Totally Technical Talks

It Wasn't Cinnamon: How systemd-oomd Was Quietly Murdering My Desktop

2026-07-05T16:43:59.653+01:00

Every few days my Cinnamon session would vanish — every open window gone, back to the login screen, hours of unsaved work with it.

Twenty times, easy. "Cinnamon is buggy," I told myself. It wasn't Cinnamon. It was never Cinnamon.

The symptom

A workstation running Cinnamon on X11. Mid-work, the whole desktop would just evaporate — no dialog, no "sorry, something crashed," just an instant cut to the greeter. Everything unsaved died with it.

The maddening part: the exact same Cinnamon, same version, ran perfectly on every other machine I own. So it felt like a Cinnamon bug specific to this box.

That assumption cost me weeks.

The first rule of debugging: the thing that dies is not always the thing that's broken. Cinnamon was the victim, loudly falling over. The killer was upstream, and silent.

Ruling out the obvious suspects

Before blaming anything, I wanted evidence, not vibes.

Did a process actually crash? A real segfault leaves a core dump. So:

coredumpctl list

Empty. Across every boot. Nothing — not Cinnamon, not muffin, not Xorg — had ever crashed hard enough to dump core. That already kills the "Cinnamon segfaults" theory. Something was shutting the session down cleanly, not crashing it.

Did the whole machine crash? A hard lockup or panic leaves a truncated log and a dirty reboot. So I looked at how the previous boot actually ended:

journalctl --list-boots # find the boot that died
journalctl -b -1 -e # jump to the tail of it

The tail was a clean, orderly systemd-poweroff — filesystems unmounted gracefully, poweroff. target reached. No panic. No crash.

I KNOW! I was shutting it down manually and restarting to hopelessly try to clean whatever memory corruption would trigger a cut-n-no-log crash!

The machine went down politely. Which meant the desktop had already died earlier, and I'd simply rebooted to recover. The real event was buried further up the log.

The smoking gun

If it wasn't a crash and it wasn't hardware, something was deliberately killing my session. On a modern systemd box, there's exactly one well-meaning assassin that fits that description:

journalctl | grep "systemd-oomd killed"

There it was. Not once — fourteen times in the retained journal alone:

systemd-oomd[...]: Killed /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@.../session.slice/dbus.service
due to memory pressure for .../user@... being 77.55% > 50.00% for > 20s with reclaim activity
systemd[...]: dbus.service: systemd-oomd killed 5 process(es) in this unit.

And immediately after, the desktop's death rattle:

cinnamon-session-binary[...]: CRITICAL: Unable to start session:
Lost name on bus: org.gnome.SessionManager
cinnamon-session-binary[...]: Application 'cinnamon.desktop' killed by signal 15

Read that chain top to bottom and the whole mystery collapses:

1. systemd-oomd decided my user session was under memory pressure.
2. It reached into my session cgroup and SIGKILLed dbus.service — the session bus.
3. Cinnamon lives on that bus. With the bus gone, it instantly lost org.gnome.SessionManager.
4. The session manager can't survive losing its own name, so it tore the whole session down — every app with it.
5. I landed back at the login screen, cursing Cinnamon for a murder it didn't commit.

On other occasions oomd went even bigger and killed init.scope — the entire user manager — in one shot. Same result, faster.

Why does this fire on a machine with plenty of RAM?

This is the counterintuitive core of the whole thing, and it's why it ambushes people.

systemd-oomd does not act on free memory. It acts on memory pressure — PSI (Pressure Stall Information). PSI measures the percentage of time tasks are stalled waiting on memory, not how many bytes are free. You can have gigabytes free and still register high pressure if a cgroup is thrashing reclaim in bursts — swapping, dropping and refaulting page cache, that sort of churn.

Check what oomd is watching and the thresholds it's using:

oomctl

Mine reported the trap plainly:

Default Memory Pressure Duration: 20s
Memory Pressure Monitored CGroups:
Path: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@....service
Memory Pressure Limit: 50.00%
Memory Pressure Duration: 20s

So the policy was: if my user session spends more than 50% of its time stalled on memory for 20 seconds, start killing processes inside it. On a busy workstation running VMs, compilers, and browsers, a 20-second pressure spike above 50% is normal Tuesday behavior — not an emergency.
But oomd treated it as one, and its idea of "relieving pressure" was to shoot whatever cgroup looked heaviest in my session. That kept landing on the session bus or the user manager: the two processes guaranteed to take the whole desktop down.

Where was that 50% policy coming from? Straight from the vendor default applied to the user manager unit:

systemctl show "user@$(id -u).service" \
-p ManagedOOMMemoryPressure -p ManagedOOMMemoryPressureLimit
# ManagedOOMMemoryPressure=kill
# ManagedOOMMemoryPressureLimit=2147483648 # <- that's 50% of UINT32_MAX

kill, at 50%, on the cgroup that contains my entire graphical session. That's the loaded gun.

The gotcha that wastes an afternoon

You might think "fine, I'll just disable it":

systemctl is-enabled systemd-oomd # disabled
systemctl is-active systemd-oomd # active (!!)

Disabled but active. systemd-oomd is socket/D-Bus-activated, so "disabling" the service does nothing — it springs right back to life on demand and keeps killing you. You have to either exempt your session from it or mask it outright. A plain disable is a no-op here.

The fix

Two roads.

OptionA - systemctl disable --now systemd-oomd

Felt good... felt justified after all the work loss and frustration.

BUUUUUT I took the higher ground and the surgical one.

Option B — keep oomd, but forbid it from touching my desktop (recommended)

systemd-oomd is genuinely useful as a last line of defence against a runaway process eating the whole machine. I didn't want to throw that away — I just wanted it to stop treating a busy interactive session as an OOM emergency.

Two drop-ins do it. First, tell systemd that oomd may not pressure-kill the user session:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/user@.service.d
sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/user@.service.d/99-no-oomd.conf >/dev/null <<'EOF'
[Service]
ManagedOOMMemoryPressure=auto
ManagedOOMSwap=auto
EOF

auto means "don't actively manage this — only act if an ancestor explicitly opts in," which nothing does. That removes my session from oomd's watch list entirely.

Second, make oomd far less twitchy globally, so a brief pressure spike anywhere never trips it. Twenty seconds becomes a full hour:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/oomd.conf.d
sudo tee /etc/systemd/oomd.conf.d/50-relax.conf >/dev/null <<'EOF'
[OOM]
DefaultMemoryPressureDurationSec=1h
EOF

Apply it live — no reboot, no logout, running programs untouched:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart systemd-oomd

Both files live under /etc, so they override the vendor defaults in /usr/lib and survive updates and reboots.

Verify it actually took

Don't trust, confirm:

oomctl

Default Memory Pressure Duration: 1h
Memory Pressure Monitored CGroups: <-- empty
Swap Monitored CGroups: <-- empty

An empty monitored-cgroups list is the win. oomd is still running, still available to catch a genuine machine-wide meltdown — but my desktop session is no longer on its list of things it's allowed to shoot. It cannot kill Cinnamon anymore, because it isn't watching it at all.

Why not Option A — evict oomd entirely (the blunt and the still desired by revenge... but)

If you don't care for oomd's protection and just want it gone for good, mask it so socket-activation can't resurrect it:

sudo systemctl disable --now systemd-oomd
sudo systemctl mask systemd-oomd

On a machine with generous RAM and swap, the kernel's own OOM killer is a perfectly adequate backstop, and this is a defensible choice. I preferred keeping a tamed oomd over removing it.

Takeaways

- The process that dies is rarely the process that's broken. Cinnamon was the last domino, not the first. Follow the chain upstream from the visible failure.
- No core dump means it wasn't a crash — it was a kill. coredumpctl list is a thirty-second test that redirects the entire investigation.
- systemd-oomd judges pressure, not free memory. "But I have 32 GB free" is not a defence; PSI can spike under reclaim churn while plenty of RAM sits free. oomctl shows you exactly what it's watching and at what thresholds.
- The default 50% / 20s policy on the user session is hostile to interactive workloads. A busy desktop routinely breaches it without anything actually being wrong.
- disable is a trap for socket-activated units. Check is-active, not just is-enabled. If you truly want it gone, mask it.

Twenty "Cinnamon crashes," zero of them Cinnamon's fault. Sometimes the ghost in the machine is just an overzealous babysitter with a SIGKILL and a bad definition of "emergency."

Happy days.. Cinnamon is rock solid. I-m happy again. Lets push the machine to the limit as we usually do...after all I DID PAY FOR 100% of that thing.

WLtoys 14401 is a bang as it is... but mine's better :)

2024-12-30T00:01:00.004+00:00

WLToys 14401 is a 1:14 buggy that, out of the box, comes ready for 75km/h action.

It's quite the thing. The power is such that the chassis is aluminium from start.

This is the little brat I'm talking about.

Problem with that is that everything else is vinyl and, at 75km/h accidents tend to make things definitive when it comes to bending the chassis and pulling the threads out of the screws holding things together.

I should know... I brought one, My friend Marco bent it, I replaced with another chassis, my kid Miguel bent it... so:

THIS IS MY 14401:

Cover has been cut to accomodate and ventilate the 80 AMP surpass hobby ESC

I've also cut the airway to the motor active cooling.

Full metal differentials and differential housing

Full metal wishbones

SurpassHobby 80A esc

Better Servo

Surpass Hobby 5200Kv motor

Front foam lip to absorb impact

carbon subframes

ESC tied down and tidy next to RC module.

3S battery and some on-read wheels.

Full carbon chassis, no more bending

This was something else as a 2S 75km/h car, but like this, it is very very promising.

First tests indicate that it is powerful, because I've added High grip tires and making a few pulls off the line, it completely unscrewed the differential satellite gears, making me have to open and re-screw them with tighter torque specs.

Videos will soon appear.

ZDRacing ZMT-10 the best sub 200usd 1:10 rc money can buy... hum sure... but I rather transform :)

2024-12-29T02:49:00.006+00:00

At 160 USD the ZDRacing ZMT-10 9106 is considered by many, as the best sub 200USD 1:10 monster truck you can buy.

It comes standard with a 3300KV motor and a 45Amp ESC, good for 60km/h out of a 2S battery.

HOWERVER, I already brought mine with 5400Kv and 60Amp ESC, plus, the 3S.

This means that my car, from the start managed, not the 60KM/h 24420 rpm, but an astonishing 60480 rpm. This means that each RPM is responsible for 0.002457002 km/h.

So, following a direct propositional math, my car was able to reach 148.599 km/h from the start.

This meant several things:

1 - Self unscrewing screws - easy fix with nail polish to hold them in.

2 - Twisting chassis - fortunately there is an aluminium version to buy part for.

3 - After fixing the chassis, the wishbones started to flex and the towers too. So full metal suspension parts + towers

4 - Broken semi axle - The next thing to go was the semi axles, so I brought more robust ones and coupled with aluminium hubs to match... now the chassis is all metal.

5 - So the suspension started to act and me ineffective. OK, double shocks with oil reservoir.

6 - Finally.. it went too fast for turning, so let's make the wheels bigger and the car wider. Some spacers and 1:8 wheel s fixed this.

The Car got way bigger and wider, and the speed was so insane that I managed to destroy the cover, so a new one was installed as per the last image.

The result, way more than 150 km/h, as the wheels got bigger and so the motor gear, so this is close to 200km/h now:

RC Build 1:10 Skyline R34GTR and a 1:10 S2000

2024-12-29T02:23:00.004+00:00

It all starts with the TT01 Tamyia chassis copy from the majority of Chinese manufacturers.

I chose the PMM chassis because:

1 - it has a aluminium propeller shaft

2 - if has aluminium wishbones instead of vinyl ones (however if you are not used to the power of a beast like this, I recommend you buy the vinyl one and later replace the wishbones.

All these chassis come with plastic wheels and plastic main gears. Ditch them, They will crack with the power and fail. Buy Aluminium wheels and SOLID tires. Use Super glue to bind the tires to the wheels.

Replace the main gear that connects to the motor gear-head with metal ones.

Choose a powerful servo, the rotational speed achieved with this setup is so high that the wheel s will try to keep straight and 3KG servos will not be enought.

use either super glue or nail polish to Fix EACH AND EVERY BOLT

IMPORTANT - YOU WILL NEED engine coolers and high capacity 3S bateries.

I'm using GXF power 5.2Amps because they are light, durable and powerfull on discharge.

For the R34, I Equipped the car with a 60Amp ESC (platinum) from surpasshobby and a surpasshobby 6000Kv motor

The real world S2000 is known for High RPM engine, so I managed a 150Amp ESC from SurpassHobby coupled, with an Ansmann racing 3.5Turns (10800Kv) motor

R34 cover on and the s2000 is still under preparation.

The result is a VERY chalenging to drive set. Here is the r34 tests with a slick concrete floor in the garage, the s2000 makis things even more chalenging, so I changed back from 2WD to 4WD.

And side by side with the little brother, a WLToys144010 transformed (something for a different article)

and the ZDRacing 1:10 truck, again heavily transformed (another article).

More will follow as I keep modding these babies.

Ok... so the S2000 is waiting on an even more extreme motor and ESC for a good 11000Kv, but I hated the color and overall "cheap" look of the body. So Today we dedicated some time to it:

Carbon Wrapping on the red and china-made body.

Look something else, now.

Back to 4WD conversion...front diff comes out, shaft, mounts and half shafts go back in. It's hard enough to control as a 4wd, let alone as a 2WD.

Rubber tires out (they where coming out in pieces anyway)

Foam Tires go in... and super-glued to the aluminium rims.

Chassis screws re-painted with nail polish

Leds Installed and... Voila

The 35 Kg servo is a beast... let's test the response:

NIIIICE

More to update as parts get delivered. Stay tuned.

Talking the Bose out of Bose :s

2024-05-12T13:39:00.014+01:00

Bose has been known for it's very well marketed Acoustimass systems.

If you want a no-brainer sound system that you can conceal within the living room and make the wife happy with it, it's a good choice.

If however you're an audiophile, and each and every sound frequency matters, balance matters, sound image matters and speakers are a beautiful thing you love to show off, then Bose in NEVER ever on your list. Several other options are far better.

Bose marketing claims better sound by research... not exactly true! Better than a Samsung 5.1 kit by research... maybe... but at the price they sale their stuff, there are no excuses.

In the main living room, at the beginning of my re-married life, I really didn't want a fight, so the choice was to fit an Accoustimass 15 S2 with 5 jewel dual cubes. To cope with the lack of frequencies the Bose would imply, I've added a couple of Rock Solid Sound speakers and drove the entire thing with a HarmanKardon 355.

Given fact that the living room has a mezzanine half way into it, and it's ceiling ups from 3M to 6M, the sound seamed diffuse and uninvolving. This was fixed with a B&W ASW500 and a Yamaha Y30SW, placed at the transition of the room ceiling, together with a couple of crossovers, to split the subs to pre 80Hz on the ASW500, 80HZ to 120HZ on the Yamaha and the accoustimass would pick up from there on.

The RockSolids where also supported by a set of Castle Knight 5 speakers also placed at the room height transition. Those where amped from a NAD 320 plugged to the pre-out Mid channels of the HarmanKardon.

This worked nicely. Not brilliantly, but this is mainly to watch TV, and so it works.

Most important, it allowed me freedom to show off on the other rooms (cinema room for instance) with big speakers from Mission and Wharfedale, infecting the Wife with the audiophile bug. Now I can have speakers everywhere as she loves them as much as I do :)

7 years into it and the capacitors on the Bose are starting to go. It started with a cyclic wooooah until they charged and heated, worse during winter time...and progressed to a constant "whale chanting" sound... that annoyed...well everyone.

SO, I had 2 sets of Mordaunt Short's 302 satellites laying around, That covers center and Surround back. Found a nice pair of RockSolids in Germany, so the front channel is covered, together with the a reinforcement for the middle channel - mission bipolars. Should smooth this room transition further by directing the sound.

Ok. A solution is sketched... but what am I to do with the Bose things?

Sure any audiophile knows that Bose product is not really good. But is it bad? I mean, the electronics are now going out, but speakers are speakers and the cabinets are really well built and the internal channeling to process sound reverberation well sorted out.

Plus, I've got an old Acoustimass 25 woofer unit I've used for spares.

Some creative research with the phone audio analyzer and the web, concluded that: apart from the clever room ambience effects, the Jewel Dual cubes are crossed from 200Hz on at the unit, and their internal drivers are serialized (8ohm stuff then) and the main unit, drives both woofers serialized too (8ohm again)..and that's why they all sound bigger then they are... they push twice the air at once.

SO... Before considering removing everything from the walls, and leaving the new speakers sets alone: why not trying to play around with the good parts Bose had left?

Game-ON!

The Jewels where the easy part, found a set of configurable 2 way crossovers on amazon, brought 5, crossed them a bit further than 200Hz, their actually picking up on the south side of 500Hz on (not to overdrive the cubes), on Roundsky YLY 2088 crossovers (Up-range connection only).

The same purpose was applied to the acoustimass woofers. I'm allowing them to run 100Hz to 500Hz, stripped all the electronics, and placed a 200W/channel DoukAudio Valve amp to driving both the cabinets one on each speaker output.

The HK was retired for a long deserved overhaul, and a Marantz SR5010 7.2 was placed, driving the same NAD320 for the Castle speakers. I've added a Marantz PM65 SE and a few small valve amps for the remaining, new to be placed, speakers, but before they arrive, I've decided to check just how good the new X-over jewels, and dual subwoofer acoustimass un-Bosed where.

What a surprise! Vocals are VERY clear, Guitars too. And since I've had already X-over the 2 existing subwoofers, removing the 80Hz Dolby setting on the Marantz allowed a lot of Mid range to bleed into the subwoofer output, straight into the DoukAudio that can smooth it off by damping bass and freeing treble: ended up being a HighRange Subwoofer that fills in the frequencies easily and smoothly. Much like it's original design intentions, but without all that electronic processing.

I'm about to make a few tweaks later this week , maybe chaining them to the Pre-out Front instead of the SubWoofer, (getting some more frequency range out of it) but so far, it's quite remarkable for a "strip all electronics job".

I'm sure that, when the new speakers arrive and I install them, there will be A LOT of equalization to happen, but unBoseing the Bose was an interesting exercise that MAY get to stay installed... I may actually use the reinforcement amplifiers bass/treble adjustments to damp the setup around.

Lets see how it goes. But the "taking the Bose out of Bose" was VERY VERY successful.

UPDATE

New speakers arrived, so I've rigged the Living room. And having a Yamaha RX-V1600 hanging around, I decided to go crazy and change the 9.4 into a 17.4 system (having the room change ceiling from 3M to 6M half way through is a pain to equalize.. so yeah a lot of speakers placed strategically is the way to go.

The Marantz now drives :

-Front - B&W RockSolid Sound Monitor Speakers (read more about'em here)

-Center - A pair of Mordaunt Short MS302 (read more about'em here)

-Surround Mid - B&W RockSolid Sound Monitor Speakers (read more about'em here)

-Surround Back - A pair of Mordaunt Short MS302 (read more about'em here)

-SubWoofer1 - B&W ASW500 X-over 20Hz to 80Hz

-SubWoofer2 - Yamaha YST-SW030 X-Over from 80Hz to 120Hz

The Marantz Preouts to a Yamaha RX-V1600 that drives:

-Front - Customized Bose Jewell Dual Cube X-Over form around 500Hz up

-Center - Customized Bose Jewell Dual Cube X-Over form around 500Hz up

-Surround Mid - A pair of Mission M5DS Bi-polars

-Surround Back - Customized Bose Jewell Dual Cube X-Over form around 500Hz up

The Yamaha Preouts to both a NAD 320 and a DoukAudio Valve amplifier

The NAD 320 drives:

- Surround Mid - A pair of Castle acoustics knight 5 speakers (read more about'em here)

The DoukAudio drivers:

-MidRange Woofer1 - Customized Bose Accoustimass X-Over from 100Hz to 1Khz

-MidRange Woofer2 - Customized Bose Accoustimass X-Over from 100Hz to 1Khz

RESULTS:

WOW... I'm so happy that I'll re-listened to my preferred stuff AGAIN. The room now has 3 sweet-spots... The sofa (as it was previously), the dining table (right when the room ceiling ups to 6M) and the window (at the back of the room).

A LOT of this, has to do with the missions and the tilting of the castle speakers towards the back of the room.

I'm very happy with just how clear the sound is, how well distributed and how details everything seams.

I was expecting a lot of work to equalize this, but both Marantz and Yamaha made my life easy with their very precise speaker management tools.

So I did overcook, the setup for the living room, but then again, I can now enjoy music here too and not have to change room. Happy me :)

Some Pictures/video for your viewing pleasure:

Front

Mid

Back

Audio Analysis with some ZZTop, from sweet spot 1 - the Sofa:

And even the pressure graph seems balanced!

Some Spoon for the test:

I'm very happy with these results :)

Arduino Project - Car coolant level indicator - Volvo V50 T5 AWD

2021-07-13T01:14:00.015+01:00

Most cars, as they get old, tend to die a death from overheating.

A lot of the overheating happens because the rubber hoses get brittle and fissure and at pressure they tend to break and let go all the coolant.

Depending on how that happens, which one it happens to and how zealous you are to the temperature gauges, you can be lucky and catch it in time, be distracted and catch it too late, or just be unlucky and have one of the lower end hoses go and not have a chance to catch the issue before the engine overheats.

Some cars are equipped with a coolant low indicator... but others aren't.

I was very surprised and UPSET at Volvo, when I found out that my 1997 v70 t5 HAD a coolant lever indicator, but the 2006 V50 T5 AWD from my wife didn't!

My guess? somewhere along the line, (as Ford purchased Volvo) an economist on the management team, bossing the engineers decided to take 20cents profit for sensors and not install it, unlike the engineers had designed and used for decades... the usual in today's business world. He probably also thought that, as the engines started dying on their customers, they would just buy more cars... instead of changing to a better engineered brand!!! This is what happens n'our days. Economists in power.... bad decisions all the way.

However I'm and engineer and I would never accept this sort of quality reduction... so:

I went on ebay and Amazon, and brought the following list of recommended parts:

https://www.amazon.es/ELEGOO-Microcontrolador-ATmega2560-ATmega16U2-Compatible/dp/B06Y3ZHPWC/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_es_ES=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=elegoo+mega2650&qid=1626133196&sr=8-7

https://www.amazon.es/POPESQ%C2%AE-Raspberry-Generador-Frecuencia-Frequency/dp/B06XVQYF3N/ref=sr_1_5?__mk_es_ES=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=arduino+passive+buzzer&qid=1626133228&sr=8-5

https://www.amazon.es/Vosarea-Charger-Adapter-Charging-Voltmeter/dp/B07YYYP2SH/ref=sr_1_8?__mk_es_ES=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=usb+to+12v+car&qid=1626133271&sr=8-8

https://www.amazon.es/AZDelivery-128-160-p%C3%ADxeles-91-OLED/dp/B078J78R45/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_es_ES=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=oled+128%2662+i2&qid=1626133375&sr=8-2

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/383588215448

Did I need the MEGA instead of a simple UNO? NO! but since the car is t be driven by my wife and the Display should be more informative I added the Oled Display.. that oled display (plus variables and libraries) consume A LOT of ram and the UNO doesn't really cut it. However if you are to simplify things with a simple warning and buzzer, the uno is more than enough.

So being a Polestar V50 T5 AWD and having an oled to fool around with, I've added a couple of boot logo and boot info before the real stuff. The code is here for my example and should be adapted to your own usage.

Describing the circuit:

The liquid level readers are glued with something tough (I recommend T-REX) on the top level and bottom level of the expansion tank.

I recommend you to run a 4 wire cable all the way from the arduino place within the car to the engine bay... one for ground one for 5V and 2 for 5V return (one per sensor).

I also recommend you to create a simple oled placeholder with a 3dprinter, or use a dremmel to grind the oled location within the dashboard, assuming there is space for that.

I recommend you to place the oled in front of the existing dash on a non obstructing part of the dash, and the buzzer behind it, so it send the audio buzzing to the dashboard and this amplifies and reflects back to the driver.

Evidently the red warning led should be placed in front of the oled.

Then It is rather easy. On my code I've setup variables according to pins, you can change those and have your own project divert.

Arduino Digital IO 4 - wire to positive terminal on the buzzer

Arduino Digital IO 5 - wire to positive LED terminal arduino relay

Arduino Digital IO 6 - wire from Lower fluid level sensor RETURN line

Arduino Digital IO 7 - wire from Higher fluid level sensor RETURN line

Arduino Communication IO 20SDA - Oled SDA

Arduino Communication IO 21SCL - Oled SCL

External 5V supply:

- Liquid Sensor 1 Voltage and ground

- Liquid Sensor 2 Voltage and ground

***you can power the sensors directly on the 12v car supply, but then you need a voltage divider on the sensor return line to the arduino. I find it just easier to run a 5V supply on the sensors and reduce circuit complexity and add stability, as cars can output anywhere from 11V to 14v, depending on rpm.

Arduino 5V :

- Oled VCC

Arduino GND:

- Buzzer Ground

- Led relay Ground

12v-usb car adapter, to Ignition 12V and car ground... and then a usb cable on to your arduino.

Led :

- ground to car ground and 12V to arduino replay module, then from replay module to ignition p1 power (a.k.a. - radio power).

Logic is as follows:

- show volvo + polestar logo on boot

- show car setup (power and AWD)

- enter loop mode with coolant level display

-If all coolant levels are good the return value is 2 and display that everything is OK

-If only the lower level is returning signal, then a refill message is displayed

-if both sensors are not returning, than coolant is bellow threshold and a Stop the car" message appears together with an annoying buzzer.

- if top sensor is returning value but the bottom is not, something is off and a "check system" message is issued with a less annoying buzzer.

The code and STL file can be found here:

https://github.com/mr1b31r0/ArduinoCarCoolantLevelWarning/tree/main

Some pictures of the project with some oled display info:

The enclosure (stl and cad files in github, together with the code).

First Assembly - buzzer + display + enclosure:

ground for display is shared with buzzer :) one less cable.

And a some poliurethane glue to bind things:

Next is the relay for the 12v bright led light:

The connectors on the Arduino board:

And a small test drive:

Installing:

Setting up the Relay module and led light (12V):

Sitting the Arduino in the car and pasing cables behind the climate control units:

The sensors and some tests:

The final install:

Why I've just declined an apparently brilliant deal? Seagate is why!

2020-01-05T14:54:00.001+00:00

I've been working in IT since 1995! well officially, unoficially it dates back to 1986.
But with RAIDS, since 1997... I've worked with a number of hard disk arrays and vendors, since becoming certified in storage by HP, back in 97 or 98.

Yesterday, a good friend called me with a flash deal. 6x 8TB sata HDD for 600 euro! New!

I was inclined in taking it, but then I decided to make the smart question: Hi Harry, what's the drive brand?
The reply was: Seagate!
And I've passed it! Naturally.

So why!? did Seagate, the makers of some of the best drives I've used back in the ATA and SCSI days?

I work with around 19 RAID at work and 4 at home... all running 24x7... and I've recently been over a simple statistic on hard-drive failures that is just explanatory:

Hard Drive Fail per brand 2.5" and 3.5":
Seagate - 98%
Samsung - 70%
WesternDigital - 3%
Hitachi - 0%

Hard Drive Fail without possible software recovery within 1 week of buying:
Seagate - 90%
Samsung - 0%
WesternDigital - 0%
Hitachi - 0%

Hard Drive Fail within 1 year of buying 24x7 NAS or RAID usage:
Seagate - 8%
Samsung - 60%
WesternDigital - 0%
Hitachi - 0%

Hard Drive Fail over 1Year and suffering a Datacenter cooling failure (one of the best ways to loose the reading head on a hard drive):

Samsung - 10%
WesternDigital - 2%
Hitachi - 0%

Hard Drive Fail on USB hard-drive with over one year and backup-restore with moving between locations :
WesternDigital - 1%

Now comes the conclusion:
Clearly, if you want to sleep at night, you will NOT BUY SEAGATE! Easy One!
But is the drive failure a quality problem or mis-usage?

Well the remaining 2% of hard drives are equals of most the ones that failed, operating under the same circumstances over similar periods... and one of the failed drives is a "Seagate constellation", operating under redundant temperature controlled datacenter, and used for backup, and not high load... so clearly a quality issue.

Today, If Seagate offered me HDs for free, I would just go pay and buy some Hitachi or WesternDigital... hell those, I would even buy second-hand and be cool with it.

Samsung... well let's just stick with silicon as they clearly are better with SSD than mechanical drives... still, they've managed better than the industry giant Seagate.

Blackberry Z30 end of Whatsapp support...is easy to solve

2017-07-19T23:39:00.000+01:00

Hi all

If, like me, you are a Blackberry 10.x user, you have probably been using FastTube for years not... not not and gave up like me... and then a couple of nights ago, was forced to stop using Whatsapp.
That annoying "switch to a supported device please" message that makes you furious to the core.

I've always been an android user... I have 3 android phones, 4 android tablets... and I must say I can live with android (normally after removing the operator and manufacturer bloat-ware)... but my side kick? my pocket secretary? that's the blackberry. It's always been, and I really hate that the community "try and force me out of something without first building something better for me to move to".

It's an easy (economics like) step to say "whatsapp is free, you need to use the devices we tell you to use"... but there is a reason why brilliant people are taught engineering at college instead of economics.

I hate those "non engineering, all economics, brainless decisions" and I also love a good challenge. So I took 5 minutes to digg deeper into this.

So sure the BB whatsapp is no longer supported... uninstall that crap, it will never work again.
However, the brilliance of BB system 10.x is that is has embedded android libraries as standard. That is why you can download .apk files and run it.
The problem is that most of those libraries are accessed by the GUI and the GUI from BB was built to use it's own functions.

Solution? Well why not installing a GUI manager for Android. Grab the "Nova launcher" APK and install it. All you need is to have BB OS 10.2 up... I'm using 10.3. The other APK you really need is the Playstore apk. Even if it does not run, some APK's check for it at launch so "being there" is important.

One of the apks that you can install is the Watsapp apk... and believe-me... it runs perfectly.

No need to buy a new phone... just to digg into the BB OS10 project and be amazed with the similarities between the 2 xNIX platforms and their respective support framework.

Long live BB10

The House of an audiophile Part 2 - The Cinema and Games room

2016-08-26T02:08:00.003+01:00

This article is pretty useless without first reading the Part1, so if you haven't read that you will not understand the whys in this one.

Ok so I dealt with the first part of the problem with Part1... but that still leaves me with the even bigger, even more asymmetrical, prone to echoes and natural amplification of sound Cinema and Games Room.
There is another catch: the living room was supposed to have good sound, but this has to have good and powerful sound! If I'm having a party, this will be the disco.

The geometry, already discusses in Part 1 is...

...challenging.

So, again, after several tests and trials, and the obvious usage of my Galaxy Alpha phone as a sound analyser, I managed to sort things out this way: (for the geeks sake, I'm starting will the schematics and all the goodies, and I'll explain as I go.

OK so this is far more complex (starting with the inputs... being a cinema and game room and all)!

The inputs start with the so full of glamour and on of the best CDPlayers EVER made the Nakamichi CD2P-E. This thing has been recapped and ouptup XOver trimmed so that all the possible musical details are pickup. This is an example of why a good old 16Bit DAC CDPlayer can eclipse an modern 24bit DAC cd player... I could talk for a year on this, but in very simple terms, think that the analog sound wave that you hear, once digitized is converted to a sort of bar chart of what the music would look like. Obviously, this loses resolution and that is why a true audiophile prefers vinils to CD's.
However, there are some excellent designs out there that can "imagine" the gap between the bars and recover the lost sound-wave. Some are good.. some are great and some are gods.
So in this sense, more bits = more resolution = better sound...no! CD's where recorded with a specific bit-stream in mind... having more bits does not mean that you have more resolution out of the CD, but rather you can decode more at once, and that allows you to have a bit-stream comparison on the recreation of the sound wave that could reduce conversion error.... so a 8 parallel chip 16bit circuit will easily eclipse a state of the art 24bit DAC (if the 16bit chips are really good).

Back then, while Philips created the TDA1541A 16bit DAC chip (and they did a VERY good job at that), they also created what is called a reference diagram, so that integrators could follow and create their own design. These diagrams normally are a schematic build to make the chip work and they are build long before the chip is made... so, by other words, no one ever tested the diagram.
Pioneer, sony, and all the other except Nakamichi and Arcam, decided to copy-paste the schematic and sell cd players.
Did it work? yes! Where they any good?.. no! they where all mostly dull and flat. Nakamichi and Arcam, however, waited for the chip, built their board based on the reference but not blindly, and then tweaked the output and voila! They unlocked the secrets of the brilliance of Philips TDA1541a chip design.
It is one of the best DAC out there!

The CD2P is rare for being very pure and precise in sound image, and shows you the best details in sound. It's that sort of player that makes you re-listen to all your collection because there was just too much you where missing.

As usual, loving he best ever build and being a child from the 70's-80's, I have my Amiga 1200 Tower connected to my media sytem.
You can see it here:

The rest is the typical Nintendo Wii, a Sony PS3 and a Roku3.

The AVR:

The AVR is a Denon4306... a true beast

This, is directly driving the Front L+R, the Midle L+R and the Rear L+R... and then it pre-outs the subwoofer and the Rear and Center channel to a set of slave amplifiers. The direct drive from the Denon outputs 8Ohm at 130RMS watts, and given the generous size of the capacitors, it's no wonder it can drive the speakers without getting tired when a lot of bass kicks in. The Denon has a capacity to resist starvation that is not all that common.

The central front slave to the Denon is no less than a Marantz PM55SE... yes it is a Ken Ishiwata tuned PM55... special edition.
A beauty...with a total harmonic distortion of 0.02%

This then drives directly a pair of B&W DM305. The 305 was an interesting project.
B&W where on the quest for a deep bass speaker made form light materials, that could reproduce across the range and not suffer form brittleness form the light materials resonance, and still provide some bass.
They created a Prism design backplane for the speaker that mimics the attenuator foam form the walls of any sound proof room.

Did they succeed? NO! the bass is to soft (probably attenuated by the prism), however, they are EXCELLENT to reproduce voice channels... like the typical "dialogue" assignment that a THX system enrols the central channel into. So an initial deception as main speakers, transformed into a solution for the central channel. Driven by a powerlfull bu low distortion amp.

Back to the Amps... so I talked about the front, so how about the reinforced back?
The room architecture meant that rear needed power, so instead of buying extra big speakers and loose HIFI, I chose to spread the frequencies across multiple speakers and make a "sound wall".

Welcome to my faithful Marantz PRO PM4400

Once again, I turn to Marantz this time seeking power and precision.
This beast is directly driving:

The Mission 773 pair and the Celestion Impact s1 10"sub

The Missions will be talked about soon enought, so let's look at the celestion! This 10" driver with it's own poweramp and XOver, is able of going below 30Hz (normally you would go for a 12" and more to run below 30hz). we can;t however forget that celestion is the brand behing most rock concerts speakers, the bass stations on most dance clubs and, last but not least, a major builder and suplier of drivers for other speaker manufacturers.
Yes, their driver can go bellow 30Hz and still be able to go up to 150Hz because of the stiff and light construction.

But we are not done with the Marantz PM4400 yet.... out of the back of the Celestion, Xover to 150Hz and up, there are a couple of Mission 772 on a pair of ATACAMA stands.

Now lets look at the speakers that the Denon drives directly:
Starting with the back (since we where already there), a pair of Mission 774

On the Middle we have a pair of very powerfull and robust Wharfedale XARUS 4000:

The finally, the best sounding speakers for the money ever built, driven direclty by the Denon on the front R+L channels, a pair of Mission 782.
These are very peculiar speakers that have a very interesting history, please read all about it here.

We can't forget that the mid-to low bass is output by a KEF 1000.2

The result? please have some pictures:

This is a Video of the Sound quality and image, with "The Verve's - Happy Man" brutal guitar:

Here, it is clear that the camera mic is on the limit with just a simple guitar playing as -20db, and when I up to -10db is just distorts the pickup sound. But believe-me... the listening experience is flawless if you have ears instead of a cheap MIC.

And this is a video demonstrating how easy this handles pure bass, at volume, without distortion or brittleness:

Without surprise, the Mic is not able to perform at -20db with a bass full music, the 10db is just pure distortion on the MIC.

However, looking at the graphs several conclusions can be taken on both videos:

The system is reproducing at 24hz frequency and performs all the way up to 20khz without gaps
When the volume is increased, the system increases db's without compromising the frequencies... they all grow proportionally.
The Bass (hard to equalize) is maintaining the volume without gaining HUMMMMsss or becoming excessive.
The volume at -20db is enough to overwhelm a Splash Action cam's mic...with rock!
The 772 and 773 speakers are operating near the limit on the -10db with bass sound, I'll try to attenuate this in the future, so i can go all the way up to 0db and eventually end up without windows in my place :)

Now about the Missions... all the 772, 773, 774, 782... together with my M73i, V62 and the Mission built Denon SCM51.

Some would ask, do you have a mission fetish?
No! I have an engineering over economics fetish... that's why.
It's easy to grab the best materials out there and, not minding cost, build a decent speaker that the client would buy for gazillion euro and perform nicely!

Mission is that brand that (in the old days) invested a lot of engineering time trying to create a speaker design that performed the best, and then try to replicate that design with materials that would cost less, so the client would not need to overpay (sometimes this came back to bite them, but some years in and a small research can turn this around in your favour... see my Mission 782 article).
The result is that most OLD missions sound better than their price range. But every now and then they build a product that rockets out of their standard into stratospheric performance.
The 782 is an example of that! It sounds better than speakers costing 10 times as much. Much like the M73i and V62 (after properly sanded with a minimum 2kg of sand) can sound better than speakers that cost 4 to 5 times as much.
The 772, 773 and 774 are a family of speakers that are excellent performers for the price... but within this family, the 774 is the excel. It just sings through the entire frequency range without a fuss.... it's far better than the cost.

Why? Well, just like B&W has John Bowers, Marantz has Ken Ishiwata, Mission had Peter Comeau.
Most speaker I buy are designs produced by or supervised by Peter Comeau. We seem to like the same things and that is very good... plus I love the idea of not paying for others laziness (nor marketing... hence not owning a single Bang&Olufsen).

Hope you like this article... more will follow are there are 5 other audio systems that make me very happy and proud... and will make their way into the next 5 articles, so stay tuned.

The House of an audiophile Part 1 - The Living Room

2016-08-25T23:19:00.005+01:00

Equalizing the impossible:

I'm very happy with my new house and the so very cool 2 living-rooms divided by a mezzanine thing.
So I decided to transform the top living room into a "cinema and game room"... while the downstairs living room stays as such.

Problem? Well there is a point in which I'll have to equip with some decent audio, and taking into consideration the size and geometry of the 2 rooms I was in for a challenge.
Why? well I love hi-fi, so big speakers and loads of volume would solve the room size problem... and kill quality and sound image while creating weird re-verbs and echoes.
So I started a project of trial and error till I had everything I wanted.

Lets start with the problem:

OK, so I have a Big room sized as an amplifier cone, all with hard surfaces, but then with a bottom cut on the back that leads to another big room.

Then on the bottom room, I have a change form 3 to 6 meters in hight, asymetric and in the middle of the room, right where the big and bass eating sofa will be placed.

Things do not seem easy.

So lets start by the Bottom Room, the living room with a bass propagation problem and a excessive treble at the rear issue:

I love movies, so my buy was an LG 65" LCD 3D TV.... that consumes almost all available space between the entry door and the fireplace... right in front of the extendible sofa with chaise-long...perfect.

Managing the AV system is an HarmanKardon AVR355 7.1 system. Very involving and warmed sound amp.
The HK355 then feeds the central, front and rear channels to a Bose Acoustimass system. I know there are a lot of haters for the BOSE acoustimass system out there, but bare in mind this was chosen after several tests for an even distribution of sound...hence the usage of the JEWEL dual Cubes instead of the single cubes.
This then leaves the middle channel to a pair of brilliant B&W RockSolid speakers.

This builds a basic and respectable 7.1 system capable of handling most frequencies... but no earthquake bass.
So another Subwoofer was added. After several tries ranging from a kef 1000.2 to a custom made 10", and locating every possible place on the room, I decided to reinforce the pure bass with a B&W ASW500, and place it pointing the sofa and in the middle of the room, right under the 3mts to 6mts ceiling high transition.

Everything seemed perfect, however, listening to music at the dining table at the back of the room (on the 6mts high ceiling section), sound seemed brittle and unbalanced... I tamed it down a bit by removing volume on the rear channel, but then that lost the detail on 7.1 movies every time something was coming in from behind!
It was clear that High-Low bass from the Bose acoustimass sub was not passing the sofa and having pointed the B&W rock solids to the middle of the sofa, the mid's where not propagating outside that area.
SO, I grabbed an excellent NAD302, fed it to the pre-out output on the HK355 for the middle channel and then managed a prodigious pair of Castle Acoustics Knight5 for it to drive.

Placing the Knights was easy too... right where the room grows from 3mts to 6mts, slightly towards the 6mts area.

Conclusion? a clean, perfect sound that, after some tweaking got balanced across the full range from the low 32hz to the higher frequencies.
The listening experience is prime in the sofa, but very good everywhere in the room, the sound image and detail is amazing, and it's clear that the BOSE system can handle voice channels very well, but they are eclipsed with easy by the B&W RockSolid and the amazing Castle Acoustics.

So schematics for the geeks:

So the trick to make the BOSE system bearable (yes I know they are expensive and not brilliant, but they are very powerfull for the size and allow me to distribute sound better than a single Kef EGG and less open than a bipolar setup... believe-me I' have them all and tried them all)...so the trick... do not allow them ever to go under 200Hz... on only they sound fuzzy, you can also burn them up.

Again, the trick to make the acoustimass fake Subwoofer (it is actually a resonance box with 2 internal, very stiff, 6" woofers that either blow at the same time for a lower frequency response, of individually for a mid-bass range)... is not to drive it below 80Hz... yes it can do that, but it is not the comfort zone and it is also pointless if you have a big room with a bigger sofa in front of it... so just allow it to work the 80hz to the 160hz zone and he will be happy as a kid in xmas.

So pure bass that makes the earthquake in the movie a thing of reality in your room: Welcome to B&W ASW500. I chose this because with a 10" long-throw front faced driver, fed by a internal 70W amp. Unlike most designs I tested (down firing designs), this front firing model with a down firing resonance amplifier is the best choice for the current furniture setup.
This sends most of the powerfull soundwave directly into the sofa, and the eco on the living room is the resonance output effect, minimizing the HUMMM effect that was so obvious with the down-firing designs. This beast is XOvered to work the 30 to 80Hz range.

So we have covered 30 to 80Hz, then 80 to 160Hz and then 200Hz to 20KHz. The Jewels Dual Cube allow for distribution, making the sound fill the room without the need to pump the volume up, avoiding high pitch echoes and uncomfortable listening spots.

Yes.... that leaves a gap on the 160hz to 200hz range... but fear no more... B&W is here. The RockSolids are a thing of wonder.... product of a disagreement between the 2 major partners at B&W - back then, the engineer was trying to experiment new materials with the standard designs while the artist was not happy with that and was pointing investment towards new case designs more on the "sound furniture style".... they split and the engineer decided to create RockSolid Sounds, and eager to try new materials, experimented on this model creating a 150W capable wonder. They then buried their "tomahawks" and fused the 2 companies together. This design fathered today's DM1 series... however it is far more ugly and that is why I like it... the ugly part is the result of an old design sound box that server the engineering purpose. Consequence? The Rock Solids sound better than the beautiful DM1 they fathered.
These things can work form 75hz to 20kHz! however, the physical limitation of a small driver putting out big quantities of air is clear and that is why a good Sub is over 8" big. So they are XOver at 120Hz to the 20Khz limit.

We are then left with the room side and weird geometry solution. While B&W where fighting over the external design of their speakers, trying to build "sound furniture", at Castle, they've always bee there. Every speaker is made from natural wood, carved by artisans. They also have a Dual Pipe technology, that channels air through several wooden compartments on the speakers body (much like a exhaust muffler, only sophisticated and matured to perfection... they don't sound good... they sound really really good! In practice, the speaker is a true 3 way design, but each mid and mid-low driver has it's own compartment and sound pipe to work the resonance down and up the speaker body...it doesn’t sound... it's like it sings instead.
They are connected to the award winning NAD 302 and the result is a very composed and warm sound.
These are not crossed over... the NAD receives a pre-amp bypass from the AVR and amplifies it, then the internal XOvers on the speaker will split the high, mid and mid-low and allow the resonance pipes to work their magic.

The result is a very balanced output, across all the frequency range.. and qith the NAD running tone-defeat and the Harman-Kardon too, I have literally no distortion up to the 0DB resistance limit on the HK... sure that by then the B&W rock solids cones are almost jumping out of their structure, but the castles compensate whatever they lose to low frequencies and it is almost imperceptible.

Some pictures of the living room:

Here you can see the LG Tv, under it, you can see the custom made cabinet for the amps and the acoustimass bass module. On both corners an center on the ceiling line you can see the Jewel Dual Cubes placed to distribute sound as even as possible.

Here in detail, the Jewel Dual Cube angles

Here are details on the HK AVR355 and the NAD, together with the Bose Acoustimass bass module

The brilliant B&W RockSolids can be seen here in detail, and the 2 pictures bellow show them on the corners of the image, pointing to the sofa.

At the rear of the room, you can see the other jewel cubes in an elevated, pointing angled down position... and also the difference in hight that that part of the room has.

Now exactly where the room changes to a higher ceiling, I've placed the castles and the ASW500, see?

... and again here...

And to finish, the 2 beauties:

And that's it... the Living room is done and it is perfect. There where a lot of spares form the tests but I have other rooms I can use them in :) .

So Part 1 is done... next, Part 2 - The Cinema and Game Room... where I will have to deal with disco style amplification and the so needed NO distortions and excellent sound image, personal demand.

Top Watch TW061 - Smartwatch - Good simple, not perfect, but useless without the instructions

2016-04-15T12:57:00.003+01:00

As a good father, I worry about the well being of my precious young daughter.
So, in Christmas, I gave her a TOPWatch TW061.

Making a long story short, the watch if nice and it is exactly what I wanted:

cute pink silicon enclosure (other colours are available)
analogue watch (doesn't give it away and makes you kid think when checking for time).
Water resistant
3 dial buttons + 1 sos (runs all numbers till one accepts the call)
Induction charge mode (no plugs, no plugs to get dirty, moisture and/or to fail in time)
Excellent price
White-list. Bye bye salesman calling your kid trying to sell... whatever they what to sell.

Not so good:

no instructions. It does have a set of papers but calling that a quick reference guide is insulting.
poor autonomy (4 hours- 6 if you tweak the GPS and GPRS send interval)
Stability... every now and then a reboot is good to keep it running perfectly.

So this GPS-watch allows you to call your kids, see where they are at a specific point in time, allows your kid to call you and even call any one of the 3 numbers automatically once the SOS is triggered.

Simple and straight right?Why oh why did I write this article then? Well the lack of instructions makes it particularly difficult to run.
Lucky me that I was the IT and Project Manager behind Localiser S.A. (a GPS positioning for safety purpose company we had in Portugal in the years 2005 to 2007). That allowed me to, together with a small help from the HTCmania forum (http://www.htcmania.com/showthread.php?t=1075947), quickly understand the messaging format and probe the watch's system with SMS's until I managed to understand how to configure it.

You can configure everything with SMS's, but the mobile app is a much better interface... as long as you manage to configure the 2/3g apn... and that is the miracle setting no one seems to find.
So how do you configure it:

unbox let it charge for a couple of hours. Then use the supplied screwdriver tool to open the watch, take note of the IMEI number on the sticker, you will need that latter on.
Add a gprs/2g/3g enabled SIM card to the phone and close the cover. PLEASE MAKE SURE THE cover is nicely placed, screwed and the rubber seal makes a perfect insulation... fail to do this and kiss the "water resistant" feature good bye.
Turn on the "smart core" by pressing the on button. The watch will play a song while booting up.
Use a mobile phone to send the configuration setting for the APN. The watch will play another sound and reply via SMS with a "Data account set OK" message. Fail to do this and the phone will forever be Geolocated in "Shenzeng factory".
Use googleplay to download the app "Kids Care"
Create an account and add a device by entering the IMEI on the phone as the app requests. If you failled to do so, just send an sms to the watch with the command *6* and it will reply with the IMEI.
The use the app settings panels to setup the button numbers and whitelist
Very important... reboot the phone when it stops replying "setting OK" and when you finish configuring the phone

You can also do all the configuration and grab the positions by SMS.
here are the entire command set to configure the phone (the 5 is by far the most important NOT TO MISS):

*1* -> GET GPS position from watch via SMS

*2#N1#N2#N3* -> SET the 1, 2 and 3 button dialling numbers

*3* -> GET the configures numbers for the 1,2 and 3 dial buttons

*4* -> CALL BACK (the phone calls you and enters "spy mode" so you can hear what is happening

*5#apn.mobileoperator.country#username#password* -> SET APN so the phone gets internet connection. in my case this was: *5#net2.vodafone.pt#vodafone#vodafone*

*6* -> GET IMEI

*7#N1#N2#Nx* -> SET the white-list numbers

*8* -> GET the white-list numbers

This is it... after the APN setting everything works from the mobile app, so I guess that the lack of the documentation is what is generating so much negative feedback on Amazon.

If you have any questions, post them and I will try to help.

***UPDATE***

I decided to write this article as the Amazon community keeps sending me emails about people having trouble with this watch and asking for my help... then I started replying with the link to this blog and Amazon started cutting the posts as it includes URLs!
Not commenting on amazon safety policy regarding people posting URLs... they make sense... but if you are going to send me emails asking for my help, then at least try to review the reply before censoring it.... or stop counting me on for helping YOU TO SELL THE PRODUCTS and the SUPPORT THEM FOR FREE, amazon!

Mission 782 repair

2016-02-14T02:25:00.001+00:00

--- EDIT - please scroll to the bottom of this article for the edit ---

Hi everyone.

It seems that I'm having as much bad luck in transportation services, as I'm having good luck in auction items.

I've been looking for a pair of floor standing mission "old school" speakers.

There is a reason for that: old school mission speakers where made-in the UK (not China like later ones), with excellent craftsmanship and even better engineering.

As newer models have been labeled dull and flat, old models, particularly the ones using fixed vented pole designs for the midrange drivers, where something to look for and then keep with.

The mission engineers managed to match the crossovers to the perfect driver for that type of frequency response. This brilliantly mated combination, produces results comparable to speakers costing 5 to 10 times as much. This, to me, was Mission's trademark... archiving results through efficient engineering, beating "costly materials and drivers" with brain. It has everything to do with me...engineering instead blindly mixing expensive components and then making the client pay for it, claiming the old "exclusivity" excuse.

Don't get me wrong; good materials produce better results, it's just that whenever not so good materials with good engineering produce the same results, then the obvious conclusion is that applying the same engineering effort to better materials would give your client a better "ride for the money"... mission did that for some time and I absolutely respect that.

The 782 are a perfect example of what mission used to be:

Back to my history: after a lot of searching and some frustration trying to convince some ebay traders that there was no difference on shipping a pair of speakers 10 miles of 10.000 miles, one very nice lady accepted my challenge and allowed me to bid on a pair of 782.

The 782 are a brilliant designed true 3way speaker. It features a 13cm midrange fixed vented pole ceramic design speaker on top, together with a 2,5cm silk dome tweeter, both enclosed in the top end of the speaker on a pyramidal shaped box. Then at the bottom, there is a side-firing 16,5cm woofer made from nomex, that enjoys practically 2/3 of the speaker body box for volume and reflecting.

So summing up, after a LONG search, I managed to source a set of some of the best cost/quality speakers known to man.
There was some degree of risk! The reason that make the 782 so exquisite, is that they where produced for a little time... and that was due to a mid-driver production problem! The original drives that came with the 782 where the Keraform 82-LF130/QS. Excellent design, reasonable build quality but a terrible detail. The coil protective plastic sheet, had a glue whose chemical composition reacted with the soldering on the metal, generating extreme corrosion. This would lead to increase in electrical resistance, reducing sound power and quality, with time the oxidation would inflate the once flat soldering and make the coil rub against the magnet walls and producing heat and drag, and ultimately the degradation would just insulate the parts and the driver is dead.

Most people facing this, just decided to trash or sell the speakers. for some time it was possible to buy replacement parts from Keraform, but, in time those would have the same fate.

Obviously, Mission was aware of this and discontinued the series, then instructed the technicians to accept warranty repair claims, and substitute the driver with the Audax HM130Z0 Aerogel units. These where better, more expensive drivers that would perfectly replace the Keraforms without impact in sound quality/image.

So there are some 782 out there that whee trashed, others where sold as repair item, others for parts, others perfectly repaired and updated... and of course, the original ones... few in working order.

I knew this; I accepted that ... and even managed to find a set that was original and in perfect working order. Sure i was expecting some soldering degradation, but I would be able to peel off the plastic, clean the chemicals and re-do the soldering and wrap the coil back with a non acid glue. This, unfortunately never came to be. My couriers, managed to kill the midrange drivers on both speakers. I'm working out the insurance claims at the moment, and apart from some very unpleasant dealing with customer care, the escalation seems to work... so I'll wait until I add to this article the details... either for the best or the worse of it.

While grabbing the speakers I immediately felt a heavy item loose inside one of the speakers. Bad news for sure, confirmed when opening the speaker:

The front protective cover has the pins broken and clearly had suffer a large squashing impact.

A hole was easy to spot where the cone pole would be, and the inner speaker baffle filling was observable.

In panic, I immediately rushed to the next speaker... no good news there either:

The center pole was loose, running around the speaker driver, however no heavy loose part was felt and the mounting point of the cone pole was still in place. but the pole was broken and heavily marked.

Ok... time to access the total damage on the first speaker:

First I toolk a clamp to remote the broken plastic pins that used to hold the protective front cover. then, using a screwdriver, I gently removed the rubber housings, exposing the Philips screws.

Then I removed the front assembly, which holds the tweeter.

I finally removed the driver assembly and got hold of the destruction:

Whatever hit the driver, pushed the cone pole in, with enough force to rip the magnet from the driver structure, then the weight if the magnet ripped the wire plug wide open.

This is the dismantled driver.... and, of course before any attempt to fix, a conductivity test was taken...

At least the tweeter was in perfect order

So conclusions: the main drive was dead...by many different forms of assassination attempt all at once. Independently, I would not foresee a bright future ahead of this speaker, it is an original Keraform, and the oxidation is way into the soldering.

on the inner side, the bump is the result of extreme oxidation process.

Conclusion: I've made an insurance claim for the transportation, ordered a couple of AUDAX aerogel, and I'm now waiting delivery. Will update this post soon.

UPDATE:
So the AUDAX drivers arrived. They are a thing of beauty, but their cast ring is bigger than the Keraforms... a lot bigger. They are also made from aluminum instead of plastic as you would find in the Keraform. In essence, they are a lot better built.

Step 1 - place the old Keraforms on top of the new AUDAX and use a light colored pencil to template the cutting line on the aluminium .

2- use a dremel tool to cut the excessive aluminium. MAKE SURE you protect the new cone from debris... I just covered it with gum-tape.

3 - Start cutting,

4 - After cutting the metal from the driver, put it next to the wood and template the extra cut... the better you cut the metal, the less you need to adjust the wooden part.

5 - Place the driver and use the drill tool to have new holes for the drivers screws.

6 - Place everything back together and enjoy your brand new UPGRADED Mission 782. These will not go bad of fail...and they sound a lot better than they cost.

----- Edit -----

Hi everyone again.
I decided to update this article as several of you commented on the original and some new ideas came into play.
First of all, thanks for commenting. It's a joy to know that this article has been helpful to others and that they also share their knowledge.This is what the web is all about.

Now starting with what got me into this edit: I recently upgraded my cinema & games room (yes I'll be updating those too), but by removing 2 slave amplifiers and buying a clone for my Marantz CD5000, left me with a surplus of 2 Marantz amplifiers (a PM 4400 and a 55 Special Edition) and a NAD C520 cd player.
Since I spend more time at the office than at home, I decided to move the PM4400 and the NAD to the office. All I now needed to do was to source a set of speakers.

More or less at the same time, my cousin decided to build his cinema and audio listening room. I managed to go to my first choice in audio - my good friend Bob . While searching for the items my cousin would buy, I managed to find 2 pairs of 782s... and then later that day, while explaining him how much better these are when upgrade-repaired, I instantly started finding myself going upstair and listening more and more on my 2 782's.
Weeeeellllll my cousin only neede 1 set, so i brought the other set for my office.

The set I brought has 1 driver faulty and the other driver already replaced by mission like Chris Galloway stated on his comment. I thought this would be an excellent time to look at what misison built audax drivers would look like and perform.
I also thought, this is a good time to put in practice Adrian Vos method of fitting the driver in one of them, vs my old method on the other.

ALSO, AUDAX continued to evolve the good old HM130Z0... not in it's last iteration as HM130Z12, it has a better plastic seal of the foam dumper, better coil and magnet so, by reason, should sound even better.
So yeah i brought 2. This time i chased AUDAX website, only to get to AAC's website and finally there, source the distributors. I chose the first entry - AARV and got an excellent deal and very decent shipping.

So now for some conclusions:
The Mission AUDAX made replacement driver vs the AUDAX HM130Z12.
The difference is clear. The AUDAX HM130Z is a loaded, heavy magnet, very robust beast. The mission driver is not only smaller but also plastic structured and clearly not as robust.
In the end, the Mission driver is very good, no doubt and the sound it outputs has an excellent image and is quite refined, however, unless I'm loosing it, I believe that I got slightly more detail on the HM130Zs, particularly at louder volumes. It doesn't come across as a surprise as, this being a device that produces precision mechanical waves, the more robust it is framed, the better it insulates the thrust into actually producing what it's being asked for.

The repairs:
As expected, the un-repaired KERAFORM unit was long gone and looked even worse than my previous ones.

So deciding to go for both drivers, I then went for on driver on my method, grinding the outer frame out and fitting it in:

And for the other, I decided to give it a go on the Adrian Vos method. in essence I decided to dremel the driver contour out:

and then groove in steps of 2mm up to 4mm

And then, peel GENTLY each 2mm thick slice and go on to the next until I had a 4mm socket to place the driver in

]

This is the end result.

Comparing the methods,
on the left Adrians method, on the right my old method

Final marks:

Andrians method is MUCH FASTER AND EASIER. It also requires you to know how to manage a power tool and have firm hands, or you will end up defacing the speaker's outer wood shell. I still prefer my method as the final package looks tighter, but I find no difference in sound.

HM130Z's vs Mission own driver - IF you have the keraforms, you should opt for the HM130Z, else if you already serviced your speakers and have the mission aerogel AUDAX replacements, I don't believe the effort is worth it except if you are really trying to get the absolute best possible sound out of it. If, like me, you really want these babies to eclipse much higher line speakers, then the 110 euro it's gonna cost you, plus the afternoon grinding metal and wood is worth it.
But the mission aerogel is a very good option and certainly costs half the money and 1/10th the effort.

HM130Z0 vs HM130Z12 - If buying for the first time, go for the 12's, if you already have the 0's the juice is not worth the squeeze... but you can always try to use Adrian's method and simplify the "squeeze".

It ends up being a "do you pursue audio nirvana or not?" question.

I'm now the happy owner of 2 pairs of repaired/upgraded 782's and the guys at the office went crazy when they started singing. They've just finished the run-in... boy do I love these speakers.

--- re-edit for location tips and sound test with spectrometer ---

Positioning of the speakers in the Room:

The speaker on the rigth should be another 20 cm away from the wall, but this IS a meeting room and function takes precedence! That board has given birth to some preety spectacular ideas that help paying for all this stuff so...

As you can see, sound is coherent both next to the speakers and on the far side of the room.

This room has carpet and sound/heat insulation on both ceiling and walls, so not the best for sound propagation (thought rather good avoiding weird echos).

The spectral analisys shows very pleasent sound pressures across the frequencies, without excessive high frequencies and excessive low frequencies.

ohhh and the treble, bass balance are all neutral, and loudness is off

Mission 772 speaker repair

2016-02-01T17:27:00.003+00:00

I recently brought a pair of Mission 772 speakers. They are old but they are gold. And they sit just perfect together with my set of Mission 782.

The problem is that age takes the toll on these babies, and the rubber from the speaker outer damper started to degrade.

One of the speakers shown a fatigue fracture... not only not good and with influence over sound quality (when operating and high levels), being this an open center design, this would mean unbalancing and, in time, total driver failure due to the coil rubbing the walls and erode till destruction.

A solution was needed, and I would not let these babies go because of a minor problem. So ebay to the rescue and, soon enough, a repair pack was underway.

Ok then, ready, set, go...
First step is to lay down the speaker and remove the screws.

Then use a small knife to start to unglue/separate the external border of the old bubber/foam damper. BE CAREFUL when pulling as the inner side is still glued in and too much lift will damage the speaker cone.

Then work on the inside, following the same rule: no excessive lift.

Here is an image of the removed cone and the damage on the rubber damper.

It's an excellent time to inspect the main damper spring inside the driver showing in yellow. This one was just perfect.

As materials evolved, so did the design. You can compare the thickness of the rubber vs the replacement foam damper.
This is good news and bad news at the same time: good because less weight and the same tenacity will mean less moving weight and a better response....the bad news is that the heavier rubber would hold the cone I place better during centering and reassembly...so more work for me.

The glue. The glue is another problem:
You want enough blue to hold this in place...but not too much as is will add weight... and just enough to glue fast, but not too fast so you can move and place the damper properly and within geometry.

So the solution I to apply only to the inside, and apply an almost transparent amount of glue on both the edge of the cone and the edge of the foam damper.

Then you marry the 2 parts together and, while HOLDING the cone with one finger, lift and place the foam on the cone...this will enable the glue to catch some air and react a little faster.

The material will try to counter the glue and the more surface you glue in, the more it will fight back.. SO, my recommendation is to grab gum tape, twist it into a rounded surface that will match the cone surface... and start fixing it in a cross pattern (top, bottom, side, side).

This is the final LOOK :)

Allow it to glue in... time for coffee, and a movie or two. I let the glue set in for half a day... it's not really a contact glue (rather looks like wood glue, actually). So it does take some time to set properly.

50% through... not it's time for the outer part.

The outer part is A LOT simpler... but not linear.

Glue wise, just slightly lift the foam and pass the glue without worrying too much about the amount of glue... it's a fixed part so no weight to influence motion.

HOWEVER, this is an open cone design.. it is set this way to allow better movement on the cone and consequently a better response, but this means that there is also some fluctuation of the cone and the entire coil assembly. IF that fluctuation means the coil rubs the side of the wall containing the magnet, it will rub the varnish out and then short circuit the coil... and eventually just completely wear it out until it looses continuity.

So after you set the glue on the outside, and before it sets, just move the come up and down, while adjusting the damper outside. You will feel free movement, or a slight vibration, created by the coil rubbing the walls.

Again, you can have gum-tape (this time a simple cross is enough), and adjust until movement is free, I do recommend you bias the setting a bit towards the upper side of the speaker, so that when standing, the small but existing weight will auto-balance.

Again the glue set in... a day should be enough. And then screw the driver back in... connect your speaker and... well it's a speaker, you know what to do with it :)

This is the final look of the 2 speakers:
on the left you have the repaired one, the original (yet to be repaired) is on the right.

The speakers sound better with the new damper. Weight does influence moving parts... inertia, you know?

I don't really like to say this, but...

2014-02-24T17:59:00.001+00:00

..."I told you so" is impossible to keep within my lips or my mind for that matter.
following reading this article -> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-22/microsoft-said-to-cut-windows-price-70-to-counter-rivals.html , I immediately looked at Microsoft and said "Told'ya" just like I immediately look'd at my tech friends and repeated that over and over and over again.

I use to say "boy do I hate to be right all the time"... but in this case, I don't!
This was an important step from Microsoft. Following the Windows 8.1 update without the metro as default for desktops (since statistics show most desktop users don't like it and find no use for it... no wonder!) as I've already theorized about here.

If you think about Microsoft Operating Systems, they did had a quality jump with NT3.51 and NT4, that was good enough to pay for. I mean, comparing to Unix and Linux (and respective software) systems back then, Windows NT3.51 and NT4 did represent an increase in productivity.
Now from that point on, instead of having better and more stable kernels, they actually managed to go the opposite way (with a couple of exceptions), while every one else was going better.

Today's Windows8 is a benchmark. It's Kernel is excellent and actually very well built. And just like they managed to kill the product Windows Vista with a poor GUI implementation, they managed to do exactly the same with the Metro in Windows8...but don't get fooled by the goofy "metro", it is a brilliant piece of operating system.
Invariably, the kernel supporting the software (which will help you have a stable, performer system to help you reach ROI), is now better than ever...and it's fair to pay for a good thing that allows you to work and generate income. However, the other available systems out-there, such as Linux, have evolved beyond Windows8 current state of Kernel evolution...and they are free.
So this will than have to consider other stuff beyond the simple kernel.

Now GUI wise, Windows have been better than any Linux, ever since it's debut, up till the moment they decided to consider every user would use a desktop productivity platform as they use the pad for reading news and playing games.
Linux did suffer from that same trend with the "unity desktop" but its project branching characteristics managed to save it from doom and maintain a couple of good alternatives like the MATE project.

This meant that Windows was loosing the edge it had on the GUI and not picking up the edge it lost on kernel fast enough to be competitive. So its fair to assume that windows had been living on the "software support from it's partners" cushion (ok ok and the fan boys). But the important thing is that considering price vs productivity, it was no longer the obvious choice, and that is an extremely dangerous gamble from a software company that ...survives... by selling software.

Now, having lost the mobile device train (consequence pushing...forcing really... lower quality Windows CE to the market), this protected market is now getting a taste on Apple and Android products, and as such, their based on Operating Systems. This is undermining Microsoft's cushion as most software is being ported to these platforms, and also the market will be used to "the choice beyond Microsoft Windows bubble".
To make things worse, the recent windows8 Metro interface is targeted for tablets and smartphones, so there was an urgent need to make them available beyond the one brand Microsoft forced into this (Nokia).

It seams to me that Microsoft is taking a careful look at statistics. This decision of lowering windows8 price for low-cost devices is critical, just like deciding that windows 8.1 upgrade should boot without METRO by default while on a productivity environment, is a crucial move.
This generates a better and faster ROI of anyone using their Operating Systems (manufacturers, clients... the works), and evens the cost vs functionality(productivity) scale.
There is also an internal pressure, as office product line is going online and device independent, removing Microsoft's internal cushion to Windows O.S.

It's clear to me that Microsoft is finally moving towards a better way of doing business, shifting from a set of policies that would protect mediocrity into a set that will promote quality and competitiveness. Thumbs up!

Apple unveils the new iPhone (some 5 something...)

2013-09-11T17:41:00.002+01:00

First of all, lets me warn that IF YOU OWN Apple shares and are reading this, stop immediately, call your broker and SELL SELL SELL, then you can return.
Second, if you own an iPhone, stop reading this, enter amazon or ebay and SELL SELL SELL cause no one will be buying it from you in months time.
Third, if you own an Android, stop laughing... it's not decent to laugh of other people's problems. No, really; It's actually sad that the company that kicked started the smartphone revolution is now going under. It's even worse that the world is about to loose Blackberry and later after Apple...2 less competitors means less competition and the ones that suffer the most from this are the buyers.

Google's September seems to be controversial.
First the bad news as Microsoft makes the final chess move on Nokia and buys it. It was expected ever since Nokia announced dropping the Symbian for Microsoft Operating Systems. If Microsoft intended to say in battle with Google on the smartphone market, they would need something more that a couple of Apple shares...and here they are.
Second the excellent news as Apple unveils... the iPhone...again.

So what is new about the iPhone... well if you live in the iPhone world, there are a couple of new things that clearly do not justify the shift. If however you managed to evolve out of that fan-boy package, and into the Android world then you can see the iPhone as you've always seen: A good idea back in 2007.

So what is new about the iPhone?
First, they remembered that for year now, their competitors have been launching better phones, with better hardware and software for half the price. And grabbing the customer that doesn't buy a Guccy bag and as a consequence asks for specs and then compares before buying an expensive gadget. So they created the iPhone5C.

The iPhone 5C is the iPhone 5! Same CPU, same display, same cameras, same battery (with software improved usage), only with plastic shell and 5 colors to choose from. Oh and the 16 or 32Gb FOREVER and no SDcard crap remains.

Should you buy an iPhone 5C if you own an iphone5? Why oh why would you sell your iPhone5 to buy the same phone on a worse casing.
Should you buy an iPhone 5C if you don't have an iPhone? Why would you want an iPhone with android available? Still if you think that it sits good on the meeting table, just buy a Chinese iPhone replica...it's as effective in the meeting room and a lot cheaper.

Then comes iPhone 5S...

The iPhone 5S is the iPhone 5 with ONE improvement! CPU is the next gen A7 instead of the A6. Apple announced 2x faster than the A6, but leaked benchmarks show that it's only 30% faster. New colors! You can have it in gold, silver or "space grey"...clearly for the Guccy people. FingerPrint reader! Wow... something pointless really as it will just increase cost while the simple usage of the camera for IRIS reading would be much better...and oldschool to as you can have that on your Motorola Atrix since 2011 or on your Dell laptop since 2007. Same display, same cameras but better tweaked for low light scenes and with dual color flash. The ONLY new thing is actually the M7 co-processor. It's a CPU that computes and interprets motion, allowing a finer, faster and better movement and positioning awareness from the device! Cardio-fitness freaks, this is for you.

Should you buy an iPhone 5S if you own an Iphone? Why? are you a cardio-fitness freak? if so, go ahead! Are you a Guccy freak? if so, go ahead!
Should you buy and iPhone 5S if you don't have an iPhone? No! Why? because of the same reasons you should never buy an iphone other than the first one: It costs twice of what it is worth and you have much better HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung android phones out there that completely eclipse the iPhone. And if the lame excuse of the meeting room table gadget should arise, think on just how much the "senseless fashion over reason" message is interpret by others attending the meeting.

So what did Apple managed to do?

Copy the Nokia Lumia 620 at twice the price of the cheapest version (the iPhone5C).
Improve the camera on the phone...while you can have incomparably better results with:

Panasonic Lumix 101P
Casio Exilim
Samsung Memoir
Sony Ericsson Idou
...and so on

Google is now extremely happy. They are loosing all the main competitors, and the other giant (although able to pick up the pace faster than most can imagine) took too long to wake-up for the smartphone business and as a consequence is still years behind.

Is there a future for Apple? Don't really know. So far it seems that they have done nothing more than legal suits this last years and apart from changing business into Apple law inc, I don't really see a bright future at the moment.

After 15 days of hell, I found heaven...in the less predictable place.

2013-07-15T05:54:00.001+01:00

About 3 weeks ago, my long time faithful laptop died on me.
It was my mobile workstation, packed with an extremely stable, fast and efficient UbuntuStudio64 10.10 running the only good gnome (gnome2).
After the announced death by motherboard failure, it was time to buy a new laptop, and as this last one, it would have to last for years, so it would have to be state of the art...and since I'm not rich, it would definitively not be HP, APPLE, DELL or any other over inflated price-tag laptops.
So after a lot of consideration (a looooot, believe me, as I still find it UGLY, HEAVY, BIG and KIDish...and i honestly only forget those feelings while I amaze at the brutal power and speed)...so a ASUS RepublicOfGamers G750Jx with 4rth gen Corei7 4700HQ, 32Gb ram, a boot SSD 265Gb Liteon SATA3, a storage 7200rpm 750Gb Hitachi Sata3, a Geforce GTX 770m with 3Gb and a couple of other tweaks, was on the way.

When I got the machine, I was NOT TOO amazed to find it installed with Windows8... an excellent example of how to build a kernel and then how NOT to make it usable, by spoiling everything with the "I wannabe a pad" Graphical User Interface.

Working with heavy virtualization machines, 3D and some programming, this would not do, so Linux was the ONLY way...and then...I found true hell.

Cleaning up windows and EFI was a simple 5 minutes BIOS reconfiguration followed by a Gparted tool cleanup from a live-CD...easy.

When I started installing Linux, I found the problems. First I tried the faithful UbuntuStudio64 10.10...but no network interfaces where found, leaving me with days trying to update packages by hand using another laptop and a SD card...no success. Definitively I needed some sort of networking connection so ubuntu would install every needed package.

So I tried UbuntuStudio64 12.04... it had been working in my workstation for long without problems and excellent performance...but again no network interfaces where found...this was getting annoying.

So next in line was the 13.04...under development, but at least everything seemed to work. The seemed to is a key word here... the system was stable, but XFCE kept crashing without reason or logic. And is got so frequent that I found my self doing simple copy-paste tasks without moving the mouse, and having to close any applications that might pop-up some message in-between...I've had it, I had to find a solution or start thinking on selling this piece of crap and buying an older, more reliable system.

The next in test was Debian7.1...and I got a little hope when one of my older USB WI-FI's worked and Debian requested to join a network...but then security would not implement as it's WPA2 and that needs an updated library on the installation CD! Back to 0.

Ok.. Lets try Ubuntu12.04 and then try to clean the "I wannabe a pad like Windows8" crappy Gnome3 on unity...somehow...but this time, install hanged constantly! No luck here.

Next would be the even more desperate Ubuntu13.04...and the same install problems happened.

By now I was in hell. I was already starting to look for second-hand laptops online in an effort to end this time consuming madness...when I remembered that there was another debian based distro that could work...
...I didn't think of it in the first place because, thought it's good, it has an overall green looks that just leave-me sick...and that's why I never ever thought of MintLinux.

After downloading MintLinux Olive 64 MATE, I found heaven. Everything worked (apart from the standard need to ban nouveau package at the grub loader, in order to be able to install nvidia drivers). I even tried VMWare Workstation 9.02...ad it worked immediately without tweaks and recompiling! and the 3d!!! The 3d inside virtual machines is working blazing fast, stable and like I've never EVER seen on VMWare Workstation on Linux.

So this is a BIG lesson. People, bare with the ugly green look of MINT during installation and initial configuration (as you'll probably get rid of it immediately after first boot, like I did), and then you'll be on Linux Workstation heaven.
MintLinux allows you to choose 3 different "flavors": XFCE (not recommended as the very fast and interesting XFCE was actually very unstable in this latest build...and that was my UbuntuStudio64 13.04 problem), Cinnamon (a KDE spawn... I never liked KDE) and .... the wonderful, glorious, gnome2 spwan and because of it, savior of all MATE... and that, my friends if by far the BEST DEBIAN BASED LINUX since UbuntuStudio64 10.10.

I finally found heaven...and it's ugly green, but nothing that some gray paint can't handle.

Making Ubuntu Studio 13.04 + NVIDIA TopEnd Graphics card work with the latest LowLatency Kernel

2013-06-27T20:13:00.002+01:00

Hi
During my last trip, my HP Laptop that has been my side-kick for the last 6 years died on me.
Guess it was time to find a new laptop...and it was everything but easy, but that's subject for another post.
Having received my brand new ASUS ROG G750Jx (a true monster, from the looks to the size and weight of the thing) all pumped up with a 4rth Gen CoreI7 4700HQ, 32Gigs of ram, 256Gb SSD and 750Gb 7200rpm standard hdd, blueRay and a Geforce GTX770m with dedicated 3Gb GDDR5.
It's the ONLY machine I could find with GOOD specs for heavy virtualization and graphics usage and with affordable pricing. The only problem is the "I'm a kid and this is my gaming rid" looks.

It came with Windows8Pro, and thought I think this Microsoft Kernel is a lot better, I still think it's not close the the efficiency and footprint levels I consider efficient...and then there is the Metro GUI...ughhhh.
So as expected, I used Clonezilla to backup the entire 2 HD partitions, setups, and data into a single Image to my external backup drive, and on to wiping it clean.
I then decided to use the SSD drive for /boot, / and SWAP partitions, and having 32GB of ram, my swap ended up having 64Gb of ram, so this should be a really strong virtualization environment.
I then configured the 750Gb Hd as my /home and Ubunto Studio 64 13.04, here we go!
It's a beast. System loads in under 12 seconds after touching the power button, and everything feels under instantaneous in response time. I'm just amazed...this level of performance makes-me me forget and forgive the looks.

It installed beautifully, but then after the update to Kernel 3.8.0-25-lowlatency, XFCE stopped working.
With nothing but the command line, it was not that easy to grab hold of the latest NVIDIA drivers (not from the repository but rather the NVIDIA site).
While running the NVIDIA drivers everything got clear to me, so here is the recipe to AVOID all the mess of the Noveau modules incompatibility with NVIDIA drivers:

1 - Install Ubuntu 13.04 from the ISO and allow it to perform the first package update (no kernel).
2 - Then, download the latest NVIDIA drivers form NVIDIA website. Use your file manager to allow the file to have execute permissions and leave it in the download folder.
3 - Shift screen (ctrl+alt+F1) to command line, login and kill the XFCE issuing the command:
sudo service lightdm stop
4 - cd to your home/downloads where you should fing the nvidia driver and start it issuing:
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86......(your version here)........run
This will lead to the Nvidia setup that will start firing errors. Don't worry! One of those errors is the Incompatibility warning with the "noveau kernel module". Just kick next and you'll be presented with a request to attempt to bypass loading of noveau kernel modules. Just say yes. Installer will continue and fail as the modules are still loaded.
5 - Reboot your computer. You'll probably end up with a no XFCE boot direct into command line, if so just continue and re-do step 4, if not, repeat steps 3 and then 4.
This time, the installed will succeed.
6 - Reboot and you'll find yourself back in XFCE with NVIDIA power boosting the already light DesktopManager. Be happy and NOW you can run the remaining updates (the new linux kernel)
7 - Reboot and enjoy a blazing fast kernel on a blazing fast DesktopManager.

That's it!

Microsoft Project & Project Server 2013 and Office365 line of products: Maturity to generate and support Maturity

2013-06-22T00:05:00.003+01:00

Before I start this post, and due to some questions presented at some of my classes, I'll make a simple statement: I'm not a Microsoft man, as much as I'm not an Oracle, or Apple man or even a Red Hat Man. I'm a technology man, with Project Management Career built on top of an Engineering background. So I like efficiency and quality. If a brand I love creates a bad product I will NOT support or recommend it...as much as if a brand I don't like creates a good product, I WILL support, recommend and embrace-it. You see, after years working multiple technologies with multiple projects, I no longer value childish clubbing behavior. Brilliance is all over the world and all over companies...and it is a good thing that every now and then, one competitor rises above others and shines for a while, pulling responses from other competitors....it drives evolution and that's my point of focus.

Having sad that, lets go into the article.
I' been using Microsoft products to support business and training since as early as Microsoft Windows 2.0... regarding Microsoft Project and Project Server (that I've been using from it's early days), my students (when asking for my honest opinion) would hear something like, Microsoft Project Professional is good, and I strongly recommend it, Project Server however is not mature enough to justify investment so I recommend you to wait.
That however HAS changed dramatically. Ever since Project Server 2010, that product maturity just leap forward into a top-in-class product. The only flaw would be that it was built on SharePoint, and thought better, it was (in 2010) far from acceptable in my (efficiency oriented mind).
2013 is a leap to brilliance. SharePoint improved immensely not in terms of concept (as there was noting wrong with it) but rather in terms of quality...it is lighter, more robust, faster....it just works.
This allowed for what already was a great product to be even better.

The new version of Microsoft Project Professional 2013, is not that much of a leap since the already brilliant 2010. Sure a lot of people that actually understand the software calculation routine didn't think that way (I used to be one of them during the beta trials), but then it was their fault, as the product actually improved a lot and that included the calculation routine, especially towards resource assignment and peak usage.
The most important improvement since 2013 comes from reports that are now BRILLIANT and totally flexible, and a new set of features that you really don't get to taste unless you evolve towards the SharePoint world. You see, now, you can use Project Professional 2013 to edit SharePoint task-lists, and use the brilliant "scheduling engine" in it to make those SharePoint task-lists come to life. This makes Project Professional 2013, not only the "client" app for Project Server, but also for SharePoint.

The Project Server 2013, however is an important leap since it's predecessor. If you just look at features, the comparison is almost equal, but in truth things have evolved a lot.
Project Server has been suffering a fusion with the SharePoint product. Of course this could be done at once, but it would eventually stall product evolution in terms of features that were much needed before 2010. Having reached that point, however, there was nothing to hold Microsoft back, and it shows.
Project Server 2010, used to force you to create workflows using Microsoft Visual Studio and a lot of coding...now if you think that SharePoint excels in workflow creation and maintenance simplicity, this was a "turn-down". Well, feel turn-down no more! Today's Project Server 2013 uses the same workflow engine, and as a consequence, you can create workflows visually using SharePoint Designer.
Project Server 2010 used to have 4 databases. These represent the several stages of Data inside the server. Of course that would represent a lot of shifts from database to database between saves, publishes, reports, etc. 2013, does consolidate everything into one database, allowing for better performance and control of data.
Project Server 2010 was available only as a server, so you had to license SharePoint, Windows Servers, SQL Server just to have Project Server... 2013 is offered as both the standard installation you've always had (now called on-premises) and a new service on the cloud (called on-line). This is huge as in truth, most cost of ownership, cost of growing and inability to shrink, and the cost of installation is reduced to near nothing. This is a huge step on the product ans it uses all the benefits from SharePoint and none of the drawbacks.

Microsoft Office meets the world outside Microsoft windows.
Now, Project Server always allowed you to use the web interface to use Project Web App. And that meant better support for cross-platforms and better in-company roll-out options. But if you try out the new Project Server 2013 Online with office 365, you'll experience things in a hole different level.
The new Project Web App is even better, so if the browser has total W3C compliance, it will work in just about ANY platform. Don't believe me? Ok, so I've used it in 3 different Linux types using chrome, 3 different windows versions using both Chrome and IE and even done it on Android 4.0 using Chrome:

And that was not even half the story. I've been editing PowerPoint files, from Linux using the Web App, I've customized a Microsoft Project Server 2013 report using Excel Web App, from a Linux...

...and this, this is quite something. This is Microsoft saying, we will go cross-platform with our best products, meaning that ANYONE can use them, but there is another hidden message here that is most interesting. In order to move the most interesting software outside the Windows comfort zone, pressure is being placed on Windows team to develop more quality into the future Windows kernels. This clearly places them into a "careful with your competitors from now on, because users no longer buy your stuff because they what to use other products...you better do it right from now on or you'll run out of clients fast".
Obviously this would never happen in the Windows Vista era...first because it was too early for the market and second because it would kill windows faster that a speeding bullet; doing it now that Windows 8 and Server 2012 have excellent kernels, does provide them some protection, but you must admire the gamble and pressure for quality that lies beneath all this "Web App".

There is also something very important in the product line evolution: Project Server 2010 introduced PSI (Project Server Interface). In truth it's a facade to allow coders to interface with Project Server and do...just about anything you can do with it...you see Project Professional 2010, as the Project Server's Client, uses the exact same interface, so you can build a full features Project Professional and interface with Project Server. This is the EYODF (EatYourOwnDog'sFood) at its best. Now Project Server 2013 not only supports this PSI, the "On-Line" option of using it does create a new "complication" for access to database data. Enter the ODATA. ODATA is an open standard for streaming data using JSON or XML interface. Project Server 2013, allows you to use ODATA to generate reports on Microsoft Excel and them publish them on the server. It's clean, it's powerful, it's the future.

Office 365 is big, it allows you to license "as you need", being able to grow and shrink as you need, using either windows and installing the windows desktop version applications, or using the growing number of products being "webalized" into these brilliant "web Apps", allowing for just about any system to run them. Sure not all apps exist for web and it still needs to grow a bit, but you HAVE to LOVE the commitment.

It's been long since I said something like this (long is probably ever since windows NT4 and Windows Server 2003 x64) but, congratulations on a brilliant product line and strategy. Way to go Microsoft this is the culmination of an exemplar pull to mature and integrate a big and complex product. NICE WORK...if you only fix that horrible "metro" thing from both Server2012 and Windows8...

Thank you Google

2013-06-02T12:47:00.001+01:00

The eternal Google - Microsoft battle is long known, however, it recently got heated as Microsoft condemned the Google engineer responsible for finding zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft software.
As a result of this reaction, Google announced its new disclosure policy:
After discovering new vulnerabilities, they will alert the software manufacturer and wait 7 days before disclosing the findings to the world. This will allow the manufacturer to patch the software.
So summing up, you now have the new seven-day vulnerability and the software manufacturers will be forced to invest in product quality.
This is big! Google, not only tries their best to give you quality products (most of them, FREE), they now set the pace for the industry.
The message is clear : be good or be gone from the software industry...
Thought this is a clear comment-made-non-comment to Microsoft reaction, in truth it doesn't target Microsoft as the giant has more than capacity to solve and patch the world well within the 7 day timer; however for a lot of other software makers out there, this is "the grow up call".

You gotta love Google.

Windows 8... is it a flop? is it a changer? what the hell is it?

2013-04-11T02:01:00.002+01:00

Some months past Microsoft Windows 8 launch (and I've been trying it from beta versions) a question is pooping in everyone's head: Am I the only one hating this interface?
And when that is not the question, there is always it's twin sister question: Am I the only one liking this interface?

Let's face it - a phone is a phone, a pad is a pad and a desktop productivity computer is a desktop productivity computer.

For some reason everyone else out there understands that a desktop PC is meant for productivity and work, in exception for Gnome team on Linux (they managed to screw an otherwise brilliant accession of the gnome desktop when they turned Gnome3 into a tablet like thing) and apparently Microsoft with Windows8.

I've tried lots of Operating Systems lately, so I taught myself to separate Kernel and Core quality with the Graphic User Interface Quality.
AND this just turns this article a bit more bittersweet. You see I've talking for years that Microsoft should increase product embedded security and efficiency...I even told time-over that if had Microsoft done the same Apple did, by choosing a light Linux based kernel (like Debian) and built their brilliant GUI on top of it, they would be unbeatable.
Then this! Windows 7 Kernel (thought far from perfect) was really good when compared to it's predecessors (and no, I'm not talking Vista, as it's basically the same Kernel, the problem with Vista was bad Project Management and even worse GUI implementation)...Windows 8 Kernel is so much better that, if they managed to maintain the GUI, it would be a real improvement.
HOWEVER, this time, it seams they just decided to get the kernel right, and kill the GUI... I just don't understand.

I guess the PAD and Smartphone world is growing so much, classic software manufacturers are getting nervous and doing all kinds of mistakes....since even Gnome made-it and they don't have the same market as Microsoft to protect, it seams to me that they are getting confused.

As a PC, smartphone and PAD user let-me just tell you guys what I think;
Phonewise, for pure productivity as a unified communications device, a cheap blackberry with OS5 or 6 is THE THING. For graphic complex apps and specific apps (designed by me for instance) I use an GalaxyS Duos running Android 4.
My PAD is also an Android 4 (an ASUS TF101), but the version running in the PAD takes advantage of the screen and allows for more complex usage of it. It is the same basic code, just better tuned to the device and screen size.
My computers run different versions of Linux (the laptop runs Gnome2 Ubuntu Studio 10.10, the workstation runs Xfce Ubuntu Studio 12.10).
My virtual Machines run Windows 7 X64 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

So lets make conclusions, I've been running from desktop operating systems that try to play PAD, because for that I HAVE A PAD!!! and I use my phones because none of them tries to BE THE PAD...and believe-me one of them is pretty close to the PAD running the same OS.

Microsoft made ONE smart move thought, they allowed the real desktop behind the crazy "wannabe a pad experience" stuff. So apart from the user not being able to enjoy the new Kernel efficiency because they can't close apps and this eats up memory, they at least can switch to a desktop they almost know from Windows 7.
I find urgent that Microsoft does with 8 the same thing they've done with Vista: quickly release 9 as this being the same 8 with a normally working and efficient GUI.
On the Linux side and Gnome, I honestly think they've lost the edge and XFce was paying attention.

So to close... It's not as it is bad... it is just a bad experience due to that GUI. And this could be just my opinion however I've been seeking everyone else opinion on this, and apart from fanboys, the pure lovers of this interface (from kids to corporate users) are less than my worse predictions indicated.

----------------------------------------------------------UPDATE-----------------------------------------------------------
Just learned that Microsoft is releasing an upgrade to windows 8 called 8.1. Here, you will be able to choose the interface you want to use: metro or that normal productivity desktop you've always had.
I'm having that feeling that, for some reason, I should have gone to the horse races and bet it all on a horse instead of loosing my "fortune-teller" drift on an article...but hey, nothing's perfect...

Iphone vs Android...errr is that Iphone vs Samsung Galaxy or Samsung vs LG Maximus or is it IOS vs Android...turnips vs mango-fruits?!?!?!!?

2013-04-06T22:47:00.002+01:00

These are my thought NOT about an article that talks about the iphone market share, but rather the comments i've read about that article .

The article - http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130405133714-19021-reasons-for-ios-outperformance-in-the-us

My thoughts -
I honestly can't understand most comments I've read... especially the ones from so called "tech people".

IOS (the iPhone operating system) is based on MacOSX, which in turn is based on FreeBSD (yes it is based on Darwin...the former NeXT machine operating system that in turn is mostly FreeBSD), which in turn is a unix-linux hybrid thing....Android is based on Debian which is probably the best Linux out there. In simple terms these are hybrid-made-monolithic kernels and that is why they mach the hardware perfectly and with big cohesion, stability and performance. Windows on the other hand is based on microsoft own kernels that are hybrid kernels, meaning they have a hard compiled core that loads modules as needed on the fly. So comparing the Droid to Microsoft and saying iphone is different is, for lack of a better word, nonsense... both the droid and the iphone are similar and they have nothing in common with microsoft.

Second thing is the constant reboots and crashes... what are you talking about?

I've had 1 Samsung Galaxy y Duos, and the only problems it had was the battery assembly that would miss-connection if the phone hit a table hard enough..this is hardware design, not the O.S. fault!

My current droid is a Galaxy S Duos and works flawlessly. There is one huge difference between the iphone and the droid. You see iphone admits you are stupid and know nothing about the software and hardware you use on your phone (a good assumption because 99% of users do know nothing about the internals of what they use...as shown here); while the droid lets you do pretty much what you like with it...and if you know nothing about it, you'll have performance problems and with some badly built apps, crashes.

There is another thing about the droid... it runs on zillion different devices, meaning that an app will have better chance of not working properly...while the iphone is a controlled hardware environment.

One could argue that I use my droid out of the box and don't push-it by adding apps, but you would be wrong...in fact I have so many apps that I partitioned the SD card with to have an extra 2gb partition (now filled with apps). However I also use 2 VERY important apps every droid user should know: "Advanced Task Killer" and "Performance Tool". Reboots? crashes? Complaining about this on an GalaxyS running droid is the same thing as saying your car is bad because it stalled that other time you decided to fuel-it with mud instead of regular Gas!!!

There is one thing about the iphone (and all other apple hardware for that matter) that I think no one really cares: it's priced twice of what it is worth.

A droid costing half the iphone value will have better or equivalent hardware...ohh and at least you'll have an sd card slot to expand at will.

Today streamline droid is the GalaxyS3 (S4 comming up)...it is so much better than any iphone out there that I find chocking when people still compare them. It's like entering a BMW stand and compare its best 3series with the fiat in the stand across the road, just because it has 4 wheels and it's called a car.

Just because you don't know how to drive the bmw right, it doesn't mean the fiat is better!!!

Several people from my family own iphones, honestly I think it is a stupid buy (and proved that time and time over...especially then they run out of memory and I lend them a spare sd card just for the fun of seeing them reject because they have no way of using it)..that doesn't mean it is bad; its just TOO damn expensive for what it delivers.

I suggest you appreciate the fact that droid phones allow you to actually own them and do whatever you like with them... and if you make bad decisions, live with them or just clean some bad apps or memory. I would never EVER buy a phone that costs twice as much and then behaves as I'm not actually owning it, but rather some company...jailbreak is probably the most pathetic thing on the iphone! It's just like buying a car with a locked trunk that will only unlock when you go to the ONE supermarket the car brand owns :S weird to say the least

Ubuntu 12.10 random file system in read-only mode...

2013-03-06T20:08:00.003+00:00

Hi all,
If, like me, you are a heavy Linux user, and you have some SATA II or SATA III hardware installed on Your PC, you have a good chance of understanding this post.
You see, most computers out there are Intel... hell most are Win-Tel. But ignoring software choices, hardware wise, most computers out there run on Intel hardware. In our days, running on Intel means having Intel chip-set, which in turn means having Intel SerialATA controllers.
If you have Intel SATA controllers, you are lucky enough to enjoy the widely used and (as a consequence widely debugged) Intel SATA Drivers for Linux.
If, on the other hand, you hate monopoly (in the line of thought that monopoly will kill competitors and as a result render you without options and as a consequence render you slave of a company...allowing it not to evolve products as often, and price-tag it as they want), you'll probably be running on AMD hardware...and probably use some different hardware for SATA controllers.

Enter the NCQ - Native Command Query. Back in ParallelATA time, TCQ was invented. TCQ stands for Tagged Command Query. Is simple terms, instead of asking you hard-drive to fetch 1 piece of information from it, you just send a bunch of requests at a time, and allow the drive to chose which it gets first. The drive then uses the location and path of it's heads, relative to the position of the data blocks in the disks and traces a path that fetch information faster but not in the requested sequence. It's no different that a mail man running it's mail delivery routine. If he was to go deliver each letter and then return back to the post office to go for another delivery and then back again, it would take ages compared to a well planned and scheduled delivery run in which he delivers all the letters to a specific path, regardless of the order in which the letters were sent. It was a good idea, however Parallel ATA uses the ISA bus protocols to communicate. That simple fact means the CPU has to hand over all data to and from the disk to memory. As a result TCQ was just a good idea without support from hardware communication protocols as it results in a huge CPU overhead. It's as if the letters had to be given to the mail man buy it's boss one at a time, and his boss would have to go back and forward to fetch each letter...pointless!
SATA controllers, on the other hand grabs a bunch of DMA (Direct Memory Access) addresses and uses them at will. This means that the TCQ version of SATA (called Native Command Query). Now using our example, the DMA address ability of the SATA bus is just like our mailman bag that can hold all the letter he takes before leaving the post-office.
Unlike TCQ, the NCQ is a success and it's been widely implemented in every SATA2 and 3 controller.
NCQ has one more ability over TCQ and that's the new SATA interfaced SSD drives. A lot of you would think that it's pointless to have NCQ if the drive has no moving parts, and so, no optimal retrieval path would have to be calculated to maximize the drive head to disk path...and you would be right about that. However SSD are so fast that the bottleneck becomes the host controller of the drive. So NCQ is used to instruct the drive on what to get while it's waiting for the controller to respond with a ready to receive state.

So NCQ seems like a good thing. It is, however to take advantage of it, one has to buffer things (driver wise). You see, if the Operating systems requests 1,2,3 and the drive replies 2,1,3 the driver has to buffer the request, and the reply on order to allow coherence.
THAT is the problem. Linux drivers for some non Intel controllers seem to have a bug in this caching. The result is that the Operating system often receives data that is out of order and thinks you have disk corruption... and other times you do have disk corruption because of the resulting re-writes. This will trigger a Linux kernel re-mount of the problematic hard-disk in read-only mode, allowing you to read your data and ultimately back-it-up. The more you stress your system, the likely this is to happen. Most people out there is thinking that their drive is failing and as a result are buying new hard-disks.

My case: I am now running the latest Kernel 3.5.0-25 in Ubuntu-Studio 12.10.
And my workstation hardware is ...AMD!
The first time this happened was after a kernel update. So it was clear to me that I had a problem with some of the hardware drivers on that kernel. I then decided to investigate and found out that:
1- Most of the other people having this problem were running on AMD
2- Some of them solved the issue by re-configuring the BIOS controller to SATA I mode
3- Some solved the issue by just changing to a PCI-express Intel based SATA controller.
4- Some solved by disabling the NCQ mode on kernel boot.

Solution until a bug fix happens:
The best way to solve this without changing hardware or rolling back to SATA 1?
just edit the file /etc/default/grub with super user rights
Change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="libata.force=noncq"

save and reboot.

Next time you upgrade your kernel, switch it back, reboot and try.

Recovering auto-pruned posts in PHPbb forums...from SQL file backups, instead of the internal PHPbb tool

2013-02-27T22:55:00.002+00:00

I've been using PHPbb since V2 It's an excellent tool if you want to create a standard forum without a fuss in record time. I recon that I«ve been off for a while since V2 , but recently i had the need to create 2 sites that, according to specs where just simple forums, so I returned to PHPbb and found my self on V3.
During the rush of putting the sites up A.S.A.P /BTW with install, full config, sample posts, creating emails invite emails, changing the email templates and code to include registration custom fields and template design and implementation of template design with google adds code embed, it took-me a total of 2 hours to get everything done. OOhh and it's 2 hours for the 2 forums, not 2 hours each! Not you have to respect that. Free code that saves you countless ours of coding and templating and configuring time. And mind that I was "rusty" (I didn't PHPbb since V2 and a lot has changed). This, is productivity that HAS to be appreciated: THANKS PHPbb team.

I decided to post this article after finding some misleading information on the PHPbb forums stating (and I quote): "to script to do that automatically has been created yet", "it's just too complex, better restore the entire database".

OK, you have instructions on how to restore and backup de database using PHPbb internal tools (makes sense as it IS the supported feature) but let's just assume that, just like me, you have much more to deal with and you configure your servers to backup automatically using cpanel, for instance.
That means that you will not be using the internal PHPbb backup tool and as a result you'll be able to restore or backup at MySQL (or your db of choice) files level. That is also a good way to work right until the point where you find out that you left "autoPrune = yes" on one of your forums.
You see Auto Prune is a nice admin tool. Let's just say for instance that you create a forum for improvement requests... you want to have people writing there, but you don't want those posts to stay there for ever. They just loose sense when either you implement, or reject the improvements users request.
However if you just enable it in one of your other content forums, and please mind that by default it is set to prune posts over 7 days with no activity, you might just find your self visiting a ghost forums (especially if you are still starting it and you have few people writing on it.

Now picture you forget that setting on, and also use Cpanel to backup. Well than I guess you'll find your way into this post (or the other forums posts I've quoted") sooner or later.

It's easy to restore your pruned posts if you have an SQL for for your database restore.
Just open your administration tool (PHPMyadmin for instance). At the same time, open your SQL restore file on a text editor and then browse the tables and the respective restore code to check what has been deleted and out of those what do you want to restore.
Then use an SQL tool to run commands on your server and copy-past from the backup, file, clean up unwanted lines and run the command.
It's that simple. The ONLY thing you absolutely need to understand is that there are several tables that have post information and indexing to forums and topics.
So you'll have to perform this procedure in the following tables (and add the full lines to the missing table):
- PHPbb_posts
- PHPbb_topics
- PHPbb_topics_posted

This will render your posts back on to your forum. However, you you also want the forum statistics and last post and poster up-to-date, you need to restore a part of your forums table. So inside PHPbb_forums, find the following fields and restore them from your backup (probably using either an update command or simple copy-paste into location, depending on just how much you need to restore)
- forum_posts
- forum_topics
- forum_topics_real
- forum_last_post_id
- forum_last_poster_id
- forum_last_post_subject
- forum_last_post_time
- forum_last_poster_name
- forum_las_poster_colour

When you finish this procedure, now only you've recovered your posts and topics, you have also restored those statistics indicators on the forum's front page that will point your users to the most active topics.

That's it, that's all. Simple and not by all means in need of a script or a complicated procedure.

Bad Bad hacker...Protect your JOOMLA website before someone without ethics takes it out.

2013-02-24T04:42:00.003+00:00

Recently, there has been a huge wave of sites being hacked by the so-called "Your country's name here"CyberArmy.

I've placed the "Your country's name here"CyberArmy of purpose. First was the Bangladesh, then Pakistan... and I've lost count on the rest of them. I've been watching this from the distance through feeds from twitter and rss, described as a "hacker war between India and Pakistan". However, in this last month I've had to spend over 50% of my time cleaning-up, recovering, protecting and placing back online sites from friends of mine, that were hacked.

I'd like to state here and now that I'm affiliated with the Anonymous movement. However, I'm affiliated with the original concept of anonymous. NOT THE RADICAL fractions, nor the "It's cool to say we are anonymous but we're just a bunch of kids that destroy stuff fractions".
Anonymous has no organized leadership, or body of command, so as a result, a lot of fractions just wander around and follow their own path under the name of Anonymous (counter-sense, I know, but you get the picture).

Most of my friends sites are made on Joomla. Yes, others have .NET sites, or WordPress sites, but those really don't come asking me for help as they already know my answer.
Joomla people, on the other hand, I try to help as much as I can. I don't code components (can't afford the time) but I do customize them and customize the Joomla it self. So when a friend asks for help I try to help...I figure that this is one way to give-back to the community.

One of the things I've not explained is that I didn't charge for that 50% month worth of hard work. This part SHOULD clear my "Anonymous ideal alignment" and my understanding of this wave of STUPID and POINTLESS cyber terrorism.
-If someone hack a government website and brings down the IRS database or VAT reporting and registration services, I'll be the first to cheer and congratulate...partially because very little governments on earth are honest (so they deserve to be robbed in the good old Robin Hood style) and partially because a big organization should pay for the best in terms of security (and most just decide to hire people without technical value, like friends and their colleagues kids, for these high-pay jobs).
-If someone hacks a big company, especially if it's one of those company's that are truly worthless, and do nothing but damage with blind profit in sight (like moody's for instance), I'm the first to applause and pass the message.
-On the other hand, if someone just hacks or defaces a website from a small company, because they are trying to show off skill, in truth they are showing off TOTAL and COMPLETE lack of I.Q. ...and I ultimately hate them with a despise that I can't even compare to an insect. At least an insect does what it is biologically programmed to do...a human, on the other hand, SHOULD KNOW BETTER!
Small companies tend to serve their clients in the best possible way, because they can't afford to loose them; they try to have a lower margins because they are also lighter and with a leaner structure to support; they have very little profits compared to the big companies so no Lobby is possible, creating LESS government corruption impact; They also pay the full tax load, because they can't "shake the system off" with good lawyers and tax experts on the payroll...They normally have such a lean system that it's almost impossible to access good security experts, making their efforts to migrate their business online extremely vulnerable.
As a result, most get hacked and the majority doesn't recover from the hit. Most had to pay for the website already, and did that at the lowest possible bid...it's unthinkable to rent an expert for 1 or 2 full weeks and pay 10k€.

Joomla is an excellent CMS to build up-on. I don't particularly like V3.0, but I love 2.5 and 1.7 .
Joomla gets patched regularly and it's actually very acceptable in terms of security.
There are 2 main problems with Joomla in terms of security:
- you can install 3rd party components, and not all are safe form bugs.
- the system is protected at code level, this then assumes no attack gets through as a result the data layer has very little protection.

The most common SQLinjection attack on Joomla, take advantage of one vulnerability on a form on one of the components (generally 3rd party) and Injects SQL code. So the community developing Joomla protected their code, but a part of code done outside their control just bypasses all those protection layers.
So what? Well, normally, the hacker will attack the users table on Joomla and just replace every user with the same username and password.
Why? When you install Joomla, the very first user in the database is the Admin and it's a super user. Anyone logging in with that user can do anything.
How to solve this: There are several protections (some more effective) but I'll go though them.
1-change the user name to something different than admin and description different than super user.
2-add a user called admin with no right at all (public or simple registered)
3-on your database, change the username and email fields to UNIQUE.
So now, next time the hacker tries an injection with a code like "UPDATE something_users SET username= 'admin', password='1234' WHERE 1=1", at the very first row, the database engine will issue an error because admin already exists.
If, on the other hand he tries "UPDATE something_users SET password='1234' WHERE username= 'admin'", he will end up with a user account that has no rights at all.
Is that it? No! a more knowledgeable hacker would simply replace the first row with a different user and still change both username and pass form your super user account. Something like "UPDATE something_users SET username= 'Pamela Anderson', password='1234' WHERE 1=1 LIMIT 1" or "UPDATE TOP(1) something_users SET username= 'Pamela Anderson', password='1234' WHERE 1=1" or "UPDATE something_users SET username= 'Pamela Anderson', password='1234' WHERE 1=1 ROWNUM=1"... this will change with the database engine, but you get the picture.
How to solve this:
1- create a different account on your Joomla administrator (preferably NOT on the first users on your user list)
2-give full administrator permissions to this new account.
3-remove all permissions on the default administrator account (the first row on your table).
OR- just use SQL commands to copy that account to a lower ROW, and then just delete the first ROW.

What if: the hacker is patient enough to go and execute this last hack on the first row, try to log, if the user has no rights delete the first row and re-start the hack until he gets to a row with the real admin user? THIS IS HOW you should think... that what if the guy trying to hack-me is better and more persistent than I am?
Then, the only way to solve this in the database, is using TRIGGERS.
I personally protect MOST of my website databases with a BEFORE UPDATE and BEFORE DELETE or TRUNCATE or DROP:
1-On the Update trigger I simply don't enable updating of the username and email without a safety password input into a value.
2-About the DELETE, TRUNCATE and DROP, I just don't allow-it, period (you never know if the hacker just gets mad and decides to destroy).

So what about that good thinking that the hacker is better than me and can think around my defensive configurations, or that some entry-point on some module or component is wide open and beyond my comprehension until it is too late?
Remember my advice? Assume the hacker is better and more persistent than you are; don't take Joomla updates for granted as they can still have vulnerabilities and they do not patch 3rd party components.
Well, thinking about this I created a protection service. Think of it like a bouncer.
I created a webservice (with internal protection against hacking) that is put to work in a different domain than the one of the site being protected... that way, the hacker will have to hack 2 different websites to clean up his "digital footprints".
The webservice is then called by each index.php page on my clients website and administrative site. The call will send all the request data to the Webservice and wait for a forensic analysis. The reply may point the website visitor to the website, the hacker to a standard "stop trying to hack this site" page, or simply send the hacker or visitor to a "this site is blocked on your country" page.
Independently of the answer being a block, anti-hack or a go through, the webservice logs everything and if (here come the important assumption) the hacker finds a hole, it will be recorded and later analysed to create a rule against that new vulnerability.

For the time being, I'm only allowing free usage of this tool for all my friends that have been hacked, as I'm still testing the hardening efficiency. But as soon as finish the mobile app to access reports and statistics, I'll place a price tag on it. If you like the project, please keep visiting Http://www.thesitecupid.com (still on final construction phase) under "enforcer" menu....or register and follow this blog.

VMWare Workstation under Linux....the heaven and hell in the same package

2012-12-05T00:44:00.002+00:00

I'm a VMWare guy (still am).
I've been virtualizing infrastructures from 1999 on. Back then I had no "big time" enterprise server virtualization software, so I used VMWare Workstation, first under windows and then finally under Linux.
I've sicked to VMWare Server ever since the very first version and always under Linux...then ESX and ESXi came along and things got really serious. I absolutely love ESXi and I've tested in beyond the reasonable (or designed) usage, and it always surprises me.

VMWare workstation however has a different relationship with me. I love it just about as much as I hate it. Let me explain why: VMWare workstation is very UNsupported on Linux. It seems stupid that the very best product they have and sell (the ESX and ESXi) is Linux based and it is just flawless.
So VMWare Workstation works very very well under windows...witch kinda denies it's purpose on the first place! Why oh Why would I want to run a virtual machine built on top of a virtualization solution running under the worse O.S. when it comes to resource usage and management?
When it comes to Linux, VMWare Workstation has historical problems with the best O.S. when it comes to managing and using hardware resources...and that's a bad thing. You see, Windows runs better if virtualized under Linux... it's more stable and a lot faster; the opposite is not true at all.

So things loot like they've been inverted; The best implementation of VMWare Workstation is for the worse possible usage of that product. But this would be bearable if the Linux implementation was, at least, stable...but we're not that lucky.
I'm a Debian/Ubuntu user, than meant constant headaches up until version 7. Whenever I had a Kernel Update, I would have several hours of rebuilding the VMNet kernel modules so that VMWare workstation could run, and that was everything but easy. Some guys produced patches and workarounds, but they normally posted them months after my hell week. Having less and less time to spend over glitches instead of real work problems, I had to switch into the "don't upgrade the kernel until articles with the patches and solutions have been posted" mode.

Then things improved with VMWare Workstation 7 and it's perfect install routine. I though I was in heaven by then but this "honeymoon" was very short lasting. My laptop (obviously running Linux) uses an ATI graphics card...as a result, if I turned On the Virtual machine 3D acceleration, I get screen image corruption. Up till that point, I was blaming ATI on their bad drivers for Linux, as the dual screen functions are very unstable and often produce the same screen corruption I experienced in VMWare. Back home at the workstation with it's dual Nvidia graphics cards, Workstation 7 run smoothly with 3D acceleration.

Then VMWare upgraded to Workstation8. WS8 was an important upgrade as is allowed link to ESXi for usage of the virtual machines (not full management functionality, but at least I could use the machines)...you see, VMWare VSphere client (the management for ESX and ESXi) is windows only! So Linux users had to install a Virtual Machine with Windows and then install the management application (it's goofy to manage your server from a VM running on that same server, but VMWare is well known for leaving you to making goofy decisions for lack of support on the right platforms). But back to the WS7, still the same cool installer and improved performance but, the laptop continued to have real problems with 3D acceleration. At least the Workstation could still kick ass on 3D with the Nvidia cards.

Recently, VMWare upgraded to Workstation 9. I was thrilled to see the claims for better performance so I immediately tried it...and found HELL! You see, not only this one still doesn't work 3d on ATI cards, it crashed BADLY with my nvidia cards and 3D acceleration enabled.
So where does this leave us? VMWare is building worse and worse implementations of better and better products! WEIRD!

So why do I insist on running VMWare Workstation on Linux? Because I keep trying to find a good product and finally stick with it.

My advise to EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU out there is: Don't buy VMWare Workstation until you try EVERY function available...use the trial and test before you spend any money.
I mean it's good for office and simple tools, but forget running games or even 3D apps on it without these VERY BAD PROBLEMS solved properly.

Are there any other solutions out there? Sure!
VMWare workstation is not compatible with ESXi, so I can't just stage a machine with Vmware Workstation and then upload to ESXi, I have to use VMWare converter to convert the machine to ESXi. In that sense, why use VMWare Workstation at all?
Welcome to Oracle Virtual Box. Virtual Box, unlike VMWare Workstation, comes from Linux. The Windows implementation is not the prime development but rather the secondary.
Is it perfect? no... not as a good performer as the VMWare workstation, but at least it supports 3D without crashing! Bare in mind that the USB support for the community edition is quite bad, so I recommend you to download form the Website instead of installing through Software Center.

So... unless you want to use nvidia ONLY and keep on Workstation 7, just use Virtual Box and if you stage ESXi machines, don't worry as you would still need VMWare converter anyway if you were using VMWare Workstation.

Sorry VMWare... better start supporting Linux at least as well as you do Windows! It's not that difficult, just grab one or two geniuses you have working on the ESX team and learn from them.