Just noticed something today.
A few years ago I was living in residence at St. Paul University. The internet access there was managed by an access controller which redirected all new connections to wireless.colubris.com. After some investigation, I realized there was a way to work around the bandwidth limitations and session timeouts with the use of a DNS forwarder, a Web server, MAC address spoofing, a SOCKS proxy server software and a pseudo-keepalive tool, the ever-useful Firefox addon Reloadevery. This allowed for much more effective use of the available network connectivity.
Fast forward to the present, and I now find myself on the other side. We now have installed our own HP ProCurve access controller, technology which HP acquired through the purchase of Colubris Inc.
so, wireless.colubris.com, we meet again. Things look different from this side.
Update: Just went and exchanged the HD 6450 for an HD 6670. This one works great, runs Starcraft II on High and doesn’t crash the machine!
After some discussion with a coworker, I decided to try putting a Sapphire Radeon HD6450 into my Mac Pro, since the 8800GT was a real power hog and heater.
Just my luck that today the 10.6.8 update was released, containing – you guessed it – HD6xxx drivers!
So I ran the update, then popped in the HD6450, and what do you know, it works! Only two problems: First, no EFI support which means no boot screen (white/grey apple). Second, it seems to crash when launching any game. I tried Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and Starcraft II, and both caused the screen to go blank and kernel panic.
Anyway, nice experiment, and at least it works for regular desktop work….
For anyone interested, here are all the Radeon HD6000 series cards supported by the 10.6.8 kexts, IDs and names.
- 0×67681002 CAICOS 6450M
- 0×67701002 NI CAICOS [AMD Radeon HD 6400 Series]
- 0×67791002 NI Caicos [AMD RADEON HD 6450]
- 0×67601002 NI Seymour [AMD Radeon HD 6470M]
- 0×67611002 NI Seymour [AMD Radeon HD 6430M]
- 0×67501002 Turks [AMD Radeon HD 6500 series]
- 0×67581002 Turks XT [AMD Radeon HD 6600 Series]
- 0×67591002 NI Turks [AMD Radeon HD 6500]
- 0×67401002 Whistler XT [AMD Radeon HD 6700M Series]
- 0×67411002 NI Whistler [AMD Radeon HD 6600M Series]
- 0×67381002 Barts XT [ATI Radeon HD 6800 Series]
- 0×67391002 Barts PRO [ATI Radeon HD 6800 Series]
- 0×67201002 Blackcomb [AMD Radeon HD 6900M Series]
- 0×67221002 ATI Radeon HD 6950
- 0×67181002 Cayman XT [AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series]
Bought a cheap USB multi card reader the other day. Tried it on my Ubuntu netbook and it worked great. However, today I tried to use it on my Windows 7 PC and it wasn’t detected. Opening the device manager revealed that no card reader had been detected, however a new “eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR)” was detected with an error.
The solution is to right-click the device, choose Update Driver, and force the “USB Composite device” driver.
Hello,
This is a message for the commenter “WC from Bristow” who posted a review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard on the Apple Store website on Decemer 11, 2010 (review posted below for SEO/reference).
I just wanted to let you know that your MacBook Pro is DEFECTIVE. I hope that by some strange chance you might read this before your warranty expires. There is a known issue with the GeForce 9400M graphics chips in the original unibody MacBooks with removable battery. There is random screen flickering. This is a hardware issue, and no matter what you do will not go away. If your laptop is still under warranty, and even if it’s not, take it back to Apple and demand a replacement. They will probably swap it for a new, current-generation MacBook.
Just a friendly suggestion from someone who went through the same frustration.
Not Impressed
- Written by WC from Bristow
- 11-Dec-2010
Snow Leopard brought some serious problems. Mail will chew up 50 to 75% of the processor just idling. Flashing video/screen on MacBook Pro 15″ when on low power video card setting causes me to run all the time in high performance mode so it does not flash… and now my battery lasts for an hour and a half if I am lucky. (in part because of the processor overloading of Mail). This adds 2 lbs+ to the laptop because I must now carry two extra batteries (and I do).
I spend a lot of time in Mail… and bugs like copying the email address and getting a bunch of extra garbage that needs to be trimmed after pasting is aggravating. Dock lockups, Browser lockups. Spinning beach ball of death with much greater frequency than normal Leopard. At points cascading chronic app crashing which is “cured” by rebooting the machine (a la Windows)
Hope that Lion brings some relief. Snow Leopard has fleas.
Just got a Samsung U70 USB monitor.
The U70 is very simple to set up. Just install the drivers, and then plug and play.
Drivers are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Performance is OK, can even display 3D graphics and HD video on it, although that causes very high CPU usage.
Build quality is good; packaging and instructions are in Korean. Comes with a double-USB cable, but in my experience only one is needed to power the monitor.
Screen quality is not the best, brightness is not quite uniform. However, the picture is very sharp and brightness and viewing angle are quite good.
I have tested with Mac, Linux and Windows, and it works great with all 3. Handy if you just need a little space to throw your music player, IM contact list, or have a video or other monitoring service running in sight all the time.
It’s a tiny little 7″ monitor, of “Slugterm” fame. There are a lot of things that can be done with this little gadget, perhaps a dual-monitor Nexus One setup? Check out Sven Killig’s website for inspiration.
For now I’m content with using it to watch videos while working.
I bought a cheap Agere Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard. The CD that came with it included some Windows XP drivers, but Windows 7 32 and 64-bit drivers were impossible to find anywhere but on Windows Update.
Fortunately, the Targa Traveller 1720 ML42 has this NIC built in, so the drivers were available on http://www.service.targa.co.uk/. I have extracted the drivers for XP32, 7 32 and 7 64, download below.
Agere ET131x.7z
The Netgear WNDA3100 is a pretty nice wireless adapter, but the drivers from Netgear are bundled with a crappy management software. I extracted the basic driver files from the .exe provided so that I can install the hardware using the Windows standard methods.
The 7z contains the Windows XP/2003 and Vista/7 drivers.
WNDA3100v1 Driver
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/how-do-you-properly-install-a-novatel-turbo-stick-usb-modem-773492/
I used Network MAnager “Mobile Broadband” and entered the APN (“inet.bell.ca”) instead.
These are the important steps:
Step 1:
Connecting the device, it starts as a usb-storage device but at this point the device has the idVendor: 0×1410 and idProduct: 0×5010, Ubuntu recognizes and mounts the device automatically and puts the icon on the desktop
Step 2:
Right-click on the mounted icon named “Mobile Connect” and select Eject, now the device will change its idProduct id from 0×5010 to the more re-assuring 0×7030 but somehow Ubuntu doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a usbserial device…
Step 3:
sudo rmmod usbserial
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0×1410 product=0×7030
and /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1 etc.. up to /dev/ttyUSB5 should appear on your file system.
I’d forgotten how much Vista sucks… I waited through over 45 minutes of “Preparing you computer” and “Installing software” and “Measuring your computer’s performance” for this?
Well, I suppose there is the spiffy sidebar and flip 3D……
Or, to be more accurate, I forgot how much garbage OEMs put on your brand new PC. *cough* HPToshibaDell.
OOH COOL! McAfee, Norton, Windows Live OneCare AND ZoneAlarm! Now my computer is quadruple-protected!
But wait, there’s more you say? A copy of Microsoft Works AND a FREE trial of Microsoft Office? and AOL, Yahoo! and Google toolbars, each with pop-up blocking? AWESOME!
-_-
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Themocracy