Let it Snow

Well currently a snow storm is about to hit North Bay this Sunday evening. The buzz is that this storm will cause a Snow Day tomorrow which mean no buses which mean I get to sleep in ๐Ÿ˜€

I was talking in the #mybb IRC channel and few individuals didn’t know what snow was like. So what better then to get some pictures of the white fluffy stuff.

I hate to break it to you guys but snow suck. So I put on my jacket, grabbed the camera and headed out into the snow.

Here are the shots I got.

(Click to see full size)

Back yard

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Snow Blower

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Front my house

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So there you have it… snow… I will take some more tomorrow after we get lots of it and when it’s bright out.

Windows XP Pro Upgrade

Yesterday I upgraded my Desktop and Laptop PC’s to Windows XP Pro. I wanted to have them join my domain here at home so I wouldn’t have to type my username and password in all the time.

First one I did was my Desktop. I ran a fresh install after the upgrade failed very badly. (Video card wouldn’t recognize) So with a fresh install of XP Pro I joined it to the Domain which is served by my Ubuntu Linux server. Joining it was no problem. This is how I did it

Start -> Right Click on My Computer -> Properties

Then under “Computer Name” tab, click on “Change…”

Where you see “Member Of” click the “Domain:” button then type in your domain. In my case it was “miller”.

Now you need to restart your computer. Now here where I had another problem. All Domain Controllers have a logon.bat script witch is run every time any user logs on to a computer within the network. Now in my home, we have never had Windows XP Pro so this is the steps I had to go through to get it working. On the server there is a Samba server that basically talk on the windows protocol. I followed this tutorial on how to setup the server.

Ok now I’ll get to the good part. In the /etc/samba/smb.conf file there is few lines that read this…

# Default logon
logon drive = Z:
logon script = logon.bat
logon path = \\server1\profile\$U

So that worked fine when I was connecting manually to the shares but now that I want permissions and such working I need this logon.bat to work. After going through a few Google Search pages I figured out how to get this to work. All I had to do was add the line “path = /home/netlogon” So when I was done though’s few lines, it looked like this…

# Default logon
logon drive = Z:
logon script = logon.bat
path = /home/netlogon
logon path = \\server1\profile\$U

Ok now I created a logon.bat in the /home/netlogon folder. My logon.bat mounts three shared drives I have created. (The How To Forge link will show you how to make other shared folders.)

net use Y: \\server1\shared
net use X: \\server1\programs
net use W: \\server1\pictures

So now your asking your self “Why didn’t he use Z:?” Will I didn’t because I specified Z: as the mounting point for the users home directory in the smb.conf. So now I can logon and off my computer with ease. My dad and sister can logon my computer and have access to all there files and none of myna.

Next I’m going to talk about upgrading my laptop. Now I ran the upgrade from XP Home to Pro. Every thing went well till I started using certain things. First thing I notices was Windows Updates would not run. It said there was 34 to install, but when I would run them they would all fail. The second thing I noticed was Internet Explore 6 was installed. So again I went to my good friend Google and started searching. A few people have had this problem and the easiest way to fix it was to make a simple batch file. I will go through this step by step.

  1. Open up Notepad (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad
  2. Copy the following lines into the file
  3. regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
    regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
    regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
    regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
    regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
    regsvr32 /s wups.dll
    regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
  4. Now save the file as update.bat onto your desktop
  5. Close the file then open it from the desktop.

Or Download the Batch file from Here

windows-update-fix.bat

A command prompt window should pop-up then disappear. Now if I run Windows Updates all install will work. Basically XP Pro Upgrade took out all the patches that XP Home had. But XP Pro didn’t know what was already there. So by running “regsvr32” we tolled windows that, Hey these files are here. Windows Updates is now fully functional.

Well hope this helps you in your indevers of Windows and Linux. If you have any questions or comments please post them on the Forums.

WTF??

Wow. It has been a long time. Well I have been busy the last wile with School and my Coop placement. I have also been renovating my family’s basement. That has eaten up most of my weekends for the last two months.

I have had lots of plans for this blog but I haven’t gotten any of them in motion. First on was starting a podcast. I was going to base it around internet technology such as Blogging software, Message board software and other reviews. I also said in my previous post that I would get more tutorials up. I have ideas for the PS2 head set to Guitar pre-amp. My 1/4 inch plug wire broke the other day so I was thinking, why not take the contents of the box and put it into a bigger box. Then on the bigger box I could have my head phones and input plug. That way I could use my good patch cord.

I guess the next thing I will be posting is my Halloween house setup. Should be fun. I’ll take lots of pictures!

Anyways thats all I have for now. Till next time…

Second Week

Well a week ago today my last year of high school started. Yes that’s right I have made it to grade 12! So far it’s been a boring week. On Tuesday I spent 2 hours siting in front of student services waiting to get my time table "completed". So basically I went in, they messed around with my second semester, then I left. 10 minute talk, 2 hour wait.

So after the long wait I now have English and Co-op first semester and the OSSLT courses and Co-op again second semester. Very easy last year for me!

Our school computers have been down since the first day of school. We got on them a little wile on Wednesday but the network is still unstable. Last I herd the school board waited till the last week before school started to give us a new server.

Other then that nothing has really changed. Like nothing.

 

I’m hoping to make some more tutorials shortly. I don’t know what about but I’m sure I can find something! ๐Ÿ˜€ See ya later!

Birthday

Well my birthday was on July 23 and my parents decided to get me a new mixing board. Well it arrived today and boy is it neat! ๐Ÿ˜€ It’s the new Alesis MultiMix 12 FireWire. It is a small version of the bigger recording studio mixing board. It does have firewire witch is already built in so there is no $500 add-in card later on. For around $300 it is a very nice digital mixer.

The FireWire port is what made me really want this board. It connects to the PC or the Mac and sends all 12 tracks through the firewire into a multi track recorder. In my case I use Adobe Audition. It alows me to set the diffrent devises to diffrent tracks. This makes fixing sound problems very easy when editing.

Another cool feature is the Firewire allows sound not on to come in, but go out to. So it acts as a sound card as well as a recorder and a mixer.

Another thing that the MultiMix has is a Digital output (Yellow Plug on the top). This again, acts as another output from the main mix.

To sum up this board is very cool and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to get into small recordings and or Podcast which is the reason I got it.

P.S. I have a tutorial on how to convert you PS2 Head set into another sound card. I havenโ€™t made it step by step yet but I will post it later on.