HP WakeOnLAN bug versus Open Source – An “It shouldn’t be this hard!”-Odyssey.

This is the story of how I used Open Source to work around a bug in an HP computer’s BIOS.

Background: I administer a small remote office with about 10 computers which need to be backed up regularly. To do this without disrupting the users’ work, I have the backup server wake up all the machines during the night using WakeOnLAN and, once it is done backing up all the data, shut them down via Windows RPC. Since WoL support has become fairly ubiquituous in recent years this works very well for most of their machines. One of them, a brand new Hewlett-Packard Z210 CMT workstation that we recently acquired, just wouldn’t have it though.

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Using Samsung Mobile Tracker on Galaxy S in any country.

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Steltek.
Categories: Projects, Rant.
Tags: , , .

If you’ve tried to activate the Samsung Mobile Tracker on your Samsung Galaxy S I9000, you’ve undoubtedly encountered numerous pointless error messages like ‘SSO_2012′ or ‘For legal reasons, this function not in service in some countries.’. I, for one, am sick and tired of living in a ‘technological 3rd world country’ that always gets the short end of the stick for anything on the World Wide Web and since moving is not an option for me, I decided to figure out a procedure to set up and use Mobile Tracker despite the arbitrary limitations.
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Microsoft’s horrible keyboards, part 2

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Steltek.
Categories: Rant.
Tags: , .

A few of you may remember my rant about Microsoft’s very un-ultimate keyboard. Well, I recently had to install a bunch of new machines and couldn’t believe my eyes as I started unpacking their keyboards. I mean, I’ve become used to the unnecessary reordering of the Insert/Home/PgUp block like this:

Unnecessary reordering of keys.
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Cleaning up mah server

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Steltek.
Categories: Life, the Universe and Everything, Rant.
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Yeah, like the title says, I finally did some cleaning on SHODAN and threw out the old Apache 1 install. I only kept it around to be able to access my old Postnuke site and I’ve finally copied everything out there, so that’s now gone too.

In other news: Not having Internet sucks. I don’t know what is up with my service provider today. My line went down this morning (while I was at work, talk about annoying) and just a few hours ago, it stopped working again. The modem has sync and the line TX light is blinking every now and then. I’m guessing the PPPoE server’s hosed or there’s some weird connectivity issue between me and the POP. Anyway, it’s annoying the heck out of me.

The worst keyboard ever!

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Steltek.
Categories: Rant.
Tags: , .

People who know me, know that I freak when some company ‘improves’ the keyboard layout by tilting the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdn block (ie putting it vertically instead of horizontally) or by moving down the PrtScr/ScrollLock/Pause row to make room for useless Power/Standby Buttons at the top, usually putting the ‘Power’ button in place of the ‘Pause/Break’ button which I have a tendency to hit quite often when working with Linux consoles. You can imagine my frustration everytime Windows shuts down thanks to me hitting CTRL+Power on such a crappy input device.

Anyway, I just discovered this and I must say that that contraption must be one of the worst keyboards ever to pollute the face of the earth! Not only does it have no numeric pad and none of the aforementioned blocks that I could see, no it is also missing the normal function keys like the escape key! Yes it does sport backlighting (my Logitech G15 has that too, even if it doesn’t autosense the light in my room or my presence), is wireless and has quite a share of silly multimedia buttons, but if you ask me, that doesn’t make it what they call the ‘Ultimate Keyboard’. Quite on the contrary, I think that this abomination of hardware rather deserves the name ‘Ultimate Typing Nightmare’ and I don’t care what their marketing department throws at me, I won’t buy it!

2008-12-12 Update: Microsoft seems to have moved things around on their website. The product I’m referring to in this text is this one.

Bear
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