Category Archives: Other

Minimise the Noise of the CPU Fan on a SONY VAIO Laptop

Posted on by | Leave a reply

Update: The method described in the following proved to be useless in the summer, when the laptop became too slow (almost unresponsive). I guess setting the CPU Fan Control level to quiet does not work well when the environment temperature is relatively high. So, I removed the fan cover (all you need to do is remove 6 screws on my laptop) and injected some sewing machine oil on the fan! Now the laptop is TOTALLY silent again! Hurrah!

The noise level of the CPU Fan of my Sony Vaio VGN-SZ71E laptop was driving me crazy for the past few days. When the laptop was on, you could hear the fan operating even in the room next door. The fan was also producing vibrations, which I could feel when I had my arms on the keyboard palmrest! It’s needless to say you can’t work properly (i.e. concentrate on your work) under these circumstances.

I tried removing the chassis to see if I can replace the fan, but in order to have access to the CPU fan on this laptop model you need to disassemble pretty much everything! Luckily there is a workaround.

I had installed the Sony VAIO Power Management utilities, which allow me to manage the CPU Fan speed (Control Panel -> Power Options->VAIO Power Managent -> CPU Fan Control ). I set it to level  “1-quiet” and I have to say it is much better now.  Probably this has some impact on the performance, but this comes second to the peace of mind when working 🙂

So much for AI

Posted on by | 1 Reply

For the past 3 hours I have been cleaning up my desk and sorting out the papers I had printed out (yes, when I talk about spring cleaning, I really mean it)! Anyway, I was listening to last.fm, while cleaning up. I asked it to play similar artists to Mikis Theodorakis, who is an excellent Greek composer of hmmmm… “metasymphonic music” (the term is borrowed from Wikipedia). After a couple of songs of similar to Miki’s music, last.fm decided to play a necromantia song! Necromantia is a Greek black metal group. What is the similarity between “metasymphonic music” and black metal? Well both artists are Greek, but apart from that.. none I would dare to say!Last.fm FAQ on the “similar artists” functionality says:

The list of artists which you may see on an artist page as being “similar” is based exactly on our user’s listening habits. If a lot of users listen to Artist X, but also Artist Y and Z – Y and Z artists will become similar to X.

With a few added constants and other functions thrown into the equation to help make it more accurate, you’ll find that’s how Similar Artists are made.

The screencap follows:

Theodorakis_Necromantia

Convert MyTV recorded files to DivX

Posted on by | 15 Replies

Update: Please note that I am in no way affiliated to the mytv service, in fact I am no longer abroad and I have stopped using it! So please do not send comments or e-mails for support requests! This post is just describing how to convert recorded mytv files into divx format! Thank you!

There is an internet service ( http://www.greeklive.tv/ ), which broadcasts greek tv channels over the internet. It is a subscription service, but it is probably worth the money considering you can watch all shows of the most popular greek tv stations of the past 6 days. Anyway, I only use to watch basketball games.

[ad#200x90_bloginline]

This service has its own program (myTV.exe) , which has the ability to record a show. Now, the stream data is encrypted and the videos saved are not easy to transfer as they are encoded using a very unpopular codec. If you want to convert the video files saved by the application to DivX or other popular video formats, all you need to do is use the anyMP4 Media Converter.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mepis: Personal Experiences

Posted on by | 2 Replies

Kaspersky antivirus and comondo firewall have rendered my windows 2000 laptop to be very slow. So I decided to give it a try with linux.

My set-up: A Toshiba 2450-S203 laptop (P4@2.8), an nvidia video card (don’t remember the details of the chip) and a wireless pcmcia linksys WPC11 version 4.

My experiences:

Mepis 6.5

First I tried Mepis 6.5. It worked very well out of the box and the wireless card connected to our router without a problem. However since Mepis 6.5 is based on an older version of ubuntu its repository has reaaaaly old versions of software. This was a problem and since Mepis 7.0 is coming out, I decided to try version 7.0 RC2.

Mepis 7.0RC2

Installed well, but I couldn’t make the wireless card work. I sent a post to the mepislovers forum and received a number of useful answers. It could be the version ndiswrapper that comes with Mepis 7, or the driver. So I had to either download the latest source code of ndiswrapper and compile it, or try different version… Too much work for a RC version.

Kubuntu 7.1

As I have been a windows user, I decide to go for another kde distribution, kubuntu. The installation went smoothly. However I couldn’t connect the wireless card to our router. Kubuntu would recognise it, but as soon as I tried to connect to the router… kernel panic! The caps lock light flashed and the system was unresponsive. I tried to blacklist the native drivers and use ndiswrapper with my windows drivers… but to install ndiswrapper it asked for the installation cd! (Even though I was already connected to the internet with my ethernet cable).

I managed to make it word with ndiswrapper and the system was quite stable. So, now let’s try ubuntu for a change…

Ubuntu 7.1

As expected I had the same problem with the wireless card and  resolved it using ndiswrapper again. I have to confess that I liked the interface better than KDE. It was quite fast and stable. The problem is that I need windows anyway (some .NET development, software which don’t have a linux version) . I can use virtualization (vmware) to run windows from within linux, but to do that I need more hard disk space and probably I will need again the firewall and antivirus installed.

The verdict?? I might try to switch to linux after I finish writing up, but right now I don’t have the time, resources (i.e. hard disk space) to do it properly. However there are some things I didn’t like. First of all in (k)ubuntu, when the native wireless card drivers crashed, NOTHING was logged in the log files, no warning, no nothing (at least a windows blue screen gives you a message with the address/module that caused the crash.).  The other annoying thing… why do you need the installation cd if you are already on the internet and the package manager can find the binaries on the internet?

I mean ok… you blaim windows for the blue screens of death, you blaim them for asking the installation cd all the time… so people say switch to linux (or get a mac).. you switch to linux and see things are not much better there.

Having said that I hope that some day I will have the time to be actively involved in a linux distro.