Geek, Mobile

This is the middle, the middle of our headset story

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I’ve recently picked up a Motorola H670 to use with my phone.  BT range is good, volume is decent, it fits snug against my head and it doesn’t look like ass.  So far so good.

The only problem? It auto-answers incoming calls, and I need to figure out how to change that.  I’m almost certain that it didn’t do that when I first paired it, so it must be something I did, but I haven’t as of yet figured out what that was. I’ve checked all the settings in my phone that I know of and none are set to auto-answer. This shall be the last piece of the puzzle.  I figured it was time for an update.  I really have nothing else to say about this.

Geek, Mobile

The Woefull tale of a Treo and a new headset

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I have a Treo 650 that I have accepted into my life as my personal lord and savior. It allows me greater mental freedom by offloading less important tasks like remembering anything.

For the last year, I’ve been using a Motorola HS850 with my Treo, and it’s been very well behaved. But over that year, the driver element has started to crackle, the over the ear hanger bit is loosening up and the unit is prone to falling off easily. So I decided it was time to look for a new headset. Originally I ebayed a Moto H700 which turned out to be a cheap knockoff. That said, it didn’t play nice with my Treo. So I gave it to a friend (it was only $30, good sign it was a knockoff) and yesterday I picked up a legit H700 at FutureShop.

I have a PalmOne Treo 650. Hardware revision A, Firmware 01.71, and Software Treo650-1.20-ENA. The legit H700 didn’t work with this phone. Disabled bluetooth, deleted the bluetooth device cache and trusted devices list, did a soft reset, turned bluetooth on then paired the H700 with my 650 and it still didn’t work. The H700 would pair with my phone and take itself out of discoverable mode, it would show up in my trusted devices list. It was non functional as a headset. Couldn’t answer a call, couldn’t transfer a call from the handset to the headset. Flipping open the boom didn’t “wake-up” the handset either. Every standard behavior I’m accustomed to with my HS850 didn’t work.

I tried the above in car-kit mode as well. Still no dice.

The only redeeming bit to the entire story is that there was no hassle returning the headset to FutureShop. And so, the search continues for a new headset to replace my trusty but dieing HS850.

Life

PROGRESS!!!!

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There is a new home!

We officially have our apartment! We’ve managed to snag a two bedroom halfway up a 14 story high-rise on the south-side. Close to work for me(relatively speaking, 27km commute one-way is now 9km), close-ish to work for Carla (she works downtown now).  Dave gets a room for an office, we get some privacy and independence, with a little bit of best-friends-that-live-across-the-hall just as icing on the cake.

Walk-through, lease-signing, key-getting and move-in this Saturday.  Joygasms abound!

Finer Things

First round of the Salt and Alcohol treatment

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The first pipe I bought has seen a bit of abuse over the last 2 years and I’ve started to become displeased with the way it’s been smoking.  It’s not entirely surprising either. So many different blends have been through that bowl. It’s been time for a good, thorough cleaning.  The question is, how do you clean a brier bowl?

After joining the pipes.org forum and spending some time reading over the maintenance section the solution seems to be the “Salt and Alcohol” treatment.  Wherein you remove the stem, block the shank, fill the bowl with kosher salt, then top it up with alcohol.  Let it sit for 12-24 hours.  Remove the contents of the bowl, let it all dry out, and repeat.

We’re currently at the “let it set” stage.  Here’s to hoping I get to enjoy my first pipe again.

Geek, Hardware, Linux

So far so good.

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The new hardware has been stable in apoc so far. Almost 48 hours solid, which is a fairly big jump from rebooting every 12-16 hours.  It’s also a far cry from “proven stable” in my mind though.  I think I’m going to start running some tests on the hardware I pulled out though.  First round is going to be a couple passes of memtest.  If that clears then I guess I’ll be getting a pair of hard drives and trying to mimic the OS install.

From there I hope that the same behavior will present itself.  Then I can try the tweaks one by one, disable hyperthreading, disable usb, disable apic, etc.  Until we find out what solves the problem.  Then I can get this board back in apoc.  I’d really much prefer to have the full 3gb in the VM host.

I’ve got all the MD units renamed now, so instead of /dev/md0 consisting of /dev/sda5 and /dev/sdb5 those units are in/dev/md5 and so forth. Does it make a difference to anyone but me? No not really.  But I like having things consistent.

Geek, Hardware, Linux, Site

There may be life yet

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Today I headed down to the colo after work.  I swapped out the mobo, proc, mem, and sata controller in apoc.  So far things seem to be a bit more stable.  However, I made a number of other tweaks that may have fixed the instability. On the new board, I disabled hyperthreading and onboard usb. Unfortunately this board doesn’t do dual-channel ddr and only has three slots instead of four for ram.  I would eventually like to get the original board back in apoc, but only after extensive testing at home.

Here’s to hoping we get a stable Xen box soon.

Geek, Health, Life, Site, Work

Nope, Not Dead

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Just stupid busy.

I’ve been fighting with server bitchyness the last week or so now.  Apoc seems to have a memory issue somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.  I’m not sure if it’s hardware or an issue with the new Xen kernel I’m running from etch.  Eventually I will get this resolved. I still need to move the jabber server off the VM server and onto the new seraph.  Need to get another disk in seraph and mirror them too. So much stuff to do.

I spent yesterday layed out in bed with a fucked up back.  It still hurts this morning but I’m hoping I’ll survive the day.  I guess maybe it’s time that I actually see somebody about that.