Sunday February 22
 
21:07
 
Language B*tch

My Vista is set to English. My web browsers are set for English as the default language. Despite that, when I go to google.com, it brings me Japanese Google.

Yeah, my OS is English and my web browser encoding is set to English, but pah! What does that matter? I really want my websites to display in Japanese. I was just playing silly buggers when I selected English. Didn’t know what I was doing. Wouldn’t know me arse from me elbow if I didn’t have “arse” and “elbow” tattoo’d on them. Perhaps Google would prefer I changed those tattoos to the Japanese for arse and elbow? (That would be a-roo-soo and e-roo-bo.)

Skype is even worse. I go to skype.com and it brings me the Japanese site. I find the option to switch to English and download Skype. The installer runs in English, then Skype runs… in Korean. WTF? Because I set the “Language for non-Unicode programs” to Korean in control panel? That’s because Windows wont read a disk with Korean files unless I have this setting (which makes no sense, because it’s not a “program”). And no recent program should be looking at this setting – it’s there for badly written hacked together old software.

Grrr….

(Oh, and the experience on the Mac isn’t much better – it can’t even read Korean from my NAS.)

Rant over.

Friday January 2
 
16:10
 
Vista And Samba

I’m a big fan of NAS. When my laptop was stolen last year, it was thanks to all my files being on NAS that I could be sure that nothing sensitive was left on the HDD.

After switching to Vista, I found that I couldn’t access one of my NAS drives from within Vista. Even though I gave the correct username and password, I always got this error:

System error 86 has occurred. The specified network password is not correct.

Turns out this is a SMB (samba) negotiation “issue” with Vista. The solution is different depending on the version of Vista being used.

For Home Premium, use regedit to edit the registry for the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel

Change the default of 0×3 (NTLMv2 only) to 0×1 (use NTLMv2 if available, or older versions if not) and reboot.

For Ultimate, run (Windows key + R) secpol.msc and go to “Local Policies > Security Options”. Find “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level” and change the setting from “Send NTLMv2 response only” to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”.

NAS can be difficult or impossible to firmware update – I certainly don’t want to firmware update my Netorage since it has been running flawlessly for 3+ years and I’m no longer in Korea (when I bought it). Still at least the settings above work! I could never get MacOS X to read the Korean character set of my NAS.

Monday December 29
 
10:11
 
Hello Vista!

I’ve not been Vista’s greatest fan, but after installing it yesterday, I’ve changed my mind completely. Installing Vista has completely cured my laptop fuzzy VGA output (see comment here).

This is more likely due to drivers than anything else. My suspicion is that due to Aero’s requirements (needing a Graphics score of 3.0) and the class action about what “Vista Capable” really means, Intel and Microsoft have been forced to pay attention to driver implementation for common chipsets, hence the better overally quality. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the initial GMA950 (945GM) driver upon installing Vista rated 2.2 and the later driver installed during Windows Update meets the exact minimum for Aero.

The other problems with Vista may still be there – I’ve yet to try out network shares – but this one change alone makes Vista a keeper for me. I’m actually astounded the VGA output is now clear – I expected the issue to be with the power of my laptop’s analog D-SUB output rather than a driver issue (I’m sure my XP drivers are up to date).

Why did I install Vista? Two reasons. Firstly, everyone I know now that asks me for PC help has Vista. Secondly, if I do build my own PC, it will have 64-bit Vista to take advantage of 4/8Gb memory.

I am now completely Macless. Due to limited disk space, I had to replace the Macos X installation on my LG with Vista. I’m now Windows only. I should probably have tried the VGA output from Mac before scrubbing the installation – don’t know why I didn’t think about doing that.

Sunday December 21
 
09:21
 
Mac No More

I no longer have a Mac. Correction: I no longer have an official Mac.

My iMac was suffering from a creature inside. No problem, Apple said, we’ll replace the LCD. That was two weeks ago. 

This week I went down to pick up the repaired machine. Last time Apple touched the inside of my iMac, I was left with big wipe marks inside the glass. This time, no wipe marks but dust. Dust between the LCD and glass, which, obviously, I couldn’t wipe away. Reluctantly – as if I should accept dust there – the “Genius” took the machine away for the dust to be cleaned off.

Twenty minutes later and the iMac was back. Initial impressions were not good – the front of the screen was covered by a layer of dust and little bits of packing foam. This time not only was there dust inside the screen, but wipe marks inside the glass. Exactly the same streaks that I found last time.

An hour later and the iMac was back again. No streaks but dust and what looked to be a small hair.

“We’re never going to get it perfectly right,” I was told, “Did you buy it at this store?”

And without me asking for it, I was promptly offered a full refund. Quite frankly, I was astonished – the machine is 6 months old – but since this is the 6th time I’ve lugged my iMac back and forward from Apple, and since every time my iMac is repaired it seems to come back with something inside the LCD, I decided to accept. Why they open the iMacs in a dusty environment – which they clearly do from the second time the machines was brought back – I don’t know. 

So that’s it. I’m now Macless – or at least, officially Macless since my LG still runs MacOSX. In honestly, I was getting to the stage where I was wondering why I was using Mac anyway – nothing I was running was Mac specific, and it was a hassle to backup to a network drive.

My Lightroom library opened on Windows no problem (just had to open the Mac library and then tell Lightroom the location of my top level photo folders). iTunes was trouble as usual, but after going through each of my Korean songs one by one – about 1000 of them – it was working again.

Now I’m looking at doing the same as Eyal – building my own machine. It wont run Macos, but it might run 64-bit Vista with 8GB of memory, Quad core (I do a lot of multitasking), and RAID0 on SATA disks for performance. Half the price of the iMac, double the performance.

Monday December 8
 
16:51
 
The Ring

I noticed some marks on my iMac LCD a few days ago – like a hand pushing from the inside to get out. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it to appear in any photos.

I don’t remember watching any borrowed DVDs recently.