RND(tech)

After a short break from Final Fantasy (I was working through getting "expert" on all levels of Diner Dash), I'm starting up again with Final Fantasy IV. I know, lame update, but I'm writing anyway.

I've just about given up on Final Fantasy III. I've accidentally found a game glitch described on GameSpot and this YouTube video as the "Dive into Saronia" glitch. Only, I never actually dove. I was just exploring the western side of the continent, close to the mountain range. Suddenly, I found myself flying over the mountains in the airship before obtaining "invincible". Being the good RPG player, I saved just outside the town. Unfortunately, I didn't know this was a game glitch and now I'm trapped forever a dark night outside of Falgabard. Lame.

The game wasn't all that great to begin with. It was a beautiful remake, but lacked depth in the dungeons. The job system was nice, but a gimmicky novelty. There were too many jobs, which meant there were too many weapons, made scarce across the item shops. The story line was only slightly better than FF-I and FF-II, but that was to be expected. I actually found the former two games better than FF-III. While the former two were riddled with dungeons that were TOO big at times and TOO many random encounters, they had a much better RPG flow and story.

After just over 24 hours of game play, I can't find my way back over the mountains, even though the video makes it look possible. I had a great party too, and I doubt I'll be able to recreate that job level 89 monk. He attacked with for over 200 with his two bare hands Now it's on to FF-IV!

I live in an area with frequent power outages. It's a limitation of the area I live in. If something happens near the entrance of our town, the whole town goes out. Needless to say, I have more than one UPS in the house to sustain the various electronics I run. Mostly, it's to support the VOIP phone service and the MythTV network in the house.

I own several of the Belkin F6C550VA-AVR UPSes and an APC 350VA Back-UPS ES. When the power goes out, all of them sing a horrid beeping chorus, usually in the early morning hours. At that hour, the family prefers to sleep it out and not be jarred awake to the noise. Also, I have to get up and silence them all. Worse, just before the battery is drained, they scream again and again, until finally dying. Use the software to silence them you say? Well, not all of them are attached to computers. Such is the case for the cordless phone and downstairs in the basement for the cable modem (also provides phone via VOIP) and the router.

I set out to kill the internal speaker. It was a little rough on the Belkin, but much easier on the APC:






First, take out the battery from the back of the unit. This is safer, plus the cover works as a place to put the screws.















Next, take out the two screws from the back.










Place the UPS on its side and use a flathead screwdriver to pop the plastic clip from the front cover off the bottom.



Now, put the UPS back upright and work the front cover off by lifting from the bottom up. Remove the two screws holding the left and right side of the UPS together.















Here comes the tricky part. Working the sides apart, remove the top panel (the part with the AC outlets). I popped the right side of the UPS off mostly, then pulled the top panel off the left side as it rested on the table.



See that little blue cylinder? That's what makes all the noise! I removed it by wedging a small flathead screwdriver under it. Working carefully in a circular motion, you can pop it right off the circuit board. Be careful not to crack the circuit board! Do the whole process backwards to put it back together. Now I can sleep!


This little APC was much easier:


First, flip it over, take off the battery cover and remove the battery. Then remove the five screws holding the back cover on.


Lift the back cover off and look for a little black cylinder. That's the speaker, but this one was a little harder to pry off the board because it was soldered closer to the board. I used a smaller flathead to be able to get under the speaker and I cracked it off in several tries. The picture below was taken after I removed the speaker, but you can still see the circle on the board where it used to be.

Up until recently, I started having problems with winbind on a webserver I admin, connected to a NT4 domain hosted on a Samba 2 server. We were utilizing winbind to obtain valid user login accounts from the Samba server to server webpages for our users. The home directories were NFS mounted to the Samba server, Apache2 on SuSE 10 (X86-64) was the webserver. Due to lack of available storage resources, our system partition filled, and winbind was behaving erratically. Winbind would randomly have issues translating usernames to SIDs and wbinfo -u and wbinfo -g would completely fail. While winbind is technically "the right way", providing user accounts to the system and allowing Apache's mod_userdir to provide ~user URLs, it seemed like overkill. The box didn't need real users, since it never really needs to authenticate them. The fileserver is otherwise accessible for the users to make page or file updates. The webserver simply need to translate the ~user URL requests to the static path /home/user/public_html. I knew Apache has URL aliasing and with a cleverly simple regex, you can make this happen, minus the mod_userdir module.

Add the following line somewhere in your httpd.conf (or more relevant include conf file):

AliasMatch ^/~([^/]*)/?(.*) /home/$1/public_html/$2

My /home is NFS mounted to the Samba server's /home path. Obviously, you can tweak the "destination" of the alias match to your needs. Also, be sure to stop Apache from loading mod_userdir since you don't want it stepping over your alias, or vice-versa. The alias has been working for several hours now, with no interruption to service, and no support calls so far. I can't really find the downside to using it, only that you save a little bit of system resources by not loading the module (or needing to compile it in to Apache). It could perhaps even be slightly more secure, since the users don't actually exist on your webserver...

I just finished Soul of Rebirth (the Final Fantasy II extended story). There isn't much world-wise to explore, but it was fairly long due to the fact you have minimal resources and you have to level everyone up. Ulitma and Flare are your friend...

I finished FF-II the other day and FF-I back in November-ish sometime. Here are the screen captures of both game-clear saves.



Apparently, this version (the Dawn of Souls version for GBA) has a Music Player option that is unlocked when you finish both games. Also, a new dungeon called Soul of Rebirth is unlocked. This is a continuation on the FF-II story. I'm working through that now and it's supposedly not too long...

Several months back, say around November, last year, when the remainder of the early Final Fantasy ports to GBA/NDS were announced, I decided to relive the Final Fantasy saga. With the release of Final Fantasy III for NDS, came the announcement for Final Fantasy VI. This ultimately made Final Fantasy I through VI available for the NDS (whether in NDS or GBA format).

I decided to start at FF-I and work my way up to FF-VI, and probably re-play everyone's favorite VII. I have VII for PSX and PC, but I'm undecided which I'll work through. Most likely it will be VII on some PSX emulator for PC. At this point, I finished FF-I and I'm just about wrapping up FF-II. I will probably post screen shots of my completed-game party, maybe even the GBA saves. I'm in no hurry or race to complete them. No, I won't play past FF-VII, if anything I might redo FF-VIII, but I doubt it. I never really liked anything past FF-VIII and even that game was slightly disappointing.

I keep making the switch. I haven't found THE operating system to solve all of my needs, but unfortunately, it pains me to switch back, to windows. I've been living a 99% windows-free life for about 8 months or so now. Administering a network, working with DVD/media, and wanting some basic gaming support has forced me back to Windows. OpenOffice is great, Wine is amazing, and the Linux OS has never been better. I continue to use SuSE Linux on all of my home MythTV boxes and at work on servers, but as a general-use workstation, I'll have to go back to Windows. I'll still host a virtual machine or two in various workstation settings, but alas, I've been defeated!

I love the PSC 1350. It's low cost. It's multifunctional and has enough quality for my needs. If you have one on your network however, I feel your pain.

Making it work from Windows is a challenge to a network server. I've tried the Adobe PPD files mentioned in a previous post before and it works to a CUPS server, but not to a JetDirect, Airport Express, or other RAW print queue on port 9100. I read some others' posts about using the HP DeskJet 550C driver. That sounds great and is included everywhere, but it just wouldn't print. I finally found a post about using the DeskJet 3420 drivers and that worked.

FINALLY!

From Linux, the job was slightly easier due to PSC support via PPD files, mostly included with the various distributions. Mac OS X proved a bit harder. The old PPC version of OS X had sufficient support, but the updated driver package for the PSC just doesn't work "out-of-the-box". I suggest going to http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs, and getting the HPIJS driver packages for OS X.

Network printing is a daunting task. Network printing in Linux is tricky. I have a Linux server with a shared CUPS printer (one of those HP PSC printers). Making OS X print to it was somewhat simple because it's BSD under the hood, so it has CUPS/IPP support. Adding your server's hostname to your hosts file was the trick to making it work.

I set out to make Windows print to the Linux CUPS/IPP printer. You should add your hostname and IP to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS. This allows for name to IP resolution. Windows doesn't come with CUPS/IPP printing support out of the box. The key to making this work was found in a free Adobe PS driver found here. I chose Adobe Universal PostScript Windows Driver Installer 1.0.6 - English. Run the installer, select "Network Printer", and enter the URL of your printer queue. It will be something like http://hostname:631/printers/PrinterName. Select "yes" when prompted. You can use the Generic PostScript Printer option or you can use the PPD file created by CUPS for your printer with the Browse button. Your PPD file should be in /etc/cups/ppd on your Linux server.

I've only tested this under Windows XP, but other versions of Windows should work similarly.

A little while ago I posted an entry about sharing iTunes over a WAN with SSH tunnels. I also posted a little something about Hamachi networking. Well, apparently you can use Hamachi for WAN sharing of iTunes, without the need for Rendezvous Proxy or SSH tunnels. Get Hamachi working on your Windows or Mac OS X computer. For the OS X users, I HIGHLY recommend HamachiX. This is a graphical front-end to the currently console-only version of Hamachi. You could run through the console-based install of Hamachi from their website, but OS X is supposed to be easy, right? Anyway, once you get Hamachi working on both hosts, you just open up iTunes and share as if you were local on the LAN. No special tricks, but that's the point of Hamachi.

I was recently using iPhoto 6(?) or whatever the current version is. It seems it has problems importing JPGs from certain digital cameras with some setting. I know its a setting and not the camera because I actually imported from two identical cameras owned by two different people. Apparently there's a colorspace setting somewhere that is either wrong or corrupt on one of the cameras. This Apple support document hits the nail on the head for their idea of a fix:

iPhoto unexpectedly quits when viewing or editing certain photos

I'm currently working on an Automater script, but it's not quite ready for the masses.

LaCie announced today that they now offer a complete Lightscribe solution for all platforms. That means now Mac OS X and even Linux users can write labels to Lightscribe media with Lightscribe drives. Lightscribe is a technology that allows you to etch silk screen quality images on the label side of CD/DVD media. Up until now, the technology was limited to Windows users due to lack of software. Now with the LaCie LightScribe Labeler for MAC OS, SureThing for Windows and LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux, we have software available to the three major OS platforms. Did I forget to mention the software is free from LaCie? Yes, it really is.

See:
http://www.lacie.com/lightscribe http://www.lightscribe.com

It's been over two months with the new Optimum Voice service. So far so good, but I have a few not-quite-complaints about the service. First off, the price isn't bad if you have the other Cablevision/Optimum services. If you don't, you'll be paying a hefty price for service. Most of the features compare with the Vonage service I once had. One big problem I have is with the call log on the Optimum Voice website. It shows all the outgoing calls, but not the incoming ones. If anything, I'm more interested in the log of incoming calls. If I'm not home and I'm missing calls, it's the best way to know who called, even if they don't leave a message. The Caller ID is inconsistent, or at least it's going through some changes recently. Most of the time, I see the calling number's city, rather than the person calling. The distinctive ring or VIP ring is a nice touch over Vonage though. The voicemail, call waiting, and call forwarding services are also equivalent to Vonage. However, Vonage had one nice feature that Optimum Voice didn't quite get right. I live in an area that suffers from frequent blackouts. Vonage allows for a fall back number, in case the Vonage adapter is off due to power, or your ISP is out. Optimum Voice doesn't have this, but they do have "Follow Me". This rings multiple numbers simultaneously. This is great, but I don't want it to happen all of the time. International rates are similar, but I make few, if no, international calls. Optimum Voice does a weird thing where they expect you to buy Internation minutes in bulk. I think it's a minimum of $10. The minutes roll-over to the next month, but it's still somewhat annoying. Optimum Voice doesn't offer the different pricing plans as Vonage, has no second line option, no choice in are code/exchange, and no 1-800 number services. Finally, the Optimum Voice adapter is not portable, where the Vonage adapter is. The Optimum Voice adapter is integrated into the cable modem. This is great for setup, but you can't take it with you if you travel. Of course, from my last post, one of the reasons I changed was for customer service. With the "triple play" package of voice, data, and tv, I pay just about the same as I did with Vonage and if my adapter fails, I expect to bring it to any Cablevision center and get a new one right away.

I was a happy Vonage customer up until last week. Technically, I'm still a customer, but I'm in the middle of changing over to my local cable company's VOIP service. They claim my install date is next week, so I'll keep you posted. Here's what happened:

Vonage has been great up until it wasn't. The voice quality was perfect. You couldn't tell that I was on a VOIP line or not. Chances are that had much to do with my ISP (the local cable company). I was using the two port Linksys adapter, without issue for about 18 months. I originally had gone with Verizon's VoiceWing because I assumed they'd be able to port their own POTS line number easier than any other company. After a week on the phone with Verizon, I learned sadly that they can't even do something as basic as that. So, I ordered Vonage, got a new number and went with it.

Last week sometime, we had bad thunderstorms, lightning, brown-outs and all. The Linksys adapter went dead for dial tone, but the Internet router functions were still working. After 2 hours of on and off the cell phone with Vonage, I gave up. This was partially my fault that my cell phone dropped out, but the next call was not made any better by the next support person. Yes, it was a help desk in India, and no they were not even responsive to anything but their script. They wouldn't even admit to the fact that I had just been on the line with someone else and I had to restart from the beginning of their script. Needless to say that this was fruitless until I finally yelled at the last tech. It wasn't her fault, but after two hours, I didn't see the need to continue this on my cell phone charges for a $15/month phone service. Maybe that's why Vonage sucks for support. All I wanted was an answer on what to do about a dead router. They insisted I had a MAC address conflict on my network. I'm not sure how that was on my three computer network, but sure, whatever. I suppose it's even more proof of why I'm lucky to have passed on the stock offering...