Minecraft Peculiarities

I haven’t played minecraft since November, but was lus to play the other day so downloaded the latest version: Beta 1.3_01. I ran the program, loaded one of my maps and was met with an unplayable environment. Severe lag being the main cause, and when movement did occur it resulted in unstoppable spinning movements. I tried playing the in browser version, but for some reason it won’t let me out of the menu and into the game, it appeared to not register my mouse clicks.

First thing I did was update my Java to the latest version, this appeared to have no noticeable effect.

Next was my graphics driver which at least appeared to solve the lag issue, but the mouse would start my man spinning at the gentlest nudge. Searching for such issues mainly resulted in issues with Java and the in browser version. Finally found a reddit post mentioning Synergy (which I run). Turning off Synergy fixed the issue so my Minecraft is once again playable, although it does hamper my multi-tasking abilities with Synergy closed.

/me

note: the actual title of this article is “/me ‘greater than symbol’/3 Logitech” but it appears WP sees this as some kind of html code, so…

I’ve always been a fan of Logitech products. They make good, hardy and elegant/pretty looking hardware. I’ve had my current wireless mouse/keyboard set for the past 5 years without any problems. And so it was with great excitement that I purchased a second hand set of Logitech 2.1 speakers about a year ago. They were a great set of speakers, and a massive upgrade from old cheap standard “comes with the PC” speakers I had been experiencing the last 10 years.

Suffice to say, I never knew what I was missing in terms of sound until I had listened to music through these speakers, and these are fairly entry level speakers from Logitech. In any case, it made beautiful music and pumped a previously unheard amount of bass out. That was until about three days ago when I got back from class turned on my music and nothing happened. I check all the plugs and connections in my PC and I notice that the power light is off, even though it should be on.

So I follow the wires back to the sub. A beautifully sealed wooden box. I unscrew all the screws I can find which results in a small opening on the back of the case in which I can look in. I do a quick multimeter test and it appears as though the transformer isn’t putting out any current. That’s ok, but I can’t get to the transformer, and can’t get any of the electronics out to test components. I look in and can see that all the planks have been glued together, to give a lovely, no nails, no fuss (for assembly) product.

My only option really is to try split the case down one of the joins. I manage this down the one side, damaging the fascia quite noticeably, But find to do one of the other sides is going to be virtually impossible. 10min worth of trying has me splitting the wood in places it wasn’t supposed to. So I went and bought myself a hacksaw :D

A lot of sawing and dust later and I find myself with a plank of wood with a fairly large transformer attached to it. I still can’t take most of the electronics out as the wires attached to the speaker are too short and are soldered on every where. Pull out the soldering iron, which decides it no longer wants to work, take it apart and decided I need a soldering iron to fix it. To fix my soldering iron in any case.

So that’s where I am at the moment. Sitting with a broken speaker set, broken soldering iron, and my Headphones need some soldering work themselves. But what am I to do…

I miss music in my room.

Save mah netbook!

My Netbook has actually done this several times. It will just stop booting. You push the power button and nothing happens. Everything lights up, but no BIOS screen. First thing I thought was “shit”, I’ve kind avoided this things warranty. So I swiftly removed the installed flash drive and extra RAM, and tried to cover up the one melting incident and took it in to the local Incredible Connection where I bought it.

Each time this has happened it has been while using a cheap “SATE/IDE to USB” thing I purchased off E-bay, so I just think my BIOS isn’t a great fan of it, unfortunately this is the only way I can install Windows and the easiest way to install Linux on it. In any case I took it in and they just seemed concerned that I had been trying to install a new OS onto the thing mumbling somethign about this voiding warranties and saying they’d see what they could do.

I’ll admit I was very impressed when they phoned me the next morning and said I could come pick up the Netbook. When I picked it up they said they had just flashed the bios, so the next time this happened I was only slightly less concerned. Googling this I found some instructions here. Ignoring the warning of voiding warranties and tentatively waiting for the flashing light to stop flashing I watched in relief as my PC booted successfully. I’ve posted the instructions below here for if I ever forget and can’t find the link, I have also uploaded a BIOS here so I always have a copy.

My netbook is now happily dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 :)

How to edit Grub (Ubuntu 9.10)

It’s holidays now, so I finally got round to getting my netbook to dualboot Windows and Ubuntu 9.10. Got both up and running nicely, only issue is that the Grub defaults to Ubuntu. Not an issue really, but I tend to restart more often in Windows than in Linux, so I’d prefer if windows was the default. So I went and tried to edit the menu.lst file, like in previous versions, but it appears, Grub has now updated to 2.0. Still quite a simple process.

To edit the boot order you can just open the terminal and type the following command: “sudo gedit /etc/default/grub”. Once you have edited that, you have to update the main grub file by typing: “update-grub”.

Voila. Easy as pie. For more info on Grub 2 go here.

To edit the Grub in previous versions of Ubuntu, go here.