Some new hardware just arrived. Everything looks OK on first look
Some new hardware has just arrived. Everything looks fine at first glance. There are four notebooks, three PCMCIA LAN cards, one USB->LAN card, some floppies, a bag of RAM and some CDs with drivers for the notebooks.
I will look at each of the notebooks. I have tried booting them all. One of them has Windows XP password locked. I have not tried to hack the password as I am going to install the system that was originally on these laptops (based on the licence stickers on the bottom), one starts but Windows refuses to boot because of some "security issue". The other two boot, but one has no working touchpad/trackpoint. The second has Windows 98, which is locked by a password, but in Windows 98 you can easily log in to any account by pressing ESC or clicking Cancel on the login dialogue.
This one seems to have a problem with the hard drive, as it 'ticks' every X seconds, causing the system to lag for half a second. It may be necessary to replace the hard drive.
So I will check each of them and try to get ...
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There was a clean-up day at my company and I found this "gem". When I first picked it up, I was a bit confused because it was really light, so no battery is included. Luckily, after opening the lid, I realised that it can also be powered by 4xAA batteries.
The phone also has no charger. So I connected a lab power source to the battery connectors and switched it on. To be on the safe side, I started at 3V and slowly increased it to 6V (4xAA batteries). The phone was able to start, but the display is probably dead, as you can see on the following picture.
As I have an OCD to have only working phones and notebooks in my collection, I will try to repair it or exchange it with another collector for something else.
There is still a chance that there will be some oxidation on the contacts between the display and the motherboard, or maybe I will give it a bit of a head and then let it cool down to see if anything changes. I will see.
However, it is still a nice piece of old technology and even if I ...
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I finally got good source code from ai on the first try! Unbelievable, but true. And this is the resul
To be honest, I use chat AI a lot when I'm coding, but usually it's not that useful, especially when configuring any GUI. If you want to write some code, you have to specify very basic tasks and then connect everything by yourself, and then you have to hope that it works.
However, any complex tasks or GUI coding is usually absolutely useless.
Yesterday I had to make a menu for my new game for hryprodva.cz and I was really lazy, so I gave the AI another chance and today it worked. The picture at the beginning of the article is the result of the prompt:
"I need a page with a white background and a menu in the middle. The menu will be a grid, and it will be one third of the page size. it will be centered horizontally and vertically. the grid will theoretically be 3x3 tiles, but topleft 2x2 will be one big button, and the remaining corners will be rest 5 smaller buttons. The buttons should have different pastel colours and will be labelled by single ...
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I am experimenting with Adsense for my project hryprodva.cz. The project has consumed thousands of hours of my time and it is still in the red as there is no income. So I decided to try to place some advertisements and the easiest way seemed to be Google Adsense.
For the first try, I decided to place just two small ads, on the main page with the game list. The idea was to place the boxes with the same look as the game cards, with some advertising.
After three weeks of testing, it was still buggy and generating almost no income. On the PC, the ad appeared every tenth time, and on the phone it almost never appeared.
With a total income of around $1 after three weeks, I tried another experiment. I experimented with the automatically placed ads. There is a simple editor in the administration of the Adsense account where you can adjust the excluded parts of the pages and also select the types of ads that are banned. For example, the full-screen stickers are absolutely annoying...
Now the site is full of ads, but the income is many times higher. Now I have to find a balance between the ...
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I have received the solar charged power bank I ordered for "scientific" purposes. I am interested in the electronics for charging the cells and the safety mechanisms for overheating.
The picture presenting "perpetuum mobile" is just a joke. I remembered the funny video where the guy connected the extension cable to himself, then took the piezo crystal from the lighter, sparked the ground stick and established "never ending energy circulation".
I was suprised, when the Power Bank arrived partitialy charged and seemed to have some capacity. I have connected it to phone and tried it with the probe. It has been charged by about 1 ampere and it charged 560 mAh before it died.
I am going to give it a few charge/discharge cycles and will measure it. I want to discover it remaining capacity. Then, depending on the capacity i will possibly diassembly it and will make some test of safety mechanism. My question is, what wolud it do, when you leave it under the windshield in your car to charge it in hot summer, to be able to use it then to charge your phone. Wait for my next steps :)
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I have received a Galaxy Xcover 3 and PS1 slim as an exchange for an old PC HDD shaft and a couple of old SSDs.
The PS1 came with a demo CD and without any cables or controllers. I leave it for the long winter evenings and look forward to getting it working.
The phone does work though and is only missing the back cover. I will 3D print it later. The battery seems to be alive, it can be charged, and it has lasted tens of minutes of playing games without any significant drops in charge.
It runs on Android 5.1, and after the first start it seemed very old. I did not know that the Android interface has changed so much, as it still looks the same to me after each update. It may be that there are many small changes between versions, which is why the 5.1 looks so old.
Since Google Play only supports devices with Android 6 and below, I downloaded some really old .apk files for my favourite games that are no longer available on Google Play. For example, Slingshot Racing is a really great game that I bought many years ago, but it ...
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Fifth and hopefully final part of the NAS configuration. The main part, anyway. The problem with the VPN connection has been solved... in a really weird way, but it works.
I tried many solutions and it always worked weird. Each time I set up the working solution and tested it, it looked good. I also shut down the server, waited a minute, restarted and the VPN still worked. However, the next day when I rebooted, the VPN was down again. I went through this loop many times.
But finally I found a solution. I have three scripts running after startup. The first one kills the running wireguard instance and saves an iptables configuration. The second flushes all iptables configurations and restarts wireguard. The last one then restores the iptables rules and restarts the firewall. Then it works. I cannot see why the firewall is behaving this way, but at least it works.
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After dens of unsuccessfil tries, i have finally found a way, how to install software to Windows Mobile 10.
There were lot of different tutorials, declared as 100% working, but they were not. But at the end i have found few months old reddit post, which looked serious. As i was almost convinced, that the installation of apps is impossible, i have tried it with no expectations. I was really suprised when it worked!
The solution was incredibnly simple. First step was to "unlock interop", no matter what it means, i have done it. Then there were some more possibilities in phones, some magic switches enabling magic functions.. I just followed the given steps and set-up everithing i was told to.
The next step was to use some installer tool, which runs in PC and which installs the .xap files to phone through usb. The issue was, that the tools runs just under Windows. As i have no PC with windows, i had to set up a virtual machine and bridge the USB connection to this machine and use all tools through it.
At the end, i have tried 13 games yet, and 12 of them are working, which is real ...
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I have tried some next step to install software to Lumia 630.
The windows 8.1 mobile was absolutely 'bricked' in the way of installing software. I have tried all possibilities, read hundreds of articles and watched hours of youtube tutorials, but i was inable to make any installer of app working.
So i have decided to try to update to Windows 10. After trying some semi-official command line tools to upgrade the phone, without any result, i have found some chinese tool on XDA developers forums, which finally worked.
After few tries and many hours of updating, the phone is finally running Windows 10. However it has changed almost nothing. The store does not work either. The end of support of Windows 8.1 store was announced in 2019, the Windows Mobile 10 store was silently closed at the end of 2023 without any announcement.
The only progress i have made by updating to Windows 10 is, that now i have the File Manageer app, which was not included in Windows 8.1, so now i can access the files, transfered from computer. Now i can see the .xap .appx and other installer files, i can open them, see the dialog for installation, ...
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When I saw the article about "Worldwide IT Systems Problems", the first thing I thought was that this is just another buzzword headline for an article full of bullshit, as usual.
I didn't even want to read it, but after some time, when there were a lot of similar articles on different websites, I decided to read some of them.
I was really surprised that it looked relatively serious, but I was still not convinced. At first there was not much information, just some random "blackouts" of airports... Something that still seemed like captchphrases that we can see every day.
Later, when I finally saw some serious information and official statements about the untested update being sent to corporate machines, I finally believed that it was real.
The first thing I thought about was the comparison with the Y2K problem, and the funny fact that I think that Y2K was relatively funny, and not so serious, as there were mayor count of computers that were not facing the problems, this one came with no warning.
On the other hand, it was only a matter of time when something like this would happen. It is just a reminder of how much we depend on the internet ...
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