So why is it that none of these pens actually work as a pen? The Microsoft and Atempo pens have what appear to be normal, decent quality cartridges and the IBM pen has a super average cartridge but none of them are able to place a solid a line of ink on a clean piece a paper.

The IBM pen also sports a stylus, LED flashlight and laser pointer and all of those functions work properly… so why can’t the pen function also work? Because it’s a swag pen, that’s why.

“The pens never work.” -rthomson

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From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470:

System Volume
The system volume refers to the disk volume that contains the hardware-specific files that are needed to start Windows, such as Ntldr, Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com.

On computers that are running the Intel x86 line of CPU processors and later versions, the system volume must be a primary volume that is marked as active. This requirement can be fulfilled on any drive on the computer that the system BIOS searches when the operating system starts.

The system volume can be the same volume as the boot volume. However, this configuration is not required.

and

Boot volume
The boot volume refers to the disk volume that contains the Windows operating system files and the supporting files. By default, the Windows operating system files are in the WINDOWS folder, and the supporting files are in the WINDOWS\System32 folder.

The boot volume can be the same volume as the system volume. However, this configuration is not required.

There is only one system volume. However, there is one boot volume for each operating system in a multiboot system.

So… the “system volume” is the volume that contains the boot files and the “boot volume” is the volume that contains the system files. It might have been opposite day when this was named. Yikes.

Thanks for the laugh, Microsoft.

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As far as WordPress is concerned, it’s much better for the new found purposes of techslaves.org than TinyPortal. Not that TP (hehe, TP) is bad or anything. It’s just not as slick for blog/article publication. WordPress allows me to spend less time formatting articles than TinyPortal did. That, I damn well enjoy. I also spend less time futzing about with the CSS in WordPress because this free theme (Clean Home) is clean and simple: my favourite web design elements. Another significant benefit of WordPress is SEO. I’m not an SEO expert, but the number of views from search engines is definitely up.

The downside to this one way expression is that I barely receive feedback. What I do here isn’t of importance or enough interest to anyone whom actually finds the place, so they probably aren’t going to leave comments. I’m no Tom Limoncelli, Matt Simmons, sysadmin1138 or storagebod and thusly, I don’t share their common trait of regular readers. All that adds up to what feels like me lecturing, yelling, asking questions and ranting into a giant empty space. Sure, it feels good but it’s also strangely egotistical and self serving. Hey, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel to be a geek with a blog. Heh.

During the year, I produced about 41 original posts. That’s less than 3.5 per month. And some of the posts are just random things, not even substantial. Output definitely too low, but hell, that’s the story of every web presence I’ve ever had.

Happy WordPress anniversary, techslaves.org! It’s been a fun year.

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That’s pretty darn insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a milestone for techslaves.org none-the-less. Of course, the vast majority of traffic is related to the iSight Disabler AppleScript but I’m still happy to see that traffic to techslaves.org is increasing in a fairly consistent fashion since the site’s format change and move to WordPress.

Also not surprising is that techslaves.org seems to get more views the more I post. There were 8 posts in october (the most since moving to WordPress in March) and also the most views. Seems like I should keep posting regularly to increase the number of eyeballs on techslaves.org.

Although 3000 page views in one month is nothing, it still makes me happy. Thanks for making me happy readers and iSight Disabler downloaders!

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We run Dovecot 1.1 with a MySQL backend and Postfix for MTA duties. Everything requires both TLS and SSL for authentication and everything requires authentication except for sending mail from the local subnet. It works pretty well. I never touch the thing anymore, it just runs. However, it doesn’t support push email and it certainly doesn’t support ActiveSync. So I went looking for something that could do push email to my spankin’ new phone.

I was surprisingly happy to discover z-push, an open source, standalone ActiveSync implementation in PHP. Well hot damn!

I initially installed the latest stable release, but then quickly tried the SVN trunk for any potential fixes that have yet to make it out to the stable release because I wasn’t having much success. After a few simple problems got resolved and I was updated to the SVN trunk things started to work… kind of. The initial sync takes forever! I didn’t have the patience to wait for all my mail to download because it appeared to be taking several minutes per email. The folder list loaded right up and my nearly empty inbox too but any folder with more than a few messages was taking forever to sync. Not to mention the apache server started to churn CPU pretty hard on the server. Also, it seemed the sync would only even start to work if I had “No Limit” selected on the iPhone for history of emails to sync. Maybe the large volume initial sync by using “No Limit” is just too taxing and that’s why it’s brutally slow but I kept getting “Cannot Get Mail – The connection to the server failed.” on my iPhone if I selected any option besides “No Limit”.

On top of that, push didn’t work!

I’ll keep plugging away at it next week, maybe post on the z-push forums to see if I can get this figured out. Cheers for now.

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My previous phone was old faithful: a Nokia 6020 that was, hilariously enough, my first cell phone. My Nokia took many beatings over it’s lifetime including two dips in the ocean and recovered from temporary problems as a result in very short order. It always just worked as a phone and nothing more. It’s battery lasted long enough that I would pretty much forget to charge it after a week or two and realize I have next to zero battery left at inopportune times because charging it was the furthest thing from my mind.

But now it’s out with the old and in with the new. Goodbye Nokia 6020, hello iPhone.

There are huge tradeoffs. Voice + data = more $$$ per month than just voice. But with that increased cost of ownership I get mobile Internet, something that a geek like me has wanted for a long time but had a really hard time justifying. The old phone would go way longer between charges but the iPhone does so much more on a charge. The list goes on and on.

Suffice to say, I’m happy for now but let’s wait for the excitement to die off and then I can really start to asses the cost/benefit ratio of this slick little black and steel rectangular box.

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It’s from a recent trip to Europe (this was in Prague)… I had to take a picture when I saw it.

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First, I took it snowboarding and it decides to get wet and short the battery somehow, killing it. Bad iPod! I told you not to get wet but you wouldn’t listen! At first I wasn’t sure if the battery really was dead or if the iPod itself had died. I quickly found out the battery was at fault when plugging it into my Macbook and seeing it come alive… too bad it was demanding that I restore it.

So, I tried to restore it. Turns out you can’t restore an iPod touch that doesn’t have a working battery. Part way through the restore, the iPod would die, presumably because it would disconnect from the USB power momentarily. Fine, I bought a new battery and soldered the three tiny little wires in and tried to restore it… and BAM! same problem! Ok, my fault, I didn’t let the battery charge enough. Once charged, I was able to perform the restore.

Now after waiting quite some time for the iPod backup to restore and my music to sync, I try plugging in my headphones to listen to some music. Nothing. The software volume slider is there and I can turn up the volume all the way but nothing. Some jiggling of the jack allows for one channel to come through all muddled. Open the iPod back up and I notice how I destroyed the ribbon cable going from the board to the jack during the battery replacement! Noooooooo.

I actually spent time trying to run four cables to jump the broken ribbon cable, but I didn’t heed my friend’s advice: There was no space for four wires in that tight case. Absolutely no way I could put the back on with those four “jumper” wires crudely soldered in. I also ended up shorting out at least two of the four leads, making my iPod think some kind of remote volume control was plugged in and preventing the display of the software volume controls! I decided to remove my failed attempt at fixing the headphone jack ribbon cable.

I’ve now ordered a replacement jack and I’m going to learn about the joys of soldering a ribbon cable to a tiny PCB. Wish me luck for when it arrives!

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What would happen is that while recording, the variable hi hats would respond correctly and play closed when I had the hats closed and open when I had the hats open. However, on playback the hats at the start of a song that should have been closed, played open! After I had closed the hats once in the recording, the playback would then play closed as it should have been from the start…

This was perplexing for a little while until something dawned on my friend: Not long ago, I had adjusted my MegaDrum settings so that it would only send the hi hat pedal position MIDI CC messages when the position was changing or had changed. That is, once the pedal was resting opened or closed and the final CC message for that position was sent, no more CC messages where being sent to BFD. The previous configuration, which I thought was a misconfiguration, was sending CC messages at a fairly constant rate when the hats were both open and closed, basically constantly informing BFD of the hi hat pedal position.

It turns out that while recording, the initial closed pedal position CC message was not recorded so on playback BFD simply assumed the hats were open. After recording some closed position CC messages at the start of the track, everything worked fine! I’ve since returned the MegaDrum configuration to one where constant CC messages for the hi hat pedal position are being sent so that when we record from now on, we will always been recording the hi hat pedal position and it will always be “correct” on playback/bouncing. I just had to lower the “closed lvl” setting and raise the “high lvl” setting to achieve a steady rate of CC messages from MegaDrum to BFD.

I just thought I’d share that for anyone in the same position, wondering why BFD with “all hats variable” seems to play the “wrong” hi hat position on playback when it worked fine while recording. If you’re getting this kind of problem, now you know why.

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