Category Archives: Computers

Friday 13th and BIOS Updates

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I did a BIOS upgrade this morning for my ASUS P5N32-SLI motherboard, normally I don’t do them unless they are absolutely necessary, this one supposedly fixes something with the network cards that should make them work properly in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) [I think if what I read on the forums is correct]. I downloaded the update file (BIOS version 1404) from ASUS.com stuck it on a memory stick, booted the machine lauched the EZ Flash bios update tool (built into the bios) and went to make a cup of tea.

I came back to a black screen, fans and LED’s running but nothing else. Switched off and on… same thing, hit the reset button, same thing. At this point I start hyperventilation as I realise that this is an extremely expensive motherboard and that life is seriously going to suck if I have to replace this thing, that I probably end up single because the money that I was going to spend on my girlfriends birthday present would have to pay for the replacement board.

To cut along story short, I fiddled for a while, even tried to use the “Asus CrashFree” feature but nothing worked. Did a lot of searching and then came across this post on the Asus Forums. In it some guy suggest pulling the cmos battery out waiting a bit and putting it in, I had already tried the “reset cmos jumper”. Low and behold it fixed it 🙂

After all this I took a look at todays date… Friday 13th.

So here the important details for Google to index and hopefully help someone else out:

Asus P5N32-SLI Motherboard
Problem: Flashed BIOS to 1404 version, computer wouldn’t boot no POST nothing.
Solution: Switch off, take out cmos battery wait a minute, put back in switch on, reconfigure BIOS.

Web-based Timesheet

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Anyone know a good web-based open source timesheet application?
Before I re-invent the wheel, I thought I would ask the Internet about this one. I tried asking Google but I couldn’t find much there.

I’m trying to find a good, easy to use, open source web based time sheet application. I don’t need all the fancy stuff of the project management applications out there. I just want to be able to select a Customer and Project, put in a date, start time, end time and a description. At the end of the day/week/month I would like to be able to get a report with a list of everything that was done.

Extra points if I can put in KM’s for travel and have one or two other fields. It should be able to easily export this info to various file formats (CSV, XML, XLS or something) and look nice and pretty. It should preferably have a database backend and support multiple users. Would be really nice if its interface had a bit of AJAX behind it to make it nice and snappy and an integrated task list would be cool too. The web interface should at least run in Firefox and IE (not as important) and perhaps Safari, would be awesome if I could use Opera Mobile from my phone to access it too.

If you know of anything leave a comment, Thanks.

A new way to stalk friends, family and ex-girlfriends.

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FacebookSo do you sit and Google friends and family to see if they’re still alive, arrested or done anything worth knowing about? (If you don’t… then neither do I and all this is a thought exercise.)

Well now from the socially enabled, Web 2.0 world comes the greatest tool since the creation of the web and Google in helping find lost friends and family that you can “web stalk”… Facebook.

Hello My Name is Dale and I’m a Facebook Addict. (mmh wonder if there is a group on Facebook for Facebook addicts….)

Every day starts and ends with me checking Facebook to see if I have any new friends, who’s poked who and who uploaded what. I haven’t gotten to the point that I update my status every five minutes… yet. But I am running out of people to search for and add to my friends list. So if you know me, met me, or like me… and are single and female 🙂 add me to your friends list.

Google add’s face recognition

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Rachael Leigh CookIf you spend alot of time online you’ve probably read about this…

Google has added face reognition to Image Search. It’s not officially available yet but you can enable it with a change to to the search url.

What exactly does it do? If you do a search for say Rachael Leigh Cook you’ll see that you don’t only get pictures of people but other odd pictures too, but if you do the search again with the modified url you’ll see that you only get pictures of faces, and the pictures are mostly of her, that s pretty awesome. You can tell it worked because the number of items found have substanously decreased from 24,200 to 3,130.

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LOL Cats

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LOL CatIf you’ve spent any time online lately you’ve probably noticed or seen something about LOL Cat’s. (Wikipedia Entry) Last night I found an awesome site with tons of pictures…

So if you’re mad about cats (and a few rabbits, hamsters, mice, dogs and other furry things.) its an awesome waste of time. Go to:

I Can Has Cheezburger?

K2 & WordPress 2.2

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If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and use the latest K2 theme you’ve probably noticed some oddities. On stuff.za.net only the header loaded, a temporary fix was go back to an older version of the K2 theme.

After a quick search I found the cause of the problem, its the Sidebar widgets. Turns out that the code that K2 use for the sidebar widgets and a new feature in WordPress 2.2 are slightly incompatible and this ends up breaking everything. But as usual someone else has got a fix, just took me a few minutes to find and apply.

You need to download and install this plugin which when activated disables K2’s widgets. As usual let me know if things appear broken or don’t work properly.

Why can’t they talk to each other?

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Why?Why can’t everything I have and use integrate into one giant “thing”? Why can’t I make a phone call from my fridge? blog from my toaster? Why can’t I integrate WordPress and Facebook? Why can’t I combine Yahoo & Google? Why can’t I have one central contact list across all my devices and there various operating systems? Why can’t I easily blog from my cell phone? or take a picture with my camera, upload it via my cell and post it to this site, flickr and Facebook all at once? Why? Why? Why?

I’ve decided to make it my mission in life to make everything I own and use talk to everything else.

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Facebook Friends

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As if I don’t have enough things sucking up my free time, I’ve now been bitten by the Facebook bug. Yes that’s right I’m one of those people now sending out those annoying emails to all my friends asking begging them to acknowledge me as a friend.

Social networking software/websites are rather interesting, how you suddenly start tracking down people that you haven’t heard from or seen for years. You suddenly discover that a friend from high school is now sitting in London or that a girl in your primary school class is now incredibly *hot*. The big problem of course is that maintaining your friends list and keeping up with whats happening in there lives becomes almost a full time job, I’ve already spent a few hours going through friends, friends lists looking for friends that I’ve lost contact with and adding them to my friends list. (I hope that sentence made sense my friends.)

So if you know me, go add me as a friend. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go find more friends…