Sunday, March 31, 2013

Making gamepads work

Thought I'd drop this little link here for those who need help with getting gamepads to work on Steam.  Here's another link based on Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection.

Monday, March 18, 2013

/boot ran out of space!

I realize that installing new updates filled up my /boot with unused kernels.  I managed to get rid of the old kernels by doing:

sudo apt-get purge linux-image-3.5.0-1{7-generic,8-generic,9-generic}

This will get rid of the linux-image-3.5.0-17-generic, 3.5.0-18-generic, and 3.5.0-19-generic images.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Python scripts crashing with setLocale?

There are instances when I get Linux servers that have misconfigured locales and I don't have time to really fiddle around and fix these issues.  So I get these python scripts crashing out on me like with this locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'') and going locale.Error: unsupported locale setting with no real solution in sight.

One way to move forward is to do:

export LC_ALL=C

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Fake USB Pen Drive Update

A teeny tiny update to this counterfeit flash drive.  I had ChipGenius scan the thing and also was able to open up the case to dig up some substantial information on it.  All that after the jump!

Friday, March 8, 2013

Fake USB Pen Drive

My brother was having trouble with a Transcend 8 GB flash drive and brought it to my attention so I could take a closer look.  I could never get the drive to work on Linux, but I never knew why.  I also didn't ever get a chance to take a closer look at it.

Once I began digging into it, I started to see something interesting with this drive.  According to Linux, it bore the Vendor ID: 0011 and the Product ID: 7788 and all over the internet, I saw plenty of references to point to me that it is a fake flash disk.  They also recommended to use ChipGenius to see just what the actual disk was.  Here is what it yielded me:


So ChipGenius says it's... 
VID: 058F PID: 1234.  
Chip Vendor: Alcor Micro 
Chip Part-Number: SC708 (FC8708)/AU6987/AU6990 - F/W 2EDD
Flash ID Code: 98D59432 - Toshiba - ICE/Single Channel [MLC-8k] -> Total Capacity = 2 GB

I will look for the FC8708 MP Tool to see if it's the one that will resurrect this.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Windows 7 Remote Desktop Connection Display Resolution

I don't use Windows a lot, so every time I have to meddle with Windows, half the time I can't find options and settings to what I want to happen.  This is one of those moments.

On my Virtual Box install of Windows 7, sometimes, I mistakenly change the resolution and force Windows to set a specific resolution for the remote desktop inside Windows 7.  This article answers how to change it back to full screen.

Run Remote desktop connection without connecting to any of the IPs and click on Options and Diplay.  Then change the slider to large.

Problem with MergeList on Ubuntu

Today, I got this strange error from my laptop on apt-get where the package lists could not be opened.  I found an article that basically says:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

Should about remove the bad files and regenerate them.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Lessons on Android and Multimedia files

First off, if you're looking to skip folders from being scanned, put the .nomedia file inside the folder.  Second, using my A500 for music has lead to several particularly annoying issues.  Putting music in the micro SD card is just bad news.  Very, bad news.  My music players would pick up duplicate entries of the music files which is reminiscent to my problems with the original Google gallery.  That app would pick up and duplicate entries in its cache when the micro SD card needed to be reloaded.

Lesson learned.  Do not put music in the micro SD Card.

Cleaning up the crap takes a bit of time and effort, but if you've isolated your files in a folder, that's good.  Rename your folder and put the .nomedia file on it to keep Android from re-scanning and grabbing those poor files.  I then used Winamp to purge all the music in the library which just removes Android's internal mapping.  To be sure, load up each of your music players and make sure none of the music gets picked up.  Move your music folder to /sdcard and remove the .nomedia file.  Reboot your device and then run a music app which should begin re-scanning your device for media.

Hopefully, that will tidy up your music player.