Scary PC mod

This is one heck of a scary PC case mod I've seen so far. I agree with most comment the Digg.com that this is freaky.

Reboot always solves problem

I was fustrated for a short while when my machine was having some ultraheavy harddisk access for no good reason. I was no sure if it was actually caused by the VMWare, or the Toad 8.5, or the combination of both. But eventually I remoted, and all the problem solved.

Security Tools

- Ettercap - [More info]
- Cain & Abel
- Ophcrack 2.2 Password Cracker

To crack Windows administrator password using Cain & Abel:
- Start Cain & Abel
- Click on cracker tab.
- From left column, select "LM & NTLM Hashes".
- Right click at right side (white area), select "[Add to List ...]
- Take default ("Import Hashes from Local system"), close window.
- Right click on "Administrator". Select [Dictionary attack] -> [LM Hashes]
- For dictionary, add "....\Cain\Wordlists\Wordlist.txt"
- Click [Start] button. And see the fun.

secure email

I wonder if this hushmail really does the job to allows me to securely send email. Any suggestion?

New Windows Genuine Advantage released

New Windows Genuine Advantage has been released recently. So if you haven't been updated your system for a while, then when you try to get the new update, you will be asked to download the new Windows Genuine Advantage.

No green version for Acrobat Professional 6

Tried creating a green version of Acorbat Professional 6. Failed.

Looking for Look LK-A6 removable harddisk firmware update

I have to admit that I made a bad purchase on buying the LOOK LK-A6 OTS removable hardisk for several reason:

- I rarely use it. My imagined scenario of loading movies from hard disk back to the CF or SD card in order to enjoy them on my Pocket PC NEVER happened. Well, actually it happened twice, but the process was way too cumbersome which makes the process doable but impractical. Plus I sort of resolved the problem of getting a 4Gb CF card at a reasonable HK$1190 price point.
- The whole thing (hard disk plus the battery case) was TOO HEAVY for daily carrying.
- The hard disk has occasional failed to be recognized by my home PC. That's is a major blow.

Nevertheless, I still want to find a way to use it. I recently posted a message in forum to ask for a A6 firmware upgrade since I couldn't find it from official web site. Hopefully it may resolve the problem on this thingy.

Remove virus and spyware without reformatting harddisk

It's really a big challenge to cure a PC system without reformatting the harddisk, but that's what I spent the last two night to work on in order to cure my teacher's computer system. She has a system with the following configuration:

- Hard disk: IBM NetVista A60i (6832/6833)
- CPU: Pentium 4
- OS: Windows ME Traditional Chinese edition
- Memory: 127Mb (DIMM)
- No illegal software in the machine (: >)

After a few attempt, I conduct the following steps and have most of the system problem resolved:

1. Boot from a Super WinPE plus 2004 disc (SA-530) (a WinXP OS bootup from a CDROM)
2. Run the virus application on the WinPE OS.
3. Boot the WinME OS as normal and continue scanning and removing virus/spyware using AVG Antivirus, Spybot search & Destroy 1.4 and Adaware 1.6 SE.
4. Run Windows update (which previously I couldn't deal to the virus), and apply all the critical updates.

Unfortunately by the time I get to step 4, I already spent 4 hours on the system. So I have to leave (I needed to work the next day). But at least the number of virus was down from 8000 to almost none.

Task still needs to perform on the system:
- Clean up the rest of the spyware and virus
- Set up automatically Microsoft System Update
- Set up automatically virus update
- Perform a scan disk to check hard disk integrity
- Install the Creative Lab webcam
- Install CD Burning software
- Backup personal data from the system
- Open the system, check the DIMM type, buy and install a 512Mb SIMM

Items I need to carry to conduct the repair next time.
- SA-530 disc (WinPE)
- CD Burner software (Nero Burner 6.x)

That's all.

Need to install Firefox extension on separate machine even for portable version

I realized that the Firefox extension I installed in the office didn't show up on my home machine even though I use the same portable version of Firefox on my removal harddisk. Oh well. That means I need to install those extension separately on my office and home computer desktop.

Writely needs to improve the spelling checker

Writely, an online word processor recently purchased by Google, has a nice interface, but it lacks a good spelling checking. I experienced so many times that the Writely spelling checker failed to provide a correct spelling for me, while the OpenOffice 2.0 desktop version for Windows had no problem providing me tons of options. Thus I won't actively use Writely unless they dramatically improve their spelling check feature.

So much fun on the Net

Here's a list of nice list of great freeware of links mentioned in a Taiwan Computer magazine. However you can do some simply query string hack to get to other issue.

For those of you we are into downloading Google video or YouTube video, try this FLV Retriver. I tried and it worked. Here's the Chinese instruction. You also need a FLV Player to play the video fiile.

Failed to create a bootup partition in a removal harddisk

Seems like I CANNOT create a bootable partition out a removable harddisk. I have 4 partiitioins in the harddisk and tried to use one as boot partition. Based on my testing this simply cannot be done as the XP Installation and Windows Server 2003 installation program saw the partition but refused to install the OS in it. The Windows 2000 cannot even see the partition.

So it seems like only the USB Flash drive can be a bootup.

The office DVDROM loves the 2x burned Sky DVD-R Disc

I am cataloging a Sky 4x DVD-R disc (burned at with with 2x speed) full of photos using Porfolio 7, and I found out that the catalog process went very smooth. In fact, a bit smoother than I expected. I don't know if it's because of the DVD-R disc burned right, or that the catalog file itself is resonable small as of now (about 800Mb).

No green version for Crystal Report 10

I tried truning Crystal Report 10 Developer edition into green version application and it failed.

Free video converter saves the day

I have this strange MPEG video (exact from VCD) that it didn't play sound on my Pocket PC (with TCPMP). I resolved the problem by converting it to DIVX using PocketDivxEncoder. Not only I got the audio back, the file size was shrinked from 22Mb to 6Mb. Very sweet.

Tried Tetris DS

我用Feel The Magic 正版卡 開機, 遊戲基本上運作正常, 但用Wi-Fi 後死機. Well, I am so glad that I kept the 3 original software just in case. But then I do enjoy those three games (Yoshi DS, Feel the Magic and Nintendog), I just prefer the case of carrying around by using SuperCard.

A new Promising conversion application to convert video file into DIVX format ...

I wonder if this Pocket DIVX encoder supports converting rmvb file to DIVX, but at least here's another choice. Besides it is a portable mention, meaning that no stupid installation. So that's good.

The worst thing about Microsoft Ultimate Mobile PC

Here's the worst part of the current batch of Microsoft Ultimate Mobile PC : 3 hour shitty battery life. My little DELL x50v PocketPC can provide 4+ hours of battery life. There's no way I can setttle with anything less.

PXDXA.com is back!!

Oh, awesome! pxdxa.com is back. All Pocket PC lovers can celebrate now.

Missing Channel V

I rarely watch Hong Kong television, partly because I don't see anything worth watching, and partly because I already have enough US TV, podcast and eBook to consume. There was, though, one channel that provided by the my living place's Satallite TV system which got a appreciation. It's a music channel called Channel V. It comes with a good mix of US, HK, Asian, Japan, Korean, UK and other world music. I enjoyed watching this channel whenever I got time to watch TV.

Well, the fun is over. Today I found out that my TV signal provider replaced Channel V with a few channels like CCTV 4, Info Channel and a few channel's that doesn't contain anything I enjoy.

Sigh.

Channel V, I will miss you. Sigh.

My new Kingston 50x 4Gb Compact Flash card

With the Compact Flash card price recently dropped to a reasonable level, I finally bite the bullet and got the Kingston 50x 4Gb Compact Flash card for HK$1190. There's another brand called Transcend selling a 120x 4Gb CF card for HK$1280, but since I trust Kingston because of all my positive experience with it, I went for Kingston.

I tested it right away on my DELL x50v Pocket PC by copying a 680Mb video file from the slow (24x) Toshiba SD card to the 4Gb CF card, and it was proven to be such a ultra long process. It took almost 1.5 hours to get the file from SD card to the 4Gb CF card! And it generate a lot of heat during the process.

I also tried copying a 3.21Gb MPEG video file from my PC harddisk to the 4Gb CF card. It took 24 minutes. Not too bad. HOWEVER, I also found out that Pocket PC couldn't recognize this 3Gb video, and treated it as a FOLDER! I suspect that the OS of Pocket PC simply cannot handle any file with size bigger than 2Gb.

Even with the 1.8Gb MPEG video file that plays on the Pocket PC, I found a little bit of frame skipping here and there when I played it on TCPMP. It turns out that the problem is on the video file itself. The file was captured using a cheap chessy USB 1.x based video capture device, and thus the quality of the videos aren't up the par. Still, I recorded a few TV shows and they looks decent enough for brief watching. That seems to be good enough for me.

And then I found out that my 4Gb CF card has to be formatted in FAT32, and unfortunately my SuperCard (for Nintendo DS) can only take CF card formatted in FAT. That means my 4Gb CF cannot be used in my Nintendo DS.

Am I disappointed by all these findings? A bit. But then I will still buy the 4Gb card if I have to choose again since:

(1) If I buy a 2Gb SD card, I still get into the problem which I need to swap out the CF card whenever I need to test drive some new NDS game.

(2) If I buy a 2Gb CF card, I still haven't maximize the usage of the space provided by the CF slot. See my original purpose of getting a big card is because I want a get a card as big as possible (yet price reasonably) so that I can carry tons of stuff with my Pocket PC everywhere I go.

So I will still get the 4Gb. But then, I was wondering if I should take the risk and try out the 120x 4Gb card. Oh well.

Quest to for a portable friendly photo viewer

I spent sometime today and couldn't trun ACDSee 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 or 8.0 into portable vesrion. So I turned my attention to a viewer called IrfanView 3.98. You may ask why I need a photo viewer since the photo view built into Windows XP seem to do an OK job for viewing photo. The problem arise when I view those huge 3 to 5 megabyte photo these days. ImageViewer just isn't efficient enough to do the job. Oh well I tried InfanView and it was not working too well, the JPEG zoom or not being optimized. It looks bad.

Well, but eventually my seraching was ending with something useful FastStone Image Viewer 2.30 . This freeware is so tiny in size and yet does all I used to do with ACDSee. I love it.

Find older version software

Here's a site that you can find some older version software from. At least I found older version of ACDSee 5.x from there.

Battery Life : the reason why I got a PPC instead of a SmartPhone

The experience of my colleague explains why I didn't get a smartphone (one that runs Windows CE OS and capable to play Divx, mp3, and all sort of fun stuff): battery life. My friend got the battery used up 70% just by playing a few games on his pocketPC based mobile. This is totally unacceptable to me. I use more than 3 to 4 hours of my PPC constantly playing video and audio. My X50v serves with well with the 2 batteries (one extended and one regular). I definitely don't think I get the same nice battery life if I get a smart phone.

And I don't use my phone much. Don't like being found at all :-D .

Suspect that Portfolio 7 cannot handle more than 4.1 Gb catalog file size

I found the catalog process I ran on Portfolio 7 was stopped this afternoon. The error message said something like out of disk space. I checked the catalog file size and it said 4,193,312Kb. Rather than the problem causing by running out of harddisk space, I suspect that the real reason is that Portfolio 7 simply cannot handle file size bigger than 4Gb, much like the file size restriction on FAT32. Ironcially, both the Portfolio 7 app and the catalog files are running on a NTFS partition on a Windows XP box. Mystery indeed.

TCPMP 0.72 RC 1

The TCPMP has 0.72 RC 1 released. It was supposed to be an big deal to me since I was heard that this version makes TCPMP playing those iPod video format movie in a much smoother way.

The result? Big disappointment. And I am so glad that I backed up my PPC before trying out the 0.72 RC1 because I had to rollback at the end of the experiement.

Here's my result of trying out 0.72 RC1, 0.71 and my original 0.66m:

0.72 RC 1
- Missing MPEG 4 AAC audio encoding (removed before of some shitty intellectual property shit)
- Still does not resolve Diggnation problem
- No improvement seen
- Play less video than the old 0.66

0.71
- Missing MPEG 4 AAC audio encoding (removed before of some shitty intellectual property shit)
- No improvement seen


0.66m
Original
- Does everything right except the Diggnation thing.
- Need 0.66m specified plugins to work

So basically I just roll back. Everything back to normal :- I ...

Another podcast, and more Web 2.0 site to burn your time

Google has this new freaky Web 2.0 kind of page-creation thing. It kind of reminds me the ProtoPage (damn it, now ProtoPage has trouble as they attracted the big shark).

And then there's this Podcast called GeekDorme. Sounds like a show for me. I am downloading it right now.

And "IT Crowd" has it's 5th episode which .... I don't know, the show gets less and less about IT. Sucks.

DVD Recorders drove me nuts

The LiteON and Pioneer DVD Recorders drove me nuts, and I don't really understand how come all DVD Recorders attacted my machine created so much crazy problems.

I need to copy a Swan Lake ballet DVD, so I tried to first rip a DVD image to the harddisk. Pioneer DVD Recorder failed to rip the DVD, while LiteOn has no problem ripping the DVD image file. HOWEVER, I CANNOT get the DVD playback properly on PowerDVD when the DVD is on LiteOn, and I had completely no problem playback the DVD on Pioneer DVD Recorders.

AFter the 4x burn on the green Sky 8x DVD+R disc, I did a manual verification. From the LiteOn DVD recorder I can copy the whole CD images to my harddisk. From the Pioneer .... of course, failed, with "Cannot copy VTS_01_3: Data error (cyclic redundancy check).

Confused? Yeah, same here.

Just upgraded the firmware my Pioneer A10 DVD Recorder. Still shitty.

I just upgraded the firmware of my Pioneer A10 DVD Recorder from version 1.22 to 1.39. I am never a big fan of firmware upgrade, but since my recorder had enough trouble recognizing a lot of these already anyway, so maybe this dose of firmware upgrade can magically cure something (or great a bigger disaster).

Well, the result: the firmware upgrade A10 still sucks.

I used A10 to burn a DVD at 4x (because it cannot get any slower on the Sky 8x dvd+r disc), and it CANNOT be completely read by A10. However, it was read corrected by my Liteon. I also tried two DVD player in the office (NEC DVD+-RW ND-3450A, NEC DVD+-RW ND-3530A) , and they both read the disc correct. So I guess I will keep using the Sky 8X DVD+R disc for 4x burns.

On the other hand the LiteOn DVD Record still sucks big time. I use it to burned a DVD at 2.4x speed. It can be read by the LiteOn DVD itself, but failed to be read by the A10 and one of the office NEC DVD+-RW ND-3530A recorder. Funny how, my desktop player NEC DVD+-RW ND-3450A has no problem with it. So I need to totally aviod buring DVD using LiteOn.

Sigh. Until I brought yet another DVD Burner, I may need to continue seraching some 4x DVD media.

A trip to Golden Shopping Center

Haven't been in Golden Shopping Center for almost a month, so I went there tonight just to check around. Several foundings that caught my attention:

- Nintendo DS Lite was displayed in more than several stores. The price, around Hk$1880, was totally unacceptable, but it's nice to see the actual model. Just like the iPod Nano wowed people by shrinking the size and yet keeping all the funtionality, Nintendo DS Lite I saw was very compact, could easy be stuffed in your pocket, and with the size and form factor just right. This is what Nintendo DS should have been. However, unless the price go down to the reasonable level, and known for sure whether it can play SuperCard, I won't even put it in my wish list.

- The faithful 4X Sky DVD+R discs were all gone. This is bad, very bad for me, for my stupid Pioneer A10 recorder has some serious problem recognizing 8x disks. So just a while ago I head toward the Pioneer web site, and hoping that a new firmware upgrade will be my rescure. And notice that the web is a Japan based site, because I cannot find my model in the US web site.

- Price for 2Gb memory stick is getting lower and lower. Now a SanDisk 2Gb Memory Stick Pro Duo is selling at HK$795 in many stores. There's no doubt that PSP is the main reason of such a booming of Memory Stick business. However, the price for SD card is also lower. I saw that a slow Toshiba 2Gb SD card is selling at HK$590, a very reasonable price. Some lowend Compact Flashcard is also getting cheaper. I saw the 4Gb Transcend Compact Flash card (slow one, of course) selling at HK$1190 now. It's now much easier to cheap thousands of songs and several movies around in your mobile device, be it PSP, PocketPC or your mobile phone.

I don't see any big XBox 360 promotion. Guess the games for XBox 360 are just not attractive from HK gamer's point of view.