I appear to have broken my netbook.
Well, ‘broken’ might be a bit steep – it no longer responds to a lid close event with the nice, neat standby mode it once treated me to. Instead, it triggers the standby script and gets itself into a half-on, half-off state.
In this state, the power light is flashing to indicate that it’s in standby. Unfortunately, it isn’t – everything’s still working fine. The only indication that it even tried to standby is that my SD card unmount/remount script is triggered and the default keyring is locked.
Continue reading ‘Gnome Power Management glitch’
I came home tonight to find that my Internet connection had crapped out, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about how Billion – that is, the company rather than the oft-misused numerical value – software engineers are perhaps not the sharpest tools in the box.
After restarting my router, the syslog spat out the following:
Jan 1 00:01:33 DDNS: DynDNS can not be reliable if SNTP -time server do not
reply to modem correctly, Please fix SNTP -server address.
Oct 21 19:13:50 syslog: NTP current time is Wed Oct 21 19:13:50 2009
That’s the DDNS service complaining that things might go wrong if it doesn’t know the current time – followed by the NTP service updating to the current time. Apparently making those two things run the other way around is too logical.
It’s not often that a mere sign – even one displaying a frankly staggering ineptitude with the English language – leaves me speechless, but this particular example of apostrophe abuse came close.
Note the shotgun-like approach to grammar involved in this image, where every single S is preceded by an errant apostrophe – with the exception of “brows” and “extensions,” which I can only assume were missed by mistake.
The sign may declare that “Beauty Matterz,” but I posit that grammar ‘matterz’ more.
Ever since switching to WPA2-AES security on my wireless network I’ve been having some problems with my Pinnacle-branded Roku SoundBridge wireless MP3 player. Problems like “strange, this used to be connected to the network.”
It seems that after a few days of working perfectly happily the device drops off the network. Well, not quite ‘off’ – it sits there continually sending out DHCP request after DHCP request. My router, being a good router that does as it’s told, sends out DHCP offers in response to these requests – which are routinely ignored by the SoundBridge.
Switching to a static IP on the SoundBridge doesn’t do a lot of good: although it fixes the Herring Sandwich Experiment qualities of the issue by removing the continuous DHCP requests, the device still drops off the network.
I’ve upgraded the firmware to the latest beta release, but there’s still no joy. Next step is an e-mail to Roku.
Since my PC blew up – and took Windows with it – I’ve been gradually making the switch to using Linux as my everyday desktop operating system. Although I’ve been using it on my laptops and netbooks for years, I’ve usually kept Windows on the desktop for one simple reason: TVersity.
TVersity is an excellent UPnP media server which works perfectly with my media playback devices – the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Roku SoundBridge in the bedroom. Sadly, it’s Windows only – and most of the Linux equivalents have left me cold.
I stumbled across a small daemon called miniDLNA, written by a Netgear engineer for the company’s ReadyNAS range of network attached storage devices, which works like a charm as a TVersity replacement, with one exception – the damn thing refuses to be seen by the Xbox 360. Thankfully, I’ve figured out why.
In the configuration file – /etc/minidlna.conf – the software makes reference to a “presentation URL,” which by default is commented out. This results in an invalid default of http://192.168.0.1:80/, which everything except the Xbox 360 happily ignores. The 360, however, decides to go visit this URL – and falls over.
To fix the issue, simply change the line to the IP address of your server and the port you’ve got miniDLNA working on – 8200 by default. The entire line should end up reading:
# default presentation url is http address on port 80
presentation_url=http://192.168.0.20:8200/
Once that’s done, restart miniDLNA and everything should spring into life.
