Long time

As is customary, it has been ages since I last posted.  If you follow me on Twitter, you will have seen most of what I’ve been up to.

Navin and I waiting to go up in the plane, to then jump out of it again!

First up, was my skydive. I jumped out of an airplane at 12,000ft (~3,700m), was in free-fall for about 45 seconds (to about 4,000ft) then opened the parachute.  This all happened at a tiny airfield in Headcorn, Kent with two friends from work, Chris & Navin.  When sitting on the egde of the airplane, with my feet dangling out over England below, I could see all of London to the North, and the coast of France to the South.  Very cool!

Next up was Gillian’s MRes graduation, which was somewhat thwarted by Eyafjallajökull, the Icelandic Volcano.  Unfortunately Gillian’s parents spent the graduation itself stuck in an airport in Belfast, unable to get to London to see the event.  Hopefully we won’t have similar problems when her PhD gradation comes along in a few years time.

In June, we went on a two week trip to North Eastern Europe.  The trip started off in Stockholm, where we saw my sister, Tierney, complete the marathon.  After a week in Stockholm we went to Tallinn, with a day trip in Helsinki.  We had a great time, but does mean I’m all out of holiday now until Christmas. Long slog!

Anyhow, that’s a very brief catchup. Got quite a few things lined up in the coming weeks and months, so hopefully I’ll manage to find the time to blog about them!

My new Computer

I have a new computer!  My time has come to get a dedicated Home Theater PC (HTPC), to connect to my Sony 37″ 1080p LCD TV.  I spent several weeks researching, as I was quite specific with my requirements.

  • Must be quiet
  • Should look good in the living room
  • Needs to have a good range of video/audio outputs
  • 1080p (full HD) video shouldn’t pose a problem

With the above in mind, my first stop was check out the usual suspects.  First, I considered the wonderfully designed Apple TV and Apple Mac mini.  These are massively expensive, and really don’t offer that much in terms of performance or features.  The Apple TV dies with it’s lack of optical drive, while the Mac mini is low spec and doesn’t have HDMI output.  Next up, was the Dell Inspiron Zino HD.  Again, this box looks brilliant, but the hardware specs aren’t great given it’s price.  The glaring omission is the lack of multi-channel audio output, so no surround sound here!

At this point I decided to start looking at the range of Mini-ITX motherboards on the market, with the aim to building my own machine.  Mini-ITX are tiny PCs, which are 17cm square in size.  Very quickly I came to the conclusion that I would need a dual core Intel Atom N330 and an nVidia ION chipset.  The other options on the Mini-ITX format are either too low performance or have too many fans so are pretty loud.  I settled on the following:

The final PC, along with the keyboard sitting on top.

Assembly of the above was a breeze, with one exception.  The SATA cable supplied for the slimline DVD drive doesn’t fit in the case.  The back of the drive is too close to the edge of the case, but thankfully I have a pile of them and found one that fit.

Upon first boot (connected via HDMI to my TV), everything worked fine.  I booted and installed Windows 7 Ultimate, and then started to test a few videos out.  At first the results were poor, with many videos not playing smoothly.  I quickly discovered that the CPU was pegging at 100%, causing all the issues.  Video’s were being decoded by the CPU, rather than taking advantage of nVidia’s CUDA technology.  I installed CoreAVC and almost everything is fine, with videos playing at 1080p without trouble.  Cue BBC iPlayer problems.

Adobe Flash 10.0 (the current version) also uses the CPU to decode video, however the upcoming Flash 10.1 will fix this.  You can download this from Adobe Labs to test for yourself.  It’s not very stable at the moment, but does work.

Finally, I wanted to get a nicer interface than just vanilla Windows Media Center.  As I am used to it, I have decided to go with XBMC using the Aeon skin.  Now it’s all up and running and works perfectly!

Samsung Q210 WiFi Upgrade

Happy New Year everyone!  One of the things I have resolved to do in 2010 is to update this blog more often, so hopefully you will see more of my geekyness grace these pages soon.

Today I’ve spent half my day diagnosing a problem and then upgrading my girlfriend’s laptop.  As I’ve found precious little information online, I thought I would share my work here.

The problem: Poor WiFi speed and regular disconnects on a Samsung Q210 laptop.

The cause: The Intel WiFi Link 5100 PCI Express MiniCard is known to have many problems, and is unfortunately the card Samsung choose to use in the Q210.  A quick Google search for Intel 5100 problems returns 400,000 results.

The solution: A simple upgrade to an Intel WiFi Link 5300, which cost me £23.  I chose not to install a third antenna, and only connect the existing two to TR1 & TR2, which means it will only get speeds of up to 300mbps, not the 450mbps the card is capable.  Except the upgrade wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped…

Samsung, in common with most laptop manufacturers would rather you didn’t dismantle their devices, so the Q210 is very hard to crack into.  I’ll try to describe, with a few photos, what I did and if you have any questions, please just reply to this post and I’ll try get back to you.  You will need a small phillips screwdriver and a small flathead screwdriver.

First (rather obviously), you need to unplug the laptop and remove the battery.  You will then need to remove 4 small length screws from the back of the laptop, labeled ODD (Optical Disc Drive, 1 screw), HDD (Hard Disc Drive, 2 screws) and MiniCard (1 screw).  Remove the ODD via sliding it out of the laptop chassis.  The MiniCard cover should just lift off, and the laptop I was working on had no card inside.  The HDD cover slides forward about 5mm, then lift it up (there are four catches, two on the bottom and two on the outside edge – opposite the screws).  Now you will see the HDD itself (with a metal case over it) and a black tape attached to the top of it.  Pull on the black tape to lift the HDD out of the laptop.

Next you will need to remove the keyboard.  The instructions for this bit are clearly outlined with images in the user guide, which you can download directly from the Samsung website.  Remove three medium length screws from the back of the laptop, labeled KBD.  Now release the three clips on the bottom of the keyboard itself, using your flathead screwdriver (as outlined in the user guide).  Be gentle here, as it is very easy to scratch the case.  Carefully lift the keyboard away, and disconnect the ribbon cable from the mainboard by opening the lock and pulling towards the LCD (again, outlined in the user guide).  Finally for this step, remove the RAM modules.

Now we come to taking the top of the laptop off.  On the underside, you will have to remove 2 large length screws, 7 medium length screws and 4 small length screws.  Back on the top side you will also need to remove 1 medium length screw from just under the RAM slots (marked with an arrow).  Still on the top side you now need to very carefully disconnect the speaker cable on the left by pulling it to the right.  On the right hand side you will see the touchpad ribbon cable, which you will also need to disconnect by opening the lock and pulling to the left.  You are now ready to lift the top off.  There are a few catches along the edges which should pop off fairly easily as you lift.  I found the hardest one to lift up to be just under the touchpad buttons, so gently used my flathead screwdriver to pop it open.  Before you lift the top off, this is very important, you need to reach inside and disconnect the microphone cable (on the left) from the mainboard.

Finally you are inside.  The WiFi card is in front of you, under where the touchpad was.  Pull upwards on the white and black cable ends, lifting them off the card.  Then remove the single small length screw holding it in place and the card will pop up (much like a DIMM would).  Remove the card, and replace this with your new 5300, and screw it into place.  The cables go back in the same way, leaving TR3 disconnected (i.e. white to TR1 and black to TR2).  It shouldn’t matter if you get these the wrong way round, but this is the way I did it.  You can now put everything back together (basically the same steps as above, but in reverse).

You would think that your upgrade would now be complete, but no such luck!  I had a software related issue which stopped the card working.  There is an issue with the current version of Kaspersky Internet Security, which prevented the WiFi card from starting correctly within Windows 7 Ultimate.  Took me ages to find this out, but to fix it is very simple.  Disable Kaspersky by right clicking it’s icon in the taskbar and selecting Pause Protection.  Reboot your laptop, and now your WiFi card will be able to find all your networks.  Connect to the network of your choice, and then resume Kaspersky protection.  Finally, you are complete and the card will work normally now.

I hope this is some help to people, as it took me most the day to find the problem, figure out how to get into the laptop, and then figure out the Kaspersky problem!  Have fun!

Battlefield 2 1.50 and Windows 7

It’s been a while since I posted, so apologies for that.  This post is all about how to get EA’s Battlefield 2 (which has just released a new patch v1.50) working on Microsoft’s new Windows 7.  First things first, I need to point out that I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate thanks to my MSDN Subscription, so no dodgy play going on here!

So now you might ask, “How do I get a copy of the latest patch?”  This is going to be harder than you would expect, given the volume of people who want to download it.  I got it in about an hour using a torrent, which beats all the FTP and HTTP servers out there at the moment.  Here is a link direct to the Torrent file courtisy of http://www.speltorrents.se.  I recommend you use µTorrent to download the data the Torrent file links to.  Note that you will need to install patch version 1.41 prior to installing 1.50.

So, at this point I’m going to assume you have installed BF2, (maybe also BF2:SF as I have), followed by patch 1.41, then patch 1.50 and finally a nice reboot.  If you now try and jump into the game you are going to have a world of trouble, as Punkbuster (the anti-cheating software) is going to chuck you off most servers you try and play on.  So, how do you fix this?  Google is full of unhelpful forum entries of people saying “Why would you use Windows Vista/7?  You should go back to Windows XP”.  This isn’t very helpful and to be honest (I might post another blog later), something I totally disagree with.

You need to get your Punkbuster up to date, as BF2 doesn’t seem to auto update as it is supposed to.  You will need to download, save, then run as Administrator PBSetup.  Follow the instructions on the Punkbuster site to install, and you will find it will update most of the items needed.

Side note: To ensure you run an application as Administrator in Windows Vista or Windows 7, right click it’s icon and chose “Run as Administrator”. Do not do this often, as it can leave your system at risk if you do it without understanding and trusting the programme you are running.

Now you have run PBSetup, there is one more item from Punkbuster you will need to install.  This is called PBSVC, and is used in Windows Vista and Windows 7 based systems.  Basically this allows Punkbuster to run in the background of your PC, without you having to manually grant it administrative rights each time.  Download the PBSVC file from the link above and run it as Administrator.  Follow the instructions to install and test the services required.  If you want to know more about what it’s doing, check out this FAQ.

After this step, BF2 should run fine.  I decided to reboot prior to running BF2, just to make sure.  I’ve had the odd crash, which I suspect is driver related, but on the whole it works fine.  I’m also running Kaspersky 2010, which I have not needed to change any settings to make this work.

I hope this helps.  Have fun!

Google Ads

Whilst looking up what is going on in London this week with the G20 protests, I found this article on the Torygraph website – “G20 summit: What to expect“.  Fairly decent run down, however look at the Google Ad in the below screenshot recomending stab vests!  I hope I don’t need them during these rather disrupting protests, but I suspect if I try go into work this week I may well do. 🙁

G20 Stab Vests

A short break & my latest geekery

This is where we stayed

This is where we stayed

I have just come back from a 4 day relax and rest up in Scotland, staying at the excellent Marriott Dalmahoy hotel.  Gillian and I felt we needed a nice relaxing break away from London, with nothing specific to do except relax!  For anyone thinking about a cheap, but luxury getaway I heartily recommend it.  Currently if you are a Marriott Rewards member (which is free to sign up for) you get 3 nights for the price of 2 as well, so we didn’t burn too big a hole in the old credit card!  I’ll post some photos once I’ve got some sort of online album setup properly.

We used National Express trains (NXEC) first class up to Edinburgh, then a ~20 minute taxi to the hotel.  A great way to travel, and the first class train ticket was still cheaper than flights from City Airport.  NXEC is great if you pay the little bit extra for first class – giving you much more space, regular free tea and biscuits(!), but most importantly it’s quiet.  Took us about four and a half very comfortable hours to get from London to Edinburgh.  To top it off, the views from the train are absolutely stunning: http://twitpic.com/1uz7j

We did spend one day in Edinburgh itself, catching up with old university friends over dinner at Browns and attempting to do a little bit of shopping!  I want to get myself the Edinburgh Edition of Monopoly, but we couldn’t find a shop in Edinburgh which sold it.  We were advised in Jenners (now depressingly part of House of Fraser) to “try searching on Google”!  Amazon to the rescue…so anyone feeling generous it is now on my wish list!

Since returning, I’ve had a bit of a geek-fest at home!  I have finally bought myself a NAS setup, which in this instance consists of a D-Link DNS-323 Storage Enclosure and two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1.5-TB hard drives.  First thing I had to do was to go to the D-Link website and download the latest firmware (1.6), to enable support for the 1.5TB drives.  I then setup the drives to be RAID1 mirrored, giving some measure of backup.  This won’t protect me if something gets deleted off the disk, but will protect against a single case of hardware failure.

The D-Link device is a great piece of kit, running almost silently, and providing a variety of different access methods (which you can read about through the link above).  I have chosen to have the drives and fans power down after 10 minutes of inactivity, making it even quieter.  The “feature” I like the most however, is the ability to hack it!  In reality, the DNS-323 is just a Linux machine, running a custom kernel.  I have found this excellent Wiki, which outlines many of the possibilities, and I’d encourage anyone considering a DNS-323 to have a read through.  The only thing I have done is to enable SSH access, so I can move files around on the drives easily and possibly run BitchX at a later stage.

Now the NAS is all setup, the first thing I did was to dump all my content onto it, setup some read-only shares and configure XBMC to connect.  With that done, I set about transferring my iTunes library to the NAS.  This was a total nightmare.  I was trying to a) move iTunes off my Windows XP machine onto by Windows Vista machine and b) transfer all the storage onto the NAS.  Apple make it as complicated as possible to transfer iTunes from an old PC to a new (why you can just use your iPod I don’t know), meaning it’s all but impossible to do this flawlessly for most users.  This amazing blog post helped me out considerably, but even after doing everything listed I was still stumped with one major issue.  Windows Vista does not retain network passwords between reboots, even when you check the “remember password” check-box.  The means that whenever I fire up iTunes, it can’t find any of the files on my NAS unless I’ve already setup the network.  Thankfully, in Vista Ultimate you can set this manually up in the User Accounts control panel. If you are stuck on this, hopefully this should help.  I haven’t tested this on Windows 7 yet, but will do later this weekend and report back progress!

Finally, Bradford Peyton enlightened me to the delights of Quake Live – a web based multi-player version of the Id Games classic, Quake.  Unfortunately I’m having problems getting the game running for long, thanks to the eternal hunk of junk known as PunkBuster, which is forever causing problems across various games I play (usually because it wants access to my system which Kaspersky is unwilling to provide).  Anyhow, once I get it fixed do look me up for a game.  I’m registered as jacksprat, which is my usual alias.  In some places, such as on Xbox Live and on Battlefield 2, you’ll find me as jackspratUK as someone else has started registering jacksrapt and not using it all over the place :(.  On that note, I’m going to head out for the rest of the day and enjoy the sun!

Welcome to my New Blog

It has been approaching 4 years since I last had a blog, and my life has changed exponentially in that time.  4 years ago I was a Computer Science undergraduate at Edinburgh University, stressing about exams and coursework but generally leading a pretty relaxed life.  Now, fast forward to 2009 and I’ve been in the world of work for nearly 3 years as a Project Manager for Citi, one of the worlds highest profile financial institutions – working through the middle of a recession and the worst period of Citi’s recent history.  What a contrast!

I don’t plan on making this blog about anything in particular, but rather I am just going to write about subjects which interest (or annoy!) me at any given time.  Don’t expect literary excellence or anything as well crafted as the excellent Stephen Fry’s Blog.  My life is neither as interesting, nor am I as talented as Mr Fry!  I shall probably write about technology a fair amount, as well as things I’ve seen and done recently.  I hope the posts will flow and you’ll get the gist of it!

At this juncture, I must apologise for the plain look of this Blog.  I have been looking to integrate it into the same style as the rest of adrianlovell.co.uk, but I’ve several stumbling blocks.  The first, and by far the most significant, is that my code for the styling of the main site is not yet complete.  Everything looks ok for most people, but switch into Internet Explorer 8 and you’ll instantly see how I’ve cobbled some of it together in the hope of cross browser compatibility.  In addition to that, WordPress is proving very stubborn when it comes to integrating it to an existing site.  It’s a great stand alone product, but it’s modules are not as flexible as I would like.  From my limited experience with it so far, I am struck by the sheer number of values which are hard coded into it, rather than being available as global variables.

Anyhow, check out my Twitter page to see what I’m up to at the moment and I look forward to blogging shortly!