GE Skype Phone went down

In general the Skype phone is awesome. We save a lot of money using our Skype phone. I'm not sure we needed to buy two additional handsets, but they're nice to have now that we do have them.

Well they phones work like 98-99% of the time. Sometimes, however the phones get de-registered and it has to do with the phone-router.

This last time was the worst set back we had. Eventually I figured out that the phone-router wasn't getting an IP address from the DHCP server on the wireless router. Basically I shut everything down that connects to the wireless router and then get the phone-router setup first. When the phone-router is working fine, it's easy to register all of the handsets. In fact, it's so easy that I forgot what the actual process was except for following the handset's directions. I didn't even need to do long resets on the phone-router.

I found some interesting information that led me to this solution from:
http://tinyurl.com/y8exmyz

Ripping Wii games on a Mac

For educational purposes only!
Google: "mac ripping wii iso"
http://wiinewz.com/forums/faqs-guides-tutorials/69742-rip-wii-games-mac.html
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/482844

UDF to burn troublesome DVD's

Wii Modchip

I tried to order a D2Sun V3 SPI pre-soldered to a Wii-Clip V12. It sounded like a good deal for a little over 80 euros and included a tri-wing driver. Unfortunately, the Polish company, console24.com, is less than reliable. I never got my order. Currently, I'm waiting on the refund they've promised. I'm crossing my fingers.

So, back to the drawing board.

What to order?

• Wasabi V3 or Zero

Where to order?

And cross the fingers again.

UPDATE 1/7/09: I was hoping the chip would have arrived by now. We left for the holidays and I was desperately hoping that it would arrive in the mail. It hasn't come. I only hope that it will either come soon after I email the company or that they will refund me. Why the hell is it so hard to get a chip sent here?

UPDATE 1/9/09: Looks like my chip got sent to Maui. The seller sent the chip to the address I had in Paypal for security reasons. Since my parents are in Maui, they are having their mail forwarded from Princeton. I talked with Dad last night and he confirmed that he had an envelope from Canada with something lumpy in it. Nice. Looks like they got it! I hope I have a tri-wing driver bit somewhere.

Mac's Rule the Day (yet again)

Well, maybe it should be... Vista blows yet another day!

I hope I don't get fired for this, but apparently there's a VPN problem here at PSU that relates to 64-bit systems:

Currently, there is no Cisco VPN client (a type of software that creates a secure connection over the Internet) available for these 64-bit operating systems.

All I can say is, glad I have a Mac.

PSU@UP VPN config

I have to admit that I'm not exactly sure why I need a VPN, but I think it has something to do with UP's new wireless security here at the Outreach Building. I have the notion that we're just catching up with other networks on main campus.

I had some problems connecting initially. I realized that I was having troubles since I didn't have WiFi active. Once that was on and I was connected to "pennstate", everything went well.

phpESP

One of the best things about running your own server is the flexibility to add tools that you would otherwise have to pay money for.

I've been experimenting with phpESP, a survey tool that I hope we can use here at CE@UP to handle our own surveys without having to go to Marketing Research. They are fantastic there and are great for large-scale surveys. But, I wanted to have a tool that we could use here as well.

After I was able to install it the first time, I lost access to the account because of a bad password, or something like that. I'm giving it another try. I use a different set of install instructions and I hope I got it right this time.

The server seems to be holding so far. The survey site is available here. Now I just have to populate it with a basic survey.

Buffalo LinkStation Live

I've been trying to solve this problem of how I can share all our documents, music, photos, installers, etc. across our network and when I'm at the office.

Previously, I had to use my MacBook as a file server. Given it's relatively small drive, I had to hook up my two external hard drives to it directly. It ceased to be portable. I couldn't use my G4 PowerMac or PowerBook, so that left me with my MacBook.
I took the plunge for a NAS last week and it's up and running. It looks like a great system that can serve up our files and provide backup options if I hook up an external drive to it.

My biggest problem right now is getting our files on to it. I've got over 350GB of files and transferring them via ethernet is going to take a while. If it were only that, I could wait. In fact, we'd probably be finished now. The real problem is that my Mac isn't copying all of the files. I'll leave it and then return to find that the copying process has halted and I don't really know what has and what hasn't been copied.

I should probably write the MacCast and find out what they have to say, because this is really frustrating.

Oracle to iPhone

There isn't much out there, but I did find this pretty cool way that will potentially allow me to at least pull my Oracle calendar into Apple's iCal so that I can sync events that way. I found this article from a different UIC webpage on general Oracle use.

Maxed-out at 128 GB?

Apple Discussion

OWC Helpdesk Info

White Box iPhone Bug

Two days ago, I went to sync my iPhone and was a little surprised that the one photo I remember taking wasn't appearing when I launched iPhoto. It wasn't a super-important image, so I let it slide.

Then yesterday, Hyunjoo and I went for a hike on Mt. Nittany and tried to take images there. That's when I discovered that the camera wasn't taking pictures. I was almost certain that it was a software issue.

I just hopped on the internet and lo-and-behold... it's a pretty well documented bug.

I used the Method #2, but maybe should have waited to read further down to the "f1b43d3b3ecf259a3626c13a8b0cebd8ba513117.mdbackup" solution. That's OK, I'm beginning with a new slate.

Apple's new iPhone (kinda)

Well, Apple did it. I dunno why they didn't do it earlier, like at Macworld. I waited until the 17th of January to buy my iPhone because I was holding out for a 16GB model and they just released it two days ago. Nineteen days, geesh. Well, it would have been $100 more than I had paid which in itself is enough to warrant patience. But, now that I've been using the 8GB model I'm OK with the capacity since I'm syncing about every day anyhow and I can't go through 8GB of video, podcasts, and audio. But the prices will come down and when Hyunjoo gets one, she'll get the bigger one for sure.

PDF to Website

1. Convert PDF to JPG

2. Import text to XLS 

Page 001

3. Set fixed deliminations

4. Fill rows down

5. Series to 100

6. Save as Tab delim Text

7. Open in TextEdit and clean up text

8. Paste into DW

Leopard woes

I don't regret switching to Leopard. I do like Spaces and the redone finder. I wish I could play around with TimeMachine, but I don't have another external drive. The upgrade forced me to start fresh and clean things up... but I've run into some problems like many with this new version of the Mac OS.

• Kernel Panics & bittorrent client
  
• Dock Problems
  
• EyeTV issues
  
• keyboard/trackpad lock-ups

Unfortunately for me, those are things I'm using all the time now. I hope Apple and developers get some patches out soon.

Leopard Crashes: Kernel Panic

I woke up this morning to find this lovely screen on my Mac. Actually this was the second screen. I can't take a snapshot of the first screen cuz the whole darn thing is frozen. Yesterday my computer choked maybe four times and this morning makes five. I've never had my Mac crash on me... I'm not using any applications I didn't use with Tiger, so it must have been something with Leopard.

I thought I found some good information on Hoopla! posted by LCO, but my computer crashed after making the suggested changes:

- Try disabling IPv6 in your Airport System Preferences
- In Azureus preferences, expand Connection -> Advanced Networking Settings, and make sure “Prefer IPv6 addresses when both are avail” and “Enable experimental extension…” are UNTICKED.

There's also a good website that has kept tabs on which applications are not compatible with Leopard. This would have been nice to know before I upgraded.

UPDATE: After making the changes LCO mentioned above... I only had one more crash, but it was after I set Azureus back to "Simple" mode or whatever. Once I returned it back to "Advanced", I haven't had any problems again.

UPDATE: Still crashing under Azureus. Transmission isn't any better while running a large torrent. Tomato - I'm not even going to go there.

A Turbo.H264 Pain in Ass

I just got Elgato's Turbo.H264 hardware video encoding acceleration device and it was initially a major pain in the ass to get converted video to play on my PSP. It wasn't until I found some information on their website that I was successful. The most important information is at the bottom! I guess I'll just have to get an iPod one of these days, but the PSP is a great PVP even though I only have 4GB of storage on it.

Network update

Server anomaly
I had a strange problem emerge this past weekend where my server couldn't connect to the web via Firefox. I couldn't even use Server Admin to connect to the server. I restarted a bunch of times and even precariously used changeip to try changing the IP address of the server, stupid in hind sight. I ended up changing the DNS servers to ones that were listed from my router and changed the server listing from Server Admin to its IP address. Whatever I did, it worked. I don't like the powerlessness of not knowing where to look for solutions. I don't know how to read the logs beyond a superficial level, so I don't really know where to go to fix the problems.

WPA TKIP
I don't know why I didn't do this earlier, but I changed my router from WEP encryption to 120 bit WPA TKIP encryption. I wasn't able to enter in my 503? bit passkey, so I had to choose a 20-digit key instead. I'll limit the MAC addresses next ensure that no one will be able to access my IP address.

FTP admin
I just tried to access my net2ftp admin page and was twarted by the login. I have no idea what the password is! I'll have to change that this evening.

eDrive
I installed a TechTools eDrive on my PowerBook so I don't have to rely on my newly created iPod "toolbox" for maintenance. I had troubles installing iDefrag though since I wasn't able to resolve permissions on the eDrive to allow the license key to be copied into the /Library/Application Support folder.

Buffalo 80GB Protogo Drive
Since I made an eDrive for my PowerBook, I thought I'd do the same for my MacBook. Well technically I can't make an eDrive since I have Bootcamp installed, but I have a Buffalo external USB 2.0 drive that wasn't doing anything, so it's now a portable Intel-only toolbox with lots of storage space on it (about 73 GB).

Firewire bridges are not built alike

I've been juggling around external HD cases to address overheating problems with my drives and now I've had to resort to juggling again for a different reason: my newer Buffalo enclosure doesn't support "powered Firewire pass-thru", for lack of a better term.

Until last night my set up was:
PowerBook > external LaCie DVD > external Buffalo enclosure

This set up was fine when all I needed to do was hook up another HD, like my MacBook in Disk Mode, and all was good. But when I plugged my 3G iPod into the FW port, it wouldn't charge. Apparently it had something to do with the fact that the Buffalo drive only has one 6-pin connector. The other is a non-powered 4-pin port. The missing 2-pins in the chain breaks the power connection even when all of the drives in between are AC powered!

So I switched my 250HD from the Buffalo enclosure to my OWC enclosure, again, and am running it with the case cracked open to let it ventilate. I hope it doesn't over-heat in this configuration. What a pain in the ass!

Private eyes, please!

I had to find a way to hide my tracks since my the computer on my desk faces the entire office, I need to have a way to keep what I'm doing private. It's not that I shouldn't be doing certain things at work. I'm not looking at porn or surfing the internet all day long, it's just that I need some privacy at times. For instance, I was reading about the shootings at Virginia Tech this morning before school and my boss came by and read what I was looking at over my shoulder and made a comment about it. I didn't make me feel very comfortable. I know in America things are different. Bosses can literally log all activities, no problem.

Installing the color network printer

This is how I installed the printer for KTC's English office on Sheryl's laptop.

1. create a printing port (Printers and Faxes > Files > Server Properties > Ports tab > Add Port... Standard TCP/IP port)
   
2. install the printer via "install local printer attached to this computer"
3. Have disk... navigate to the KTC Teachers folder on "shared" and look for the printer's file (L:\8. KTC Teachers\Software and Drivers\Color Printer Driver cx8800\english\Disk1)
   
4. select the CX8800 profile