Category: Computer

Posted on

Lost Camera?

I just read this article and was very happy with the outcome: Photo clues lead to camera’s owner

This photo provided by Alan Murphy shows him posing for a photo with his niece Sarah O'Sullivan on Dec. 20, 2007, in Florida. Erika Gunderson found Murphy's camera in a New York City taxi cab on New Year's Eve. Using clues from photos and video stored on the camera, Brian Ascher, Gunderson's fiance, was able to track down Murphy in Sydney, Australia and return his camera to him. (AP Photo/Alan Murphy) Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn’t seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.

… (A lot of detective work) …

Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.

The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from Ireland. The group included their friend Alan Murphy, who had journeyed to Florida with family before heading to New York, where the clan stayed at the Radisson. (Their Noel was not the Noel whom Ascher e-mailed.) Murphy ended the trip kicking himself for leaving his camera in a cab in the twilight on New Year’s Eve.

If you have time, it’s definitely worth it to read the entire article to see all the detective work that went in to figure out they were a group of Irish people, how they visited some amusement parks in Florida, how they figured out which hotel they stayed at, how they contacted someone in Ireland, how they located the bar they were at, how they eventually found the owner who lives in Australia (updated). Stuff like this always makes me happy to see that some people are willing to go the extra mile to help others.

But this got me thinking. Many people have lost camera over the ages and before when you lose a camera, that’s probably 20-40 pictures in that roll of film. However, now when you lose a digital camera, that can be hundreds or thousands of photos, and just like how when a hard drive dies on you and you haven’t backed up your important data, it’s that sinking feeling that kills you and you regret what you could’ve done to prevent the data loss.

Of course not everyone is going to be as nice as the folks in the article. Even if it ends up with some honest folks, they’ll probably give up the search after a week or so.

So what can one do to aid the finders to locate the original camera owner?

What most people typically do is probably add a name/address/phone tag to the camera, sort of like your luggage, but that’s just tacky. At first, I thought I’d just take a snapshot with my info such as email and phone number, lock that photo and never delete it. Then I thought what I can also do is create a text file on the the memory card and name it something like “If You Found This Camera, Please Read This.txt” or “Owner Information.txt” and include my name, my email, and my phone number (including international codes). You can also include your address, but I thought that was giving away too much PII (personally identifiable information), especially if it lands in the hand of someone not as honest.

Just wanted to share my thoughts with you guys.

Posted on

Gallery2 Auto Rotate

For the longest time, I’ve been rotating images on Gallery2 manually (usually using IrfanView beforehand) and then uploading them to my ftp server. Of course I only rotated copies and left the originals intact. Anyway, I got sick of it for some reason today and remember this USED to work where Gallery2 would auto rotate based on the EXIF data.

I tried searching the admin panel, but didn’t really have much luck.

I tried to see if there was a rotation plugin and there was none.

I checked out Jpegtran since it’s the tool used for image transformations (specifically rotation), and there didn’t appear to any problems.

Searching for auto rotate or auto rotation on search engines didn’t really result in anything too useful besides the fact that starting with Gallery 2.2, auto rotate was an added feature.

Finally I found a thread that told me how to enable this. Apparently the place to do this is:
Site Administration > EXIF/IPTC > Rotate Pictures Automatically

Woot! Auto-rotate works! I’m thinking about enabling “Preserve Original on Rotating”, but not sure if I want to do that or not, since I assume when people click on “Download photo”, they’ll might see the photo in the wrong orientation.

Posted on

Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet – Review

Despite some complications in receiving my new laptop, I’ve been fairly impressed by it so far and I can’t believe I’m actually loving the tablet aspect of it.

First some pictures:
lenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tabletlenovo x61 tablet

Then the specs:

  • Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 LV (1.6GHz, 4MB L2, 800MHz FSB)
  • 12.1″ SuperView WVA SXGA+ TFT
  • 1GB PC2-5300 667MHZ 1DIMM
  • Windows Vista Business
  • 160GB Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
  • Integrated Bluetooth PAN
  • Integrated Fingerprint Sensor
  • ThinkPad X60 Tablet 8 Cell Li-Ion Battery

Screen:
As you may have known, the 2 major reasons I purchased this laptop was because it was light/portable and the fact it had a really nice screen. The X61 Tablet comes with 2 types of screens:

  • 12.1″ SuperView WVA SXGA+ TFT, 2×3 UltraConnect II antenna
  • 12.1″ MultiView + MultiTouch WVA XGA TFT

I’ve actually been waiting for over 2 years for the X series to have a better screen than XGA (1024×768 resolution) and when the X series Tablet got the new SuperView SXGA+ (1400×1050 resolution) awhile back, I thought the X series would get get the updated screen in no time. I was wrong and it’s been almost a year and the X series still only has the XGA option. However I figured out why the Tablets were given a better screen. The Tablet screen is noticeably thicker, probably to handle the tablet features and was able to increase the resolution due to that fact.

The screen however is just amazing. The image is super crisp and resolution is drool-worthy. I’ll talk about the Tablet part later in the review.

Battery:
I also opted for the 8 cell battery (over the 4 cell), which made it protrude in the back, but gives me about 4 hours of usage with WiFi enabled at the brightest LCD monitor setting.

The protrusion also made it not fit in my existing 12″ laptop neoprene case. I’m not sure if they actually sell neoprene cases that has an extra inch or 2 depth wise, but if you know of any, please do let me know.

Memory:
First of all, 1GB of RAM is NOT ENOUGH to run Vista Business with all the applications that Lenovo loaded. My memory usage was constantly hovering around 90%. I did have a Crucial 2GB stick of RAM on the way, but while setting up my machine was extremely painful.

When I did install my 2GB stick of RAM (a total of 3GB), memory usage was still hovering around 50%. I’ll probably need to take a look at what Lenovo included later and determine what I don’t need.

ReadyBoost:
I had an interesting experience with ReadyBoost. This laptop actually comes with a SD (secure digital) flash memory card reader. The old X-series came with a CF (compact flash) memory card reader and it worked extremely well with my Canon PowerShot S400. And now that I have a Canon PowerShot SD1000, it’s perfect! But this also meant I can enable ReadyBoost with one of the many SD cards I have laying around. In fact I cracked open a brand new PQI “Hi-Speed” 60X 2GB SD card. However, when trying to enable ReadyBoost, it said the drive was too slow and wasn’t able to enable it. I thought, “Darn! Maybe the SD card reader is too slow for ReadyBoost.”

So I started searching for USB thumb drive. I also have a bunch of those lying around. Found a PNY Secure Attache 2G (MMAR – make money after rebate) and plugged it in. Gave me the same too slow message when doing the speed test. Getting disappointed, I was beginning to give up, but decided give my new Kingston DataTraveler 2GB I had picked up at Buy.com for $1 shipped. Woot! It worked! However having this USB drive stick out like that was rather inconvenient, meaning I had to unplug it whenever I stuck it into my backpack and plug it back in when I needed to use it.

I decided the inconvenience wasn’t worth it and removed the USB drive. However, I did still have some spare SD cards I could try out. I took my spare Kingston 2GB SD card that I have in my backpack and gave it a whirl. Woot! It worked! Now I can have ReadyBoost the way I originally wanted it. I guess Kingston’s a good brand for ReadyBoost if you’re interested in trying it out.

Fingerprint Scanner:
This is one of the coolest things to have integrated into the notebook. The software that Lenovo provides for it is also rather neat. First of all, there’s the logging in. I associated 2 fingers for each account. Left hand logs into my corporate account. Right hand logs into my personal account. So now you know you can chop off my fingers and gain access to my laptop.

Besides that, it comes with a password manager for Firefox. Instead of using Firefox’s default password manager, I’ve opted to use Lenovo’s and what happens is when you’re prompted for a password that it has or you’ve entered a new password, you get prompted to scan your finger so that it will input the password for you. That’s rather neat!

Networking:
Lenovo has also done quite a bit to upgrade their networking software. I’ve always thought their connection manager was neat, allowing me to create zones which will automatically setup the networking device, printer associated to this network, and some other customizations. They’ve gone a step further where if you’re using a Ethernet connection, it automatically turns off your WiFi radio (conserving battery). Little things like these always make me excited.

Bluetooth:
I haven’t gotten a chance to play with the bluetooth yet, but I’ve always wanted it in my previous laptop, so that’s why I opted for it.

Hard Drive:
160GB isn’t a lot, but it’ll manage nicely. Compared to my 20GB hdd previously on my X31, this is a heavenly amount of space. I even bought a 60GB hdd to swap out, but because IBM has this proprietary partition that’s unreadable by anyone else, I’ve been too lazy to actually try to figure it out.

Portability:
This notebook turned out a bit heavier than I was expecting, probably due to the aforementioned reasons such as Tablet screen, larger batter, etc. It comes out to about 4lbs, a bit heavier than my X31 (which weighs 3.6lbs) and over 1lb heavier than the new X61 (non-tablet) which starts at 2.7lbs. However, despite weighing about 4lbs, it still is extremely portable.

Keyboard:
They FINALLY added the Windows (WIN) key!!! They also added the context menu key which is nice.

Tablet:
To clear out some confusion, a Tablet is NOT a touch screen. There’s some sort of (magnetic?) screen behind the LCD and only reacts to the special Tablet pens.

Anyway, I’ve always noted that I didn’t really want a Tablet, or actually didn’t really care for a Tablet, as I don’t particularly find having the ability to write useful. However, this past week has been nothing but fun with the Tablet capability. It helps that I have Office OneNote to play with. Taking notes is actually fun! I can draw diagrams and then email them out as is. One Note has this doodle-to-text converter where it tries to change everything you’ve written into text so it’s better organize. It’s actually pretty good and as I teach it more, it’s getting better.

Then I found out that Office Communicator actually has a writing mode and I was able to write text which would then be sent to whoever I was chatting with. That was really neat!

Here’s one of the doodles I did in OneNote:

poke krunk

There’s 3 buttons on the Tablet pen:

  • the tip
  • the side button
  • the eraser button

The tip was easy to figure out. If I hold it down, it’ll be like holding down left click and dragging. However, I still haven’t figured out the side button completely. I know if I hold down the tip and not move and wait for the circle to form, it would then act as a right click. If I hit the side button, the circle immediately pops out, but I’m not exactly sure if right click is the only action it can do. I can also use the side button to select items in OneNote. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how to use eraser button (I didn’t find out it was a eraser button until much later). I kept on clicking and pushing it, but it would have no response on the screen. It wasn’t until I flipped the pen around once by accident and notice it was erasing what I had written in OneNote. I was like, SWEET! I’m still learning the different tricks of the Tablet pen, and if you have any to share, please do!

One thing that is someone annoying is the fact that when I’m writing on the Tablet, I leave fingerprints and palm prints all of the screen, requiring me to clean it everyday. I just end up using Costco’s Lens Cleaner that I use on my glasses.

Posted on

Some New Toys

It’s been awhile since my last post, but this post is going to be short and probably only a summary. I’ve recently obtained some rather new cool toys to play with.

First of all, I finally took the plunge and purchased an HDHR (HDHomeRun). For those who don’t know what this thing is, it’s a dual external QAM/ATSC tuner for your PC and is the easiest way to get QAM channels on your Media Center. I’ve had Media Center for awhile now, but I’ve really ever used it to watch videos and stuff. I finally wanted to play with the TV settings and like I said, took the plunge. I got it for a $160 shipped (deal is still available, inquire if you’re interested), only to find out a few days later a rumor of an employee discount. I’ll probably talk more about this later.

The next toy I got is my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet. I had actually ordered this back in mid-December, but due to a UPS fiasco and them delivering my package to some other address, Lenovo to build another one and that’s why it took so long for it to arrive. Then there was the fact I was no longer in Monterey Park, and had to change the shipping which was more complicated than I originally thought. Anyway, I had been holding out for a portable laptop for some time since my IBM Thinkpad X31. I really wanted a X-series Thinkpad with a better screen. They decided to put a better screen on the Tablet, but not the regular X-series, so I finally made up my mind to get it. I was also contemplating on waiting for Apple to release the MacBook Slim (or what I had called it), but finally gave up on waiting for it. When the MacBook Air was announced a few days ago, I justified to myself that most 1st generation Apple products have a lot of problems.

Anyway, this morning I was having some sort of dream. I can’t remember what exactly the dream was but it involved a doorbell ringing. Doorbell ringing?!?! I jumped out of bed, ran to the window and saw the UPS truck. I ran down the 2 flights of stairs as a kid would do on Christmas morning to greet my UPS guy and signed for my package. I’ve played with it for awhile really nice. I’m still not that accustomed to the tablet features, but it’ll probably come bit by bit. It comes with Vista Business and definitely needs more RAM. Fortunately, a 2GB stick is on its way. I’d go into the specs later with its official post.

Yep, life is good. 🙂

Posted on

Couldn’t Send/Receive Emails with Attachments Greater than ~3MB

So awhile back, I hit some weird problem with my email. I was trying to schedule weekly backups of my websites and email them to me. My HD-Trailers.net backups worked fine, but my Krunk4Ever.com backups were giving me problems. The email would come through and the size would be correct (~5MB), but the email didn’t have any attachments. I tried copying it over to another directory, and the size shrinks down to a few KB.

Thinking it might that my Krunk4Ever.com mail server has some attachment size restriction, I tried sending it to my GMail account and the same thing occurs. Do note, I have GMail mapped in Outlook 2003 as a IMAP folder. I see a 5MB email, but no attachment listed. For the time being, I concluded that someone’s restricting the attachment size and I would just go and backup manually once a week.

However, another problem occurred when I was trying to share a video with someone. It was a 3.12MB video and Outlook would just not send it. It kept on giving me the following error:

Task ‘Krunk4Ever – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13) : ‘Unable to connect to the network. Check your network connection or modem.’

Searching for that code resulted in some winsock error, but that didn’t get me anywhere. I decided to shoot DreamHost an email and their reply was:

Our email supports up to 40 megabytes for outgoing and incoming emails. Our webmail; however, is limited to smaller file-sizes If you need to send-receive large attachments you would need to install your own custom webmail and possibly PHP or use a full-featured email client such as outlook or thunderbird. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

It turns out not all large attachments were blocked. A few 5MB files have gotten through before, and if I just keep trying, eventually they make it through. I went to GMail (web based) and searched for previous emails where I had sent my backup databases and they were indeed okay and I could see the attachment fine. That led me to a preliminary belief that Outlook or IMAP had some sort of attachment size restriction. Testing it out in Thunderbird was something I had planned to try next, but didn’t really get around to it.

Today, I was trying to email my work email some logs that some Vista people wanted and I hit the same darn problem. I eventually uploaded it via OWA (Outlook Web Access), but then that got me angry. So I began searching around for other people who have gotten the 0x800CCC13 error, but a quick skim didn’t result in anything useful. There were a lot of mentions of firewall and antivirus, but think that my regular email came through fine, I didn’t see how a firewall or antivirus would be acting up…

Then I tried disabling my antivirus and resent the large email. Guess what, it WORKED! !@%$!$#%#!@%@%#!@% The antivirus software I use on my main box is CA (Computer Associates) eTrust, which is what we use at work. Given that Microsoft is a software company and they mandate us to use eTrust, I just assumed it was good enough. eTrust is actually rather nice. It’s small, lightweight, and pretty nice on the system resources.

So I went into eTrust to see if I could configure this weird email problem I was getting. I could not find a single email option to configure. It does mention it scans incoming and outgoing emails, but there was nothing to configure that was email based. The only possible solution I saw was to add Outlook to the exclude list which I didn’t want to do.

I eventually decided to uninstall eTrust and went with AVG which I’ve installed on most of my other machines, and my emails with large attachments appear to be working fine.

Posted on

Video Thumbnail Generation

So after I fixed my Vista Media Center yesterday, I got tired of how long it took to generate thumbnails for the video files in Media Center. I understand it has to open each video file and create a thumbnail from that and since all my videos are located on a file server (even though it’s on a gigabit network), I can see why it’s taking awhile. Of course it caches it and stores it into ehThumbs.db, but once in awhile, it decides that those thumbnails are out of date and clears and redoes everything.

I had learnt a trick that if you have a jpg with the same file name (i.e. video1.avi and video1.jpg), Media Center will load that image instead of generating its own. I’m actually not sure if Media Center 2005 supports this, but I know Vista Media Center does. So I decided to check how fast it took to load all those images on a test directory and BOY WAS IT FAST! I had just taken a random image and copied it a bunch of times after naming it after the video files in that directory.

So now I needed a video thumbnail generation software, hopefully something that will automatically go through directories, create these jpgs images, and then name it correctly. Sounded like a very specific program and a brief search resulted in nothing. It did however give me an idea that instead of generating a thumbnail, I can maybe go with a screenshot. I know Media Player Classic and a couple other video software I have allows me to take screenshots, but having almost 1,000 video files, doing that manually would really suck.

So I talked to RayAlome and we decided the best way to do was find a program that can take screenshots from videos via a command line, which I can then script to automatically run that line on all the videos under a certain directory and subdirectories. RayAlome suggested virtualdub, but I decided to take a look at my Gallery and see what it uses to generate thumbnails for the video files. It uses this thing called FFmpeg, which somehow led me to MPlayer. Apparently MPlayer allows you to save screenshots via command line after reading this: Re: Video output to jpeg/png file and Tools for extracting individual frames of an AVI movie file.

So I decided to give it a try:
mplayer.exe -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 300 X:\video1.avi

and it worked! I got an image named 00000001.jpg in the current directory. Renaming and moving the file should be simple enough. What was funny was the fact when it created the screenshot, audio was played for about a second. I knew that’d get annoying if it was processing hundreds or thousands of video files, so I added the -nosound option to it.

I got off starting to write a script. I did mine in Perl, though any scripting language would’ve worked. I realized my Perl knowledge was quite lacking after not using it for so long, but searching for Perl commands online wasn’t that bad. Interestingly enough, Perl doesn’t have a way for you to check if an item exists in an array (or none that I saw) and you had to inverse the array (as a hashtable) and check by calling the hashtable’s key. Another weird thing is that their way of defining methods and functions really sucks. They’re actually called sub (short for subroutines) and looks rather ugly.

Anyway, what the final script does is take a starting directory (current working directory if no starting directory is specified) and finds all the files with the preset list of extensions (changeable) and generates thumbnails for it. You’ll need to download MPlayer for Windows and update the path to it in the script.

There’s also a few other defaults you can change. I set the default time to take a screenshot at 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Another thing I added was to skip processing videos that already had an associating screenshot/thumbnail. Since I was testing this script out quite a bit, I realized that it was redoing a lot of screenshots that already existed. However, you can pass in the -f option and it’ll force it to regenerate everything under the starting directory.

One thing you must realize is that if the video file is not long enough to generate a screenshot at the given time, it just skips it. My HD trailers typically run from about 30 seconds to 2 minutes and having a 5 minute capture time basically skips over all of those. I then reran the script with a screenshot time of 30 seconds in that directory and everything came out fine.

Since I feel that others may be in my situation, I’ve decided to share the script here in case anyone wants to use it:
Generate Video Thumbnails for Media Center Perl Script

Usage: generateThumbnails.pl [-OPTIONS [-MORE_OPTIONS]]

OPTIONS:
-d StartingDirectory Sets the starting directory [cwd]
-f Forces Thumbnail Generation [off]
-t TimeInSecs Time in video to grab screenshot [300s]

Use this script at your own risk. I will not take any responsibility for any damage it causes. Of course to use this, you’ll need perl for your system. I also have cygwin installed, so I’m not sure if there’s any environmental differences.

As noted earlier, these are generating screenshots, not thumbnails. So depending on the resolution of your video, it can result in a screenshot that varies from about 30KB to 100KB. I’ve thought about finding a command line utility to shrink the screenshots to thumbnail sizes, but for now, this will work and until either it becomes intolerably slow again or if someone has knowledge of how to do so and is willing to share it with me, I’m probably not going to add this feature any time soon.

After running this script on all my video files, I will have to say that browsing videos in Media Center became a lot quicker and faster. Enjoy!

Posted on

Windows Update Error: 80070490

So yesterday when I was playing with my Vista Media Center, I was playing around with WebGuide and I was getting long delays when browsing through the folders. I know there was a network transfer bug in Vista that caused it to be slow and since all the files I was sharing were located off box, I decided to see if there was a new patch to fix this. That’s when I noticed that my system hasn’t done a Windows Update since December 5th, 2007. So after clicking on check for new updates, I get this error code: 80070490

Looked simple enough. I thought if I search online for this number along with windows update, I’d get a simple solution on how to fix it. Boy was I wrong.

First, I tried the Windows Update help file. It showed me a different bunch of error codes, but none that match mine.

So the next thing was the search engine. There were a bunch of hits, but none with a simple solution. According to FAQShop.com, 80070490 means Permission denied / [Problem initializing or using session variables] or Element not found. Not really sure what to do about that.

There were no official solutions. People have contacted Microsoft Support, but the only fix is to “upgrade” your Vista. I’ll elaborate later. The 2 most helpful sites I found in regards to this issue were actually threads:

I believe they both originate from the microsoft.public.windowsupdate newsgroup, but there’s several additional replies in the Google one. I also like the formatting of the Google one better as they hide the replies.

Here are the several solutions suggested:

I recently encountered this problem as well, and what the technician told me to do was enter the services menu, and reset the following services in this order: BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) – Cryptographic Services – Windows Update)

then restart your system. that worked for me once but it only worked until i restarted my computer again. any other more permanent ideas would be greatly appreciated, and i hope that these suggestions help somebody.

I wasn’t exactly sure what “reset” meant, so I restarted the following 3 services in order:

  • Background Intelligent Transfer Service
  • Cryptographic Services
  • Windows Update

I then restarted my computer. Windows Update still didn’t work and still returned the dreaded 80070490 error code.

The problem was eventually resolved by Microsoft Support via their free service for update issues – thanks for that advice, PA Bear. In spite of trying various ‘fixes’ with guidance from Microsoft, I ultimately had to ‘upgrade’ (not reinstall) Windows using the original Windows Vista disk. This process takes much longer than a typical install – so long in fact that at one stage I thought the system had frozen and that I’d have to do a complete reinstall. Fortunately ‘upgrade’ eventually completed the various tasks and all original data, other installed software and setting were preserved, so ‘upgrading’ was the better option – for me at least.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

This is actually the solution that has worked for most people that encountered this error and is in fact the current solution provided by Microsoft Support. What you do is stick in your original Vista DVD, perform what you would do with new install, and when the option comes up to for Upgrade or Advance/Custom, select Upgrade. I’m not exactly sure what it means to Upgrade when I already have Vista Ultimate installed, but what the heck, I just followed directions. They note that it does take several hours to complete. Of course that depends on how fast your machine is.

Anyway, I’m already somewhat pissed. What the heck is this error and why am I repairing my Vista install when I haven’t done anything to it in the past month. But worse of all, half way through the repair, it says my system isn’t compatible to install this version of Vista and tells me to run the compatibility tool. It then reboots and restores the previous configuration. I tried this like 3x, each time waiting an hour or so before it hits this error.

I finally gave up with this Upgrade solution.

– MY SOLUTION –

An idea hit me. Since the last successful Windows Update was on December 5th, 2007, what if I try doing a System Restore to the last point before that date. I hate doing System Restores as it smudges up tons of settings and breaks applications you’ve installed after that date. Anyway, I do a System Restore to November 30th, 2007 and behold, Windows Update suddenly works again! I had to reinstall WebGuide and a couple other apps, but this error needs to be better documented.

Update: David has provide an extra solution for people who have installed Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%. Apparently there was a problematic file (sptd.sys – Scsi Pass Through Direct) that causes Windows Upgrade to fail. I’m guessing the file is what allows you to have virtual cd/dvd drives. The solution was to delete the problematic file, upgrade Daemon Tools, or uninstall it altogether. You can read more about the solution in his comments.

Update #2: Patrick provided a very interesting tool to try:

When Googleing for answers I found out that many people had this problem and that it was not easy to fix. But one guy (jhaysITQ) found a Microsoft tool called “System Update Readiness Tool” that fixed 3 systems for him. I tried it and TADA, it worked for me too!

I hope it helps some of you people too!

Check out his original post here: 80070490 Vista Windows Update Failing

Tool info and download here (about 70 – 75 MB): System Update Readiness Tool

Posted on

Unlocking PAP2 Adventure

So I had quite some fun unlocking the PAP2. And by fun, I really meant headaches. First sign of trouble was when I noticed this PAP2 came with the 3.1.9 firmware which makes it impeccably harder to unlock than anything before.

However the guides posted on B$: Linksys PAP2 Unlock Info also included instructions on unlocking for firmwares 3.1.9 and higher, however they’re much more difficult. When unlocking my previous PAP2, all I had to do was setup a TFTP server and force it to upgrade the firmware. However the latest firmware prevents updating the firmware without administrator access and the admin password isn’t provided.

These new instructions required me to setup the following:

  • TFTP Server
  • DNS Server
  • HTTP Server

The instructions also called for setting up a DHCP server, but I decided to use my router to do that.

I ended up using SolarWinds TFTP Server, SHTTPD, and Simple DNS Plus. At first I wanted to use IIS that comes with XP, but I was hitting into issues with permissions and I just didn’t want to deal with that.

I pointed *.vonage.net to my main box that was hosting the the TFTP server and HTTP server. Following the directions, I created a similar environment that the PAP2 would try to connect and update the firmware with, which required getting the actual encrypted updated xml, but replacing at the location of where the new firmware is supposed to be, with something that I had.

After doing the 1st step, I hit into a snag. No longer was I able to access the PAP2 via the browser nor would **** access the IVR (interactive voice response) system. However, looking at my DNS and TFTP logs, I noticed that it would still try to connect to different address at *.vonage.net. I thought I’d just “bricked” my PAP2 and began looking replacements for it on Amazon. Meanwhile, I left a message for Diggler on the forums telling him about my situation and asking if it’s recoverable at all.

Diggler comes back and tells me the good news. Turns out I didn’t kill my PAP2 and this was expected if it was able to get the encrypted xml, but not the updated firmware. The updated xml file told it to disable web access and if I continue to hit *s, the IVR system will eventually come up. With the ability to reset the PAP2 now that I can access the IVR system, I would be able to repeat this for as many times as I want.

So I decided to check the logs on my SHTTP server and even though it was sending the file, the logs show 404. Someone else said they were having problems with SHTTP and said wxWebServer had worked for them. I also tried this, but it didn’t work and no logs were generated. I finally gave up and decided to go back to IIS and BAM! It worked!

The rest of the unlocking steps were pretty straight forward.

Other useful guides:

I then setup GrandCentral to IPKall to FWD and now line 1 at my parents house is a new number they can use to receive calls. I was surprised that sticking the PAP2 into a line 1 jack actually made all the line 1 jacks in the house work. Derek had told me that it’s worked for him, but I had little luck back at my place. Then again, I really just plugged it into a jack and then plugged in a phone in a different jack, and that didn’t work.

With the web UI, they can also make calls, but that’s a blog entry I’ve been meaning to post for some time. Maybe sometime soon.

Posted on

These Past Few Days…

Sorry for not posting for the past few days. Been busing fixing stuff around the house. First I had to fix my stupid computer. It was pretty obvious either the motherboard or cpu was the one causing all the reboots, so I brought home my old motherboard and cpu from my previous computer (which has been upgraded since) and everything’s been flawless since. No random reboots. I did spend half a day reinstalling Windows XP and random software and doing updates.

The next thing I had brought home was a Slingbox and Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. My dad had subscribed to Satellite TV and wanted to watch it on other TVs and computers and since our main TV already had a computer, it seemed like the right thing to do.

First I decided to flash it with DD-WRT, but it turns out I can’t use the default flashing tool provided, and had to do it via a TFTP server (instructions). It wasn’t too bad. The reason for the router was to use it as a client bridge so that it can talk wireless to my existing network. I deemed it too much trouble to drag an ethernet cable all the way to the kitchen. Setting it up was pretty simple. I gave it a static IP and increased the Xmit Power to 100mW since it was going to be further away. I set wireless mode to client bridge and set the WPA password and it worked pretty much flawlessly afterwards.

The SlingBox was also quite easy to setup. Hooking it up to the TV and satellite receiver was simple. Then I just ran the setup program and it immediately started working. There’s some voodoo magic going on since it can automatically find it without me providing an IP address. However, I hit a snatch when trying to control it with the IR emitters. Turns out the plug wasn’t inserted snuggly so it wasn’t really emitting anything while I was trying all the different remote codes.

The classic SlingBox which I got supported BOTH cable TV antenna and composite (RCA) inputs. However, in the newer SlingBoxes, I’ve noticed that they’ve split the cable TV one into its own product and the composite one into its own product. Maybe they have higher quality but it would suck if I had to switch to the other.

Finally it came to my PAP2… actually, I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Posted on

Black Friday

It’s been awhile since my last post. It’s been a pretty crazy week so far. I hope everyone had a wonderful turkey day.

Anyway, as many of you guys know, the day after Thanksgiving is usually the biggest sales day of the year, known as Black Friday. After shopping Black Friday at retail stores back in 2002, I’ve sworn I’d never shop in person again on Black Friday. Plus with the internet, there’s just as many good deals available.

AR below denotes After Rebate and I haven’t included shipping/taxes (too lazy to calculate that).

So far my count:

It’s been quite an eventful shopping day. 🙂