Category: Internet & Technology

I was rooting through some old email this week, and I came across an old PDF file back from 2000 that had a computer system that I had spec’d out for a friend. I got a chuckle when I looked at the specifications – a 433 Mhz Celeron CPU, 64 MB of RAM, a 10 GB hard drive, a graphics card with 4 MB of RAM. Those look like typos today don’t they? Those specs wouldn’t even run a netbook today. And how much was this hot-rod computer from nine years ago? $1589 CAD. Oh, but it includes a 17 inch CRT monitor, so that makes it quite the bargain… 😉

My friend Tim Heerebout pointed me to this short video, and it was just too cool not to share. The creator, a Canadian named Patrick Bovin, has some other excellent videos worth checking out.

I’d been fighting with getting my Logitech Squeezebox Duet set up after migrating to a new Windows Home Server – an HP MediaSmart EX485 to be precise – for the past few hours. I finally got it working, and here’s the solution: the SqueezeCenter software assumes that it can function on port 9000, but because the HP MediaSmart server has the Twonky Media server software installed, it can’t – because the Twonky software uses port 9001. So you have to change the SqueezeCenter software to use port 9001 (or whatever port you wish). The problem? You can’t change the port number using the software without first getting the software to load. Yeah, exactly.

So the first thing you need to do is remote desktop into the HP MediaSmart server and browse to the following folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SqueezeCenter\prefs

Inside that folder, you’ll find the Server.prefs file. Do a find and look for port 9000 and change it to port 9001. Save the file. [thanks to Anoop at Logitech for help with this part]

Then exit and re-start the SqueezeCenter software. It still won’t work though – that was the last piece of the puzzle I had to work though – you need to go into the Firewall on the HP MediaSmart (Control Panel > Windows Firewall) and add port 9001. Once that’s been added, you should be able to use the SqueezeCenter software via another PC – the browser that ships on Windows Home Server (which is really Windows Server 2003) sucks and doesn’t allow the SqueezeCenter software to work. On a desktop or laptop PC point your browser to the IP address of your server, and port 9001. It might look something like this: http://192.168.1.125:9001.

Once the firewall is opened to port 9001, you should be able to connect the remote to the music source – your HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server.

Whew. It’s been a while since I’ve had to hack at something this hard to get it to work – I was wondering if I still had my geek chops. Looks like I do. 😉

On Friday afternoon I was interviewed by Janet Dirks, the Alberta Bureau Chief for CTV National News. The topic? Netbooks! One of my favourite things to talk about lately, netbooks have been raging through the tech world for about a year, and they’ve finally gotten so big that the mainstream press has taken notice. Unlike the previous TV interview, this wasn’t a story about me, so I’m the tech expert weighing in with a few quotes. It’s hard to convey accurate information in a few short quotes though – netbooks are fast enough for what they’re designed for (Internet tasks) but slower at things like photo editing, video editing, etc.

It was a fun experience all in all – I love talking about technology – but I was sure nervous leading up to it, so maybe it was good that I only had a couple of hours notice. Less time to stress out! I wonder how many times I’ll have to be on TV before I’m not a bundle of frazzled nerves beforehand…

Oh yeah – check out the sweet computer hardware from the ’90s shown at the 2:04 mark. CTV needs some updated B-roll footage I think! 😉

…and you’ll see a video I created that took over an hour to render on my overclocked 2.8 Ghz Quad Core machine, at the end of which I noticed the mis-spelling of the word “Premium”. Time to re-render. Sure makes me wish Adobe Premiere Elements 7 had a spell-checker!

I’ve blogged about the Firefox spell check before, but this really got metoday: Firefox 3.0.5, the US English version with the Canadian English dictionary installed, generated this series of red error lines:

Do you see any spelling errors in that sentence? I don’t. So what’s with all the red lines? Come on Firefox developers, you can do better than this…

I’m not sure how or why, but a few months ago the DVD drive went missing on the HP Pavilion Slimline that my wife uses. Not physically missing of course, but missing in software – as in, there was no optical drive showing up in the list of drives. Putting a disc in the drive did nothing – I couldn’t load any new software on it. It wasn’t a big deal for quite a while, because we didn’t have much use for the drive, but this week I needed to load software for a new HP multi-function laser printer, so I figured I’d try to get it fixed once and for all.

When I saw that the optical drive was showing up in the device manager with a small yellow exclamation mark, I tried the normal thing: uninstall it, scan for new hardware, and let Vista fix the problem by re-installing it. Unfortunately, that didn’t work – it continued to complain about a bad driver, giving me error coe 39. I did a bit of searching and found this page on HP support that addressed the problem through a variety of steps. I knew the drive had power because it would eject properly, and the case hadn’t been opened in months so I figured it wasn’t a cable problem.

The solution ended up being in the registry. Here are the steps I followed to fix it (a shortened version of the steps from the HP site):

1. Fire up the registry editor (START > RUN > REGEDIT)
2. Drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Class
3. Select 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 (the first REG_SZ will say “DVD/CD-ROM Drive” to help you identify the right one).
4. Select the LowerFilters value and press the Delete key.
5. If you see UpperFilters listed as a value, select that as well and delete it.

After a reboot, I was back in action, with the DVD drive showing up. Thanks HP for having worthwhile online support and saving me a phone call!

The most recent, and probably (hopefully?) my last television appearance on the topic of unboxing, is courtesy of CityTV’s “Your City” news program. I had the most fun with this interview, largely because the camera guy was kind of geeky himself and we were chatting about digital cameras, HD video, video editing software, etc. As for the piece itself, I think it went pretty well. What I found particularly amusing were the facial expressions of Sandra Jansen, before and especially after the piece – you can tell she was thinking “Really? People watch this?” 😉