails kicked back in three days or so with a similar type of permanent error. Online mail check programs seem to yield either similar or inconclusive results. (I had never seen 'SMTPConnectionShutdown' errors before.) Having had occasion to call them several weeks ago, they offered up a different email address, digitalcameras@vivitar.com, which failed in the same way that the first one did. ("Mail server unreachable for too long.") Imagine all of the productive time that they gain by not having to read and answer email! It could be saving the company tons of money!
Maybe I've glossed over the finer points of this, so perhaps I recall my version of the story here. My wife was given her choice of gifts at work for a recent employment anniversary. It's done through a company that does this sort of employee rewards program for several companies, not just the one my wife works for. As we were thinking that it would be nice to have a newer camera, she ignored the other things in the catalog, like battery drills and vacuum cleaners. It was hard to tell what sort of quality level the things in the catalog are, especially when they did oddball things like including a camera whose part number doesn't appear on the company's own website and doesn't appear for sale anywhere except for one listing on eBay. But, don't look a gift camera in the lens, right? She puts in her order, it shows up in a week, and it arrives with all the accessories and the install CD. Oddly, there's a big crack in the install CD, but all of the crack is outside of the area of the written part of the disk. So, I figure that I'll still be able to install the software. I wasn't able to the first time, but it may have had more to do with the way the program talks to the internet and how Windows 7 behaves during certain types of installs. The camera ran just fine after being charged, and I was able to get pictures and videos from the memory card on the camera. Windows Media Player couldn't play the .avi files that the camera made, but since it said that the camera utilizes MJPG compression, VLC Media Player and QuickTime didn't have any problems playing them. I thought it was a little bit odd about the install, so I thought that maybe there was a newer version of the software that I could get from the internet, and I figured that if I could contact them, I would ask them about codecs and maybe about how to set the time and date on the camera. I sent them an email, which failed, but I didn't know for a couple of days because the internet really does try to make sure that mail goes through before it completely gives up. I called the 800 number, and got a non-native speaker of English who seemed charming enough. They said that they would email me a link to the software so I could download it, which never arrived. I mentioned that I had already sent an email that never seemed to get there and they suggested the digitalcameras@vivitar.com address that also didn't work. I asked them about the model number, they said that the camera was too new. I didn't even want to argue that with the support tech since most of their newer products for the last few years got press releases but this one did not. My personal hypothesis on the camera is that it's a model made specifically for the employee gift program that's not actually much different from a couple of their other models. Was the support tech intentionally lying to me? It seems unlikely. It seems more likely that everything looks like it works from their end and they don't get to see the pattern of failure from where they sit.
I eventually managed to install the software for the camera, after some careful application of "Run As Administrator", but had to tell the software that I have a 785HD instead of a 786HD because it's the closest thing I can find. It turned out not to have any codecs in the install that I could find, and I can't figure out if the program has any way to set the time and the date on the camera. The install also did not change how Windows detects the camera, since all Windows can tell is that it's a generic USB drive.
I just feel bummed by the whole experience. The camera works, other than not having the right datestamp on the pictures, but I'm just not sure that people that were having actual problems would be well served by their support system. Of course, if they spent more money on support, they'd have to charge more for the cameras and they'd risk their low-price market position.
I suppose since America's Funniest Home Videos is still running, maybe there's some studio exec at Sakar that keeps a camera rolling in his office to capture footage of some disgruntled customer that totally loses their mind at him some afternoon when they can't get the customer support email to work. (That's afv.com/upload, just in case you need it. Just don't hurt anything important.)
Maybe you wanted to win some money from "America's Funniest Home Videos" and you set up a scenario to hilariously injure yourself while a stationary camera recorded it?
Or, perhaps you're a ninth-rate celebutante that was sort of famous for doing some thing on that commercial that was banned in six counties in California but not so much these days so you 'accidentally' let a sex tape leak out? (Wow. 'Leak out' sounds horrible in that context.)
So maybe that wasn't what I was talking about. How about this one? How long can you be a name-brand company selling products in the US and have horrible customer support? I'm not even talking about the recent list of much-maligned retailers. In a way it's worse, since I'm talking about a brand that's been sold in Walmart, Kmart/Sears, Target, Office Depot, Staples, some drugstores, all over Amazon, and even legitimate camera stores.
We're talking about the low-price digital camera brand Vivitar. The actual people that founded Vivitar are long-gone, and the company's past success revolved around a rather popular and functional flash unit, the Vivtar 283, that worked better than most of the more expensive units on the market at the time.
As far as I can discern, they haven't had a consistently working email address for customer support in the last seven years. (Scroll down to the 2/8/2007 post where they describe an email to support@vivitar.com getting kicked back with a 'permanent error'.) Since Sakar has only owned Vivitar since sometime in 2008, I suppose we can give them a pass on 2007. But, digging around on the internet, you can find people perpetually having issues with them, and a consistent theme that I noticed was that people were not always able to email customer support. It's not like they've changed any of their literature - it all still says that support issues are to be mailed to support@vivitar.com. Having tried it myself, I got emails kicked back in three days or so with a similar type of permanent error. Online mail check programs seem to yield either similar or inconclusive results. (I had never seen 'SMTPConnectionShutdown' errors before.) Having had occasion to call them several weeks ago, they offered up a different email address, digitalcameras@vivitar.com, which failed in the same way that the first one did. ("Mail server unreachable for too long.") Imagine all of the productive time that they gain by not having to read and answer email! It could be saving the company tons of money!
Maybe I've glossed over the finer points of this, so perhaps I recall my version of the story here. My wife was given her choice of gifts at work for a recent employment anniversary. It's done through a company that does this sort of employee rewards program for several companies, not just the one my wife works for. As we were thinking that it would be nice to have a newer camera, she ignored the other things in the catalog, like battery drills and vacuum cleaners. It was hard to tell what sort of quality level the things in the catalog are, especially when they did oddball things like including a camera whose part number doesn't appear on the company's own website and doesn't appear for sale anywhere except for one listing on eBay. But, don't look a gift camera in the lens, right? She puts in her order, it shows up in a week, and it arrives with all the accessories and the install CD. Oddly, there's a big crack in the install CD, but all of the crack is outside of the area of the written part of the disk. So, I figure that I'll still be able to install the software. I wasn't able to the first time, but it may have had more to do with the way the program talks to the internet and how Windows 7 behaves during certain types of installs. The camera ran just fine after being charged, and I was able to get pictures and videos from the memory card on the camera. Windows Media Player couldn't play the .avi files that the camera made, but since it said that the camera utilizes MJPG compression, VLC Media Player and QuickTime didn't have any problems playing them. I thought it was a little bit odd about the install, so I thought that maybe there was a newer version of the software that I could get from the internet, and I figured that if I could contact them, I would ask them about codecs and maybe about how to set the time and date on the camera. I sent them an email, which failed, but I didn't know for a couple of days because the internet really does try to make sure that mail goes through before it completely gives up. I called the 800 number, and got a non-native speaker of English who seemed charming enough. They said that they would email me a link to the software so I could download it, which never arrived. I mentioned that I had already sent an email that never seemed to get there and they suggested the digitalcameras@vivitar.com address that also didn't work. I asked them about the model number, they said that the camera was too new. I didn't even want to argue that with the support tech since most of their newer products for the last few years got press releases but this one did not. My personal hypothesis on the camera is that it's a model made specifically for the employee gift program that's not actually much different from a couple of their other models. Was the support tech intentionally lying to me? It seems unlikely. It seems more likely that everything looks like it works from their end and they don't get to see the pattern of failure from where they sit.
I eventually managed to install the software for the camera, after some careful application of "Run As Administrator", but had to tell the software that I have a 785HD instead of a 786HD because it's the closest thing I can find. It turned out not to have any codecs in the install that I could find, and I can't figure out if the program has any way to set the time and the date on the camera. The install also did not change how Windows detects the camera, since all Windows can tell is that it's a generic USB drive.
I just feel bummed by the whole experience. The camera works, other than not having the right datestamp on the pictures, but I'm just not sure that people that were having actual problems would be well served by their support system. Of course, if they spent more money on support, they'd have to charge more for the cameras and they'd risk their low-price market position.
I suppose since America's Funniest Home Videos is still running, maybe there's some studio exec at Sakar that keeps a camera rolling in his office to capture footage of some disgruntled customer that totally loses their mind at him some afternoon when they can't get the customer support email to work. (That's afv.com/upload, just in case you need it. Just don't hurt anything important.)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Two Quick things...
I am working on a review of Capcom and Eighting's "Tatsunoko vs CAPCOM" fighting game for Wii, expect to see that posted sometime over the weekend. The short version - game is good, get your Gamecube controller out of storage to play it.
The other thing that I need to mention now is that all users of the Open Office productivity suite should update to version 3.2 at their earliest convenience, and if you haven't tried Open Office yet, it's a good time to do it.
The other thing that I need to mention now is that all users of the Open Office productivity suite should update to version 3.2 at their earliest convenience, and if you haven't tried Open Office yet, it's a good time to do it.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Troubleshooting Windows... or is it?
I had an interesting time this morning, working on a problem with Remote Web Workplace. For those of you who don't know, Remote Web Workplace is a feature in Windows XP and later where a desktop connected to a internet-connected server can be accessed via a web interface, and then turns into a standard Remote Desktop situation - so a home user could access their work PC, for example. The only way this works is through some fancy pants ActiveX controls, so Internet Explorer is the only reliable way to do it (and yes, I know some people have made ActiveX plugins for FireFox).
The problem becomes a little trickier, when the problem is on an Apple.
As it turns out, Apple has been turning out nice-looking hardware these days, and the nicer part is that the old excuse of "There's no programs for Apple that do X" is greatly diminished. Thanks to programs like Boot Camp and Parallels and the fact that Apple uses Intel processors these days, Windows can be run on a Mac either from a separate partition (Boot Camp) or as a virtual machine (Parallels).
The problem the user was having was that he was unable to do Remote Web Workplace through his Mac through Parallels. His purchase of a Mac and Parallels was somewhat predicated on the idea that he'd be able to do this. We were able to get to the portal on the server, but when it was time to actually log into his desktop, it always told us that the username/password combination was incorrect.
I spent a bit of time on Google seeing if there was a known problem with this, and tried to make sure that neither Windows nor OSX were blocking some port that I needed to make the computers communicate correctly. It didn't take me very long to find out where the Apple firewall was, and I'm glad I didn't need to adjust anything there because I felt like I would have left the machine vulnerable had I done so.
I even tried logging into my own desktop, and failed several times, adjusted some settings, and then I got it to work once. Happy that I had solved the problem, I brought it back to the user only to have it fail for him and then me when I brought it to his office. Maybe the WiFi signal isn't strong enough, I think. I bring the Macbook Pro to where the router is, prop an equipment rack door open, and then try again.
Same problem again.
I painstakingly check my typing, only to discover the oddest thing.
The Shift Key, it fails me. If I were to hold shift and start typing the letter 'a', I get 'aAAAAAA'.
If I pressed shift once, held it and pressed 'a', released both keys and repeated, I only get 'aaaaaaa'.
The only sure way to get a capital letter the first time was to temporarily engage CapsLock. Since Windows obscures the password as it's typed, there was no way to know that the password was wrong other than the error message. This was not a problem with the whole computer - the shift key worked perfectly fine for regular programs, and even the first login. Somehow, during the second login at the remote desktop, there were too many layers of computers there and some info was not passed. Once I discovered the CapsLock workaround, there were no more rejected logins.
This seemed like the computing equivalent of a Turducken. Bon Appetit!
The problem becomes a little trickier, when the problem is on an Apple.
As it turns out, Apple has been turning out nice-looking hardware these days, and the nicer part is that the old excuse of "There's no programs for Apple that do X" is greatly diminished. Thanks to programs like Boot Camp and Parallels and the fact that Apple uses Intel processors these days, Windows can be run on a Mac either from a separate partition (Boot Camp) or as a virtual machine (Parallels).
The problem the user was having was that he was unable to do Remote Web Workplace through his Mac through Parallels. His purchase of a Mac and Parallels was somewhat predicated on the idea that he'd be able to do this. We were able to get to the portal on the server, but when it was time to actually log into his desktop, it always told us that the username/password combination was incorrect.
I spent a bit of time on Google seeing if there was a known problem with this, and tried to make sure that neither Windows nor OSX were blocking some port that I needed to make the computers communicate correctly. It didn't take me very long to find out where the Apple firewall was, and I'm glad I didn't need to adjust anything there because I felt like I would have left the machine vulnerable had I done so.
I even tried logging into my own desktop, and failed several times, adjusted some settings, and then I got it to work once. Happy that I had solved the problem, I brought it back to the user only to have it fail for him and then me when I brought it to his office. Maybe the WiFi signal isn't strong enough, I think. I bring the Macbook Pro to where the router is, prop an equipment rack door open, and then try again.
Same problem again.
I painstakingly check my typing, only to discover the oddest thing.
The Shift Key, it fails me. If I were to hold shift and start typing the letter 'a', I get 'aAAAAAA'.
If I pressed shift once, held it and pressed 'a', released both keys and repeated, I only get 'aaaaaaa'.
The only sure way to get a capital letter the first time was to temporarily engage CapsLock. Since Windows obscures the password as it's typed, there was no way to know that the password was wrong other than the error message. This was not a problem with the whole computer - the shift key worked perfectly fine for regular programs, and even the first login. Somehow, during the second login at the remote desktop, there were too many layers of computers there and some info was not passed. Once I discovered the CapsLock workaround, there were no more rejected logins.
This seemed like the computing equivalent of a Turducken. Bon Appetit!
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Tales from the Cube - Birthday Edition
I went out to Moe's for my birthday with the family over last weekend. I enjoyed my giant tofu burrito immensely. I got run over out in the parking lot with a shopping cart. It hurt, but it was fun. Later, we walked over to Best Buy to see what they had in the bargain bin. We almost picked up Slither for $5, but if I'm going to buy it I'd rather have widescreen and all they had was Full Frame (which is probably why it was in the $5 bin.)
I tried to play PS3 Guitar Hero on Hard on some song I didn't know but I couldn't manage to get in sync with the game. For all I know the display guitar's strum bar was all beat to heck, but I don't really know what it was supposed to feel like anyway.
I also played the new Wii Control Pikmin at the Nintendo kiosk, but I didn't like the controls at first. The idea of the Wii Control re-releases is that they take a game that sold well or got lots of critical acclaim on Nintendo's Gamecube, and then freshen it up so that it has native Wii controls. I hope that the freshening up process also includes widescreen support. It's one of those things that might be better if I just started over at the beginning and re-learned it. I still have my Gamecube copy of Pikmin and still play Challenge Mode periodically - so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the game - but I didn't immediately 'get' the new control scheme.
After #1 son and I got tired of picking through the game section, we found Mom and #2 son back in the camera section. Mom was disappointed that more cameras don't list their minimum focusing distance on their specification sheet. The only advice I could offer was to not look for anything that couldn't physically support a decent lens, and that if the megapixels were high enough, you could compensate for lack of zoom somewhat. While we were chatting about that, an employee spotted my Rubik's cube, and asked me about it, and I solved it for him. I assume I took forty seconds or so, which is par for the course for me if I'm talking up a storm while doing it. He was dumbfounded, and dragged me over to the front where the other associates are and the Geek Squad counter is. I handed it to the first employee to re-scramble, and he dragged out one of the other employees, presumably someone he had to show this stupid human trick (Sorry, Mr. Letterman) to. The other employee asked me if I'm a professional cuber, which I both denied that I am and also denied that there are. I suggested to him that there might be a few people that make some of their travel money back, but that nobody does it for a living. I knocked down a slightly faster time, since I didn't talk as much, and they were even more impressed. After I finished, I walked past the nerdy looking girl (Please, no feminist outrage. I had Dana Scully on my work desktop for a while, and I dig the big black glasses look.) at the Geek Squad counter and I asked her "You can solve this, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't let you have the shirt..." She shook her head no. Maybe I should have asked her what devices the first group of IRQ's go to or what the pinout and voltage for USB is.
I tried to play PS3 Guitar Hero on Hard on some song I didn't know but I couldn't manage to get in sync with the game. For all I know the display guitar's strum bar was all beat to heck, but I don't really know what it was supposed to feel like anyway.
I also played the new Wii Control Pikmin at the Nintendo kiosk, but I didn't like the controls at first. The idea of the Wii Control re-releases is that they take a game that sold well or got lots of critical acclaim on Nintendo's Gamecube, and then freshen it up so that it has native Wii controls. I hope that the freshening up process also includes widescreen support. It's one of those things that might be better if I just started over at the beginning and re-learned it. I still have my Gamecube copy of Pikmin and still play Challenge Mode periodically - so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the game - but I didn't immediately 'get' the new control scheme.
After #1 son and I got tired of picking through the game section, we found Mom and #2 son back in the camera section. Mom was disappointed that more cameras don't list their minimum focusing distance on their specification sheet. The only advice I could offer was to not look for anything that couldn't physically support a decent lens, and that if the megapixels were high enough, you could compensate for lack of zoom somewhat. While we were chatting about that, an employee spotted my Rubik's cube, and asked me about it, and I solved it for him. I assume I took forty seconds or so, which is par for the course for me if I'm talking up a storm while doing it. He was dumbfounded, and dragged me over to the front where the other associates are and the Geek Squad counter is. I handed it to the first employee to re-scramble, and he dragged out one of the other employees, presumably someone he had to show this stupid human trick (Sorry, Mr. Letterman) to. The other employee asked me if I'm a professional cuber, which I both denied that I am and also denied that there are. I suggested to him that there might be a few people that make some of their travel money back, but that nobody does it for a living. I knocked down a slightly faster time, since I didn't talk as much, and they were even more impressed. After I finished, I walked past the nerdy looking girl (Please, no feminist outrage. I had Dana Scully on my work desktop for a while, and I dig the big black glasses look.) at the Geek Squad counter and I asked her "You can solve this, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't let you have the shirt..." She shook her head no. Maybe I should have asked her what devices the first group of IRQ's go to or what the pinout and voltage for USB is.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Net. Book.
I guess I never noticed that a company called Psion ever made anything called a netbook in the 90's. The fact that they've issued Dell and others warning letters about that word that they trademarked in the 90's only makes me want to say three things.
1) Although I am familiar with laptops, tablet PC's, PDA's, the term 'netbook' only came into my usage in the last year - probably because of offerings from Asus, HP, and Acer and others trying to fit in the low-cost end of the computing spectrum. The word feels generic, eCost and other sales sites treat the word like it's generic, and everyone else gets that it's an interNET noteBOOK computer. I'm sure part of the reason that I'm unfamiliar with Psion's original netBook is because it was not that popular at the time, and the company is in the UK. As a matter of fact, the last time I touched something that that company made was probably the Chess game for the Timex Sinclair computer back in the mid 80's. Some of you may have phones with the Symbian OS on them, or some software written for that OS - but it would be hard to know that Psion had anything to do with it unless you spend your day picking through the fine print. The other reason you might be unfamiliar with Psion is that's it's been reorganized and spun apart a couple of times.
2) I'm surprised they haven't filed suit against Toyota for introducing the Scion brand of vehicles since it's pronounced the same.
3) Net Book. Netbook. Say it with me.
Netbook netbook netbook netbook notebook laptop desktop internet notebook netbook.
Klaatu barada netbook.
The NBC Nightly Netbook with David Brinkley.
You're watching the netbook channel.
All your netbooks are belong to us.
See? Perfectly generic.
We can't let people trademark stuff so easily. Sure, if it's a completely made up word like Narbacular, whoever made it can control it. Otherwise, Exxon is going to trademark the word 'biofuel' or 'gasohol' or 'corn' and the next thing you know, they'll have the Jolly Green Giant working at a truck stop fueling 18-wheelers because they own him anyway and it's more productive than him standing around in a field all day.
1) Although I am familiar with laptops, tablet PC's, PDA's, the term 'netbook' only came into my usage in the last year - probably because of offerings from Asus, HP, and Acer and others trying to fit in the low-cost end of the computing spectrum. The word feels generic, eCost and other sales sites treat the word like it's generic, and everyone else gets that it's an interNET noteBOOK computer. I'm sure part of the reason that I'm unfamiliar with Psion's original netBook is because it was not that popular at the time, and the company is in the UK. As a matter of fact, the last time I touched something that that company made was probably the Chess game for the Timex Sinclair computer back in the mid 80's. Some of you may have phones with the Symbian OS on them, or some software written for that OS - but it would be hard to know that Psion had anything to do with it unless you spend your day picking through the fine print. The other reason you might be unfamiliar with Psion is that's it's been reorganized and spun apart a couple of times.
2) I'm surprised they haven't filed suit against Toyota for introducing the Scion brand of vehicles since it's pronounced the same.
3) Net Book. Netbook. Say it with me.
Netbook netbook netbook netbook notebook laptop desktop internet notebook netbook.
Klaatu barada netbook.
The NBC Nightly Netbook with David Brinkley.
You're watching the netbook channel.
All your netbooks are belong to us.
See? Perfectly generic.
We can't let people trademark stuff so easily. Sure, if it's a completely made up word like Narbacular, whoever made it can control it. Otherwise, Exxon is going to trademark the word 'biofuel' or 'gasohol' or 'corn' and the next thing you know, they'll have the Jolly Green Giant working at a truck stop fueling 18-wheelers because they own him anyway and it's more productive than him standing around in a field all day.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Do I really have to say this again?
I'm serious.
Really, really serious.
I can't stress this enough.
I've seen this several times.
It disappoints me every single time.
Pay attention, you will save eighty bucks.
If you own a laser printer, do not plug it into a battery backup.
If you have a battery backup where some of the outlets are labeled "Surge Only", then that's OK.
Just make sure you don't plug it in the battery side. It will cause premature battery failure, and no one wants that.
(Getting off of my soapbox now...)
Really, really serious.
I can't stress this enough.
I've seen this several times.
It disappoints me every single time.
Pay attention, you will save eighty bucks.
If you own a laser printer, do not plug it into a battery backup.
If you have a battery backup where some of the outlets are labeled "Surge Only", then that's OK.
Just make sure you don't plug it in the battery side. It will cause premature battery failure, and no one wants that.
(Getting off of my soapbox now...)
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Adventures in Tech Support
File this one under "I wouldn't believe it unless I saw it myself."
I'm sure that many of you just expect your computer to work right and don't spend any time under the hood messing around with the parts. I'm guessing that more than half of you are using a computer that's a year or two old and has Windows XP on it. If any of you running Windows XP have less than 512MB of RAM, I would suggest you fix that if you can. 256MB is technically enough, but most days it doesn't cut it. With that in mind, here's my crazy tech support story.
I took apart a machine at the end of the business day yesterday to put some RAM in it. Our estimator at the office has been running an old AMD Athlon machine with only 256MB of RAM. He never turns it off because it's running his Blackberry redirector all the time, and uses a couple of fairly hefty programs on a regular basis including AutoCAD. He says that he has run two simultaneous sessions of AutoCAD before, even with other things running. On the down side, he's got a small hard drive that's almost completely full, and the machine took approximately fifteen minutes from hitting the power button to being able to work at the desktop. I even tried to get him to upgrade his machine last year and had the new workstation in the building, and he refused it because he didn't want to have to reinstall all of his extra stuff and sort through his files. I was able to use the workstation for one of the other users that really needed an upgrade, so no harm done overall. I subsequently decided that more RAM was the best solution for now, and I got him 2 Gigs which is plenty for Windows XP in hopes that his machine will now last until Windows 7 comes out. We shut down the machine, cracked open the case, and took the old RAM out. What I saw, especially considering that the machine was still running moments previously defies description, so here's a picture.
I was too scared to use the RAM socket that it came out of - luckily there were two other free slots to put the two 1G chips in. Like I said, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.
I'm sure that many of you just expect your computer to work right and don't spend any time under the hood messing around with the parts. I'm guessing that more than half of you are using a computer that's a year or two old and has Windows XP on it. If any of you running Windows XP have less than 512MB of RAM, I would suggest you fix that if you can. 256MB is technically enough, but most days it doesn't cut it. With that in mind, here's my crazy tech support story.
I took apart a machine at the end of the business day yesterday to put some RAM in it. Our estimator at the office has been running an old AMD Athlon machine with only 256MB of RAM. He never turns it off because it's running his Blackberry redirector all the time, and uses a couple of fairly hefty programs on a regular basis including AutoCAD. He says that he has run two simultaneous sessions of AutoCAD before, even with other things running. On the down side, he's got a small hard drive that's almost completely full, and the machine took approximately fifteen minutes from hitting the power button to being able to work at the desktop. I even tried to get him to upgrade his machine last year and had the new workstation in the building, and he refused it because he didn't want to have to reinstall all of his extra stuff and sort through his files. I was able to use the workstation for one of the other users that really needed an upgrade, so no harm done overall. I subsequently decided that more RAM was the best solution for now, and I got him 2 Gigs which is plenty for Windows XP in hopes that his machine will now last until Windows 7 comes out. We shut down the machine, cracked open the case, and took the old RAM out. What I saw, especially considering that the machine was still running moments previously defies description, so here's a picture.
I was too scared to use the RAM socket that it came out of - luckily there were two other free slots to put the two 1G chips in. Like I said, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Get Open Office 3!
...but not yet. Open Office is a magnificent full-featured productivity suite, available absolutely free at OpenOffice.org but as of a few minutes ago the site is still completely unavailable due to the rush of people clamoring to get the new version. It's got better .pdf tools, better .xml tools, and even works with Microsoft Office 2007 better!
Put it on your to-do list for later in the week (unless you're on dialup - in which case you better call someone for a CD.) And, it would help if I fixed the link.
Put it on your to-do list for later in the week (unless you're on dialup - in which case you better call someone for a CD.) And, it would help if I fixed the link.
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