Sunday, December 28, 2014

Wii U and Storage Space

I've bought quite a few digital games on my Wii U and the 32 GB storage is absolutely woeful.  To make matters worse, the eShop insists that I have enough free space to BUY a game.  Absolutely insane to think about this restriction.

At first, I figured I could use my spare micro SD with an SD card adapter as back up but apparently, it's only usable on Wii mode!  What in the world?!  I swear, sometimes, Nintendo tries hard to be incredibly dumb!

So, at the end, it looks like I will have to buy a USB hard drive with an AC adapter OR with a Y-cable to use the USB power.  It seems that these drives have sleep modes if there isn't an independent source of power.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo revisited

I had only one purpose for revisiting the demo and that was to get the Chakram Launcher for Mass Effect 3.  I went about downloading the demo but the game refused to log me into Origin.  Fortunately, I found a fix here.  Go to Documents then My Games then Reckoning and look for the personal.ini file.  Edit the file and remove blaze_email=your@email.com.  Then restart the game.  It should all be fine.

To get the Chakram Launcher, play the demo and until you speak with the fateweaver in the overworld.  The demo will tell you that you have a 45 minute window to play the game.  Finish that 45 minutes and you'll receive the DLC.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Assassin's Creed Director's Cut and Wine

I've been pleased that this GOG.com release of Assassin's Creed works out of the box on Wine.  However, a recent update, Wine 1.7.30 on Ubuntu via launchpad, has a regression in that the sunlight in this game is way too bright. It's making the world bleached white. I used POL and downloaded an older version of Wine to fix this issue.  I downloaded Wine 1.7.27 which didn't seem to exhibit this issue.  Word of warning to those using Wine to play.

Friday, October 24, 2014

GOG with Wine

I'll keep this brief.  I tried installing the Witcher Card game beta some time back and had to use the /verysilent parameter to get through.  Had some error messages but the game worked.  It looks like the update facilities do not work on Wine so I may have to re-download the installer and get a new version.

Currently, I'm trying to install Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut.  Ran into some install issues so looking over at WineHQ, I found some list of components to install.

$ winetricks d3dx10 d3dx9_26 d3dx9_28 d3dx9_31 d3dx9_35 d3dx9_36 d3dx9_39 d3dx9_42 d3dx9_43 d3dx9 directx9 physx vcrun2003 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun6sp6 vcrun6 wmp10 xact_jun2010 xact xinput

Ran into the same empty message window again, so I'm running the setup with the /verysilent parameter.

Update: I think that the additional packages may have broken x360ce on Wine.  My previously configured ini file seems to work though so I just copied it into the folder.  There seems to be no added benefit to the libraries.  Direct3D 10 doesn't work so you have to run Assassin's Creed using the Direct3D 9 binary.

Also, the Witcher Adventure Multiplayer Beta no longer works, it seems.  It doesn't recognize the account as part of the closed beta.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Mass Effect 3, Origin Cloud and Wine

So, I had installed Mass Effect 3 on my Windows Vista laptop and also on my Wine Linux box and I decided to use Origin cloud to sync up everything so I could play on the go on the laptop and at the Linux box when I'm around.  On Vista, it picked up my Mass Effect 3 saves from Wine, no problem.  Apparently, I had issues when I was syncing my saves back to the Wine box.  At first, I simply chalked it up to Wine's own deficiencies and moved on.  When I went around to copying my saves from the Vista laptop to my Wine box however, I noticed that all the files touched by Origin's cloud save on Wine had 000 file permissions.  I also checked that the files were of the same size as the Vista files I copied.

I infer that this means the cloud sync actually worked but only the file permissions were goofed up.  Next time, I will try to simply chmod this.  As an additional side note, cloud syncing on Wine only works when launching Mass Effect 3 since Origin in Wine cannot detect when the game is finished running to sync back the progress.  The only way around this is to exit Origin, then restart again.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Nintendo DS Shoulder Button Unresponsive

I have to slap my head on this as I used to do these sort of cleaning tasks back in the day with the Famicom and the Megadrive.  The old DS I have started having issues with the R button.  It was responding at random and so I thought the button was just busted.  In fairness, the system is really old, and literally glued together due to numerous abuses from other people.  I decided to do a quick Google search for possible solution and the simplest solution to give the button a good and hard blow should do the trick.  There was probably way too much dirt on the contacts and this was apparently all I needed.  Phew.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Random Thoughts: Youtube Channel App on Wii

Yes, I still use my Wii on some occasions.  Usually, it's just to browse the web or use the Youtube app and its hapless streaming and buffering insanity.  I remember long ago before the html5 video days that Youtube videos used to stream at 240p reliably on the Internet Channel but those days are long gone.  While the Youtube app plays videos at crisp visual detail, the buffering insanity means you'll barely ever get to watch anything.

Last night, I had an idea to improve my usage experience of this horrible app.  This is to play only videos with smaller resolution when encoded on Youtube.  You'll spot video preview images that sport a letterbox-like black borders versus those that have the full screen when you search for videos.  I think that these imply the video source uploaded to Youtube was not ideal and the server encoding ended up producing odd borders.  Less video image information per packet, should mean better buffering, hopefully.  I tried it on one video and got reasonable streaming performance.  I will look for other videos and see if this theory works.

As a funny extra random thought.  Try browsing the Nintendo Miiverse using the Internet Channel and laugh at Nintendo.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Fglrx on Ubuntu 12.10

After my excursion with the wifi, I went to AMD's site and downloaded Catalyst 14.9 for Linux.  I also had to do more apt-getting for fglrx.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs dh-make dkms execstack dh-modaliases linux-headers-generic fakeroot xserver-xorg-dev lib32gcc1

Then follow the steps here.

Going back to Ubuntu 12.10

So, installing Ubuntu 12.10 on my HP laptop came with some unforeseen issues, but I think they are mostly sorted at this point.

After install, I had to go to /etc/apt/sources.lst to change all references to old-releases.ubuntu.com which is to be expected from an OS that is no longer supported.  I also decided to grab all the updates which took a bit of time to do.  It asked me to reboot which turned out to be a bad decision as I forgot to install the kernel headers and source which meant I had no wifi when I rebooted.  Why on earth did Ubuntu not auto-install the kernel source when these dkms dependent packages need them is beyond me.

So, to solve the lack of wifi from my Broadcom Wifi Card (4313, if I'm not mistaken), I had to boot back to the old kernel.  Right after the laptop's POST and just before booting Ubuntu I hit the shift key to get the grub menu.  The old kernel is at the advance option.  This allowed me to get my wifi back.  Then, I did some serious apt-getting.

 sudo apt-get install linux linux-headers-generic kernel-package

After that, I loaded Software Sources and disabled and re-enabled the Broadcom drivers which did some apt-getting and dkms work on its own.  Reboot after and voila, wifi on a new kernel.  Now for fglrx.

Fedora Core 20 and Virtualbox

I liked Fedora Core 20's interface.  I think it's right up there with Ubuntu's unity.  Unfortunately, it seems as my HP laptop cannot really run what I need to run from my backed up Virtualbox install.  So, I will be purging this and installing Ubuntu 12.10 which was the last Ubuntu release that was very problem free on this laptop.  Anyway, this blog post details the issues I came across while getting my backed up Virtualbox image to work.  More after the jump!

Monday, October 6, 2014

Backing Up and Restoring Oracle dbf

I had a brief excursion into installing Oracle and playing around with dbf files and figured to understand how to move the actual dbf file as a backup of the database and then restore it in a completely new installation.  These are notes I made using default parameters on Oracle and I'm not crazy enough to go into detail on what the hundreds of customized Oracle installs are available out there.

An important step before copying is to shutdown your Oracle instance and database.  So use your sysdba privileges and shut it down.  Then, basically, I copied the entire oradata folder from my ORACLE_BASE path into an external hard drive.  Along with that, I also copied the flash_recovery_area which contained the RMAN information as well as the revision of the database.  NOTE: the database from oradata must match the control.ctl file from flash_recovery_area.  If you startup the database again, the ctl file will be different and the backup won't work.

After reinstalling Oracle, I moved the oradata and flash_recovery_area from the fresh install into another folder (as precaution) and copied over the ones from my hard drive.  Then, I did:

SQL> startup mount;
SQL> recover database until cancel;
SQL> alter databse open resetlogs;

Then you can log into SQL*Plus and verify that the data is intact.  Afterwards, shut the database down.  This seems to take a long while to do but it will finish eventually.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Mass Effect 3: Multiplayer Error

I had one nasty instance where when I loaded the multiplayer on Mass Effect 3 PC version, the game froze when switching character classes.  After I forcibly killed the process and restarted the game, everytime I went to multiplayer, the game would load forever.  I tried to repair the install but that didn't work.

The only fix that I could do was pull out my backup install from an external hard disk and replace the installed copy with that backup.  I was then able to fire up the game and play multiplayer.  Note that the game did crash once after this replacement when selecting multiplayer.  Restarting the game went into multiplayer just fine though.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Semi-revisit of DP55WB Network Issues

I had spoken to a friend of mine about BIOS flashing at one point and he was very experienced at that.  Some time back, I had an article over the issues my DP55WB motherboard had and showed him the downloads.  He was kind enough to clear things up with me over what the downloads were.

The WB0336P.BIO file is used to restore in case the flashing goes wrong.  The WBIBX10J.86A.0336.BI.ZIP is a zip file that contains the flashing tool for DOS.  You would have to use something like unetbootin to build a FreeDOS boot disk.  Then, run the executable to flash the BIOS.  The last one WBIBX10J.86A.0336.EB.EXE is a Windows executable to update the BIOS directly.

As usual, it's important to get the motherboard right and make sure the power doesn't go out during flashing.  I'm not going to update my BIOS but this is good information to post here in the mean time.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

MoveTab MAQ71DX


So, I just got another one of these OEM tablets from MyView.  It's a bit pricier than the usual OEMs, but it's a dual core tablet which made me a bit leery considering the bad experience I got from the Thomson M-6. I checked the battery rating on this one and it's the same as the Eken which was 3000 mAh.  I gave the tablet a test run and it seemed fine and had Google Play Store so there was not much to complain about.  I double checked the Thomson battery rating and it was 2000 mAh which should explain the completely horrible battery life of that one.

The MoveTab has an 8 GB internal storage partitioned with around 1 GB for installation and the rest for data storage.  It seemed that several of its preinstalled stuff can actually be uninstalled which is a nice thing.  This seems to be a pretty new brand so it may get tricky down the road when the company vanishes, but as long as you get from a reputable store, they will take care of your issues.  Other than that, no real complaints.

GPU is PowerVR SGX531 and the CPU is MTK8377 ARM Cortex A9 which is a MediaTek SoC.  So far, works well with decent wifi and good touch screen functionality.  As an additional note, the website reports it as 2500 mAh but the box I bought had said it was 3000 mAh.  Please do not settle for anything less than that.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Wine-ing About Everything

So, the past few weeks of using Wine was interesting to say the least.  I had not realized how big this post was going to be until it was all done, so I'm putting this all after the jump!

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Mass Effect 2 and Screenshots

I wrapped up Mass Effect 1 yesterday and it was an interesting journey after playing Mass Effect 3 so many times and knowing much of the reveals.  I was going to move to playing Mass Effect 2 on my Linux box through Wine, but for some reason, it just wouldn't work.  I suspect it's because of Origin's activation thing that is tripping up, but after fighting with this for hours, I decided to install it right back on my old Vista laptop.

The next issue I had to fight with was the screenshot taking.  I used this forum thread to help.  To make things brief, what you need is to download the ME2CoalescedEditor and point it to your installed Mass Effect 2 path.  Then go to the BindingsManager, select the key to use (I used F12) at the bottom left panel, then select "Add New".  Type in 'Shot' (capitalizations don't matter, I think) on the command so it looks like:

Bindings=( Name="F12",Command="Shot")

Then, look for the BIOInput tab on the left side tabs and the following trees:
  • SFXGameNodeConversation
  • SFXGameNodeCinematics
Right click and then select Add Settings, then new single setting.  Paste the command above and then exit the editor (it automatically saves the changes).

There are two screenshot folders in Mass Effect 2.  The Bioware/Mass Effect 2/ScreenShots/ is always empty.  All screenshots go to Bioware/Mass Effect 2/BIOGame/Screenshots/.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Batch processing with GIMP

I found a useful article on how to get GIMP to perform tasks on files.  Have a look at this.  Be sure to apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry.

Origin on Wine and the Preparing Download

Well, I've gotten stuck on Wine and Origin's Preparing Download and had forgotten to patch Qt5Network.dll that had been overwritten by several Origin updates.  I'm fortunate that the patch is still in my Origin install folder so I backed up the new dll and re-ran the patch to fix it.  Details on this issue are on this Wine Bug thread.

Mass Effect 1 was pretty good and I finished it entirely in Wine/Linux.  Awesome!

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Windows Vista Disk Thrashing

I've tolerated Vista's insane disk thrashing forever now and usually the system would lock up with disk activity once in a session.  Having used Vista more often now, I decided to have a look at why in the world is this happening.  I have reduced it and here's the three basic culprit:
  1. Windows Search Indexing - Go to the Services and disable this service from starting up.
  2. Windows SuperFetch - This is also in the Services
  3. Automatic Disk Defragmenting - Go to Accessories, System Tools and then Disk Defragmenter.  Then, disable the Run on a schedule option.
Of the three, disk defragmenter was the major culprit of locking up.  So, if you're suffering, disable this one first.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Mass Effect 2 and sudden poor frame rate

My friend was going through Mass Effect trilogy and suffered sudden drops of frame rate in Mass Effect 2 mid-game and we were going through possible workarounds to solve her problems.  After all the tests, it turns out it was as simple as disabling the Origin overlay.  Damn crazy!

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Update on Realtek ALSA

I figured I'd put this down for whoever ends up finding this post.  I'm buying a new sound card and disposing the onboard sound.  Whoever is having issues with the ALC line of sound cards can look into Realtek's ALSA fork.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Random thoughts: Wii and Youtube PLUS Latest on ALSA

I've been playing around with the Youtube app from the Nintendo Shop Channel and the old Wii and it buffers like there's no tomorrow.  I found a tip online that suggested to set the MTU (Maximum transmission unit) to 1500 instead of 0.  A higher MTU means more data is being transmitted per packet.  This seemed to improve the Youtube streaming.

On ALSA and Ubuntu, the last bit of my research lead me to Realtek's own ALSA fork as the daily HDA drivers from Ubuntu do not do me any good.  I could not wrap my mind around trying to dkms it, so instead, I'm going to shop around for a decent sound card.

That's all!

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Revisiting Ubuntu and Trine 2 Audio Issue

I'm still running some tests on a possible solution to the problem.  I edited /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and added the line: options snd-hda-intel model=auto.  We'll see if it works.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Nintendo Wii U and the Samsung HT-BD2

So, after studying how to get the my Wii U to work with the Samsung bluray home theater system, I figured out a few things.  First of all, most likely due to a recent firmware upgrade, it is now possible from the TV setup menu of the Wii U settings to set the audio to go to HDMI, A/V cable, or both.  This became key to setting up the system (and it's very easy to miss!) as the Samsung HT-BD2 does not have any HDMI input.  For you to use the home theater system with other devices, you either use the digital audio in (which was abysmal the last time I've seen it used) or the auxiliary in (which worked much better).

Using the Wii component cables, I had hooked up the audio cables on the AUX in ports of the home theater system.  I also set the Wii U to use both HDMI and A/V cables for audio.  It worked really well but I realized that if the home theater system was turned on after booting the Wii U, the Wii U detects there's no device active on the A/V cables so it will automatically disable those.  To recover from this, you'd want to turn on the home theater system first before booting the Wii U.  If you get into the situation where the Wii U disables the sound, visiting the Settings app on Wii U re-enables the sound settings saved.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Google Play Install Error Code "919"

I had problems with the Thomson tablet with installing some applications and was getting this error message.  A little bit of searching and I found out that this was a network issue.  Clearing the dalvik cache and Google Play cache is commonly suggested but that doesn't help.  What helped in my case was to go to Settings and Data Usage, then turn off Mobile Phone Data.  This fixed the install problem.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Ubuntu 13.10 and Wifi

Seems like there's an issue where wifi keeps dropping on my new Ubuntu 13.10.  So, I found this article that seemed to help.  These are the commands:

sudo modprobe -rv wl
sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo modprobe -v brcmsmac
 

Friday, March 7, 2014

Upgrading to Ubuntu 13.10

Keeping this brief, I ran into an error with upgrading Ubuntu.  "Could not calculate the upgrade" or some other mumbo jumbo.  So I look into just what the hell is happening on this upgrade and came across with this askubuntu article.  Basically, it told me to look at the logs which was very helpful.

$ grep Broken /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log

This showed me that the custom xorg-xserver-video-intel package I installed for fglrx is causing the breakage.  I did apt-get remove to delete the package and re-ran the upgrade.  It seems to be pushing through now.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Using Origin on Wine is BAD NEWS... maybe not?

It seems that most of the issues with this are due to the fiber optic line that broke causing internet issues and DLC authorization errors.  Make sure that all Origin executables on Windows is in your antivirus/firewall exception list.

I'll keep this brief. Over the past days, I had issues with Origin when playing Mass Effect 3 online where connectivity is just shot. I would get errors where Origin would complain not having internet connection.  Mass Effect 3 wouldn't go online either which caused DLC authorization errors.

As it turns out, I started logging into Origin using my Wine install and I noticed doing this would create connection issues on Origin. Once it all got sorted on Windows, using it was fine. So, I deleted Origin on my Wine install. Never again.




Sunday, February 9, 2014

Better Oracle Exception Handling

While working with Oracle, I've learned more and more on better ways of handling exceptions.  There are some major specifics that need to be taken note of.  raise_application_error only works with custom error numbers.  You cannot use it to make Oracle throw just any exception.  Normally, you would use a predefined name like this: 

begin
      some select statement...
exception when no_data_found then
      --handle exception
end;

Sometimes, the Oracle error you want to handle is just not predefined.  So, you'd need a better way of handling errors and throwing some meaningful error messages back.

var b_err_code number;
begin
      some select statement...
exception when others then
      :b_err_code = SQLCODE;
      if :b_err_code = '-00904' then
          --handle exception
      else
          raise_application_error(-20000, 'Some Customized Error Message: ' || :b_err_code || ' Actual SQL Error: ' || SQLERRM);
      end if;
end;

Some points of interest here.  Using when others then allows you to handle all other cases.  Over here, we store the SQL error number to the bind variable b_err_code.  In Oracle, SQLCODE returns exactly that and in our example, we are expecting to handle ORA-00904 via the if condition.  We also have an else part where we generate our own application error.  We also use SQLERRM to return a human readable version of the SQL error message received, that would otherwise had gotten lost in the call stack.  Hope this little bit helps other Oracle and SQL developers.

May Lee Shepard

Reposted here.

Having left the wikia community.  The profile is gone.  I may re-post it here some day.

I had fun doing this in the Mass Effect wikia.  Hope you enjoy this profile.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Nintendo Wii U and my HD TV

So here's a fairly significant update from my tests for some form of TV control via my Wii U gamepad for my Ovation 32" HD TV (OVA-HKC32A5).  For control, my bare minimum requirements are volume control and powering up and down my TV.  In my previous post, I found a signal buried in the Wii U's Akai manufacturer to provide some minor semblance of functionality.  Unfortunately, it's woefully inadequate.  This time, I've gone without much success until I reached 'T'.  All through that time, I was only testing using the volume + and - buttons but since the recent finds, I've decided to also test the INPUT button.  So without further ado, I give you the signals I found in addition.

TAG Signal Type 1 surprised the hell out of me as at this time I had come to get used to nothing ever happening.  Pressing 5 will change the sound mode on the Ovation TV.  Pressing Volume - will open the TV source menu.  The A button will decrease the volume while D-pad right will increase the volume.  D-pad down will alter the picture mode.  Pressing either the left or right stick will decrease the volume of the TV.  None of the other buttons seem to have any discernible effect.

Telefunken Signal Type 21 is the next one.  Again, pressing 5 will change the sound mode.  Pressing on Channel down button changes the picture mode.  D-pad down does this as well.  The volume buttons are properly mapped, so that's a good thing.  D-pad left increases the volume.  INPUT button toggles the sleep mode of the TV.

Telefunken Signal Type 23 is another.  The volume buttons are once again properly mapped.  INPUT button opens the TV source menu.  D-pad left decreases the volume and D-pad right increases the volume.  The channel up and down buttons browse the source menu up and down respectively.

Last one is Telefunken Signal Type 24.  INPUT button once again opens the TV source menu.  Channel up button decreases the volume.  D-pad right increases the volume while D-pad left decreases it.  Power button is properly mapped so it's now possible to turn on the TV and fiddle around with the volume settings.  This is pretty much the bare minimum of what I want my Wii U TV remote to do.  Shame Nintendo had to make me go through an enormous amount of tests just to find this.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Nintendo Wii U and TV Signals

Good grief, Nintendo.  You clearly don't know how to make a user friendly app.  I've gone down to 'P' with no sign of progress except for the Akai one.  I read somewhere that the Akai TVs were rebadged Samsung TVs so that gave me some hope in using the Samsung signals.  I did go through those though and came away with nothing!

Nintendo has a search page for TV remote signals on their website but its all hidden in this crazy ajax search box.  Please let people browse the actual database.  Some people may actually want to try different codes on their TVs and not something tied specifically to their model number.  If you have a wealth of information there, let the people actually see it!

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Update on PulseAudio v ALSA

So, here I go again, diving into this PulseCrap and so, I've found that Ubuntu does come with the Pulse plugins for ALSA.  It's tucked inside libasound2-plugins but I'm starting to think this is the cause for my audio disappearing.  This reminds me of my OSS/ALSA days where sound contention causes the audio to just disappear.  Time to dive into the Launchpad bugs.

According to the archlinux blog, Trine 2 uses OpenAL, but I'm not certain if Natural Selection 2 uses that.  Still need to keep digging, though here's one interesting link I found.

Losing sound on select games...

I've noticed that on some games, I lose sound not only on the game, but also on the entire desktop. It's an odd issue, but I believe I have finally found a possible cause. I have tried playing Natural Selection 2 and although I am happy that it comes with a Linux client, along with Trine 1 and 2, as well as Red Orchestra, the sound goes away until I reboot.

I decided to run ldd on it to see if there were clues. I noticed that when I compare it with games that don't exhibit this behaviour that NS2 has a link to libasound.so which I think is a sure sign that this is another one of those ALSA vs Pulse Audio conflicts.  I will do more research, but this is a theory that is making a lot of sense at the moment.




Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition not on Wii U?

Hey Ed Boon, skipping on Wii U like all the other developers, eh?  How hard is it to simply release an Ultimate Edition DLC pack on Wii U and sell it on eShop instead of pressing discs?  C'mon.  This ain't right!

Monday, January 20, 2014

Kingdom of Amalur Demo Loading Times

I'll keep this brief.  Tried Kingdom of Amalur demo and suffered through long loading times.  Disabling v-sync helps with that but brings some unintended issues like the player stuck moving forward and out of sync audio.  Just deal with it.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Feedback on Thomson Tablet

I've been using this tablet for a while now and the final conclusion on this tablet is that people should not buy this one.  The dual core processor definitely looks attractive but the Infotmic SoC is not good at all.  It's incredibly underpowered and Real Racing 3 struggles to get a steady clip on it.  Overall response is not good when under duress which leads to input failure.  You're buying into this sort of tablet to get performance and you are getting none of that here.  This is just the tip of the iceberg though.

The touch screen performance under normal operations is touchy.  Dragging icons and removing them ends up being such a chore.  It constantly misinterprets taps and touch drag actions which brings the whole experience down.  Battery life is also very short.  I suspect the battery pack slipped into this is no different from other Chinese OEM tablets but the dual core SoC ends up sucking up more juice.  Lastly, the camera stopped working a week ago.  Everytime I try to use the camera app, I just get an error saying that it couldn't connect to the camera.

There's a lot of promise for cheap Chinese high performance tablets, but don't buy into it this fast.  I would advise sticking to a single core tablet as the performance on those are much more reliable.  While Thomson had good and loud speakers and the over all display is much better than the Eken, its several negative points really mar the experience.  This made me look into other tablets of similar nature like Polaroid tablets.  The lack of documentation is disconcerting and I've only found the SoC of only one of their models to be Rockchip.  That's a good manufacturer, but Polaroid tablets don't use Google Play which makes it a no-go almost immediately.  Do your homework and always be careful with these things, guys.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

This is Insane!

I've begun searching through my Wii U TV signal to find a hopeful possible remote control code to use to interface with my TV.  The old Ovation LCD TV (OVA HKC32A5) is an OEM LCD TV from the manufacturer HKC down in Shen Zhen, China.  Unfortunately, it looks like this is no longer being sold here so I figured finding out a possible replacement for my remote control in case that piece of equipment breaks would be a fine idea.  Nintendo's interface is so sucky though so it's been time consuming going through each of the TV signals from the Wii U's database.  Is it so hard to automate the IR transmission and have a progress bar go through every signal type of every brand and have the user just tap Work or Didn't Work?  Gah!

I've gone from letters A to F brands and probably will resume on the letter G when I turn the machine back on.  The lone success case is Akai Signal Type 10 but it's far from perfect.  The remote signal mapping is totally weird in that signal type.  Pressing Vol + would change my picture mode while pressing INPUT would increase my volume.  0 will open the TV's option menu while 7 scrolls up.  8 enters the menu and also increases the volume (if the menu is not open).  The rest of the buttons do not do anything.

I'll be back with an update if I find a better signal type or with a note if I did not find any signal whatsoever.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Random Thoughts: Linux stuff

I've had to deal with some Oracle apps I've downloaded the other day and I needed JDK which I normally do not like to install.  I ended up installing openjdk7-jdk (don't use jre), and I needed to figure out where the Java path is.  It's in /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-xxx/.

The linux command pstree -p is good at showing a list of commands running.  I had a problem with apt-get updating packages when it got stuck on flash.  Killing package-data-do got it sorted.

Finally, I loved Mass Effect 3.  Great game!

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Mass Effect 3's Endings

Yes, I'm late to the party.  Chances are, people have moved on and many others were angry.  With limited exposure to the Mass Effect series, I looked into the original cut endings on Youtube and remembered how random it all looked and felt.  It just ended and there was little of anything in it.  It was so unsatisfying, but I also pointed out that without the actual journey, the ending would be likely meaningless.  BioWare eventually came out with the Extended Cut release and the endings there were much lengthier and more effectively rounded out the ending.  It was much better when compared to the original cut, but without the journey, it would be difficult to understand the experience.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Checking nVIDIA driver blob versions

I'm half thinking about a GPU upgrade for my desktop machine and I'm also thinking that hotswapping an nVIDIA card for my aging GeForce 9500 GT may work.  Doing a bit of homework, I decided to check what the driver version is right now.

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  313.30  Wed Mar 27 16:56:45 PDT 2013
GCC version:  gcc version 4.7.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.3-1ubuntu1) 

From the NV's documentation, it covers GPUs all the way to GTX 770.  That's good to know!

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Even better Youtube Alternative on Android

I had a previous post regarding the old Youtube app no longer functioning and had recommended an app which in the long run did not perform as well as I had hoped.  This has lead me to look into PVSTAR+ which is remarkably more stable and has better streaming capabilities.  It's pretty good and deserves mention!