Modern Warfare - error after v1.40 update

Fired up my copy of Modern Warfare the other day as I'd started to get bored with all the nonsense of MW3/MW2 and I fancied getting my gold shotgun out again.


Anyway, had to download the latest update to v1.40 and once the update had completed, I was met with the following screen where it asked me a question without actually stating exactly WHAT the question was:

I could move between Yes and No but pressing the X button on the PS3 controller had no effect whatsoever. I made contact with Activision who admitted there was a problem and they were working on it.

AVAST - my preferred choice of anti-virus program

Download the latest and greatest version of Avast here:

LINK

It's quite a bit faster than AVG and less of a memory hog. Sorry AVG, but you've had your day.

Regback process on Windows Vista - slow

Open a cmd prompt box (right-click and Run as Administrator)

Navigate to the following folder:

C:\Windows\System32\config\regback

Delete any files names regxxxx - where xxxx is some arbitrary number.

Wireless ADSL routers - suggestions

Here's a nice Buffalo unit on Ebuyer

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/243075

or Cisco/Linksys

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/191547

PlayStation Network - Welcome back offer

After the recent PSN hack fiasco, Sony have finally offered us gamers the option to download your choice of 2 free games from a selection.

This goes some way to recompense me for the fact that Sony have locked my account, saying that there were 5 PS3s connected to that account. When my old '60Gb fat launch version' borked for the last time, I took the option of purchasing a new 'slim' PS3. After connecting it up, and attempted to download all of my previously purchased content (DLC stuff like map packs for Call of Duty), I was met with an error message saying "5 PS3s connected to this account, unable to download". What a complete load of spherical objects. This is on a brand new PS3.

Anyway, on to the new free games situation. I simply hooked up my PS3 to all 5 of my PSN accounts, downloaded 2 games on one UID, then logged in to one of the other accounts, and hey presto, more free games.

On this occasion, Sony 0 - Johnnyboy 1   :-)

Windows XP error

Just reinstalled XP after a new PC purchase and came across a problem:

Oh, how I laughed at the irony of Microsoft's DEP pulling the plug on Windows Update.

Clowns.

Playstation Network outage (PSN)

The PSN went down on the 21st April, it is now the 9th May. I make that over 3 weeks ago...

What the blue blazes are you doing, Sony? Where's your commitment to all the loyal people like me who have invested literally thousands in your company's products?

In this day and age of SLAs and KPIs, Sony seem not to care about them one iota.

Get it fixed, soon.

Back in the day...

Born in the 60s or 70s? Read on...

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were babies in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s probably shouldn't have survived, because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was regularly chewed and licked. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles or baby monitors or latches on cabinets, and it was fine to play with pans and cardboard boxes.

 When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokeys' on our wheels. If we rode in cars we had no seatbelts in the back, and riding in the boot was a real treat. We drank water from garden hoses and public fountains and it tasted just the same. We scrumped apples and ate blackberries without washing them first. Of course we ate chips and wham bars and drank full-fat milk, but were never overweight because we were always playing out. We shared one Lilt or Panda Shandy between four friends - from the same bottle or can - and no one died from it. We would spend several hours re-building go-carts, then go top speed down the hill, only to find out we'd forgotten the brakes. After running into a patch of stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.

 We looked out for the other kids on our street we knew who lived in each house, and not everybody was a paedophile. We didn't have televisions in our bedrooms and there were only three or four channels. Sometimes, the television just got switched off!!  When it rained we played cards, or built things from Lego, Meccano, papier maché, egg cartons and pasta shells. Sometimes we listened to the radio. There was no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chat-rooms, or MSN. We had friends - we went outside and found them. We played penny-up-the-wall, football, manhunt and skipping. In the summer we had water-fights with kids we hardly knew and organised big games of football and rounders. Sometimes that ball really hurt. We fell off skateboards and out of trees. We double-dared each other and sometimes it didn't work out. We grazed knees and broke bones, but there were no law suits. We wore our scars with pride. We played Knock Down Ginger
and were actually afraid of the owners catching up with us. We were scared of the old lady who lived on the corner - not the other way round. The corner shop let the four of us in at the same time, and those pretend cigarettes are definitely not the reason some of us smoke as adults. We walked to friends' homes. If they lived quite far away, we borrowed our next-door-neighbour's bike. We also, believe it or not, walked to school; we didn't rely on Mummy to drive us to school as it was just round the corner. We made up games with sticks and punctured beachballs. We rode bikes in packs of seven and wore our coats by only the hood. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we had a run-in with the law was unheard of; their punishments were usually worse...

That generation produced some of the best risk-takers, problem-solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. Not every one of us passed our exams at school, not everybody did well at everything, and not everyone had a gap-year. But it all turned out okay, and everybody learnt to cope with the hard bits. And you're one of them. Congratulations!

PS3 - YLOD and now fixed!

I had a bit of bad luck recently, what with my car accident and then my beloved PS3 died on me. Great, rang Sony and they refused to replace it. They offered me a 'refurb' unit at £130 and only 3 months warranty. See you later Sony.

Youtube revealed a series of YLOD fixes and most of them were based on the old trick 'turn power on whilst pressing the EJECT button on the BluRay drive'. No help to me with my launch 60Gb PS3.

One of the videos by a northern bloke called 'gilksy' pointed me in the direction of a possible fix. I took my PS3 round my mates house and performed the fix, which basically involved reflowing the solder on the board. It took us a couple of hours in total, and we did 20 seconds of 300C heat.

This didn't work.


3 days later, I tried again on my own - and used 40-45 seconds of 300C heat. Put it all back together and it WORKED!!!!


Very pleased with the result. The only difference to gilksy's procedure was that I used a drinks mug to support the BGAs when being heated from the underside.

What a total result! :-)

JB

Internet radio stations

Bearing in mind the time I spent in Uruguay in 2008-2009, I developed a love for all things internet radio-based.

Some of the stations I listen to on a regular basis include Deep FM, Audiogrooves.net and PointBlankFM.

I've also been able to add a gadget to the right hand side of my blog as you can see...


Cheers,

JG

LG GH22LS50 DVD burner

I've had all manner of problems with this particular DVD burner from LG, but only when using it under Ubuntu. Trying to burn using either CDs or DVDs usually resulted in producing a coaster, which is no use to man or beast.

After booting into Windows 7 this morning, I checked the LG ODD firmware update tool and it said that the drive had been upgraded from version TL01 to version TL02 firmware.

I rebooted back into Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx 10.04) and tried burning a DVD ISO image using my trusty k3b application. The drive sounds like a rocket ship and managed to burn my hefty 4.3Gb ISO image in no time at all! Wonderful stuff.

I would suggest that anyone having problems in burning with this particular drive should update their firmware from TL01 to TL02.

PS3 jailbroken with USB dongle? Read on...

I've been reading various online reports about the PS3 being hacked with some USB dongle device. Videos have been surfacing on the 'tinterweb' purportedly showing how it all work. There is one in French, but a more useful Aussie one can be found, courtesy of OzModChips.

The website of the USB jailbreak device in question (http://psjailbreak.com/) is currently down at time of writing but I have managed to grab the text of the website below:

PS Jailbreak is a USB plug and play solution that installs in seconds, keeping your valid warranty seal in tact.

Easy to use installer and GUI takes you step by step.

Compatible with all production models FAT and SLIM. Supports all regions: USA, JAP, PAL and KOREA

PS Jailbreak disables forced software updates and will never brick your console.

Supports all games (it does not allow backups of bluray movies , dvd movies , or past consoles games)

Backup games to your internal hard drive or external hard drive through USB, and boot directly off GUI. Eliminating the need for expensive blueray burners and costly blank media.

Play backups off your hard drives 2x as fast as off the blueray drive. This eliminates lags and glitches to provide you with smoother game play.

Open up your console to a new generation of homebrew applications. Load homebrew apps/games off any USB hard drive/flash drive.

Fully updatable with new features/updates by connecting PS Jailbreak to any computers USB port.

The USB device, which apparently sells for around £80 (US$120), is plugged in prior to booting. When the PS3 is switched on, the Eject button is also pressed in quick succession. LEDs light up on the USB device to indicate mode of operation.

Its basic premise is that you seem to be able to perform backups of games to an external HDD, and then be able to run them as if you had loaded the game CD/DVD/BluRay into the drive on the PS3. This sounds great in practice.

Although BluRay discs seem to be quite resistant to scratches, once a game disc fails to load - then you are stuffed. Time to go out to the shops and buy another. This device fits the bill for my requirements, although having said that, I can see other miscreants using it for copying say rented games.

I'm convinced that Sony will be trying their best over the next week or so to release a new firmware update to negate this device's effect on the operation of the PS3. If they are unable to do so, then I might be interested! It may possibly give me the option of being able to perhaps reinstall my Ubuntu Linux as another OS to use, which was the 'other os' option that Sony so kindly removed for me in a previous firmware update.

Fingers crossed.

More info available here in the Register article:


PS3 jailbroken - The Register

SATA connections

I'm a touch 'old school' when it comes to connections inside or outside computers. I had the pleasure of sorting out a PC that belonged to the parents of a dear friend over the weekend, and all seemed to be going well.

They had a rather dodgy version of Windows 7 installed and Microsoft Security Essentials was complaining that it might not be 'genuine software'. I elected to remove this and install Grisoft's excellent AV product called AVG. All was going well, until I went to reboot. I had removed a game CD from the CD drive prior to rebooting.

System rebooted and promptly told me there were disk errors - press Ctrl Alt Del to restart. Each restart then displayed differing errors, namely - slight corruption on the BIOS screen, failure at different points of the boot process, and oh dear, it was all going wrong for Johnnyboy at that point.


After checking the obvious, and then booting into my OS on my USB flash drive, all seemed OK. I normally carry around an install of Puppy Linux 4 OS to assist me in case Windows can't boot. And that happens rather too often for my liking.

Opening up the case revealed a rather warm PC. The power supply unit (PSU) was in the opposite corner of the case to that which I was expecting, and consequently covered most of the motherboard connections for the PC/case. I hadn't been able to figure out why I wasn't able to boot up after simply removing the CD.

After a bit of prodding around and checking, and then reseating cables, I discovered the cause. The CD drive had ejected rather forcefully (a good example of this effect would be a slide hammer) and in doing so had made the connection for the SATA HDD lose partial connection with the motherboard. I suspect that this was mainly due to the heat build-up and subsequent heating/cooling effect when the PC was switched off and on, and therefore making the connections possibly somewhat looser than required.

IDE connections are very firm and secure, but hard to work with in the confines of a PC case. SATA cables are great, and easy to work with but the less than solid connection has always concerned me. If you ever have troubles booting your PC after installing a new HDD, then I would certainly recommend checking the SATA cable connections as a first port of call.

Dad in hospital last night

I had a frightening moment this morning when I woke to find a text msg from my Mum, saying that Dad had gone to hospital at 3am this morning on a 999 call. Apparently, he had breathing difficulties.

I arrived at the hospital to find my father in good spirits. It seems that he had suffered his first asthma attack, which wasn't too bad I guess for a 73 year old spring chicken. So panic mode over, and I can now relax again.

JB

Call of Duty - Black Ops

The latest offering in the Call of Duty series of games is called Black Ops. There's a preview video available here:

Call Of Duty: Black Ops

The ability to send a remote-controlled car  is ingenious - think something along these lines: (Tamiya model r/c car)

Work

After my return from Uruguay last year, and a consultancy position working at my last company on an LDAP/Active Directory implementation project, I'm looking for work.

If there are any openings within your organisation or company, then of course I'd be glad to hear from you. Skills include HP-UX, Unix, Windows, Linux, ssh, DNS, TCP/IP, LDAP, Active Directory, rsync et al.

AVG - latest download link v9.0

To save you all that time and effort, here's a link to the latest version of AVG (free edition):

AVG FREE

Clicking on the above link will take you straight to the Download page for the installation files for AVG9. As per normal, the FREE version is tucked away, some would say almost hidden on the main AVG site.

Regards

JG

Slow Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)?

Recently, network performance on my Ubuntu box was appalling - to say the least.

Pings were taking 3,500 to 4,000 msec, a traceroute would take forever and a day to complete. Webpages were affected too, sometimes taking up to 30 seconds to load.

I could see that DNS resolution was slow but this wasn't a problem just with Firefox. It seemed to be affecting the whole OS.

I checked that DNS wasn't using IPv6 (which it wasn't) and also double-checked all the usual suspects; namely /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf


Originally I suspected that my Sony Ericsson K800i was causing a problem as I've taken to connecting the phone quite regularly nowadays, for transferring photos and also charging it. When connected, a message appeared on screen saying Network disconnected, and this made me think that perhaps Ubuntu was using the GPRS on my phone to access the 'tinterweb' ;-) This wasn't the case though.

The problem turned out to be a service called 'Ubuntu One'. I use it for syncing my local data to the so-called cloud. It seemed to be working fine but after checking the settings, I saw that the Limit Bandwidth option was set to On, but the default limits were set to Upload 2,048 and Download 2,048. As soon as I disabled this service, my pings went from 3000-4000 msec down to 20-300 as I would normally expect.

I think I'll be syncing manually from now...

PS3 firmware - update v3.21 - UPDATED

I am now connected to the PSN but still using version 3.20 System Firmware. I managed to achieve this using the Logan5 tool proxy. Everything works fine - yay!

Custom firmware is currently being looked into by the man GeoHot so I'll probably give that a bash when it gets released.

Sony - you are a bunch of twonks.

PS3 firmware - update v3.21 - WARNING

I was so close to installing the latest update, but somehow managed to spend 30 minutes online on my PC reading The Register - which revealed that the latest update removes the ability of your PS3 to run LINUX!

You appear to have a choice but no choice. Yesterday, I was able to play online games on the PSN and also boot my PS3 into Ubuntu. I've also played around with the Yellow Dog version but went back to Ubuntu in the end. Today, I can either accept the update and then not be able to use my Ubuntu. If I don't accept the update, then I can no longer play online games, and this accounts for around 80% of the games purchased.

It is simply outrageous that Sony have even thought about this, let alone actually implementing it. They are removing a feature that was advertised as being integral to the PS3 at launch. Where Sony stands from a legal viewpoint is far from certain. My analogy is that it's similar to a car manufacturer deciding to remove the stereo or sat/nav from your car, simply because they want to. You can then use the car as before (minus the stereo or sat/nav) OR sit there in your garage listening to your music whilst going nowhere.

Early adopters such as myself have invested big money in the platform and I simply don't understand Sony's logic. Like I said, they have 'given' me a choice when in fact there simply is no choice. I purchased the PS3 because it had the ability to run another operating system (OS), as well as play games obviously.

I am awaiting Sony's response on the matter.