Blog Marco

I love the Thinkpad line... MacBook Air may look sexy but on a practical level, perhaps its a little ahead of its time.

Video details: Viral Video parody of the MacBook AIR commercial sales pitch of having the whole laptop into a yellow envelope, but then having to contend with various USB connections - a little over the top, but nowadays USB connections are used for Mice, Keyboards, Printers, external Hard Drives, Cameras, Memory stock readers... Thinkpad 1 vs. Mac Air 0

Did you know you can call a toll free number from the internet to a physical phone through the internet using skype? I haven't needed to use this until now (I think this ability has been present since 2005)... I had to call up a company in USA from Australia to enquire about an eBay auction. You can simply dial freecall phone numbers to France, Poland, UK and USA. These number rangers are supported:
* France: +33 800, +33 805, +33 809
* Poland: +48 800
* UK: +44 500, +44 800, +44 808
* USA: +1 800, +1 866, +1 877, +1 888
And this is how you can use this skype freecall system using skypeOut (you don't need to buy credits): In Skype, just enter the number in international format in the Address Bar (start with +1 for USA, +44 for UK etc) and hit the big green button. Couldn’t be easier! You can also add the numbers to your contact list and call them “pizza”, “video rentals” or wherever else you’re calling. The free calls are effective immediately and supported on all platforms where the Skype client is available. Oh and if you need to select a choice from a menu just go to the dial tab and click on the numbers you need to press. Something free... practical and a source for amusement when your bored.

So last Monday I needed to desperately backup my files as a result of all the USB ports failing. So I couldn't plug in any USB external hard drives. The other ways I can save files for backup is by sending the most critical ones by email to myself. (Or save them on some Internet Hard drive) The only other ways were to buy a PCMCIA card for USB and there is a final creative way is to use a LAN between two computers and transfer files using shared folders. The internet method is tedious and slow. Even with a fast connection. I didn't want to buy anything new, let alone wait for any eBay orders to come through so the card was out. I had an Ethernet cable - well you actually need two for this since you need a crossover bit where you crossover the transmission and receiver wires. You can find out more information about this stuff here: about sharing files, here is the best site I can find about setting up two computers in a LAN, and here some other info about shareing folders.

Last Saturday, both USB ports on my IBM X40 Thinkpad laptop died. The USB ports simply would not recognise any of the USB devices I had from the external hard drive, external DVD Burner, USB memory sticks or the Microsoft intellimouse. So off to Google to find some answers... Search query for me was "usb drive won't recognise devices" and other combinations thereof. What frustrates me the most is that a lot of the results have a partial relevancy to my problem... some have no helpful information at all... its like a hunt for facts or clues on what exactly to search for. So this blog entry is for those looking for the best way to solve the problem. Lucky for me, the laptop was an IBM and was still under warranty - and my problem was promptly solved by a replacement motherboard - or "system board" was what they called it.

So what led to my USB ports failing to recognise any devices? First of all, one of the ports was acting erratically for about a week - with my USB mouse just dying and becoming non-responsive. I had to unplug and replug it to make it work again. Then, last Saturday when I plugged in a printer through the USB - the ports just died. So the first thing I did was unplug all the ports and restarted the computer a few times. Didn't work. Jiggled the ports. Didn't work. Opened up Control Panel, in System and looking at Devices... no errors or hazard signs there. So I deleted all the USB drivers ports etc.

For all you digger fans out there you can download it from this page (Digger XP). It has been remastered and it can be played on Windows XP! But if you want the original remastered Dos version you can go here. The website also contains the recordings of the games of the world record holders - a very interesting watch! This game was made back in 1983 but I picked it up much later around 1989 when a lot of games seemed to be swapped around on those 3.5" disks. For some reason my file of Digger was named Dig Dug so I always called it that until I found out just a few months ago that it was actually called Digger. Dig Dug is actually another game but I never played that one. Digger is a simple game - get all the gems and move on to the next level before nobbin or hobbin comes out to get you. Bonus points are awarded for shooting down those aliens or getting the money or even getting the money to squash nobbin (or hobbin).

I know, I've got an old mobile phone... nothing like those new phones coming out with great internet applications. I've got a Sony Ericsson K750i whose on-board camera is now screwy as it takes snowy photos (although if I open up the phone and tighten the connections, the photos come out great). Anyway, age and the crappy camera aside, its still a good phone. It allows me surf the internet - the phone I have has Java Virtual Machine which allows me to install and run certain games and other useful internet applications (for Australians) to trade local and international stockmarkets using the CMC Mobile Marketmaker platform. I surf the internet on my phone using this cool lite browser called Opera Mobile. You can surf the internet with Opera Mobile, it compresses webpages for you and removes images. Another useful Internet Application is Google Mobile which allows you to check emails (on your gmail account) as well as view attachments you receive in messages, including photos, Microsoft Word documents and PDF files. Finally, another (new) Internet Application specifically for Australians is this thing called

When I installed AVG free last month it removed a few viruses including a file called "copy.exe". So whenever I go to "My Computer" (WinKey+E) and double click on any of my hard drives, including external and flash drives I get an error stating that "Windows cannot find "copy.exe". The only way I could get into the hard drive was to right click and select open or to simply manually type in the hard drive label into the address bar like c:, d:, etc...

Well the solution to this copy.exe conundrum is to get rid of a file called autorun.inf in each of the infected hard drives. Here's the solution to the problem...

Make sure you or the virus scanner is run through the infected hard drives/flash drives to make sure the virus files is gone.

Now, some forums said you could just select "show hidden files" from the options and this would enable you to see the "autorun.inf" file. This wasn't the case for me.

Also, some entries in the "autorun.inf" may be legitimate. So to check the file (even when you can't see the file) do this: type in the infected hard drive label followed by autorun.inf For example: f:\autorun.inf

This will load the autorun.inf file and should display it as a text file in notepad. If the only entry is that incriminating copy.exe then this is what I did. I tried to overwrite the file by saving a blank text file with the same name as autorun.inf. That didn't work because that inf file was "read-only". so I saved that blank file on the desktop and simply cut and pasted it into the drive, then selecting the overwrite file option. That should stop that annoying Windows cannot find "copy.exe" message every time you double click into a drive.

We all know backing up is important. At home its done on an irregular basis. "Oh my hard drive is full, so we gotta burn some data." That's backing up by default. In the office there is probably a daily ritual of backing up data on tapes. Recently there was a case in Alaska USA where a technician accidentally deleted data on a Hard Drive that was worth A$48 billion. And he was just doing routine work. And to add to it, he also wiped out the backup drive and it was also found that the tape drives were unreadable... Backups... or multiple backups are very important for your most precious of data.

I'm in the process of clearing out my hard drive... I can't believe how many files I've accumulated. From documents that I thought I would read when I downloaded them to fancy utilities that I thought would help me out. All either deleted or backed up on to DVD... I used Windows XP's Disk Cleanup to do its thing. Then I defragmented the hard drive to speed up file access times. Then the defragger found some files it couldn't defrag... Hmmm.. What the hell is this 1 gig image file doing on my hard drive? It turns out my burning program had forgotten to delete a few image files from a few CD copies I had made a few months before... Wow - that's 1 Gig of precious hard drive space reclaimed (since I only have 40 gigs on my laptop).

Then you know what I did next? I continued to clear my hard drive - I trawled though every possible folder deleting those temporary files that programs have forgotten to delete themselves. Then I went through all the programs I really needed and deleted those that I didn't use. Finally I found a folder that I had forgot that I had - That had 3 Gigs of stuff I hadn't used for some two years! Bonus! 3 extra Gigs to play with now... And I thought I needed to buy some external hard drive... errrrr....

Before you sell your used computer or laptop - scrub your hard drive clean to preserve your private information. "Bank details, pornographic pictures and credit card numbers were just a few of the tidbits found on hard drives of second-hand computers offloaded by Australians this year, according to a new study."

How to clean your hard drive:

:: Deleting files or reformatting are not effective methods for wiping a hard drive.

:: Use a commercial erasing tool to overwrite data stored on your hard drive.

:: For extra security, remove the machine's hard drive.

:: If you are recycling your computer, ask the recycling technician to return your hard drive to you before they take the computer.

From SMH

If your a keen fan of Firefox here's something another extension that will enhance your surfing experience... First install the Greasemonkey extension, then go along and browse the User Scripts. Happy surfing.

I found a page about excel macros. I know this page will one day be useful to me. :) Excel can do a lot of things besides, add up columns of cells. For one, it can be a flight simulator and it can do a lot of other types of analysis for all types of industries. In business it can store your business records, in Share Trading it can calculate risk and in engineering excel can analyse raw data and find out tonnes of useful stuff...

Enjoy this list of websites regarding Portable Applications that you can save on your USB drive. What are portable applications? Programs that you can transport on the USB and run them at another computer without having to install anything. Wikipedia - List of portable applications, Snapfiles, PortableApps and PortableFreeware. I've downloaded
Portable Firefox - I hate IE! and CurrPorts - to View Opened TCP/IP ports / connections.

I needed an audio alert for my Share Trading software (so I can get alerts when the share prices hit their targets) so I went along and searched for some sound bytes from movies. I found Reel Wavs to be a great source for these, with short wavs of quotes from movies. I downloaded a few like "Run Forrest Run!" from Forrest Gump and "You Talkin' To Me?" from Taxi Driver. Then I went to activate them - then I found that the software only takes .au type sounds. DAMMIT! So now I went out to find these .au sound types and I found this website that had only a few sounds. I downloaded a Star Wars quote - "May the Force be with You, Always." Yes, may the force be with me as I trade shares.

This Choose Your Own Adventure game reminds me of two things that are long gone these days: Choose your Own Adventure books and those command line games. The link above is mostly a choose your own adventure game but it reminds me of those games where all you had was a description and a choice like: "Look", "go to...", "Pick up..." or "retrieve...", "open door..." etc... No graphics just text. I couldn't finishe the game above. Too much of a time waster ;) But it is well thought out ... Actually I died when I kicked the robot.