Opgenorth.NET

A while ago I picked up a Microsoft Notebook Mouse 5000.  Finally decided to use it on my laptop.  I figured that having a bluetooth mouse would mean that I wouldn’t have a USB receiver hanging off my laptop all the time.  Plus, I thought it would be nice to use Blue Proximity.

Now, the hiccup came when setting up the new mouse on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit.  It seems that you have to do a little bit extra to get the mouse working. I found the solution on the Ubuntu forums.  For my one selfish purposes, I will repeat the instructions here:

1) install the bluez-compat package with terminal
sudo apt-get install bluez-compat

2)Pair the mouse with the bluetooth manager. The manager will say that the pairing is "successful"
Although the mouse won't worked... this step has to be done...

3) In the terminal, type :

sudo hidd --search

You should see something like

Searching ...
Connecting to device 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (your mouse MAC)

Done. Your mouse should be working now.

After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card.  A bit of google, and here is what I did

1. Download the Android SDK.  In my case, I unzipped it to C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1.
2. Connection the phone via the USB cable to my computer.  When the phone asks for a device.
3. You’ll get the new hardware dialog, when prompted for the drivers, you’ll need to specify the location.  The Android SDK has the drivers, in my case they were at C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\usb_driver\x86.
4. Once you have the drivers installed cd to c:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\tools.
5. Type adb devices.  This should list all the Android devices that you have connected.  If you don’t see any devices listed, then you have a problem.
6. Type adb shell.  This will direct your commands to your ADP1
7. Now while at the adb shell, su to root, then : 
8. cd /data/data/com.android/providers.settings/databases/
9. sqlite3 settings.db
10. INSERT INTO system (name, value) VALUES (‘device_provisioned’, 1);
11. .quit
12. Reboot the phone
13. adb shell
14. am start –a android.intent.action.MAIN –n com.android.settings/.Settings

Once all that is done, you should be enable to use your ADP1 as if you had a SIM card in it (we’ll except for the phoning part).

Useful link:  FAQ: Unlocking/Activating a G1 or ADP1 Without A Sim Card.

Over the Easter long weekend, I experience my own resurrection of sorts.  On Thursday just before Easter I noticed that my NAS, a Thecus N3200 Pro with three Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives in a RAID5 array, was beeping and displaying a “RAID degraded” message.  I didn’t worry about it to much, as it was late on Thursday, and I figured I was safe/okay with three drives in a RAID5 array.

So, the next morning I check things out.  Turns out all was not well in Whoville.  While check the RAID config, I saw that two of the three drives had “warnings” associated with them.  This was Not Good.  Two out of three failing HDD in a RAID5 array is A Bad Thing.  A bit of Googling and conversing with the vendor who sold me the NAS (note- I’ve got no problems with them, Hard Data has always been great for me for the past six or seven years) and it seems that there is a firmware upgrade for my particular trio of NAS drives.  Luckily, I managed to get all my critical stuff off the NAS, so I’m not to worried about data loss. 

So, I pull the drives, apply the firmware update, and try to rebuild. The NAS will not let me create a RAID5 array.  So, I pull the drives one by one, and then proceed to check them out in a computer.  Turns out that the two drives that had the warnings were okay, but the third drive, that was “warning-less” is toast.  What is wrong with it I’m not sure, but the BIOS on the computer won’t recognize the drive after boot up.  Had to RMA the drive back to Seagate. 

So, now I sit, alone in my room, without my NAS.