My MacBook is a crackbook!

About six months ago the top case on my MacBook began to crack, under the wrist rest on the right hand side. Distressing enough to a type A whack-job such as myself but then a couple of weeks ago the other side started to do the same.

I can see that it is an impact stress fracture from the top of the screen where the magnetic catches strike the top case when it is closed. An indirect effect of this is that shit gets inside the case.

I would be spazzing out about this except I have a new MacBook Pro arriving on Wednesday. This little fella can go to the Mac hospital and then to the Mac home for abused and unwanted laptops. $99 for the part, $40 for the labour.

Wow I am glad I am Type-A

Last year I transferred all my personal working files onto an SD card and reader. This worked swimmingly well until I came back from New Zealand a couple of weeks ago when I realized that I had dropped the damned thing in an airport or airplane somewhere. This card had all my tax returns, source code, personal details etc. It should have been a disaster. And it would have been except for the fact that I had encrypted the volume using AES Blofish and Truecrypt. Now I know that more than likely someone would have just formatted the card and stuck it in their digital camera but at least the Nigerians can’t get me

Now that porn guy has ruined the best little un-secret that is encrypted volumes they are less useful for sticking it to the man, unless part of your sticking it strategy involves plausible deniability. But for your common or garden variety snoop they still have value.

Waking a Brother HL-4070CDW from sleep across a wireless connection

Well here is something that will totally waste your life until you work out how to do it. If you buy and install a Brother HL-4070CDW network printer and don’t have a domain running at home for name resolution then you will quickly discover that once the accursed thing goes to sleep then it will be impossible to wake it with a print job sent across the network.

Your only choices will be to turn off sleep (and pay the electricity bill that results) or go and hit a button on the printer to manually wake it. This kinda makes a farce of the whole wireless print thing.

Never fear. There is a fix and it is simple. You will need to edit your lmhosts file if you have a Windows XP or Vista, hosts file if you are on Mac OS 10. Put an entry in for the netbios name of the printer for the Windows machine or for the mdns name if you connected using bonjour on the Mac. What is happening is that your computer is sending a wake signal to the printer but it is using the netbios or the mdns name, not the i.p. address. If you have no local name resolution then you are shit out of luck.

Error 0×00000028: Okay so I should have known better

The past week or so the VMWare Fusion Windows XP install that I run for my work has been acting up. Really slow, absolute eon to shut down etc. Last night I got a little frustrated at it and instead of just waiting and shouting obscenities at it I just reset it. Shit, all those warnings were true. I managed to corrupt the NTFS partition table and caused the machine to endlessly loop in a 0×00000028 blue screen.

After googling for a while I decided that the best thing to do was get to a DOS prompt and run CHKDSK /P and hope that would repair it. Trickier than one would think since NTFS partitions are not visible from DOS. So I couldn’t just create a boot disk and boot to the prompt. Really the only way to do it easily is to insert the Windows XP install cd and select Recovery. That is unless you have a virtual pc like mine. You see VMWare Fusion creates SCSI hard drives by default unless you catch it in time, which I did not. And this SCSI drive won’t run using the default SCSI drivers that come in the usual Windows XP install. So no disk is found, ipso dipso no disk can be repaired.

In the interests of saving some other poor bastard a couple of minutes scratching their heads I found the VMWare SCSI driver here. Download it, unzip it, it’s a .flp virtual floppy disk image. Create a virtual floppy disk on your VM if you don’t already have one, mount the .flp image on the virtual floppy disk. Then when Windows XP setup asks you, press F6 to load that third party driver. Et Voila! The drive becomes available and you can get to it with the Recovery Console.

Great success. Now I am back to swearing at my slow XP VM every night. Just half a days productivity lost, thanks Bill, fuck you.

It’s not the backup that matters but the restore

Right, so far I have had my Windows Home Server for about six months or so. And in that time I have had to use the restore function of it’s backup application three times. Twice when I fried my wife’s Vista laptop trying to remove and old SAN driver and once on the upstairs Vista desktop when an automatic driver update bjorked the video output.

In all three instances the restore job executed flawlessly. As anyone who has ever had to deal with backup solutions in the work place knows, it’s not the backup that’s the problem, it’s the restore that gives us all the shits. The number of times I have seen poor bloody server admins tossing aside invalid backup after invalid backup just to get some application server back up and running (pun intended).

Just last week our corporate email server went down like a sack o’ shit and the newest backup they had was from December, December 2007. Stupid pricks.

Anyway, I love Windows Home Server. Not because it’s sexy (it’s Windows after all) but because something as fundamental as restoring a backup actually works. As a side note we have a friend who is a little retarded when it comes to computers. And she has three children who are absolutely l33t at screwing with operating systems and installing malware. Since I am condemned to support the poor cow I am using the WHS backup to store a snapshot of her desktop as it is when I rebuilt it last (SP’s, Office, AV et. al.) so that when her kids inevitably bjork it again it will be a 30 minute restore not a six hour rebuild. Ha.

How to: Completely screw your MP3 collection

Step 1. Download the Picard client for the Mac

Step 2. Copy your entire MP3 collection onto a USB drive

Step 3. This is important. Don’t take notice of the fact that the drive is NTFS format.

Step 4. Scan the drive using Picard.

Step 5. Click “Save” and watch the entire 280GB of file structure disappear into the fucking ether, never to be seen again.

So boys and girls, here’s a handy tip from me, don’t use an NTFS drive on a Mac with Picard. Not unless you can’t think of a better way to get rid of your embarassing Yarni and Britney songs.

Fuck I hate you Netgear

I wanted to replace my Monowall firewall with some kind of appliance. Not that Monowall wasn’t good shit, it rocks. But running a whole box just for a firewall seemed a bit excessive, especially when you consider the electricity cost. So I went shopping for a bargain. I got one. You see 20$ for a Netgear FVS114 may seem like a deal but only if the bloody thing works.

I am not going to do a review here. I am just going to point out to any other poor bastard out on the tubes that is being driven mad by the FVS114 dropping the internet connection randomly and repeatedly that there is a fix. No, don’t drag it to work behind your car by a cat-5 cable. Instead go and download the 1.15 firmware that has just come out here. Yeah, it’s a bloody bug. I just upgraded and the shitty thing is running okay. Maybe I am lucky this time. Maybe the FVS114 is lucky. Mmmm lucky. Fuck I hate you Netgear.

OODA, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act: Canada Style

Is this statuary rape?

My wife is a reserved word

Funny thing happened to me today. I tried to create a user account on my WHS box for my wife Con. It failed, stating that Con was a reserved word and could not be used for a user name. Apparently there is a list of device names like LPT1 and CON (short for console or keyboard) that Windows will not allow as user names or folder names. It all goes back to a hack circulating in the days of Win95 and NT4 where a malicious person could gain elevated privileges by manipulating folder paths.

Who knew? So now Con is forced to be Connie on our little network. Nevermind, it could be worse, she could be Constance.

Windows Home Server is my new best friend

As you will know, last week, or maybe the weekend before I put a Windows Home Server (hereafter known as WHS) box up in the back room. Basically I was looking for a backup and file server solution so I wouldn’t accidentally kill my digital photos and thereby risk d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

All of that 1/0 goodness worked out just fine. But one of the side effects was that I am now able to backup the desktops in my house reliably and simply. Of course we all know that making a backup is definitely not the same as restoring a backup.

That moment came for me last night when a Sony update fried my wahines Vaio laptop. Blue screen on boot and a blue screen trying to get to safe mode usually means an evening of badness for me. Prior to WHS I would have been sitting up all bl**dy night reinstalling Windows.

Last night I simply put the backup boot CD into the drive and followed the “Vizard”. Thirty-five minutes later Con’s laptop lived again, negligible data loss, no nasty anglo-saxon words. I am ass-pounded that finally technology has reached the point where what they promise is actually what they deliver. Wonderful.