Orb

Thesaurus.com : Most Worthless Reference Site

EVER. This site, once useful for finding great synonyms to shove into papers produced for college professors in sweat shop conditions, now reduced to a site that continuously gives me the phrase "hot poop" as a synonym for "information". I'm not sure that (a) word(s) taken from a skinny white guy posing as a cool rapper in front of his friends constitutes as a good word (choice) substitution in a college level paper... or any situation for that matter. I just don't get it... not a single good suggestion. Try it yourself. They don't seem to be in any hurry to fix these results from the Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus for which I can easily Cite This Source. Who cares if the word sucks? "Poop" wasn't the only word completely useless on that specific page (trust me "information" isn't the only word). Although "poop" was on the page 3 times, 95.6% of the other words made no sense and did not help. This site has seriously gone down the tubes.

Netgear SC101 : Satan takes the form of a toaster

I bought a Netgear SC101 on Black Friday of '05. Sounded like a pretty sweet setup to me, a NAS with 2 HDDs for 100$, can't beat that! Turns out, I was very much mistaken. At first, it seemed alright, I put a hard drive in, and installed the software. Special software to control the read/write. Sounds sketchy, but I'm sure NETGEAR/Zetera did their homework, is what I told myself. Come to find out, NETGEAR failed the course on making a good NAS. They just made a crappy one and put their name on it. The fact that it requires special software to be installed on *only* Windows PCs is a drag, instead of using some built-in SMB sharing method. The setup program was poor, and it seemed that somehow, everything was held together with duct-tape. Amazingly, it worked.

After realizing there was no point to this device, I scrapped it and put it on the shelf for a good year, before I got it back out and shoved 2 400GB Seagate 16MB 133's in. I proceeded to get it working, and backed up a bunch of my information onto it. I figured, it would be horrible for continuous use, but perhaps using it as a backup device isn't a bad idea. Wrong. A couple reformats of my computer later (trying out Windows Vista Ultimate) I'm back with Windows XP MCE (the same as before). I tried connecting the SC101 back up last night, installing the software, etc. My router gave it the normal IP addresses, everything looked as it should there, and the software even recognized that I had the two HDDs in there and that they had 1 drive partition and 0 MB free space. However, the darn thing said there were NO DRIVES TO ATTACH!

After scouring the Internet to try and find a solution, and calling NETGEAR's worthless support number. I finally got it fixed. At first I looked on the Netgear support site and called. They said that: ~"the SC101 wasn't supported on MCE (MCE is essentially XP Pro with extra features), they said they'd have to check, hold, thanks for holding, I'm still not sure, hold, thanks, but we'll have to have someone call you back in 1-2 hours (5pm'oclock is the current time)"~. They confirmed my phone number and it seemed promising, but it wasn't until 9:30am the next day that I got this message while in class: listen I think he said "Geevn a cold bach" like 10 times. Even if I did answer the call, from what I've read online, I would have gotten more help and been able to understand better a signing monkey on the phone.
These are the websites that helped me solve my problem last night:
SITES TO BE LISTED LATER
http://blog.forret.com/2006/07/netgear-sc-101-urgent-support-required/
- Blog with more information like this.
http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n101605.asp
- Get 'ut_full.exe' here (required for reparation)

What ended up fixing my unit is this:

1. Use Utility 1.5.6 NOT 1.5.7 I said DON'T use 1.5.7
• If you've installed 1.5.7, uninstall, reboot, install 1.5.6.
  
2. Make sure the password for the device is the DEFAULT PASSWORD 'password'.
• Yes, the default password is 'password'.
• Make this the administrator password for both drives (yes each drive is unique) and for all the partitions 'password'.
• If you only have one of whatever, just ignore the 's' and set the default password for however many drives/partitions you do have.
  
3. You will need to run two commands with the 'ut_full.exe' for each partition to attach after running 'ut_full.exe listall'. Get the ROOT_IP and PART_IP from the set of information in this picture (The section to the top is what the ROOT information will always look like, just 3 lines. The section to the bottom will contain at least 2 lines, more if you have more than one partition.), make sure it matches up correctly for the partition you are trying to repair:
1. 'ut_full.exe ROOT_IP PART_IP getpart password'
• Note the number set in the middle either 01 00 01 or 02 00 02
• 02 00 02 - For a MIRRORED DRIVE
• 01 00 01 - For a NON-MIRRORED DRIVE
• If your values match neither of these, use the values that it should have for the next step.
  
• Note also the number at the end (THE LAST SET) 01, 02, ..., 18, 1C, ...
2. 'ut_full.exe newattr ROOT_IP PART_IP password'
• Type in:
• 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0X 00 0X 00 00 00 0A XX
• Yes, use the numbers from the 1st step to fill in the X's.
• Essentially all you are doing, is hopefully just changing the value before the last to '0A'.
  
4. Try resetting the device by holding down the reset button on the back for more that 10sec.
5. Try uninstalling the software/reinstalling.
6. Try attaching.

It took me several tries and a few different techniques to get my drives working, but they are A-OK, now. I fully attribute their working order to the steps above, so if you are having trouble with yours, try it out, and let me know if it helps.

If the 'ut_full.exe' commands are not working, make sure you followed the directions. If it just won't work, period... Then you may have a problem that is only fixable by tossing the thing in the rubbish. I apologize if this wasn't what you wanted to hear.

What is my final opinion of this product?
Do NOT buy the SC 101 from Netgear. You can find much better and more viable alternatives elsewhere.

Final opinion of this for Google is:
DO NOT BUY THE Netgear SC 101 SC101
do not buy the netgear sc101 sc 101
horrible un-reliable lose data non-working broken bad stay away

The Zen Clock

Like those seen on http://www.now-zen.com/, you can create your own Zen-Alarm Clock with your PC for free! I'm sure that you've heard about them. I've been wanting to do this for a while to see if the Zen clock really does make a difference. You can try it for yourself, as I have timed the sounds to the web site's specifications for the optimal ultimate wakeup call. If this works, I may buy the real thing.

Download the .ogg files and the m3u for making your own Zen Clock. I added a task into the Task Scheduler so that my alarm starts going off at the exact time so that I am awake by 8. Try it yourself, here are the files:

• ZenClock5sec.ogg - Set of 3 tones, 5 second separated (15sec)
• ZenClockTimed.ogg - The Variably timed tone file
• ZenClockOgg.m3u - Standard Play list File
• ZenClockOgg.xml - Vista Task Scheduler Task XML File (setup for an 8am wakeup)
• This task launches Windows Media Player with the m3u above. Of course, you'll need to either edit the XML or load it into Task Scheduler and edit the argument to have it point to the location of your m3u.
  

Make sure your media player supports ogg audio files. If not, just convert them and use find/replace to change the ogg's in the m3u to mp3 or whatever. Ogg was just the smallest file size for uploading.

**UPDATES:
Jan 30, 2007 - Last night, I tried my Zen Alarm. It worked almost as advertised. While, I think I woke up after the first tone (perhaps due to the volume), I was still able to wake up, less groggy than normal AND I can remember most (?) of my dreams from last night. I say, overall, it was definitely successful and this will be my alarm clock permanently. I'll try finding the sweet spot for the volume.
Feb 2, 2007 - Media Player freaked out this morning and kept repeating the bell sound in about .5 sec intervals from the beginning. I woke up groggy and tired. I got the same amount of sleep as before. This shows that the placebo effect is not in place as I expected to be woken up by the gentle alarm, but instead what I got was essentially, a regular annoying alarm clock.

If you've had success, post your results in the comments.

Link to JAVA MIDlet Applications

After looking all over the internet to figure out how to make a shortcut directly to a JAVA MIDlet on my Pocket PC for the Start Menu, I finally compiled this for your enjoyment:

• The "right-click" in explorer didn't give me the option to create a shortcut.
• I didn't find out 'till after the fact, that you have to "Show All Files" for the "jmm.exe" file to show up in "\Windows\". Oh well. Doesn't matter.
• I'm pretty sure this requires "Total Commander" Google it, it's free and easy.
• You should already have launched your Application once from MIDlet manager.
• Some apps, like Gmail, must already be running to work from this shortcut.
  

To create a Start Menu or Programs Shortcut to your favorite JAVA application:

1. Open up the MIDlet manager however you do that.
2. "Hold tap" to open the context menu.
3. Press "A" or click "About".
4. Note the name of the Vendor and Name that appears.
• In my case the Vendor is "Google" and the name is "Gmail" for the Gmail Application
• WRITE IT DOWN... You need it in a minute...
• Yes, it's case sensitive.
  
5. From here, there are three options, but they both end in the same place, so start at step 3.
1. Use your Pocket PC to create the "shortcut":
1. Create a shortcut to "\Windows\jmm.exe" by...
2. Go to "\Windows" in "File Explorer".
   
3. "Hold tap" on "jmm.exe".
   
4. Select "Copy".
5. Goto "\Windows\Start Menu".
6. "Hold tap" and select "Paste".
7. This supposedly creates a shortcut. I didn't do it this way, so I don't know.
   
2. Use your Non-Pocket PC to create the shortcut:
1. Connect with Active Sync.
   
2. Right click in "\Windows\Start Menu" and click "Create Shortcut".
3. My computer (Windows Vista) did not give me this option, so I don't know.
• The best and easiest way to do it is below.
3. Create the shortcut in one swoop with "Total Commander":
1. Use TC to locate "\Windows\Start Menu".
2. Copy and paste one of the other shortcuts located there.
• I used Media Player
  
3. Select your newly created shortcut and rename it to whatever you desire.
• In my case, I chose "Gmail".
4. With your new shortcut selected, click on the notepad icon at the bottom to open the file with TC's built-in text editor.
• You should see (if you used Media Player as the source to copy):
  
• 13#:WMPLAYER?:mediaplayerapp
5. Delete that line.
6. Type (/Transcribe/Letter Recognize/Tap in):
• 48#"\Windows\jmm.exe" -r"","",""
• 48#"\Windows\jmm.exe" -r"Gmail","Google","Gmail"
• To pick a special icon, you can follow up this line with:
• "?file.ext,index" where "file.ext" is a file containing icons, and "index" is the index of the icon within that file.
• For example: "...CALENDAR?outres.dll,-10002"
7. Click "OK" to save and wham, bam, check out that Start Menu.
6. Click to launch.