This post will be updated regularly.
Titanizer Home Screen Editor (Requires Adobe Flash 7 for Windows Mobile)
Titanium Home Screen Plugins
Nice Windows Mobile wallpaper/background pack
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Ubuntu: Use apt-get through a proxy
You can set proxy settings in the Synaptic package manager but these don't seem to affect apt-get. To get apt-get to work through a proxy do:
You'll need to open a new terminal for it to take effect.
sudo nano /etc/bash.bashrcAt the end of the file add:
export http_proxy=http://username:password@proxyserver:port/If your proxy server does not require authentication then leave out the username:password@
export ftp_proxy=http://username:password@proxyserver:port/
You'll need to open a new terminal for it to take effect.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running cannot be used to view PDF files in a web browser
This is caused by an incorrect registry entry.
From: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405461.html
Go to Start > Run
Type regedit and click OK.
Browse to the following key:
Make sure that the correct Default data value is set for the path where Adobe Reader or Acrobat are installed.
The default installation values are
From: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405461.html
Go to Start > Run
Type regedit and click OK.
Browse to the following key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Software\Adobe\Acrobat\Exe
Make sure that the correct Default data value is set for the path where Adobe Reader or Acrobat are installed.
The default installation values are
"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe"or
"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat.exe"depending on whether Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat is installed.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
ATI Radeon 4770 Windows 7 Drivers
UPDATE: The newest Catalyst drivers work just fine and should from here on out.
There are Catalyst 9.5 beta drivers out that will support the 4770 under Windows 7. You can find them here.
There are Catalyst 9.5 beta drivers out that will support the 4770 under Windows 7. You can find them here.
ASUS P5B Windows 7 Audio Drivers
The latest drivers I could find for the AD 1988 audio chipset work great under Windows 7 (x64). ASUS hasn't updated their website in ages but there are much newer drivers available. 6.10.02.6520 worked the best for me. The stock Windows 7 drivers do work, but there's no bass crossover management if you're doing 6 channel out to a receiver. 6.10.02.6520 corrected the issue.
Download 6.10.02.6520 here
When installing use the following executable, the DTS drivers do not work well.
See http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/adi-soundmax-1986-88-a-b-xonar-t71280.html for a full list of available AD 1988 drivers.
Download 6.10.02.6520 here
When installing use the following executable, the DTS drivers do not work well.
SoundMAX_Audio_V51016520_V61016520\NON_DTS\Vista\setup.exe
See http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/adi-soundmax-1986-88-a-b-xonar-t71280.html for a full list of available AD 1988 drivers.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
ASUS P5B Deluxe Bios Recovery SPI Flash Cable
UPDATE: Here are some excellent tips from Anthony Quatroni in the comments:
Skip down the HOWTO for the good stuff.
In perhaps a moment of great stupidity and laziness, I reflashed the bios on my ASUS P5B Deluxe using the ASUS windows based flash utility. It wiped it clean, loaded the new one, and then it couldn't verify. At this point your only two options are quit or retry. So I retry, now it won't even try to write the bios. Having no other choice I rebooted the machine and hoped for the best. I got the worst.
The machine wouldn't do anything. The motherboard is supposed to have a built in bios recovery mode, but it seems that was wiped out as well by the Windows flash utility. It was time to send it back to ASUS so they could reflash it. The bios isn't removable, so surely there's some kind of device they plug into to reflash it for you I thought.
It turns out I was right. Next to the BIOS chip, to the left of the south bridge, is an undocumented 7 pin connector labeled SPI_J1. After a lot research I stumbled upon a few pages (linked at the bottom) that documented the type of cable necessary and the software to use this port to reflash the bios.
The cable consists of a parallel connector wired to something you can plug into the pins that also has a 2.7V-3.6V input to power the chip while reflashing it. I made a really bad attempt at using a chopped up parallel cable and the ends from a USB header port thing. This didn't work out well so I found at the local electronics store a parallel connector with a ribbon cable on it. I took it apart and re-soldered the ribbon to the correct pins.
To get the ~3V, I took a pass through power connector from an old case fan and added three diodes to the 5V wire, giving me a little over 3V. I then wired this to the ribbon cable and hooked the power connector into another running machine. I then used my laptop to flash to bios.
HOWTO:
Supplies:
A DOS boot cd, usb drive, or floppy
BIOS ROM for the motherboard
SPIPGM (Software that does the flashing)
CWSDPMI (DPMI host process needed by SPIPGM)
Multimeter
Soldering Iron
Male DB25 connector
Header connector of some sort, you'll need 6 pins total.
To make the cable I used a DB25M TO IDC10 SERIAL connector. This really seems like the easiest thing to use. They look like this:
The header is found on the motherboard directly to the left of the south bridge.
Here is how the header pins are numbered:
Here is a table showing which header pins should be connected to what parallel pins. Pin 1 on the header is for +3V.
Here's what my cable looks like (Note: it looks like the power lead is connected to the DB25 but in fact it is solder to the ribbon, it goes to pin 1 on the header)
If you use a cable similar to mine, open it up and desolder the ribbon from the connector. Take a paper clip and stick it into the holes in the header connector to determine which lead needs to go to what pin on the DB25 using your multimeter. Solder each lead appropriately.
You then need to get a 5V line from another computer (The Red wire on a molex connector). Solder three diodes in series and connect them to the 5V line. Use your multimeter to ensure the voltage drop gives you between 2.7V and 3.6V. Solder this to the appropriate ribbon lead.
Now that you're ready to flash, boot your flashing computer with your DOS boot media. First, you need to run cwsdpmi.exe, then run spipgm. (Note: you have to run cwsdpmi.exe before SPIPGM each time.)
The command sequence should look like this:
It will ask for the total size of the flashrom, enter 1024
If SPIPGM reports your chip id as fffffffh then something isn't right. Check all your connections. SPIPGM has several functions, such as erasing the BIOS first. Run SPIPGM without any options to see a list.
Giving credit where credit is due, without these sites I never would have figured this out.
http://richard-burke.dyndns.org/wordpress/tag/p5b/
http://www.fccps.cz/download/adv/frr/spi/msi_spi.html
http://rayer.ic.cz/elektro/spipgm.htm
OK let me go into a little more detail. It seems that SPIPGM.EXE by itself, writes a page at a time to the SST chip in the Asus P5B boards. You MUST use either the recompiled SPIPGM.EXE or, even better, use the SPIPGM2.EXE. You can build the cable WITHOUT any resistors or caps as long as you use the orange (3V) output from the surrogate PC's ATX power supply. Then you MUST use the /S switch (SPIPGM2.EXE /S xxxxxx.ROM) to write to the chip AFTER you unlock it with /U and erase with /E. This is the only thing that worked for me and I am back up and running perfectly.
Skip down the HOWTO for the good stuff.
In perhaps a moment of great stupidity and laziness, I reflashed the bios on my ASUS P5B Deluxe using the ASUS windows based flash utility. It wiped it clean, loaded the new one, and then it couldn't verify. At this point your only two options are quit or retry. So I retry, now it won't even try to write the bios. Having no other choice I rebooted the machine and hoped for the best. I got the worst.
The machine wouldn't do anything. The motherboard is supposed to have a built in bios recovery mode, but it seems that was wiped out as well by the Windows flash utility. It was time to send it back to ASUS so they could reflash it. The bios isn't removable, so surely there's some kind of device they plug into to reflash it for you I thought.
It turns out I was right. Next to the BIOS chip, to the left of the south bridge, is an undocumented 7 pin connector labeled SPI_J1. After a lot research I stumbled upon a few pages (linked at the bottom) that documented the type of cable necessary and the software to use this port to reflash the bios.
The cable consists of a parallel connector wired to something you can plug into the pins that also has a 2.7V-3.6V input to power the chip while reflashing it. I made a really bad attempt at using a chopped up parallel cable and the ends from a USB header port thing. This didn't work out well so I found at the local electronics store a parallel connector with a ribbon cable on it. I took it apart and re-soldered the ribbon to the correct pins.
To get the ~3V, I took a pass through power connector from an old case fan and added three diodes to the 5V wire, giving me a little over 3V. I then wired this to the ribbon cable and hooked the power connector into another running machine. I then used my laptop to flash to bios.
HOWTO:
Supplies:
A DOS boot cd, usb drive, or floppy
BIOS ROM for the motherboard
SPIPGM (Software that does the flashing)
CWSDPMI (DPMI host process needed by SPIPGM)
Multimeter
Soldering Iron
Male DB25 connector
Header connector of some sort, you'll need 6 pins total.
To make the cable I used a DB25M TO IDC10 SERIAL connector. This really seems like the easiest thing to use. They look like this:
The header is found on the motherboard directly to the left of the south bridge.
Here is how the header pins are numbered:
Here is a table showing which header pins should be connected to what parallel pins. Pin 1 on the header is for +3V.
| Header Pin | Parallel Pin |
|---|---|
| 2 | 18 |
| 3 | 7 |
| 4 | 8 |
| 5 | 10 |
| 6 | 9 |
Here's what my cable looks like (Note: it looks like the power lead is connected to the DB25 but in fact it is solder to the ribbon, it goes to pin 1 on the header)
If you use a cable similar to mine, open it up and desolder the ribbon from the connector. Take a paper clip and stick it into the holes in the header connector to determine which lead needs to go to what pin on the DB25 using your multimeter. Solder each lead appropriately.
You then need to get a 5V line from another computer (The Red wire on a molex connector). Solder three diodes in series and connect them to the 5V line. Use your multimeter to ensure the voltage drop gives you between 2.7V and 3.6V. Solder this to the appropriate ribbon lead.
Now that you're ready to flash, boot your flashing computer with your DOS boot media. First, you need to run cwsdpmi.exe, then run spipgm. (Note: you have to run cwsdpmi.exe before SPIPGM each time.)
The command sequence should look like this:
cwsdpmi
spipgm /u /e p5b-bios.rom
cwsdpmi
spipgm /p p5b-bios.rom
It will ask for the total size of the flashrom, enter 1024
If SPIPGM reports your chip id as fffffffh then something isn't right. Check all your connections. SPIPGM has several functions, such as erasing the BIOS first. Run SPIPGM without any options to see a list.
Giving credit where credit is due, without these sites I never would have figured this out.
http://richard-burke.dyndns.org/wordpress/tag/p5b/
http://www.fccps.cz/download/adv/frr/spi/msi_spi.html
http://rayer.ic.cz/elektro/spipgm.htm
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Google Chrome and Windows 7
To get Google Chrome to work properly in Windows 7 you need to modify the Chrome shortcut. Right-click the Chrome icon and click properties, then click the Shortcut tab. Where it says target you need to add --in-process-plugins after chrome.exe. The final line should look like this:
Also, there's an issue with Chrome crashing when you hit the back button if the page you are currently on has a Flash element on it. Just install the latest Chrome beta. It seems to help a bit but doesn't fix it completely.
C:\Users\mondo\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --in-process-plugins
Also, there's an issue with Chrome crashing when you hit the back button if the page you are currently on has a Flash element on it. Just install the latest Chrome beta. It seems to help a bit but doesn't fix it completely.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 and GRID
I had a lot of trouble getting the Logitech RumblePad 2 working correctly with GRID. The steering was way too sensitive and twitchy. GRID only has built in support for the wired version of the RumblePad 2, but by editing one of the XML files you can get the cordless RumblePad 2 to work great.
First, make sure you have the latest GRID patch. Then open the actionMapPreset7.xml file which is located in the install directory under ActionMap. The standard path on a 32bit XP machine is:
On a 64bit XP machine it is:
You need to replace every occurrence of
Now when you go into the game controls the default preset should say Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 at the top. You will also now be able to control the game menus from the pad. If you have trouble try creating a new game profile.
First, make sure you have the latest GRID patch. Then open the actionMapPreset7.xml file which is located in the install directory under ActionMap. The standard path on a 32bit XP machine is:
C:\Program Files\Codemasters\GRID\ActionMap\actionMapPreset7.xml
On a 64bit XP machine it is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Codemasters\GRID\ActionMap\actionMapPreset7.xml
You need to replace every occurrence of
Logitech RumblePad 2 USBwith
Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 USB
Now when you go into the game controls the default preset should say Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 at the top. You will also now be able to control the game menus from the pad. If you have trouble try creating a new game profile.
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