The first thing I found was a complete Telecom Commander system with handsets..  I really wanted it, but deep down knew it was a waste of time (and it wasn’t going to fit on the scooter).

About ten minutes later I discovered an old scrap metal collector on another pile prodding at a keyboard that I instantly recognised as a Casio CZ-101.  I immediately pulled over and started to chat to him, and started to point out some other stuff in the pile that he might be interested in, he got excited about a box of brand new mop refills, and I said “you don’t want this old keyboard do you?”.  He mumbled “you’d be bloody lucky to get that working again..”, so I grabbed it and straddled it between my legs on the scooter and rode home..  Amazingly it still had an RA-3 RAM cartridge installed.

Dirty old Casio CZ-101

I got the CZ-101 home safely and proceeded to take it apart.  I noticed straight away that somebody had made some rather dodgy attempts at repairing/modifying it..  Did some googling and discovered that it needed a 9V DC power supply at 850mA with a negative tip.

Found a plugpack and fired it up, but nothing happened..  Checked for voltage on the main circuit board, but nothing.  re-soldered the connections on the DC power socket, and removed some additional wires (some kind of battery hack), and it fired up!

Plugged some headphones in, and started making noises.  Many of the switches didn’t work, so I turned it off, vacuumed all the dust from the front panel, and cleaned it all.  After this and a bit of playing around, all the switches seemed to work again (two of them are still a bit dodgy)..

Anyway, so far I think this is a much better synth than the Korg Poly 800 I use to have. Certainly much easier to use : )

Nice clean (and working) Casio CZ-101

Anyway, when I started looking at iPhone cases I thought that I’d never be able to find anything other than the standard translucent or black rubber ones, or a big boring ugly leather flip case with a belt clip.

Actually I had a similar problem years ago with my Apple Newton Message Pad, for which I ended up getting a padded case from a hiking store.  By the way, I still have that Newton (and case) today, and in some ways I like it better than my new iPhone.

My girlfriend was keen on the Hermès and Louis Vuitton cases (which are both fantastic), but all I really wanted was a simple (yet stylish) slip case, and finally found these two (much cheaper) options:

http://foofshop.com/

http://www.absutton.com/

I’ve ordered a couple of the foof cases to try, and I’m still deciding which colour and style to get in the A.B.Sutton, there’s way too many to choose from…

It’s a nifty little Mac OS X dashboard widget that displays current data from the BOM website. A very handy replacement for the standard Mac OS X weather widget.

While searching, I found another useful widget for Aussies, The Australia Post Widget which is rather handy for finding postcodes in a hurry.

The following updates fix the problem:

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.1 Update

This thing was quite simple to setup, except a few problems with the Mac OS X drivers.

The driver that came on the CD with the QL-580N was a package (.pkg) installer.  Great I thought, I’ll just install the package on the 8 machines using ARD in one simple step, but it wouldn’t work…  Then tried copying the installer to a machine, but even that wouldn’t work.  I searched for a more recent driver on the Canon website, but couldn’t find anything.

I ended up installing it on each machine from the CD, what a pain!

After a bit of mucking around, I managed to create a label layout in filemaker that would print correctly on the QL-580N..  I found that I had to set my print area a bit shorter that the label size, even with margins set to zero.

The BRAdmin Light software worked well (as does the web interface), and I managed to assign a manual IP address to the QL-580N without any problems.

The first level of navigation is the row of tabs at the top of the main window, each tab corresponds to a particular table or section of the database.

On the blue line below the tabs is a series of buttons that show different layouts or views for each tab.

Contacts

Details -

This is where contact information for all types of contacts is stored.

There are three panels on the Contact details page:

Basic details - Name, company name, etc.. There is also a checklist for the type of contact.

Contact information-
This panel has five tabs

Phone

Press the + button to add a new phone number, you can add as many as you like.

You can use the description field to enter information such as an extension or a time to use this number.  One of the numbers can be marked as the “Main” number by clicking in the Main column.

The zoom button (magnifying glass) can be used to show a phone number in a separate window in rather large type.

The delete button (trash can) will prompt you to delete a phone number.

Email

The email tab is very similar to the phone tab..

The send mail button (Arrow on the left of each entry) will create a new email in your default email program, addressed to the selected email address.

The checkbox to the right of each email address is used to select whether that address should be included in mailouts.

The following characters have special meanings in most operating systems (including Mac OS X), and in Windows they are reserved characters and are not allowed:
<> : ” / \ | ? *

Mac OS Finder will let you include most of these characters in a filename, but using them in the command line (and some command line based utilities) is a real pain.

If you have filenames with these reserved characters, it will make the process of transferring file to a Windows Server (or any Windows machine for that matter), rather difficult. Whether you are using a network or an external drive, you’ll still have problems.

If I come across a large amount of file/data that has bad filenames, I use a utility named “NameCleaner” http://www.sigsoftware.com/namecleaner/ to clean them all up and make them Windows friendly. Even this can cause problems if some of the files are “links” for Indesign document, as you will need to manually re-link them again.

To avoid any problems down the track, I recommend avoiding the characters \ / : * ? ” <> | no matter what OS or filesystem you are using. These characters are not portable.

Also avoid using a dash as the first character of a file name, since most Linux/Unix commands will treat it as a switch.

To be really sure, use only letters and numbers, dashes, and underscores (no spaces).

After looking through the AFP server log file, the AFP server did deny access to the problem file a few times (showed up as -5006 error), and that two people had it open simultaneously.. This concerned me, so I started searching the web for answers..

I then found that Photoshop doesn’t lock files, so it is possible for two users to open a file at the same time.. This is obviously not good..

Adobe don’t support working on files hosted on a server, well at least not without using Version Cue.. Quote “Adobe does not support opening from or saving a file to a server, because of potential file corruption. Please see related documents for more information.”

Then I thought, why hasn’t this happened before? I asked the user if he had updated his computer to Mac OS X 10.5.3, and the answer was yes.. Did a bit more searching, and found there is a documented problem (on the Apple and Adobe forums), regarding the exact issue that he had experienced… There is no fix for this yet, other than not opening photoshop files directly form a server.

Apparently using “Save As” (instead of “Save”) is a workaround, otherwise just copy files back and forth..

The long term solution is to setup version cue.. Otherwise this problem, or similar, will most likely happen again…

The problems with the HP 1/8 Autoloader were:

1.  Backlit LCD display flickers.

2.  The HP 1/8 Autoloader randomly locks up the SCSI buss during backups.  The error presented by the backup software is (Bru Server Mac OS X):  ”Short SCSI return in INQUIRY”.

The autoloader then needed to be powered off, and on again and the host computer restarted, for it to work again.  Sometimes it is necessary to repeat this several times.

This problem started at the same time the display problem.

The computer and SCSI card had been checked, no problems found.   The computer/SCSI/backup software has not been changed, and worked well for over 12 months.

Tape drive firmware has been updated, but did not solve the problem.

After about an hour on the HP tech support line, I finally got the contact details for the Australian repairer for HP tape drives and autoloaders (they couldn’t help me more than that!),  http://www.cxp.com.au/

I sent an email to cxp, and one of their tech’s replied saying it’s probably a faulty PSU..  I bought the drive back to the workshop, took it apart, and checked the voltages from the PSU.  12V was OK, 5V line was only reading 4.7V..  Got out my trusty oscilloscope and checked for AC ripple, 5V line had about 200mV ripple..

Took out the power supply, and first thing I noticed was two bulging capacitors (1500uF 10V) on the output stage!   Replaced both with the closest values I had, and it’s all good!

Unfortunately I was so hell bent on fixing it, that I didn’t take photos..   Photos of the oscilloscope would have been cool, you could see how “fuzzy” the signal on the 5 volt line was…