Random Bits of Dell XPS M1330 Knowledge

Here are some random bits of information I’ve discovered about my Dell XPS M1330 in the past few days:

  • The issue where, upon resuming from sleep mode, the M1330 will drop from 1280 x 800 resolution down to 1024 x 768, seems o have no fix at this time. I called XPS tech support and they weren’t even aware of the issue (which I find hard to believe, it’s mentioned all over the place). It happens perhaps 25% of the time, and the only fix it to go into the display settings and set it back to 1280 x 800.
  • Upon resuming from sleep mode, the screen will light up as normal, then go black, then come back. This is irritating. The solution (which I found in this forum) is to go into the Task Scheduler (just type Task at the start bar and you’ll find it). Look under MICROSOFT > WINDOWS > MOBILEPC and you’ll see a task listed called TMM. Right-click on it and select DISABLE. This will address the issue.
  • Although the XPS tech I spoke to insisted otherwise, upgrading the graphics driver for the NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS with a driver right from NVIDIA isn’t possible. Only a driver directly from Dell will work, which sucks because it means I’ll never be able to have the highest-performing drivers.
  • I have a D-Link DIR-855 802.11n router and was having a lot of connectivity problems with the XPS M133o – it would always connect initially, then it would drop the connection…but only for certain types of requests (seemingly). I could ping anything (I ran a ping -t), but no Web pages would load, nor would email. Vista’s “Detect and Repair” thought that the connection was perfect, so it was no help (I suspect it does a ping to check connectivity). This issue was driving me crazy, but after installing the 1.05 firmware on my router, and updating the BIOS on the M1330 to A06, it’s now working fast and stable.

UPDATE: A solution was presented in the comments section: disabling the TMM scheduled task. I did that, and guess what? No more resolution switching. No more “fade to black” effect. Nice!

It’s Official: The US Dollars Has Tanked

My wife Ashley cashed a cheque for $93 USD today (a deposit from a timeshare rental we made for some friends) and came back with less than $93 in Canadian dollars. I was puzzled. Last I checked, there was still a 3% difference. It seems that a lot can happen in a short period of time. Even if, on paper, the US and Canadian dollar has reached parity, the banks alway screw you over just a little bit extra. Here’s what the Royal Bank of Canada has to say about the exchange rate:

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Simply…amazing. For the first time in my 32 years on this planet, the US dollar is now the weaker currency. And for someone such as myself that gets paid primarily in US dollars, that’s just depressing. I know Canada’s surging natural resource industry is partly to blame, but there are a lot of things very wrong with the US economy that, if fixed, would make a big difference. This just sucks.

Somebody Broke Adobe’s Web Site

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It’s so incredibly rare when major Web sites go down or get broken, I was shocked to see Adobe’s home page generating all these errors – betcha’ someone’s getting thrown down a few rungs on the ol’ corporate ladder. Thankfully I was still able to find the Adobe sub-page and grab a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1.

WordPress and YouTube Videos

I wonder how many releases of WordPress there are going to be before they address the issue where WordPress mangles pasted in YouTube code? I know there are many YouTube plug-ins out there, but I’m not looking to have to jump through hoops to implement YouTube video code – I want to take the YouTube code from YouTube, paste it in, and submit my blog post. It’s truly bizarre that such a massive bug can go un-fixed for so long – and I’m not the only one that’s noticed this. The work-around right now is to switch to the raw code view, paste in the YouTube code, then hit Publish without switching back to the visual editor. If you do that, the YouTube videos show up just fine. Need to edit it? You have to re-paste the original YouTube code into your post.

Come on WordPress crew: I love your CMS, but there are some gaping holes that need plugging up.

Killer Halo 3 Commercials

The marketing engine is in full swing for Halo 3 now, and this morning while watching the UFC 76 Countdown I saw a great commercial for it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it – they essentially built a diorama with dozens, possibly hundreds, or Halo 3 miniatures and film around them with an eerie piano melody slowly building. Very cool stuff.

There are also some interesting live action trailers that are impressive. Great stuff!

Unethical eBay Seller: Majeeda Haaq (wickedly-whimsical)

I think eBay is one of the greatest Internet-era inventions in history – it leverages the power of a world-wide market of sellers with an equally large pool of buyers, connecting in ways that no previous market ever could. When eBay works, it works very well – but when it works poorly, boy can it get ugly. eBay relies on the individual integrity of buyers and sellers, but when the integrity of a buyer collides with that of an ethically bereft seller, it’s usually the buyer that gets burned if he’s not expecting it – which unfortunately is what happened to me. Allow me an early morning rant…

My wife Ashley was looking for a new flat iron – I’m mostly ignorant about such things (my hair takes 30 seconds to “do” in the mornings), but apparently there are flat irons that get hot, and flat irons that get really hot. She had the former, but wanted the latter to tame her unruly hair. Local sources for the type of extra-hot flat iron that she wanted were charging over $250 CAD (about $240 USD) so naturally I turned to the greatest marketplace on earth to find a better deal: eBay. I found a seller, Majeeda Haaq (who sellers under the name wickedly-whimsical with a store called Wickedly Whimsical Witches and Cats), who was selling a Paul Brown Hawaii Ceramic Flat Iron for $100 USD. The shipping charges were steep at $25.68 USD, but I assumed this was because the box was fairly big and I’m always willing to pay what it costs to ship to Canada. It was still a good deal overall, so I used the Buy It Now feature and paid $125.68 USD for it on August the 2nd. I received an automated response to my message stating my payment had been received. I never heard back from the seller, but I assumed the package would be on its way soon enough, and I’d see it within two weeks – that’s on the long side of how long it normally takes to get a package from the US to Canada. Continue reading Unethical eBay Seller: Majeeda Haaq (wickedly-whimsical)

How NOT to Warn Your Customers About Phishing

Sometimes I’m amazed at how poorly big companies can be at executing upon the simplest things. Future Shop, a big-box retail chain in Canada, sent out an email on the 13th warning customers about an email phishing attempt. That’s nice of them, but they violated one very important rule that all companies should follow when they warn customers about phishing attempts: they made their email look like a phishing email. The small thing was the lack of a FROM name – the email came in with no information about who it was from. The bigger thing was the URLs they were using for linking. Check out the screen shot below:

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The easiest way to determine if something is a phishing attempt is to look at what URL the links are going to send you to – if it’s anything other than the companyname.com, you should be slightly concerned. When you mouse over an URL that’s typed out as www.futureshop.ca, you should see an URL that says www.futureshop.ca. When I looked at this, I thought to myself “What the heck is DCM5.com?” That’s sure not Futureshop.ca! The length of the URL was also raising a red flag – it was linking to an unknown domain, sure, but it also looked like it was linking to a script that would do something. I tried going to DCM5.com in my browser to take a peek, but it didn’t load, which is also suspicious.

Eventually I just clicked on one of the links, trusting in Firefox and Vista to protect me from anything seriously bad happening, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up taking me to a legitimate Futureshop.ca page about phishing. I suspect the DCM5.com URL is some sort of click-tracking service, but guess what: when you’re emailing your customers about an issue of security, tracking their clicks should be the last thing on your list.

I’m Not in Hawk Nelson. Seriously.

It seems like it’s once again time for me to explain again on this blog that I’m not the Jason Dunn from Hawk Nelson. Below is an email exchange I had with someone this week. She (and it seems to be a “she” 95% of the time, and probably age 15 or under) had subscribed to my RSS to email feed (the box in the upper right corner) and saw my post about the Heroes disc two locking up where I said the words “my wife”. She then emailed me back expressing her shock that I was married. The screen shot below explains the rest.

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I suppose by now I shouldn’t be surprised by these types of messages, but I swear when I was 15 years old I was smart enough to realize that are “regular” people in the world that have the same names as the famous people, and when someone becomes famous the rest of the non-famous people in the world with the same name aren’t required to go to a lawyer and get their name changed. I also think that at age 15 I could read and understand what I was reading.

I couldn’t even respond back to this girl a second time because every response I wrote ended up sounding mean. I shielded her identity in the screen shot above, and unsubscribed her from my email feed, but I swear this is much less funny as it was a year ago. 😉

Saying Goodbye to George “Nampy” Dunn

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George Dunn in 1939, around age 22.

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George Dunn at age 74 enjoying a four-olive martini.

It’s been just over a month since my grandfather (whom we all called “Nampy”) passed away, so I thought it appropriate to publish these two photos as a way of saying one last goodbye. Goodbye Nampy, your family and friends will miss you…

Which Transformer Are You?

Ok, I didn’t think I’d be posting another one of these, but come on, it’s the freakin’ Transformers! Looks like I’m quite up to Optimus Prime role model standards though. 😉

I AM
71%
OPTIMUS PRIMETake the Transformers Quiz