My dead navigations system

OK, I finally dissected the cradle and found out the following:

– On the back of th cradle, there are 4 metal pieces that hold the thread for the screws that attach the cradle to the car-windshield-holder. One of the screws was loose (probably due to the constant rattling the craddle takes when attached to the windshielt), and the respective metal bit had detached itself from its plastic socket and fallen into the device, probably causing a short-circuit.
– There’s a fuse soldered to the PCB, and its blown. I short circuited it and found both the cradle’s and the GPS mouse’s LED to light up when bringing power to the system.

In short: There’s a good chance that my GPS mouse and cradle are still fully functional but I can’t say for sure given that my PDA is still dead. (Anybody got an rz1710 that they’d be willing to sacrifice for a test? ;) ) In either case: If you’ve got a similar GPS system, check the screws on the back from time to time and make sure they’re all safely attached (that way, the metal counterpart inside wouldn’t have been able to fall into mine).

I also tried to open the PDA, but alas it is riddled with those @^$&# ultra-tiny torx screws which I just can’t get to budge. Anyway, I doubt I could fix whatever is damaged in there, and as you probably know, I’ve got a new one on order as well.

I trashed the server …

… but I did not touch the registry. OK, enough with the singing, my server doesn’t have a registry anyway! (at least not the one known from a certain operating system)

I DID however manage to mess up the configuration of my SMTP daemon. Sure, you might say that that is not a first, as I managed to inadvertedly disable TLS support a few months ago, but this time it was actually serious enough to be able to cause mail loss on my end. I noticed it this morning as I received a ‘delayed’ delivery alert from my MTA telling me that it had trouble delivering a reminder I had sent to myself. Looking a little further, I found the server trying to look up the domain in DNS and subsequently attempting to contact my outside/Internet IP address which eventually failed as my router doesn’t do forwarding on requests coming from the inside. Not realizing my mistake, I started digging around to actually try and forward the port, until it dawned upon me that the MTA shouldn’t even try to deliver the message through the network in its normal configuration. Sure enough, the test mail that I subsequently sent from outside bounced back in my face with a big “Error 550: relay not permitted” and I recalled recently editing the config files as I hurried to open my text editor.

The bottom line: While melding in updates from the default config file, I had managed to overwrite the line defining the server’s local domains, causing it to omit the ones I had manually added later. I’ve now changed this configuration and moved my local definitions out of the config file (and into the locally imported config that’s provided by my distro for these kind of things), that way, future modifications to the default/global config file shouldn’t affect this setting again.

P.S. I also did a quick scan through the logs and it looks as if I was lucky: the affected domains have a very low traffic volume and apart from spam, no other mail delivery attempts came in while the server was misconfigured. Phew.

Games Convention 2006

All right, I’ve been to lazy to write again, but I guess this one needs to be finished. So, together with a few of my fellow gamer-FM colleagues, I went to Leipzig last weekend to do the audio/video techie stuff for a booth there. Read on for a small recap and the link to the few pictures I made. Continue reading “Games Convention 2006”

The worst keyboard ever!

People who know me, know that I freak when some company ‘improves’ the keyboard layout by tilting the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdn block (ie putting it vertically instead of horizontally) or by moving down the PrtScr/ScrollLock/Pause row to make room for useless Power/Standby Buttons at the top, usually putting the ‘Power’ button in place of the ‘Pause/Break’ button which I have a tendency to hit quite often when working with Linux consoles. You can imagine my frustration everytime Windows shuts down thanks to me hitting CTRL+Power on such a crappy input device.

Anyway, I just discovered this and I must say that that contraption must be one of the worst keyboards ever to pollute the face of the earth! Not only does it have no numeric pad and none of the aforementioned blocks that I could see, no it is also missing the normal function keys like the escape key! Yes it does sport backlighting (my Logitech G15 has that too, even if it doesn’t autosense the light in my room or my presence), is wireless and has quite a share of silly multimedia buttons, but if you ask me, that doesn’t make it what they call the ‘Ultimate Keyboard’. Quite on the contrary, I think that this abomination of hardware rather deserves the name ‘Ultimate Typing Nightmare’ and I don’t care what their marketing department throws at me, I won’t buy it!

2008-12-12 Update: Microsoft seems to have moved things around on their website. The product I’m referring to in this text is this one.

My first surgery

If you’re reading this, that means I’ve survived the very first surgery and hospital stay in my life (apart from maybe my birth, but I didn’t really memorize that one).

So what happened? (Be warned, what follows is very very long and actually quite boring and I’m way to lazy to edit and cut it down, so it’s bound to stay that way.) Continue reading “My first surgery”

Bear