Lewies Blog

I got the HDTV from wall-mart that I was looking at. I tried to purchase on my wal-mart card, but the purchase was denied. Even though I had over $1500 credit on it, it had a $350 credit limit. I went ahead and purchased it on my debit card instead and asked the folks to refund me the extra funds as a check in the mail.

Apparently, I already had HDTV capability on my DVR box. Everything was showing up in black and white with red/purple dots. It took a while to figure out how to switch the box (Explorer 8000HD) from standard mode to HDTV. I had to press INFO+GUIDE to get the settings to show up. The only option displayed was Standard Mode. One time, I did something else for a moment and then looked at the television to see that the settings had changed on its own to HDTV. I quickly grabbed the remote and confirmed that I wanted HDTV. Things worked. I found that later when trying to hook up the DVI cables, my cable box had them blocked, so I stuck with the RGB component cables.
Things show up so much clearer now. Even my DVD player seemed to have HDTV capability since the picture looked so crisp. I doubt it since I only connected it to the television with a normal yellow component cable rather then the RGB component cables known for HDTV. I was able to hook my computer up through S-Video. I tried the DVI with the computer, but apparently my video card treats regular VGA as the primary output. I would hook up VGA to the TV, but I get better resolution on my monitor.

I also picked up a hard drive this past weekend. I reinstalled my operating system. Windows complained that I had activated it one too many times. Interesting, as I had not reinstalled it since I received my computer a few years ago. Calling the toll free number, I was able to chat with a nice woman with an Indian accent. I was able to get in after that and it’s been a constant event of installing, patching, and upgrading software.

I got four new tires for my car and an oil change. It only took four hours and seven hundred dollars. A woman came in asking the people to squeeze her in. She thought that they were putting other people in front of her. I went over to the mall while waiting and picked up a book of over two hundred su doku puzzles. I only got a few puzzles done before I was completely bored.

My wife’s new power supply came in the mail today.  The dimensions of the box look small enough to fit in her computer.  I even saw the extra power adapter on the back for her old speakers to plug into.

I just need to find the time when she is sleeping and I am awake at home.  I need to swap out the standard power supply that we purchased to get her up and running in the meantime.  I also need to put in the CD and DVD drives back in.  The standard power supply is too large for the drives to fit in along with them.

I was in another office with my coworker today and I noticed a smell. I asked her if she smelled electric. She smelled something, but didn’t think it was electric. Her laptop had been run over by a car and the screen looked like a piece of modern art. She had a regular CRT monitor hooked up to it so she could still use it. I suggested that she should keep a close eye on it and use caution.

From there I went to my cube and sat at the desk. I had a black screen and figured the screen saver had kicked on and that the monitor went out due to my energy saving features. It even had its amber “standing by” LED turned on. This is common as I’m usually away from my desk for hours at a time. Only this time, the screen wouldn’t come on.

I jerked the mouse, typed a few keys and even hit the infamous CTRL+ALT+DEL combination of keys. Nothing. I decided to just hit the power button to turn it off and turn it back on. Snap! A very bright white horizontal line was burning across my screen as smoke came out of the back of the monitor. After some quick reflexes, the monitor was turned back off and all cables were pulled out of my battery backup system.

The system administrator was on vacation so the configuration management guy and myself took care of things and left a nice note.

This monitor literally blew up. This is was Lewis’s monitor.

So for the rest of the day, I had been working on everyone else’s computers with them getting my work done. As I said before, I’m usually not in my office. It gave an interesting task for one of the new people to work with me as I walked through my tasks.

Playing 3D games brings to my attention that my video card is seriously lacking. My computer is pegged to do most of the work and my frames per second is really low. I believe that 15 is the bare minimum that they suggest to tweak your settings in the game for. I’m only seeing 5.

My wife seems to be doing better, but she is asking me to buy the best video card that money can buy for her. I don’t think she realizes that these cards can get into the thousands. She is in the same situation as I am. We both have come down with the low frame count sickness. I have an AGP 4x slot on my motherboard and a few PCI slots. I have yet to find out what she has. I could upgrade my motherboard to support the 8X or have PCI-E, but her motherboard seems to be custom made. My worry is that she only has a few of the old PCI slots.

The first step would be to identify what exactly we have in regards to slots on the motherboard and existing video cards.

On top of this, my hard drive is overloaded. The thing appears to be defraging itself 24/7. This worries me because it might wear itself out through overuse. I would reformat the thing, but I have too many things that need to be backed up. I’m considering buying a new master hard drive and setting the old one up to be setup as a slave.

That brings up a weird concern. Why do they call them master and slave drives? It just seems so negative to have that weasel its way into the technical field. Why not call them parent/child drives? Maybe it’s all political.

I was having some troubles assigning a second IP address to one of my computers. What I had left out was that all computers were behind a firewall. The cable modem assigns IP addresses based on your MAC address. Since it only saw one MAC address representing everyone, it didn’t have an opportunity to give out the other IP.

To solve this problem, I went out and purchased a hub. I hate to think of all that unnecessary traffic being broadcast everywhere. Hubs are stupid things. If I were in a room full of 100 people, and wanted to send a message to just one person, I would approach a hub and it would broadcast the message to every person in the room. Switches on the other hand are a bit smarter. They remember people. They would take your message and hand deliver it to the recipient. Switches are also expensive. The hub was thirty bucks.

So I’m driving home thinking of how to set up the network. I have cables that can only reach so far. It then strikes me. Rather then connect my own computer directly to the hub, I can do the same with my wife’s. She has some firewall software that is better then what I got. Then I come to the point where I just want to slap my head. I already have a hub that I can swap with my router.

I got everything setup in no time at all and confirmed against the What is my IP? site with different computers to see that the addresses were as I had in mind. Tomorrow I get to go back to Wal-mart and return a hub still sealed in its original packaging.

Since my wife and I have been having problems when connecting to Second Life at the same time, I went ahead and ordered a second IP Address from my cable company, Comcast. It costs $6.95 extra per month. To keep my budget within reason, I called up my cell phone company and asked them to change my phone plan. So after moving money around in the budget, it turns out that I’ll have about eighteen dollars more per month.

Anyhow the extra IP address was made available to me immediately - or so I was told. Rite now I’m just confused as to how to set one of my computers up to use the extra IP address. I have a Linksys Router (BEFW11S4 V2/V3) and a Terayon cable modem (TJ715x).

I discovered today that the cable modem has its own service located at http://192.168.100.1. This is interesting because I’ve seen this IP address before. I think our computers used to have its address in there network settings when we were troubleshooting our connection problems in the past. I always assumed that we were somehow connecting to a neighbors wireless DHCP hub.

A page went on to give information about many types of cable modems. This modem also has some diagnostic information at http://192.168.100.1/diagnostics_page.html. It has a password on the page. Chances are, if you know how to access the page, you probably know that the password is “icu4at!”.

Problem is, I went in here searching for something telling me how many computers are allowed to connect to the modem. I hear that the cable company needs to set my CPE parameter, and that it can only be changed by Tier 3 reps. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m not quite certain if I’m getting anywhere either.

MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit. Information flows over the internet to us in small packages. Rather then receiving an entire file (such as an image) all at once, it is split up into smaller pieces and sent to us. MTU defines how large those pieces can be.

The size of a packet of data also includes the header information that comes with it. Smaller packets will transmit more headers along with the data.

For an ethernet connection (a standard network card) the value can range from 68 to 1500. The default value is repported differently accross the internet. Some say 1500, 1480, or other values. These high values seems to cause problems. Changing the value to 1492 may help ressolve some problems (or 1400 if you are using VPN).

Also make sure that your router and all PC’s on your network are setup to the same values.

I’ll be tweaking a few things here and there until I can ressolve my crashing issues.

Oddly enough, the MTU Ping Test gave me max results at 1472. Adding 28 for the MTU header size, that brings me rite up to 1500. Now I’m really confused.

C:\> ping www.google.com -f -l 1472

I heard something fall downstairs. I went to check out on my wife and apparently her computers power supply had fried. I took her over to Comp USA. We got a new 250 watt power supply, a fan with heat sink for the CPU, and a couple cans of air.

I should have looked at the fan closer, because when we got home, it said that it was good for CPU’s up to 1.5 GHz. Angels CPU is around 2.5 GHz. We could only get the power supply in by taking out her CD and DVD drives. The original power supply was much smaller. She didn’t use them much anyhow, so we took them out as an interim solution.

The power supply was also too thin. We could only use one screw to secure it to the case. I put in another screw to help secure it against the frame, but it wasn’t to my liking. It’s the best I could do. Hopefully we can order this specific power supply on the internet.

We also got the boards and the case cleaned out pretty well. Angel kept begging me to let her use the vacuum cleaner on it. It just seems absurd to vacuum a computer like that. I told her if she did it, then I would have to get a camera and take pictures.

Anyhow, the computer is up and running with her second life. I teased her that her character was too hot for her computer to handle.

I had made a pretty nice template for a website that I’m working on in the office. Since I didn’t have any graphic editing software where I work (besides MS Paint), I created the graphics at home and brought in the final images. Today I ran into a problem. The graphics that I made a few months ago needed some modifications and I couldn’t just run home to work on them.

Enter The Gimp. The Gimp, (an acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program), is a very powerful graphic editing tool that has been around for a long time. You could compare it to Adobe Photoshop. Rather then paying six hundred, fifty dollars for commercial software and an extra one hundred, fifty dollars for each upgrade that comes out, you may download The Gimp free! It also works on many operating systems including windows.

Being familiar with the features of Photoshop, I knew what it was that I needed to accomplish. My primary problem is that I am not familiar with The Gimp. I was stumbling while trying to understand how to use its layers when pasting images from my clip board and moving them around. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) works much like applications do on Linux, such as the dialog for saving a file. There are many unfamiliarity’s that I’m just not used to. Some of the recent news on The Gimps’ support site is starting to focus on usability, so it may not be long before it gets easier for people like me to figure it out.

I think it is great that feature rich software is available like this. Another piece of software that I’m starting to work with at home is OpenOffice. Sun Microsystems donated the source code of StarOffice to the open-source community five years ago and the rest is history. You can still purchase StarOffice from Sun, or you can download the free OpenOffice sponsored and contributed to by Sun along with many other companies and developers.

From what I have read, Open Office 2.0 kicks Microsoft Office around the block. The review pretty much said that Open Office competed very well and perhaps much better as a word processor then Microsoft Office. Slide presentations are better in MS Office due to the availability of clip art. Spreadsheets are fine as long as you are not going back and forth between MS Office and Open Office.

Ever so slowly, I’m starting to move over to open-source applications. As each new version of current software comes out, I get really frugal and start asking myself if I really need to buy into it. What is offered that is not already available to me? Is the upgrade worth it? Do I need those new features? Is there another product that can already do this?

When it comes to graphic design and word processing, the need for new features really isn’t in too much demand. With each subsequent upgrade, I always find myself just using the same features that I originally had. A few tweaks do come in handy and are noticeable, but I would have been able to get the task completed without them. It seems that most software gets bogged down with features just so that you have more reason to buy into the next version when what you have is good enough.

It’s been agreed for quite a few months now that I’ll be getting a new computer for my nephew next month. It may help to offset many of the holidays where I haven’t been able to aford much at all. I still don’t have much cash to spare, but at least I have enough credit with Dell to purchase a new system.

Shopping on the Dell website sometimes requires very much time. They sell so many different systems that you can customize to be the way that you want them. You can make what appears to be two identical systems, but end up paying an arm and a leg for one over the other.

In the end, I found a combination (2.4GHz, 512 RAM, 80 GB HD) for about seven hundred dollars. This is a system for school work as well as a game called Ultima Online also known as UO.

The game is about eight years old, but it is alive and kicking. I’ve been in and out of the game many times and even got to play it during the beta. I picked up the gold edition tonight for roughly ten dollars and created a new account (free for fourty five days). Angel found that we still have access to my brothers account, so I’ll probably change over to it and activate it on pay day. An aged account has some advantages over new accounts such as the ability to receive special items every year and during software upgrades.

Here is a list for all of you hardware buffs, or if you are just interested in what I purchased.