I picked up the Atari 2600 from a friend that was throwing it out. Good score as they are not cheap to pick up from Ebay these days. Unfortunately it was not an orginal wood grain unit but the later released black edition.

I must admit I did not spend too much time connecting it up to a TV – everything that I read suggested it would not work and that it would be better to get a A/V mod so you’d have RCA connectors out of the 2600. Too much work but certainly an option if I didnt have success with anything else.

I wanted it to work with my TV tuner which is a Winfast DTV1000T. From when I read forget the A/V inputs – you cannot convert RF to A/V (for a technical explanation why ask Google). So the other option was the RF (or TV aerial in ) connection. I connected it up but the card would not allow me to search and find channels. The Atari 2600 uses (here in Australia anyway) VHF channel 2 or 3. The channels are programmed into the Winfast based on your location selection.

I found an older card where I did have more freedom to scan channels – that being the Winfast TV2000 Expert. I selected the auto scan and it found the 2600 quite quickly. The picture was pretty good with only a little bit of static. ‘Awesome’ I thought but my joy was shortlived – no sound.

I checked the TV tuner card settings as I had not used the card for a while and couldn’t remember how I set it up originally, but it checked out all good. Back to the search engines on the www….

Mmmm found a solution but it involved opening the unit up and retuning the variable inductor for the audio circuit. What have a got to lose?

Anyway, here’s what I did:

(these instructions below are only a guide. I take no responibility for any damage caused to you, the Atari 2600 or anything else caused by the below)

Turn the console upside down and you will find it held together by 4 screws. Grab a philips head screwdriver and undo them.
The console should come apart quite easily, with the circuit board held to the upper half of the case with 3 hooks. It will just require a bit of a wiggle and movement in every direction to release it.

The is what mine looks like:

Atari 2600 black edition circuit board

With the circuit board removed, ensure that it is not placed on a electrical conductive/metal surface. Place it on a cardbox box or newspaper.

The inductor is located in the little hole on the large the metal shield. If you wanted to remove it, there are four tabs located around it that just have to be turned slightly with long nose pliers to straighten them up. Once the tabs are straight, the metal cover should lift up quite easily.

With the metal cover off, this is what the circuit board looks like (the inductor is the vertical red ‘tube’ – on some Ataris it is mounted horizontally):

Atari 2600 black edition circuit board heat shield off

To turn it you will need a small hexagonal tool (or Allen key). With the game on, insert it into the screw located in the in the ‘tube’ and turn it slightly in either direction until you hear sound. Remember how many turns you do just in case you have to return the screw inside to its original position.

If you’re lucky and followed the above instructions you hopefully should now have quality 8 bit sound along with retro graphics on your PC monitor screen.

Enjoy!

Click on Start>Control Panel>System Security>Administrative Tools and you’ll see the task scheduler there.

Click on that, and then ‘Create Basic Task’ (on the right hand side):

You’ll see the following screen come up. Give the task a name and a description so you know later on what it is for.

The next screen is the trigger for the task. How often do you want it to occur? In this example, we want the shutdown to occur every day.

The next screen will allow us to specify and starting date, and what time (each day) the task will be scheduled.

As this scheduler can be used for many things, we are asked next what do we want to do once the ‘trigger’ is hit. In our case we want to start a program (and that program is a shutdown sequence).

We have to locate the shutdown program from the next screen.

so, click on browse and navigate to the \windows\system32 directory and find shutdown.exe, and select it.

Once selected, put /s in the ‘Add Arguments’ field.

Once done, the final step should look something like this:

Click on finish, and you’re done!

Also I have seen a few users that have experienced problems also. Every one of them has been a user issue that I have seen, and I just wanted to share an experience that I have come across a few times already.

A friend was complaining about low volume levels whilst on a phone call. Yes the volume was turned right up. I thought ‘mmm might have a dud iPhone here’ but before I gave my friend the bad news, I asked her ‘dumb question, but have you taken off the original plastic screen protector?’ The response was a roar of laughter which told me that this was the problem.

So, it doesn’t hurt to go and check the basics first. With the film that is on the phone when you take it out of the box, the phone speaker is covered up – hence the low volume problem.

Failing that, try a hard reset of the phone before contacting Apple.

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So, what options do I have to throw more memory in? Not too many. It comes with 1Gig built in, and only has one slot for another 1Gig. Will it make a difference? One way to find out – hence this post.

The type of memory required is DDR3 204pin SODIMM 1333MHz. I bought mine off Ebay as I could not find anywhere else to buy it.

Ok, let’s get to it but before I do:

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for any problems caused by the following instructions. They are provided for your information only, and could possibly void your warranty.
If unsure of the procedure described below, then don’t do it and a get a professional to install the memory.

Prerequisites:
Anti static wrist strap for the procedure
Phillips head scewdriver that fits exactly into screws
The Netbook and your memory.

Before you start, turn your netbookover and locate the screws that you will be removing. There are nine, one of which is located under your warranty sticker (see pic below, with screw locations highlighted in red). Also, remove the battery.

MSI U135 DX

Proceeding past here will probably void your warranty as we will need to break that sticker to get to the screw, so if you want to keep your warranty stop here.

Remove all the screws, and then gently grab the base of the case from the top (up near battery). There are two tabs (located in battery bay) that may require a slight push to release the base but it should start to lift up (there is no real force required, so if it doesnt move with only a slight effort, try to work out why).

What I noticed when I did it was that the right hand side came up quite easily but on the elft hand side the external monitor port connector was holding me back, so in the process of left the base up I moved it to the left in order to move the base away from the monitor connector.

Base off:

The location of the memory slot is easy to find Note, when you go to put the memory in, it will only go in one way. It will slide in at about 45 degrees, and once in you can gently push down to a horizontal position when two tabs will grab the module and keep in down.

To put the Netbook back together, reverse the removal instructions and enjoy the Netbook. If something has gone wrong it will not boot at all, so go back and check your work.

The final question – Was it worth the effort? Absolutely. The Netbook runs much better and doesn’t seem to hesitate when opening up programs. It is a much more enjoyable to use.

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to a logon screen (similar to what you would see at your workplace:

They both work the same, the change is pretty much cosmetic only for most users.

How do you change it? Well, from within control panel>user accounts there is a link labelled ‘change the way users log on or off’. From there you would change that to your desired preference. All of 15 seconds work – normally.

I came across an interesting situation the other day where I could not change it. I received an error say that the rtlgina.dll file was missing. Yeah that helps me ….. /sarcasm.

I bit of searching around and found the problem to be related to the software I installed for my Netgear WG111 USB wireless adaptor. The welcome screen and fast user switching had been disabled and I could not enable it without getting a message about deleting this rtlgina.dll file.

Anyway, how do I fix it? Bit more searching found that Doug Knox, a MS Most Valuable Professional (MVP), wrote a program to reset the registry to use the standard windows gina DLL file and return the use of the welcome screen in Windows XP.

The registry fix can be found here

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What does Wiki mean? The word ‘wiki’ is a Hawaiian word. Wiki-Wiki in Hawaiian means very quick or fast, and this perfectly describe one of the best features of Mediawiki.

Mediawiki is a software platform written in PHP that creates webpages for display in any web browser. The pages can be group into subjects, interlinked to each other with a lot of customization available depending on your needs.

For the technically minded, the backend utilises SQL for the database, with the software typically running on a Linux or Unix based operating system. The pages are served to you thanks to the web server (Apache on a linux box) that is running on your box. The resources that it requires are fairly minimal unless your database is quite large, but for small or medium business you don’t need to outlay thousands of dollars for a server. If the database is going to be large, one might consider getting a hosted server and installing Mediawiki on it there.

Most IT support staff would have operating system knowledge and would be able to set one up without too much difficulty. Maintenance would only be required at the beginning to finetune settings etc, and database backups kept regular like any other produvtion data.

It can not only be used for business, but charities or even at home dpending on your needs. With my limited knowledge, I had a mediawiki up and running on a OpenSuSe install in under 30 mins so i know it’s not rocket science.

Having said that, if you ever forget your admin password like I did, all is not lost. Check out my other post on this site.

So, let’s give it a quick roadtest. I have a iPhone 3GS and was keen to give it a go as most of the reviews I had seen were on a iPhone4.

What I planed to do was to try a couple of different format video files and see if there was any performance issues or noticeable differences in the playback of each.

Once the app was installed, I fired it up I was presented with a screen such as this:

Ahhh so that’s how it will work. You need iTunes to drop the files into the shared app area and then sync. Not a problem.

So I did. 1 X 150M AVI file that I got off my video camera, a 380M DIVX file and a 20M FLV file got thrown on the iPhone.

Results:
* The AVI file was laggy in the video but the sound wa sfine
* The DIVX played without a hitch
* The FLV played for a few seconds, and since then I haven been able to get them to play. It’s pixelated beyond belief and I thought my iPhone had actually locked up.

From what my neighbour was telling me, FLVs play fine on his iPhone so it just may be the 3GS that struggles.

Overall, not too bad for a first effort and I’m sure there will be some updates along the way for this app. I would definitely pay for the app as I have been a big fan of VLC for ages.

The advantage of using an existing standard as opposed to creating a new one is that it can reuse existing encoding hardware that is already in place in millions of cameras and chipsets worldwide. Pretty smart.

Human Monitoring’s hipix™ patent pending technology utilises the existing h.264 video Codec to achieve two to seven times more effective still image compression compared to JPEG images. Sounds almost too good to be true, but if you check out the demos on their website, you will be suitably impressed.

To view hipix images on a computer or mobile device, users must initially download a viewer and to create or convert images users need the hipix “Wiz” application. The applications are available for Windows, Linux and Android operating systems.

Just think of the how much bandwidth could be saved when emailing or sending photos over the internet – all while keeping a very high quality image.

Check out the video demo:

More info can be found on the hipix website here.

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I must admit, I was surprised how easy it was. I had an old test box at home, and was too lazy to rebuild it so I did a bit of searching on the internet. What I describe below worked on OpenSuse 11.2, 11.3 and also 10.3.

For other distros and version, I cannot guarantee that it will work. But please leave a comment at the end of the post to let me and others know.

Turn the computer on and select the normal boot menu from the list:

Once selected, tab down to the “Boot Options” box and type in the following:

init=/bin/bash if you are using GRUB Boot loader

linux init=/bin/bash if you are using LILO Boot Loader

If you are not sure what sort of bootloader you are using (and I certainly didn’t), I did notice that just before the boot screen appeared there flashed a quick message indicating the grub bootloader was there.

This will throw you straight into a Bash shell prompt which comes up even before the Single User mode loads and has the “/” root file system mounted. How cool is that?

Do a mount command to check if the root file system “/” is mounted as Read-Write.

If you notice the screenshot below, you will see that mine was mounted.

Next, simply type the passwd command and enter a new password (as per below):

opensuse_linux:~ # passwd
Changing password for root
New Password:
Reenter New Password:
Password changed

Type in reboot and that’s pretty much it:

opensuse_linux:~ # reboot

Now, if you’re thinking that your system in insecure because you can change the root password so easily, bear in mind that you will need physical access to the box in order to perform the above. Furthermore, you can secure things a bit by password protecting the BIOS of even the bootloader if so desired.

Hopefully, the above will work for you and save you a bit of heartache if you forget/lose your root password.

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The more common of course are your sh ip int brie, sh run, sh ver, sh controllers etc but there is one that encompasses all of the afore mentioned and more. And even better, it will help you if you need to get help from a colleague or the TAC to solve your problem.

From ‘enable’mode, type in ‘show tech‘ and you will see that quite a long output will be provided (hint: you may want to set ‘term length’ to 0 for this so you cont have to hit the spacebar after each screenful of info. Also log your session so you can save the output).