Just find out today that my BYON M31W’s touchpad is fully configurable by Jaunty.  I find this hard to resolve on Windows, but with Jaunty – hey it is fun.  I believe that the touchpad is made by Compal.

First, vertical and (almost unused) horizontal scrolling.  All I have to do is just slide two fingers anywhere on the touch pad vertically (to scroll vertically) and (perhaps) horizontally for scrolling horizontally.  Just find it out on the ubuntu forum.  It is quite different with Synaptics touchpad (slide on the right or bottom side).

The “tapping” function can be disabled!  Accidently tapping the touchpad which resulting an unwanted actions is very annoying. This nuisance can be avoided by System -> Preference -> Mouse menu and click on the Touchpad Tab.  I can disable Mouse click with touchpad from there.

Great!

A friend has a NEC Valuestar PIII 667MHz with an intermittently malfunctioning hard disk drive on it and some other irritating compulsive error behavior. He is not interested to replace the hard disk drive (or at least not yet interested) regarding to the value of the whole unit. So he just ask me to keep it for an undefined period of time, at least until he needed it. I also has another 40GB WD Caviar which is formerly failing, but after I removed the controller board and clean the contacts points, it is back on duty – at least till now.

So I just apply a re-assembly works and some heavy cleanup to the whole unit with some additional SDRAM and USB PCI card and here I go with a functional desktop PC. I just need to replace the ATA hard disk cable when I find out that the IDE device (hard disk and CD ROM drive) is intermittently detected.

Here I want to share the cleaning method that I’ve done.

I disassembled the whole unit to a modular level possible for DIY level and cleaned all the dust and spydey web using a “crew-cut” brush.

and for some stubborn small animals stain regarding to how long this unit has been kept in a “mouse and mosquito” room, I use a bent unused toothbrush. You can make your own bent tooth brush by properly heating the tooth brush neck using a stove or heat gun. For cleaning solution, I use eucalyptus oil or “Minyak Kayu Putih” and a bicycle hand pump for blowing any leftover solutions. Then sun dried the board until it seemed no liquid on it. Later, I bought a can of paint thinner / reducer to completely “soak – wash” the motherboard and blow – sun dried combination. Both crew cut brush and bent tooth brush are still involved. But careful with the toothbrush, I think it can melt on paint thinner.

I remove the RAM and clean the goldfinger contact with a rubber pencil eraser. I also did this on all of the PCI goldfingers.

Then re-assemble and after some patience and a lot of coffee, “Frankie” is on duty once more.

When I’m confident enough that Frankie is alright, I begin to seek for a lightweight yet functional Operating System. Windows XP is not an option since I have “converted” to a GNU/Free/OSS/whatever as long it is not a pirated Windows person. It has something to do with my peace of mind.

I don’t know but finally I find that Ubuntu Jaunty is the most suitable OS for this old PC. I’ve tried FC9, 10, Ubuntu Hardy, but Jaunty is seemed make more senses. Even Xubuntu Jaunty desktop is not performing well so I switch back to Gnome Ubuntu.

I add Inkscape, Google Picasa and FileZilla along with standard Ubuntu apps packages (Open Office, GIMP, etc) for my everyday activity. Oh and a Virtual Box for emergency only. I don’t install the multimedia function since I think the system won’t be adequate for current multimedia codecs.

One thing I found discouraging at first, it is the cursor misalignment issue. It happens when I need to draw rectangle or circle on inkscape. The rectangle / circle will appear on far right side (around 30% screen width) of the cursor. After some times googling around and found no answer, Thank GOD that I figured out that changing display resolution one step down will fix this issue. So I just adjust the display resolution from 1280X960 to 1152×864 and I can do my everyday activity with confident on this 1999 issued Frankie. Hopefully I can be productive on it and make some money.

I’ve been using Inkscape for about a month now and found it awesomely great.  Very intuitive and high usability of UIs.  I’ve done several page mockups using this wonderful tool and finally find myself wondering “Where’s the slicing tool…”

After sometimes Googling around, I found no satisfactory result and then I just nagging around kicking some unexplainable objects in the neighborhood putting the blame of this incompetency to the whole world (just kidding….) then some angels (actually some disgusting tiny smelly friends who lives inside my empty head) comes and bump me an idea on how I can slice with Inkscape.

First, I need a mockup to slice.  Let use the ugly first WP theme I fiddled with the last time.

Then, I create a rectangle with the exact dimension of the final sliced object dimension will be.  Let say, I need to make a background image for my content div to make a “rounded rectangle” content box effect.  In this case, a 50% transparent red rectangle with 900px wide (the same width with the content) and 30px height (approximately where the rounded corner radius).  I use tranparent red so I can see the rectangle cleary on the mockup.  You can use any color or transparency or even any stroke style for your own works.

Then align the red box with the content box or header bottom.  You can access object aligning features of Inkscape by pressing Shift+Ctrl+A.  Try to play with the feature for a while and you will be an Inkscape aligning expert in no time…

Then, you will have the rectangle exactly as the final slice will be.  Then select the transparent red rectangle and remove the fill and / or stroke style by right clicking the fill / stroke panel located on the bottom left of the inkscape window.  Careful don’t lose selection by clicking any other object since the transparent red box will become ‘invisible’.

After that, you can export to bitmap by using menu File->Export Bitmap or by pressing Shift+Ctrl+E key.  You will have the following dialog box.

Choose Selection for Export area, let other parameters set to default, and you can select the export file location and name by typing it on the textbox or use the browse button.  All bitmap export from inkscape is only in *.png format, so if you want to use jpg or gif, you have to convert it with another image manipulation tools (GIMP, Picasa, etc).  When you think it is all set, don’t forget to click the Export button.  I missed this step several times since after selecting the export file location by using browse button, the OK button on the end of the browse process is quite deceiving.  And if you happened to select more than one object when exporting, please make sure that the Batch export all selected objects check box is unchecked.  If not, you will have a lot of images (subsequently with the number of the object you have selected).

Maybe it is not a perfect slicing tool or method anyway, but it does do the trick for me.  I’m beginning to build a bad habit of ‘sketching’ on any part of  inkscape document and export the selected object(s) only.

]]> http://plebeianism.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/slicing-images-using-inkscape/feed/ 4 Abah slice Screenshot-mockup.svg - Inkscape Screenshot-mockup.svg - Inkscape-1 Screenshot-mockup.svg - Inkscape-2 Screenshot-Export Bitmap (Shift+Ctrl+E) http://plebeianism.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/ask-cable-modem-windows-usb-driver/ http://plebeianism.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/ask-cable-modem-windows-usb-driver/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:24:06 +0000 Mamang http://tantesun.com/?p=362 Continue reading →]]> This driver is quite hard to find, or at least the last time I did find it hard to find on the internet – in fact, I did not find any   Not even from ASK official website.

This driver is for using the ASK Docsis Cable Modem via USB port on Windows operating system (Win98, WinME, WinXP, Vista) regarding to the INF file description.  Using this modem via ethernet port is no problem at all, but in last my case when you need to connect to this modem by its USB port – then this driver is mandatory.

I finally get this modem driver by scraping it from a computer with the driver installed. As I have tested on a freshly installed Windows XP (SP1), it was working just fine with no hassle at all.  Just extract the driver package and point to the folder where you’ve extract the files when Windows ask for the driver.  There were some (minor) unsigned driver warning issue – it is OK, just click OK/Continue.

You can download the driver from from the following link ask-cable-modem.

The modem itself is look like a small rounded white box (about the size of CD case but much thicker), with no brand – just model and s/n label on the bottom.  Most comes with Megavision Internet cable provider (Indonesia).  Sorry I did not take picture of the modem.

It is from the  SiS 67x family which is according to every Linux distribution forum I’ve visited is having a serious driver issue so it cannot use the chipset 3D ability.  It seemed that SiS won’t let the 3D Linux display device driver -  even the binary to be released to the public.  There’s a story about a guy, Barros Lee who claimed that he wrote 3D driver for this chipset, bust cannot release it since he work for SiS and he is not permitted to do that.

The last time I use Mandriva Linux One 2009 which is supporting this SiS chipset which the display adapter is also known as Mirage 3+ right out of the box, in 2D acceleration mode though.  Since Mandriva is not supporting the notebook’s power management feature very well and felt a little too heavy for my hardware, I gave Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” a try.

After some times spent downloading the disc image from the net and burn it to a disc, I install it and it was going with no problem at all.  Initially, the display run only in vesa 600×800 mode, while normally the notebook should run at 1280×800.  After some browsing on the Ubuntu forum, I came accross to this very generous guy who posted a nice debian package for the display driver.  So I just download it (some registration needed) and install the package.  And there I go with my first successful attempt on Ubuntu on this notebook.

I’m quite happy with this Jaunty, the sound is louder and clearer than Mandriva.  It also runs the power management feature better (lid switch, hibernation and suspend), working buttons (browser, e-mail, and mute) and most of all, much-much faster boot time.  The reason that I wait for the Jaunty and not Hardy Heron (8.04) right after I know Ubuntu, is that Network Manager applet is included on this distribution can manage my 3G network with more ease.  I’ve tried Hardy, but my 3G modem works intermittently with this distribution, so I switched back to Mandriva at that time.