Someone asked me yesterday “You’re good with computers, can you give me a copy of Photoshop?“. Aside from the fact I run Linux on most of my computers, I’m not keen on being accused of software piracy on the basis that I’m “good with computers” or any other reason. I made the mistake of asking why he needed it, he wanted to resize some pictures – so I suggested Paint.net.
His answer? “Oh no that’s free, it’s bound to be rubbish.”
Strange, I thought he wanted Photoshop free.
Extract from an article over at “The Art of Manliness” that gives instructions on editing hosts to block time wasting sites:
Linux
If you’re using Linux, you’re probably a geek and don’t need some guy who blogs about manliness to tell you how to edit your host file.
I bought a new laptop the other week, a Samsung NP-RV511-S02UK. I have been using a Samsung NC10 dual booting Ubuntu and XP. An NC10 is a wondrous thing but when push comes to shove, a 1280×600 resolution is too small for Visual Studio work – especially when you want to see a PDF at the same time.
I removed Ubuntu from a Samsung NC10 yesterday, now the F4 recovery option doesn’t work. Please excuse the lack of screen shots on this Howto but I couldn’t think how to capture from the recovery manager and camera shots look rubbish.
It would appear that Samsung uses a custom Master Boot Record (MBR) – so for Grub all is well because you can choose to boot into the recovery partition and away you go. However if you have followed any of the usual guides to removing grub (such as running an XP CD to a recovery console and typing fixmbr) F4 will not launch the restore tool.
System Rescue CD is a great tool to have handy on a USB key. You can, so booting into it run this command:
fdisk /dev/sda
Now pressing “p” should show you that the recovery partition is 1, so type “a” then “2″, “a” then “1″ to make it bootable. Now write the partition table by typing “w” then reboot. At this point you will boot into the recovery manager and be able to recover but the F4 key will not still not be available at boot and of course trying to create a backup will not work either (as Windows will be booted on restart).
Once Samsung Recovery Manager III has loaded up, press Ctrl+Alt+F10 – I had no idea there was a management mode until I read this page (French) but be aware its only available from the recovery partition. It asks for a password – “secos” (without the quotes). Once in management mode, click the “Image” tab and select “Export” then “Select Location”, I used “D:\”. Click “Start” and accept the dialogue box that comes up. This is a backup of the recovery partition.
Once this stage is finished, select the “Tools” tab, insert a spare USB stick and click “Admin Tool USB”. It will format the USB stick and then install some utilities. It takes a couple of minutes. Once finished click the close button in the top right and it’ll ask if the computer should be turned off – say yes.
Boot with the USB key we just made, bringing you to a completely different recovery menu. Click “MBR Fix” and then close the application.
Now when you reboot you’ll notice that the MBR has been repaired and F4 once again boots into Recovery Manager III.
A friend brought me a Compaq CQ10 over earlier. It seems it lost power during a Softpaq BIOS update. Initially the screen was booting to the HP BIOS recovery screen, attempting to rewrite and failing around 10%. I tried a few things and nothing worked, until the owner mentioned they’d upgraded the RAM.
Sure enough, it was a different size and type to the original specification so I refitted a 1 Gb 666MHz stick I had lying around from a previous upgrade and rebooted.
This time we re-flashed, verified and rebooted. Then it kept repeating this cycle so I took off the back panel (use the orange latch visible when the battery is removed) and removed the CMOS battery. After a short pause (30 seconds or so) I put it back and rebooted. This time there was an error message about the CMOS settings (unsurprisingly) and it rebooted.
However this time we got the Compaq BIOS boot screen, so I hit the escape key to enter BIOS. Then hit F9 to load default values, accept it and hit F10 to save values and hey presto the system is back up and running.
I go away for five months at the start of the year and my Internet usage drops to around 500 Mb a month. Rockstar has the Grand Theft Auto Complete Pack on Steam for £19.99, GTA IV is downloading as I write (16 Gb). Should make it interesting when I renew with my ISP at the end of the month.
Steam has three GTA collections:
Well that was emotional, the TU100 forums opened yesterday. My poor co-moderator Nicky got thrown in to the deep end (I was at a mess top table).
I checked in before work, and there were a few posts (about two dozen) so I thought we’d be OK. Checked in earlier and there’s several hundred!
I’m studying for MS221 and MT264 but it’s clear I’m going to have to put some time in this weekend reading through TU100′s material – especially with Sense, which seems to have captured student’s imaginations.
I applied to stand as a candidate for the Executive Assembly of the OUSA in the East of England today. I’d like to thank Carey for seconding me.
Should be interesting, if I make it.
After not inconsiderable cajoling by a friend of mine, I hired a copy of Homefront on PS3. It transpires that this is a formulaic FPS title.
The game is buggy. I’ve played through the first four levels and the PS3 has crashed on each of them, requiring a power recycle. The collision detection with scenery is very unpredictable – it often inhibits movement when there is no visible object in your path. When there are NPC in your party you cannot go through doors until they have. Worse still is the way checkpoints are handled – surely play testers noticed that putting lengthy character conversations after the checkpoint means sitting through these tedious dramatics repeatedly.
Without doubt the most irritating FPS title I’ve played. If you enjoy the desire to throw your controller through a window this game will afford you the opportunity in spades.
I’ve been reading over the course material for MS221 (I quit this module’s last presentation for personal reasons).
Khan Academy has a very good series of videos. Plus it gives you points (seriously I’m addicted to rewards – you should see me driving for PS3 trophies).
Anyway, for block A part 1 try these: Introduction to Geometric Sequences, Sequences and Series (part 1 and part 2) and Write a Fibonacci Function; for part 2 try Introduction to Conic Sections through to Foci of a Hyperbola and Parabola Focus and Directrix.