New toy for the car, full HD camera and GPS system

BlackVue 16GB DR400G HD II
Full HD video 1920 x 1080 @30fps
GPS Version


I've just purchased this item and installed it in my vehicle. I recently suffered some vandal damage (3 tyres were punctured) and I wanted to catch the cretins in action.

I've already witnessed some poor lost soul navigating a roundabout the WRONG way and also seen a mugging. It's come in very useful so far and a friend who saw the video quality bought one immediately - he was that impressed.

Have a nose at my YouTube channel - search for montevideobadboy

Evolution 2.32.2 email client - exporting to new PC

For those of you that have been reading my blog, you'll know that I recently acquired an HP Microserver N40L. It now has two extra HDDs added, in the shape of a couple of 1.5Tb units from Western Digital.

Now that I have the extra capacity, I set about the onerous task of copying the data across from my main PC's Evolution (version 2.32.2) email data store and onwards to its new destination on the HP micro-server.

I used the 'File | Backup Evolution settings' option on the source client's Evolution app to make a tar.gz backup of all the necessary files - or so I thought.

The import on the new system took ages (4.5GB of data) but eventually completed, almost. It finished but then started off again with the same prompt i.e. Import data etc. At this point, I shut Evolution down on the new server and went back to my old PC.

Having done most of the grunt work, you will still need to export some other data via the gconftool-2 utility:


gconftool-2 --dump /apps/evolution > pc_evolution_data.xml

On new PC, do the following:

gconftool-2 --load pc_evolution_data.xml

I fired up Evolution on the new PC/micro-server and it all worked fine. All I then had to do was enter the passwords for my email accounts.

HP Microserver N40L - WOL problem (wake on lan)

UPDATE (April 2014) - a comment from a poster states that he had to change "eth0 to em1" for it to work under Ubuntu 14.04 

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I've recently purchased a beautifully crafted mini server made by HP; it's the HP N40L microserver.

Leaving my PC switched on all day consumed anywhere between 110-180 watts of power so I was looking at ways of reducing energy consumption and this box only uses around 60 watts.

Memory has been increased from 2Gb to 8Gb, and the spare 2Gb stick of RAM now sits in my main PC - result!

Windows 7 worked OK until the legendary 'dazloader' patch was installed, and then it wouldn't boot (BSOD). BIOS problems might be the cause of that?

Anyway, the annoying thing about this box and Linux (specifically Ubuntu 10.10) is that the Wake On Lan functionality does not work. I did see a post about this mentioned on another blog here http://confoundedtech.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/enable-wol-on-ubuntu-hp-microserver.html but the instructions didn't seem too clear to me and needed a tidy-up/re-write.

Here's the 3 lines of code we will be using later:

#!/bin/bash
ifconfig eth0 down
poweroff

It is more than likely that ethtool is not installed on your system by default, so install it with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ethtool

Once installed, see if your ethernet card supports WOL:

sudo ethtool eth0

This should return the following information:

Settings for eth0:
    Supported ports: [ TP ]
    Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
                            100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
                            1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
    Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
    Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
                            100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
                            1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
    Advertised pause frame use: No
    Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
    Speed: 100Mb/s
    Duplex: Full
    Port: Twisted Pair
    PHYAD: 1
    Transceiver: internal
    Auto-negotiation: on
    MDI-X: Unknown
    Supports Wake-on: g
    Wake-on: g
    Current message level: 0x000000ff (255)
    Link detected: yes
 

As you can see, both the 'Supports Wake-on' and 'Wake-on' fields show 'g' which means it is supported.

We now need to make an entry in the /etc/rc.local file, which may be empty already. Insert the following line of code into the file, using whichever editor your prefer (vi/emacs or gedit for those GUI-lovers out there)


sudo ethtool -s eth0 wol g

Save the file away to disk.

Entries now need to be created for correct shutdown operation. We will be using the 3 lines of code mentioned earlier in this article:

sudo vi /etc/rc6.d/K99wol_poweroff

Paste these 3 lines of code into the file:

#!/bin/bash
ifconfig eth0 down
poweroff

Save the file to disk.

Mark the file executable:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/rc6.d/K99wol_poweroff

Now copy the file to 2 separate locations:

sudo cp /etc/rc6.d/K99wol_poweroff /etc/rc6.d/K9ls

sudo cp /etc/rc6.d/K99wol_poweroff /etc/rc0.d/K99wol_poweroff

You should now be able to shutdown the server. Please note that mine seemed to hang on shutdown the first time, but a subsequent reboot/shutdown seemed to clear it.

Try pinging the ethernet interface with your favourite/preferred magic ping packet tool. I tend to use the wol client from my Buffalo WHR-G300N router that's running DD-WRT.

Call of Duty - Modern Warfare PS3 update!

I've recently found out a way of getting past the loop mentioned in my previous post, where users of the original Modern Warfare were unable to get past the Yes/No option when attempting to play the game.

After watching a few videos on YouTube, the trick involves switching off your WiFi router so that the PS3 starts the game without a network connection - if you're using wireless that is.

The game should now start without that annoying error message that you simply cannot dismiss or answer. As soon as you get to the point where you can access the multiplayer menu option, simply switch your Wifi router on, wait a minute and then play.

Acitivision's website is completely useless in this regard since all it offers as advice is to reconnect your PS3 up to the router - which simply doesn't work and I've verified that by trying it.