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Although I hardly use my SD-1, due to my GT-8 having all of the overdrive settings I could possibly want, it was still annoying me that I had a faulty pedal sitting on my shelf. The problem I was experiencing was that the SD-1 was constantly stuck in its on position – Stomping on it did nothing but continue with the overdrive.

After taking it apart and hooking it back up to some power, a guitar and an amp, in its disassembled state it was working fine – Reassemble and the fault reappears. It was instantly obvious that something was shorting out against the metal casing. You’d have thought that there was some form of non-conductive coating on the base-plate – Maybe there is, but defective near the switching area of the circuit. Covering the base-plate with insulation tape fixed the issue and it’s now working perfectly again!

My media server was getting to the stage where it required some extra discs, so I purchased another pair of 500GB SATA disks and a SiI-3114 based PCI to 4-port SATA controller card to hook them up to as I was out of spare SATA ports.

Upon booting there was no sign of the cards BIOS during POST and no sign of the disks attached to it either after booting into Ubuntu, though running lspci reported that the card was present. After poking around with a mixture of Google and the Ubuntu forums, a number of people were having issues with the card but no conclusive fix had been found.

So I head on over to the Silicon Image website to check if there are any new BIOS images available, and surprisingly there was! After downloading, and realising that the only flash tool available was DOS based along with my server not having a floppy drive or a CD drive to boot into a DOS shell with I managed to get a USB stick booting into DOS with the flash tool.

To cut the story short – Flashing the card with the latest non-RAID version of the BIOS fixed my issue. It was now displaying the BIOS upon boot, and the attached disks were visible when running lshw -C disk.

So I accidentally spilled a cup of tea over my Blackberry. Fortunately, after drying it off most of it worked perfectly bar one of the most important components in a mobile phone – The microphone.

After doing a little research, it turns out that the mic is surface mounted to the keyboard PCB so to replace the mic I’d need a new (or working) keyboard PCB. The only place I could find this component new was on some American website, which after shipping and other taxes involved in importing stuff, would have cost about £70. Or, I could have sent it off to Vodafone for repair at a cost of £60 and a few weeks Blackberry-less no doubt.

I ended up grabbing what was described as a faulty 8800 from someone on eBay for about £40, the description said it had a software fault, so there was a good chance that the hardware was in good condition. It turns out that there was nothing wrong with it from what I could gather after messing around with it for a couple of minutes. But it was on the o2 network, so no use to me. (more…)

Since I first bought my Logitech MX5000 combo it has never worked correctly on Ubuntu (back to 6.06 maybe…) after booting. The keyboard would work perfectly in the BIOS and even in GRUB, but as soon as I reached the (GUI) log-in screen my MX5000 would become unresponsive until I disconnected the USB Bluetooth receiver and plugged it back in. As you could imagine, quite tedious on every boot.

After doing a bit of research, this appears to be a fairly common issue. One suggestion that did work for me was to remove the bluez-* packages, but apparently there is the side effect of other Bluetooth devices no longer working. This isn’t an issue for me, so it’ll keep me happy until a real fix is in place.

Drop the following into your CLI if you’re having the same issue…
sudo apt-get remove bluez-cups bluez-pcmcia-support bluez-pin bluez-utils

I have just noticed an odd bug when viewing a H1 tag with a background colour under IE6 – There is no background colour until the H1 is taken out of view by scrolling it out of the viewport and then bringing it back again. Highlighting the text partially brings in some colour.

One solution for this issue is add relative positioning to the tags CSS class.

I consider my understanding of MySQL around the intermediate level, but when writing table joins in the past I have always used the ‘equi-join’ method:

SELECT t1.*, t2.`name` FROM t1, t2 WHERE t1.n = t2.n;

Now, when a record for t2.n doesn’t exist, a row will not be returned. To solve this problem in the past, I would have executed two separate queries and process the output with PHP – Not the most efficient solution.

(more…)

I’ve had my MPC 500 for a couple of weeks and in my limited experience using it, I appear to be having an issue. I’m not sure if it’s a setting that needs changing, if the 500 is faulty, my limited RAM (I have 128MB on order) or if it’s purely a limitation of the 500 model.

In a nutshell, I have created a sequence and have it looping while I play with some samples over the top. When playing patterns over the top, it appears to be affecting the playback of other samples in the sequence. (more…)