Fettled any computer stuff today?

[nicknack]

A year or so ago i bought a HP 260 G2 Mini Desktop PC to replace an overheating ZBox. It's fine apart from playing music (or any sounds) through it. It has an annoying habit of doing a little (up to ~0.5 sec) repeat of what has just played every minute or so in a rather random fashion. If you record what's played (with Audacity for instance) then you can see instead of the repeat there's a gap which, if you edit it out restores the music to a state of correctness. So when playing it sort of gets ahead of itself. Anyway I have searched the internet to find a fix and failed although I'm sure one must exist. OS is Ubuntu 16.04 but I've tried many flavours of Linux. I'm reasonably sure the problem is with Alsa.
So I decided to get another computer just for playing music and settled on a Gigabyte Brix. I've just spent a jolly while wiring this up with a system for switching mouse/keyboard/monitor between the two and I now enjoy listening to music and internet browsing (or anything else) without interruption from noisy websites and suchlike. 

[BrianI]

Just refilled the external continuous ink supply system again on my ancient HP Photosmart Premium inkjet printer (A4 sized).    No doubt the printer will expire soon with a blocked waste ink sponge or something.

But for now, lots of printing to be done, without worrying about replacing cartridges!
Doing a couple of photographic test prints on photo paper, and I'll be damned if I can see any colour casts. Although if I submit some printed images using this printer and ink system to my photographic associations competitions, will the judges be able to tell?

* BrianI thumbs his nose at printer manufacturers.   

[Jaded]

Finally backed up a 2.3TB library. 

[TheLurker]

Finally uninstalled Firefox v17.

[freeflow]

Finally got my head around VBA interfaces.

[David Martin]

played with a Micro:Bit. Looks like fun.

[Wombat]

Installed a new 2TB SSD for my photos, as the 1TB one was extremely, unusably, full.  Went without a significant hitch, amazingly.  Obviously we had the issue of Windows making the new one drive G (the 1TB one was still installed, 'cos I was about to clone it to the new one) and then not making it back into F once the original was removed, thus meaning that Capture One said "where's your photos, i can't find them?).  A quick trip into disk management to re-letter the drive soon sorted that.  Can't have anything else being G, as otherwise Acronis will be too stupid to find its own backup drive, saying "All I can find is this drive called Acronis backup, absolutely identical to the one I usually use, but I can't use that, because it isn't G, because you've had the temerity to have a USB drive plugged in."  Programs know the identity and serial number of the drive they use, so why do we still rely on (movable) drive letters?

I have not as yet re-formatted the original 1TB photo drive (a Samsung 850 Evo SSD), I'll wait a bit before I do that.  It has a new future lined up as a portable drive for the archive digitisation project I expect to be doing soonish.

[Morat]

Lots of loverly WiFi. 20 APs installed, now I'm at the tweaking and tuning stage

[Jaded]

Had bolx with my Coel Piccolo (may contain spelling errs)

Dropped connections, restarts of network etc. Reset all my WiFi devices. For a year...

Reset the Coel to factory settings. Perfect.

[perpetual dan]

Took my phone apart (LG G5) and gently bent the three pins that make contact with the GPS aerial. I now have working GPS again, and hence Strava as a way of recording rides and runs.

[David Martin]

Unsuccessfully attempting to get a raspberry Pi zero to talk serial to a HP7475A pen plotter. Not a jot.

[CommuteTooFar]

Over the past couple of weeks I did the toughest pc build I have ever done.

Case: Fractal Design Define R6 Tempered Glass white
PSU: BeQuiet Dark Power 11  650W
Motherboard: MSI B350 Tomahawk Arctic Motherboard
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
Video: MSI Radeon RX 570 Armor OC
Memory: Kingston HyoerX Fury 2933 16GB MHz white heat spreader
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500Gb M2

So I don my anti-static wrist strap, do the lego bit, retire behind the sand bags and press the power button.

The fans come on full speed then slow down. The diagnostic lights on the motherboard all go out indicating all is well. The monitor announces "No Video Signal". Oh dear.

No POST beeps. So after re-plugging everything I suspect the video card. I get the video card out my old machine. try again, "No Video Signal". Put new video card in old machine it works the video card is not the problem.

I reset the bios memory. Try again "No Video Signal". I wait for a few mins just in case it take a long time to initialise. I read about doing that somewhere.

Next I consider the memory. 2933MHz is the fastest the Ryzen  2600X will use without overclocking.  This is marginal after checking to see if I had any DDR4 in my old machine. No it was DDR3. I ordered a stick of cheapest DDR4 I could find for next day delivery. I swap out the flashy stuff and insert the conservatively clocked udimm. Still
"No Video Signal"

So memory is probably not the problem.  So it must be motherboard, cpu and/or power supply. I think about getting my multi-meter but I do not think it is the PSU and decide to worry about motherboard and processor.

The Ryzen 2 processors are supported by the motherboard. However they need a relatively recent bios.  This motherboard and chipset have been around for over a year. Perhaps it is trying to boot. So I make a freedos bootable usb key with a recent bios and and autoexec to run bios utility program. I switch on blind for a few minutes but no luck.   

I buy a AMD A6-9500 the lowest  mainstream APU for socket AM4 currently produced. (You can get a free loan of one of these in the US, I do not know if we can here).  I remove the Ryzen 2700 and fit the A6 with new thermal paste. I Reset the cmos again. I press the power button.  Blank screen for a age then the bios splash appears I press F1 and enter the bios.  I look at the version and date of the bios.  April 2017, a year before Ryzen 2 was introduced.  I update the bios to the latest version.

I swap in the cleaned Ryzen with new thermal paste.  I swap in the nice memory. Clear the cmos.  Press the power button. The bios comes up.  The memory is recognised and is running at its rated speed. 

Now I can install an operating system.  Phew.

If anyone wants a AMD A6 with 4Gb DDR4 PC2400 let me know and I will send it to you.
 

[woollypigs]

Yeah I had a panic too, last year when I build my first PC in eons. Set it off and nothing happened, panic etc. Then I learned yes my motherboard can do the new intel version "something" but only if you used the older CPU. So thanks to Amazon I managed to boot up, update BIOS, turn off, return

[thing1]

This morning's project was to upgrade Thing2's circa 2011 Thinkpad to a 1TB SSD I "just happened" to have lying around after our last move.

Complete fresh install of Windows 7, went smoothly until I remembered the whole "need to boot strap the network drivers onto the machine" step that's never a problem with Linux. Eventually gave up on USB sticks and SD cards and just burnt a CD ROM with the Lenovo/Intel ethernet driver.  All pretty plain sailing after that.

A small oversight is the USB<->SATA cable I got to copied files off the old HDD doesn't have a PSU. Considered jump-starting it from another desktop PC but didn't like the idea of that so just ordered a  USB powered one from A for a grand 5.99£. Happily 99% of stuff lives in someone else's cloud these days so not an urgent need.

As usual installed MS Security essentials. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes before Thing2 managers to install 2 more competing AV packages again............

[Gattopardo]

Those thinkpads seem to last well.

In non computer news, I seem to use your LEL custard statement alot.  It is brilliant.

Trying to get an old hpcompaq 2510p to work after sitting on the shelf awaiting a rtc battery replacement.  Used to work fine with a flat rtc battery and worked after the rtc battery removed.  Now powers on in a loop, flashing a few lights.

My searching is not coming up with anything.  Bah.

[SoreTween]

This year due to GDPR by beancounter has password protected the PDFs of my annual accounts.  All good except that they neglected to mail me the password¹.   Take:

• The format of the password for my other company
• pdf2john.py
• hashcat
• 32 minutes of mild vole burning, it didn't even cause the GPU fan to start

Sorted 

¹ Yes I'm sure.  I have the letter advising me of the password to be used for PAYE related stuffs filed exactly where it should be and it's not that.  Different person at the beancounters and totally different format.  Plus as above I have the password for the other company filed exactly where it should be.

[Gattopardo]

Fettled a computer in to live from several dead ones.

Wonder if there is a place to swap bits of older computers with others so that things are saved from landfill.  Or is it a decidion to either sell the laptops complete with the description of what is broken or strip for parts and then ebay.

[Afasoas]

Finally got a self-hosted instance of nextcloud running, so I can use the calendar on my phone and backup my contacts!
That means the only thing I still rely on Google for is maps.

[T42]

Mrs T's email client settings. Now it won't leave downloaded mail on the server.

[woollypigs]

Fettled the Raspberry that lives over at MiL, installed a little IRC bot script for a laugh. Put it into crontab so it would start up at boot, forgot to double check it so now the boot hangs. I can see it has connected to the internet, as irssi fired up and it connected to the channel I wanted to run the bot in. But the VPN hasn't started up and so has the bot. Good news is that we are visiting MiL tomorrow so I can mend it.

[woollypigs]

Didn't get to go to MiL so I fettled a virtual machine with raspbian and hacked a script I found on github. So now when you lot post something here I can see it on irc (#yacf on freenode).

Main thing was that someone on on #raspberrypi pointed me toward tmux. Yeah I know it is old as old things, but I did a search and found a easy to understand howto. I had tried some years ago but it went straight over my head.

[pcolbeck]

Found my very own Cisco bug last week. In twenty two years of working on their kit that's only the second one I have found. They do have loads of bugs documented of course its just the second one I have been the first to discover and that they didn't already know about.

[Afasoas]

Didn't get to go to MiL so I fettled a virtual machine with raspbian and hacked a script I found on github. So now when you lot post something here I can see it on irc (#yacf on freenode).

Main thing was that someone on on #raspberrypi pointed me toward tmux. Yeah I know it is old as old things, but I did a search and found a easy to understand howto. I had tried some years ago but it went straight over my head.

No one else lurking in the channel. That's a shame!

[woollypigs]

well lurking alone on IRC isn't that what IRC nearly has become

[vorsprung]

Finally backed up a 2.3TB library. 

Spent last two days upgrading some storage.  It's 90 x 10 TB x 18 = 16.2 PB.  Had to work that out seems like a bigger number than I'd imagined

The instructions on the reaper were dubious