The Good Computer Guy Blog

12/12/2009

My iPhone needs a life

Tags: Computers
I woke up around 5 AM this morning, which really isn't all that unusual. After failing to fall back to sleep I grabbed my iPhone sitting on my night table just to see if any interesting e-mail came in overnight. Nothing much, but one of my clients' servers had a memory issue that really could have used a reboot. This is a lumber yard and I knew they open early on Saturday so I figured no time like the present. I fired up LogMeIn Ignition on my iPhone and tried to connect to the server. As much as I love LogMeIn sometimes it has issues and today it was still snoozing while my iPhone and I were awake. Plan B was Mocha Remote Desktop, another great iPhone application. Plan C would have been secure VNC through SSH tunneling with iSSH but I didn't need to go there. Since plan B got me in I quickly rebooted the server and tried to go back to sleep. Meanwhile my iPhone got a couple alerts that the server was down and then back up 5 minutes later. Then I remembered that sometimes one of the Spector 360 services doesn't always start up, so I went back to plan A, LogMeIn, which worked this time, and quickly scrolled through to start the sticky service. Then we went back to sleep. Well, I did eventually. My iPhone got a few more e-mails. That thing really needs to rest sometime.

Posted by Bill Greenberg At 7:42 AM | Digg This | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/07/2009

iPod Mini repair - don't try this at home!

Tags: Hardware
A few years ago I opened up a new bank account because I was annoyed at some of my long-time bank's policies (but that's a whole 'nother story.) I just happened to walk into the bank when they were giving away free 4GB iPod Mini's (2nd generation.) My lucky day. At first I didn't even know what to do with the thing, but eventually I ended up putting all my MP3's and CDs on it and letting it live in my vehicle. It worked great. For my current vehicle I bought a device that lets me connect both the iPod and my Sirius satellite radio and even control the iPod via my steering wheel controls. Bliss.

But eventually the iPod started having trouble. It would be OK for a while, then suddenly it would reset itself. Instead of picking up where it left off randomly playing my songs it would start over at the beginning, playing them in artist order. Unfortunately that meant I heard Lesson 1 of Pimsleur Portuguese over and over. Yeah, that got annoying. One fix seemed to be setting an alarm on the iPod so it would wake up every day at 7 AM and not go into the "deep sleep" that caused the reset. That worked for a while, then it started happening again. I figured that it could be the battery finally giving out and thought I'd need to get a new iPod.

Not so fast, though. While it seemed that there was not a user-serviceable battery at first it turned out that you actually CAN take the iPod apart and install an after-market battery, which I was able to find online for only about $6. Nice! It was a little tricky to take the iPod apart but with a little patience and some very small screwdrivers I got it eventually, popped in the new battery, and away we go. Or not...

Somewhere along the way I seem to have broken the click wheel. Or the cable connecting the click wheel to the motherboard. Not good - I couldn't control the iPod. And even hooking up to the vehicle control wasn't enough. I could start and stop, but I couldn't get the iPod to play all the songs randomly, which is what I want. Occasionally I want to play a specific song, too, and I couldn't do that. Rats.

Back to the Internet and I found people selling click wheels and ribbon cables. It seems like a common part to break when replacing the battery. Prices ranged from about $8 to $25, both new and used. I opted for the $8 new wheel.

And voila - after carefully taking everything apart again (this being about the 5th or 6th time now!) I was able to install the new click wheel, along with the new battery. And it worked! Now I'll just have to see if I get Portuguese lessons on the way to a client tomorrow morning...

Posted by Bill Greenberg At 4:16 PM | Digg This | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/03/2009

Computers are frustrating!

Tags: Software
So yesterday a colleague of mine and I set out to build a couple of servers - one for him, one for one of my clients. Pretty basic boxes with Gigabyte motherboards, AMD processors, gobs of RAM and hard drive space. We're using Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) as the host and VirtualBox to run virtual servers.

So we get the machines built and start installing Ubuntu with RAID1. It's not a straightforward install but I've done it before and found some good resources. We're both partitioning our drives and marking one bootable. Or rather, I am. The text-based alternate installer just won't let Rob flip the bootable flag on his. Mine works fine, his just won't go. We try 3 other versions of Ubuntu, all with the same results.

OK, let's recap - similar (I know, not EXACTLY the same but really close) hardware, same software, two completely different results. Some web searches find one complaint with the same problem but no solutions. Great. This is why we have grey hair.

Ultimately he ended up installing the LILO bootloader while I stuck with the more standard GRUB. Both of our machines are working now and we'll probably never know why he had the hiccup. Meanwhile, I have another machine that just won't take the latest VirtualBox upgrade. The one that should fix the bug that's plaguing one of my networks. Sigh...

Posted by Bill Greenberg At 1:49 PM | Digg This | Permalink | Comments (0)