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Yesterday I had some good old fun trying to replace the backup battery of an Acer Travelmate 803 laptop.

I thought that since this is a part that should be replaceable by the user, it should be reachable (like the memory, harddisk, you know). Guess again !

After flipping through the service manual (which I had luckily found), it seemed that there were no disassembly instructions for this battery. Looking on the blueprints of the motherboard, it showed the battery as being on the underside of the motherboard - ergo, requiring full disassembly of the laptop… wtf?!?

I’m damn glad that I had the manual, because otherwise I think getting this thing apart is not quite so easy.

Here are some after-disassembly-pics:

And here, the battery…

which ofcourse had to be of another type than the five we have in the house, so now I have to wait with the reassembly until tomorrow after I get the friggin’ battery! -damnit! Couldn’t they stick to the standard CR2032!?

*growl*

Because I keep forgetting them, here’s a list of buttons you can press during a Mac’s boot to change behaviour:

See also Apple article HT1343

So true… ;)

(thanks to Gh0sty)

I recently acquired a Mac Mini, which I’m going to use as a PVR.

Together with an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid it works perfectly, attached to my good old analogue 21″ Sony TV .

Sofar it seems to work fine, using a DVI-to-svideo convertor. I’ve installed the EyeTV software, the PyeTV Front Row plugin (which allows me to controle EyeTV from within Front Row) and Perian (for more codec support in Front Row)

More on this can be found on the Hicksdesign blog ;)

Upgraded my Macbook with a bigger disk: from an 80gb Toshiba MK8034GSX drive (with which it came delivered) to a (secondhand) 320gb Hitachi HTS543232L9A300 (what’s in a name…). Long live diskspace! ;)

And thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner the migration was painless.

I’ve been having a weird issue with the motherboard on my pc. The first time you boot it in a day, it was very likely to freeze on you - either after the USB started flopping on and off, or the sound starting cracking, and so on… not very fun. Solution: power off the power supply for a minute, power it back on, and it would be good to go for the rest of the day. It’s not an unknown issue (see this thread on the Abit forums)

The weird thing is, this problem only started after switching cases due to noise. No idea why, the power supply is actually more stable than the previous one!

I recently related this to some coworkers, and one of them still had a spare motherboard around… so I recently replaced my Abit KN9-SLI mainboard with an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe mainboard, and have had no problems since. I finally have a stable pc again! :)

I’m currently trying to get Linux (Debian Sid) working on my MacBook… it’s installed, but still needs lots of tweaking.

Most of the things work out of the box, except the things listed below:

Specific things that work (after tweaking):

• Xorg with resolution at 1280×800
• WiFi (atheros)
• special buttons (volume/brightness/…)

Things that need to work still:

• Touchpad (well, it works, but it needs to work better)
• iSight

Sources I’m using at the moment:

• http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_MacBook

I’ll write a detailed post on this later… when I’m not uberly lazy ;)

I “recently” ordered (after doing some research) a Raidsonic Icybox NAS (full model: IB-NAS4220-B). I chose it because of:

• gigabit ethernet port
• dual disk support with JBOD/Mirror/Stripe
• runs linux
• Samba/NFS/FTP/iTunes server
• community site http://www.nas-4220.org/
• low power consumtion
• quiet
• …

The NAS arrived a week ago, and I ordered two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750gb disks (model: ST3750640AS) to go in it. I prefer seagate for the 5 years of warranty they give on their disks. They arrived two days ago.

Unfortunately, after initial stress tests I got the following SMART errors (using smartctl, part of the wonderful smartmontools) on one of the disks:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

The vendor-specific Attribute is:

ID#	ATTRIBUTE_NAME	FLAG	VALUE	WORST	THRESH	TYPE	UPDATED	WHEN_FAILED	RAW_VALUE
10	Spin_Retry_Count	0×0013	069	069	097	Pre-fail	Always	FAILING_NOW	0

which isn’t very healthy :(

The disk is packed up and ready to be shipped back to the store…

I wonder how long the lifetime is of a Linksys WRT54G v2.2 router… I have one, and it’s been showing more and more problems with the WiFi part of the router: often after a powerup it just doesn’t initialise, no WiFi to be seen. The router reports it’s up, but there just isn’t any signal.

It usually takes 2-3 powercycles (unplugging and replugging the power) to get it running. Kinda annoying if half of your infrastructure depends on said WiFi :p and the router is on another floor :p

I just swapped my WRT54GL (that I used in a WDS setup) with the WRT54G, and now the internet-connected router is working well but the WDS one isn’t :p Time to either:

• use my spare WRT54G v5 (which is flashed with dd-wrt micro)
• buy a new WRT54GL (and flash it using Tomato - what I use now on my routers)

I’ll see. I still have a voucher for MediaMarkt that I need to use… ;)

After they screwed a screw in my previous repair, it’s back again. I’ve checked it, nothing’s loose, everything seems to be in order. Let’s hope it is!