Monthly Archives: March 2013

Cleaning my mother’s apartment: Techno-fossils found

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10 years after I’ve left my mother’s home she decided to make some renewal.
In order to proceed it was necessary to clean some (a lot) of my stuff still there: I got a sunday call and lost my opportunity to make a nice nap.

In exchange I had the opportunity to find some vintage technology that included:
OS/2 2.0 (original)
OS/2 2.1 (original)
OS/2 3.0 (beta, original and paid for!)
OS/2 3.0 Warp (original: any doubt about the fact that I liked OS/2?)
AT&T Unix system V 3.2 (original, a bunch of 5¼” floppy disks)
Borland Paradox 4.5 (original)
Populous (original, the first one, 5¼” floppy disk)
A bunch of other games on 5¼” floppy disks
An SGI 02 motherboard (without CPU)
An SGI Indy XL video card

This was all sent to the trashcan

But I could not force myself into a complete cleanup and I’ve kept some of the stuff that moved into my garage:
1MB memory expansion for apple II GS
Compaq Deskpro EN (Pentium 3, disk missing)
A lot of original games on 3½ disks that likely are not working anymore
A lot of games on CDROM that will need a VMware machine to run in freedos
A trustmaster joystick that connects to an analog gameport

Oven trick and GeForce Go 7900GS: worked fine for me

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The internet is full of reports about succesful DIY fixes of Nvidia graphics cards using the technique: this is one more such report.

The basic recipe is to bake the card after removing all the stickers, heat spreaders, thermal pads and thermal grease and then put the card for 8 minutes in the oven already heated to 200C/385F.
I did it and I transformed the paperweight that my cousin kindly gave me (artifacts at low resolution and no display at all when going over 800×600) into a running notebook.

Until the fix works I’m a happy owner of an Inspiron 9400: Intel T2500 (2Ghz dual core 32bit), 2GB of ram, 160 GB of HDD, 17″ 1920×1200, DVD burner, 2.1 built in audio, ABG wifi, BT 2.0+EDR.

Dell 6430U doesn’t play nice with Nokia E7

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From time to time I check if my devices have a newer firmware available and then I make a round of updates.
While the un-branded Lumia 800 is still waiting for the availability of WP 7.8 I’ve found that finally the 3-branded E7 had belle refresh available so I started the upgrade process using the 6430u.

The full backup worked perfectly, but the update process failed a couple of time with errors pointing to the USB connection.
I believed this was because the cable (Nokia original) was connected using a hub so I connected directly to the notebook port only to find out that it was not working even this way.
As in the recent past I already had a major issue with the USB connector of the E7 I started to worry.

Having more than one computer at home I went to another one (an Acer 7750G that I use as a desktop replacement) and tried again with success.

I can’t tell if the problem is with the 6430U (drivers and bios are updated) or with the E7, but sure enough this is not something I liked.

L’effroi du beau by Jean-Louis Chretien

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It’s a small booklet and it can appear an easy reading as a consequence: this is not the case. Really.

It’s not a book that I’d recommend to everyone but at the same time I don’t regret to have spent quite some time to read it.
I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on two very important subjects touched and this makes the reading worth the time.

The author elaborates a couple of time on the subject of the difference between the fear of the serf and the fear of the son.
It’s a greater difference than it may appear: the former fears the punishment as he fears the pain or the deprivation associated, the latter fears that the father may send him away.
For the son is the separation from the father that is feared first and foremost, not the possible deprivation and pain that may arise as a consequence of the separation.

A second subject is synthetized by this phrase:
“a planned joy is only a modulation of boredom”
I discussed this with a few friends as I feel it’s deeply true.
From one of them I got a strong bounce back at the first round: he told me that he planned his child and he’s very happy and never bored (sometime upset but this is a different subject) and the same holds true for a number of other things that he plans like going to sky and so on.
We digged deeper together in the idea and it turns out that while he planned to have kids he did not have a way to plan in detail the consequences of the births and the detail how the kids would grow up.
Not that he did not tried to plan, to some degree, as any father would do for the good of the kids themselves, but simply it’s not (thanks God) like programming a computer and the outcome is never known in advance and is not under control.
In the end he agreed that the source of the joy was really in what was not planned, not in the birth event itself, but in the specific, unplanned, face of the kids. And in all the things that they did while growing and that they still do.

I’ve read the book in Italian (title: La ferita della bellezza), but hopefully is available also in english for anyone who dares to try the read.

Dell 6430u: second run on battery and BIOS upgrade

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I’ve just made a second trip with the 6430u with me.
As it was a bit longer than the previous one I had the opportunity to upgrade the bios (that was just released) and then continue to use it mainly in battery mode.

It looks like the version A04 has improved the fan management reducing the use while on battery while when connected to the power supply it’s still up fairly often even in powersave mode.
In the previous test I had a very long run of McAfee security endpoint: it’s not happening anymore, likely it completed the massive first encryption.
Unless improvements for the power management come with future releases of the BIOS the machine (as configured) is not able to run from dawn to dusk on a single charge.
On the positive side is the fact that the power supply is a bit smaller and lighter than the older ones from Dell. Why apparently only Apple makes really small power bricks for the notebooks remains a mistery for me.

Here is the chronicle.

5.40, 100%, put to sleep, disconnected power
8.10, 98%, turned on, 3G key inserted
8.29, 92%, 3g key removed, put to sleep
10.55, resumed from sleep
11.05, 88%, put to sleep again
11.15, 87%, quick received email and calendar check
11.25, 86%, put to sleep, estimated runtime 5h07m
11.50, 86%, resume from sleep and turned on wifi
12.33, 73%, wifi off, fan running
13.22, 60%, only light use (chrome, outlook 2010 in bacground)
13.34, 57%, only light use, some screen backlight off due to inactivity
13.42, 55%, 3h30m estimated runtime
14.15, put to sleep
14.56, 46%, resumed from sleep, 2h42m estimated runtime, wifi on
15.08, 42%, 2h12m estimated runtime
16.11, 24%, 1h21m estimated runtime
16.18, 21%, 1h13m estimated runtime. Connected charger.

20+10+145+22=297m runtime + 345m on sleep with 79% battery

17.59, 98%, disconnected power
18.06, 96%, put to sleep estimated 6h28′
23.43, 91%, resume from sleep, light internet navigation
00.39, 77%, estimated runtime 4h46m
00.50, 74%, went to high performance for some gaming, fan went crazy
01.07, 66%, game over, back to power saving, put system (and owner) to sleep
08.29, 60%, resume from sleep
08.49, 54%, put in charge

7+67+17+20=111m runtime + 879m on sleep with 44% battery

10.08, 100%, put to sleep
10.40, 98%, resume from sleep, wifi off
11.57, 81%, put to sleep
12.30, resumed from sleep, wifi on
13.51, 55%, started charging

77+81=158m runtime + 65m on sleep with 45% battery

13.54, I felt lucky and upgraded to bios A04 (february 26th). Funny enough it says that it’s including ACPI support 0.0.0.1, I’d have expected this to be in from day 1 of the release
16.03, 100%, disconnect power
16.08, put to sleep
16.34, 99%, resume from sleep, wifi off, light excel activity
16.59, 93%, 7h32m expected runtime, put to sleep
17.56, 91%, turned on, expected runtime 6h4m (strange math)
17.57, turned on wifi
18.12, 88%, put to sleep
18.36, 87%, resumed from sleep, wifi off
18.46, put to sleep
22.18, 83%, resume from sleep, wifi on, light navigation and email
23.49, 60%, estimated runtime 4h21m, wifi off, put to sleep, looks like the bios update has changed the fan behaviour when running on battery.
07.43, 53%, resume from sleep
07.54, 50%, set to sleep
08.56, 48%, resume from sleep, plug power in

5+25+15+10+31+11=97m runtime + 916m sleep with 52% battery