First, I'd like to admit that blogging isn't my thing.  I wanted to case file some of my more interesting work here, however, having a new little wee one reduces the amount of time for things like this!

Nevertheless, a client showed me a Denon amp that has no LED display.

The Amp has a 100mA fuse.  (Upper left in the pic above.)  You can tell it's dead if you have no continuity across it when the amp is unplugged.  When the lid is off and you are looking at the amp from the back, (LCD display away from you.) the fuse is in the upper right hand side...

I removed it, cleaned up the solder through holes with solder wick, bent and trimmed the leads of the new one, and inserted it as such..  (On the solder side, not the component side.  <tsk! tsk!>

The results being...

The service manual can be found here.

If you'd like to perform this repair yourself, great!  Else, you can contact me here to arrange shipping and handling.

The whole upgrade procedure only takes a few minutes to complete.  The power LED on the router remains red in colour during the upgrade process.  In this time, do NOT be tempted to unplug the power from the hub.

• Eventually, the router will reboot itself and the Power and Ethernet LEDs will change to green colour.   Wait for the 'Broadband' LED to change to solid green colour to confirm you have an ADSL connection to the telephone exchange.
• Now you can log into the router by entering your gateway IP address through any web browser.
  
  
• Click on Connection Status and this should return you to the familiar main page of the hub.
• Now go to Broadband Link > Advanced Settings and manually enter your ADSL connection parameters and login details. 

Ensure 'ATM PVC Search' is set to 'Disabled', otherwise the 'ATM Circuit Identifier' and 'ATM Encapsulation' settings have no effect.  If you cannot get the settings in the above picture to work, try using 'ATM PVC Search' set to 'Enabled' as shown above.

• My ISP uses PPPoE as shown above.  If this doesn't work for you, contact your ISP and they should provide you with the correct settings.
• I use Google DNS servers, because I like sharing my browsing habits with our newest overlord, and I also like having fast lookups.
• Some ISPs may require you to adjust the MTU setting too otherwise you may not be able to connect to some websites.
• Enter your username and password that was supplied to you by your ISP.
  
• Press the 'Save' button to saves the settings.   The 'Internet' LED on the front of the hub should eventually change colour from red to green to confirm you are successfully logged into your ISP.  You may need to close and re-open your web browser before you can surf in the internet.
• Run the System Setup wizard to enter your desired key code.  ​

You can now configure your wireless connection and any port forwarding that you may need.  to access the Management and Diagnostic Console, go to http://<yourGW_IPaddr>/xslt?PAGE=J42 The MDC password is '2wire'

A nicely photographed storage and compute cluster..

www.flickr.com/photos/fullaperture/sets/72157626000022776

Upon occasion, my phone won't update due to insufficient space on the root partition.  There are plenty of videos out there that show you how to download more crap on to the phone.  My problem is that you can't.  There is insufficient space!

A quick remedy that doesn't involve rooting your phone, plugging in a USB cord to a secondary computer and altering archaic folders, or even worse, attempting to do so via a terminal on your phone is to dial...

• *#9900#

MikeroChip Solutions now accepts credit card payments!

Card-processing adheres to PCI Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) Level 1 thanks to Square Up.

Is your business interested as well?

Sign up at https://squareup.com/i/53B59C35 to receive your own *free* card reader as well!

What is PCI-DSS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/…/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Securi…

Upon the clients laptop smashing to the floor and the LCD becoming a colourful mess, I extracted the hard drive so that it could be copied.  A cyclic redundancy check error was preventing the drive from being read.  CRC's are an error-detecting code that is used in storage devices and digital networks to detect accidental changes to raw data.  Blocks of data get a short check value attached, based on the remainder of a polynomial division of their contents.  {from: wiki }

First you copy as much data as possible, without retrying or splitting sectors:

• ddrescue --no-split /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile 
  
  

Now let it retry previous errors 3 times, using uncached reads:

• ddrescue --direct --max-retries=3 /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile 
  
  

If that fails you, try again but this time retrimmed, so it tries to reread full sectors:

• ddrescue --direct --retrim --max-retries=3 /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile 
  
  

{from: www.forensicswiki.org }

The failure went from 57.1KB to 1024b.  Sir, you may have your drive back, and your family photos have been saved!

We don't have legislation like this in Canada as of yet, but really, besides putting more money in to the pockets of OEM's people should have the right to repair.  Not only does this limit the amount of refuse in landfills, but it's about time that we, the people, the consumers who vote ever god-damned day with the almighty dollar, ensure corporate responsibility.  Not not manufacture junk.  To take back hazardous waist that is contained in their products, and just maybe, they will reform their supply lines rather than cry the fact that it 'costs too much.'  Paying $750 for a motherboard replacement on a laptop that costs $1200 for a $0.17 part that went the way of the dodo bird is what costs too much!

http://www.digitalrighttorepair.org/

Upon enabling Chrome Remote Desktop on a remote computer that I might need to covertly access from time to time, and having it's physical location in more than less PITA location, I opted for something quick and dirty.  Enter Chrome spyware. :D

Problem was, chrome would flash some window in 30 milliseconds and be gone.  

This bug report details what I was experiencing, and the TL;DR version is summarized here.

Install the deb file, and now you should be able to generate pins from your Ubuntu computer.

I hope it works for you as well!