Geemoo dot ca

Acer Aspire 5560, Battery Won't Charge

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 11:46:30 -0400

So, we bought a Acer Aspire 5560 laptop for my wife and one day while I was at work, she reported that she broke her battery. The battery was stuck at 5% charge and even though it was plugged in, Windows was reporting "Battery 5%, Won't charge." After a number of reboots, and removing and inserting the battery, I promised I'd take a look at it that night.

After a number of searches, we found something that worked. Shutdown the laptop, removing the battery and unplug the power brick. Press and hold the power button for two minutes. I held it for 3 minutes, just to be sure. Replace the battery, and plug in the power brick, and with luck, you should get a charging light now.

The idea is that even though the battery and power brick are removed, there's still enough residual charge left in the internal capacitors for the laptop to remember the incorrect battery state. Holding the power button drains that charge and resets the state.

Camping Coffee

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:21:30 -0400

So, I just got back from a 4 day camping trip in Algonquin park, and it was all around a great time. I've been camping for a great many years, and something that is still in a state of evolution is camping coffee.

I love coffee. It tastes delicious, and I love just having that hot beverage in the morning while you're waking up and chatting with everyone else. In the past, I had used instant coffee, but being the coffee lover that I am, it just wasn't satisfying me. I've been trying out various methods, and have gotten to a state of coffee which I am fairly content with.

Camping Coffee

Ingredients

coffee
instant milk powder
sugar

First off, fill whatever drinking mug you have with your water, and dump that into a pot. Bring that to a boil, and add one heaping tablespoon of medium ground coffee for every cup of water. Let that boil for a couple minutes, about 5 minutes or so, until it frothes up a bit. Take your pot off the heat, and let it stand for another 5 minutes or so. Really, since this is camping, you aren't going to have a watch or clock, so just kind of guess how long.

Take a piece of paper towel, fold it over twice and open up one corner. This is your coffee filter. Put this into your mug, and pour your coffee into the filter, let it strain through, and then add your milk powder and sugar as you like your coffee.

Sit back and enjoy the sunrise!

Project: HF LO Module

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:23:23 -0400

So, I've finished one of my recent projects, and by finish, I really mean have a working prototype and shows most of the functionality works. Really, since this project was meant to be a stepping stone to a multitude of other projects, it's never really going to be "finished".

So far, I've published all the hardware info that you need to build the board.. I have a working proof of concept software load for the MCU which I'm going to upload soon, so stay tuned for another post in the near future.

You can checkout the board though, at http://geemoo.ca/projects/hflo/.

IPv6 Summit

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:06:30 -0500

So.. it looks like work is sending me to the IPv6 Summit. Since we're a company that makes hardware network devices, I'm pretty excited, as this is a topic we really need to be looking into. Stay tuned, more details to come.

Getting rid of default search keywords

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 10:53:23 -0500

If you ever get annoyed by searching for something on debian from your vimperator command line, and get annoyed at it using the debian package search engine, you can thank jcn for mentioning this tip to me. Inside vimperator, you can type :dialog search and it will open up a dialog box with the search of search engines and keywords installed so that you can remove or change the ones that bother you.

I don't know how to open this dialog within firefox normally (ie: without the vimperator plugin).. I don't see any menu item for it anywhere. So, if you know, feel free to send me a message and I can update that here.

Encrypting Partitions on Linux

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 11:14:13 -0500

I've recently started to encrypt my backup drives, so I had to learn how to do this instead of just letting debian's init scripts to take care of it for me. Turns out it's quite easy. In my case, I was encrypting /dev/sdd1 and named my partition "backup". Substitute those values for whatever device and name you use.

# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdd1
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 backup
# mkfs -t xfs /dev/mapper/backup 
# mount /dev/mapper/backup /mnt/backup

That's it, when you're done with the device, umount the /dev/mapper/backup device, and then do a cryptsetup luksClose backup.

Nvidia + GLX for a Quadro Card on Debian

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:52:46 -0400

I just went through the process of getting my older nvidia card working on debian, and decyphering the exact list of steps was a bit irritating, so I'm recording it here for everyone (including myself) to enjoy later on. I'm writing this down after completing the process (and I'm certainly not going to start over again), so this is from memory, and hopefully I'm getting all the steps in the right order.

First off, you need to install the linux headers (and possibly the linux source) for your kernel. I did these steps out of order, so I can't say if the linux source tree is really required. Things started working for me once I installed the headers, so those are certainly required. apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r).
Next up, idenfity what card you have, and what nvidia-glx package supports it. Run lspci and it will show you a list of hardware installed.. my card is shown below.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV37GL [Quadro PCI-E Series] (rev a2)
Take the card type, (in my case NV37GL) and do a google search for NV37GL glx debian. This will produce a list of debian packages, and hopefully you'll see a results that looks like Debian -- Details of package nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx in sid. The version doesn't matter, we're just looking for the name here. Apt-get can handle the details. (there should be a way to get this info from apt-cache, but it's not producing results for me. Feel free to send comments on how to make this work.)
Run apt-get install nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx (or whatever package google found for you.) This will install the module you need and whatever dependencies it requires. If you have the require kernel source installed, you should see a message about it building for your currently installed kernel. If you see a message that looks like Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed., it couldn't find your source tree and you need to try step 1 again.
Once you're done that, get into console mode by doing init 1 or /etc/init.d/slim stop (substitute slim for gdm, kdm, xdm, whatever), and then go over to /etc/X11 and run X -configure to generate a new X configuration. Move the file over to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then edit the file. Find the line that says Driver "nv" and change it to say Driver "nvidia".
Save, exit, restart X. Once started, you should be able to open a terminal, run glxinfo and get results saying that glx is working.
Celebrate! yay!

If you find any errors, or better ways to do that, please send me and email and I'll update appropriately. Good luck!

CPU Speed Status Bar Monitor for wmii

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:02:53 -0400

So, I recently bought a new computer, and this one is a dual core and supports all kinds of dynamic speed adjusting goodness, which apparently my last CPU did not. While this is all great, there is a bit of a downside.

Down in the status bar of the window manager I use (wmiirc-lua), there is a little box indicating the current scaled CPU speed that each core is running at. As a result of the new dynamicness, the contents of that box are changing all the time. I was going to remove it entirely, but instead decided to write a graphical version of the same. The result of this effort is a wmii plugin called CPU Graph. Upon configuring wmii to load this, it'll create a 10 character scrolling ASCII bar indicating the current CPU speed.

I've got it up at github for the moment, until bartman gets a chance to merge it into the tree.

Download. Install. Enjoy the ASCII goodness.

Turning off Magnetic Net Mode in gschem

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:07:40 -0500

I searched for this options for 15 minutes, so I'm posting this here so I don't have to again.

If you're like me and find the magnetic nets always connect to the wrong stuff, you can turn them off! You can do so by adding (magnetic-net-mode "disabled") to your ~/.gschemrc or to a gafrc in your project directory.

Reinstalling GRUB on an Ubuntu install

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:30:54 -0500

So, I recently had to fix an ubuntu install after Windows had been reinstalled onto the drive.. end result: of course Windows tromped over the MBR and wiped out grub, making the computer automatically boot into windows. The fix is to get booted into Ubuntu and reinstall grub. If you're a debian user, the best way I found to do this is:

Download the Ubuntu liveCD for whatever version of ubuntu you are trying to fix. Don't forget to download the 64bit version if you're trying to fix a 64bit install of Ubuntu.
Do a google search for the usb-creator package for a not quite cutting edge version of ubuntu. While it would be awesome if this package were in debian, I'm sure the demand for it is pretty low, since it seems to be an Ubuntu creation. I am running Debian Squeeze/testing, and had good results using the usb-creator from Jaunty, which can be found here. (It'd be nice if you could just dd the iso to the usb drive and have it work, but alas I tried that, and it does not boot.)
Download and install usb-creator via dpkg -i
Insert a USB disk that you don't mind getting wiped, run usb-creator, select your liveCD iso file and usb disk, click format, and then Create disk.
Wait forever.
Pop the USB stick into the busted machine, and boot from the usb drive into the first menu with the install options.
Move the cursor over the first option for "Try Ubuntu Live CD without changes" and press to edit the menu command. Replace the boot=whatever parameter with root=/dev/sdXY, where sdXY is whatever partition your Ubuntu install is on.
Press and boot up into your Ubuntu install.
Open up a terminal, run sudo bash to get to a root shell.
Run update-grub to update your grub configuration file.
Run grub-install /dev/sdX, where sdx is whatever drive you boot off.. probably sda. (NOT sda1)

Once that finishes successfully, you should be able to reboot the machine and grub will start up, allowing you to select what install you which to use. There might be an easier way to do this, but since I'm not a regular Ubuntu user, this is what I found through web searchs and trial and error. If someone has an easier way, please do fire me an email and I'll update this post.