Helpful hints

Here are a collection of helpful hints. They are mainly things which I've found by experimenting with things I own, and I couldn't find somewhere on the web.
Please take this as advice from someone you don't know, my liability stops at the price I charge you for this information (ie. nothing!).

Mobile phones

Motorola V975 - On Three
Great potential, but poor user interface, and a few design flaws, leave me wanting more!
On paper this looks like a great phone (for the money). But two or three flaws really hurt it in practical use.
I bought a clam shell so that I don't have to worry about locking the keys, shame Motorola don't offer that option.
Whatever you do, the volume (ring mode) buttons and the camera buttons are active.
So put it in your pocket, and the camera is forever taking pictures of the inside of your pocket (with the display turned on), waiting for you to confirm it, then finally timing out and going back to sleep.
Or worse still you put it in silent mode, and it beeps when you try to change to mode, expecting you to confirm it.
Also I'm not sure if Motorola or Three are to blame, but the OK, and back keys keep swapping places. So in one set of menus, the right hand button is "Select", and left is "Back", you type in a load of info, then all of a sudden the left one is "Send", and the right one is "Cancel". pressing the right one loses the information you've just entered.

I'm sorry, but simple things like this shouldn't have made it into a production phone!
Also note: Unless you use offical Motorola chargers, the phone turns itself off while charging!

Networking stuff

Here are some notes on various bits of network kit I've used..

Speedtouch 510 - ADSL to Ethernet switch.
- Quite fast even on marginal line
- Quirky interface, you need to use the telnet interface to use the firewall for anything useful.
- Can't seem to set the time, on uptime listed in the log
- Won't do NAT and multi IP at the same time
Netgear 614v2 - Ethernet router, with NAT & VPN passthrough
- Easy to setup
- "Just Works" - plug it in, goto the web interface, follow the easy setup, and it's up and running.
- VPN pass through didn't need any tweaking
- Local name server and DHCP server work well
- NAT bandwidth is limited to about 10Mbits/sec - OK for ADSL, but not for some other uses
Linksys PSUS4 - 4 port ethernet switch, with a USB print server
- Easy to setup
- Bidirectional drivers (which get the ink status from the USB port) get confused
- Works with Canon 830d (without ink status)
- Works with OKI-7200 colour LED printer (much cheaper than the ethernet card for it!)
D-Link gigabit ethernet - switch, cardbus & PCI devices
- DGE-528T - PCI - Cheap and chearful for windows
- DGE-530T - PCI - A little more expensive, with better unix support (But had to port OpenBSD 3.7 drivers back to OpenBSD 3.4, to get it to work)
- DGE-660TD - Cardbus - Fine under XP
- DGS-1008D - 8 port switch

HP LaserJet 5N

HP's LaserJet 5N page
This has 4 72-pin SIMM slots for memory expansion, I've discovered the following...

They must be FPM (Fast Paged Mode), EDO immediately come up with an error code.
I've had success with 2M, 4M, 8M and 16M devices (not tried 32M ones)
70ns ONLY! The 60ns FPM ones I tried don't come up with an error code, but aren't recognised at all.
I've only got 32-bit ones to work, not sure about 36-bit ones.

If the SIMM has errors, you'll get a 62.X error where X is 1,2,3,4 for the SIMM slot number
The more usual is an incompatible error, 53.1Y.Z, where Y=1,2,3,4 for the SIMM number, and Z is an error number, Errors 3 & 8 are test errors, 0,1,2 are unsupoorted devices.
As I said 60ns parts, just don't get recognised!

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This page was lasted updated on Saturday, 31-Jan-2009 10:16:22 GMT