Bartman's Blob

This is a follow up to a post that I did sometime ago on the Sound Blaster. If for some reason, your Sound Blaster USB device fails or there are no audio output you can do the following simple checks to see if things are in place. Here’s a couple of things that you should be getting if your device is in good working order. 1. Once your Sound Blaster USB device is plugged into the USB port on your computer, the stock driver should start installing on its own and proceed to detect the device. Once the driver is installed, the blue LED status indicator on the front panel your Sound Blaster should light up. If the device is not detected, you can try changing the USB cable or connecting it to another USB port. 2. Check that the device is installed, detect and working properly in Device Manager. 3. I have used the following driver version and it is tested to work correctly on my server box(with Windows 2008 R2 32bit). It is installed from the CD that came with my Sound Blaster U...

Updates to my posting on  Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray (ST18i) USB Tethering on your 3G data phone plan. After conducting further testing, I've noticed that you do not need to install the "Sony Ericsson PC connect." software in order for USB tethering to work for Windows 7. Once your phone is connected and USB tethering is turned on, you should get the following Network device(Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing Device) installed and enabled in the "Network Connections". Here's a sample config of the installed "Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing Device". Do check that an IP address has been served to your computer by using the ipconfig dos prompt command. That's It. :)

Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray (ST18i) USB Tethering on your 3G data phone plan. Having trouble getting your USB tethering to work on your Windows 7 computer? First and foremost, make sure you have the latest Sony Ericsson PC connect software installed on your PC.  Note : You do not need to launch the PC connect software for USB tethering to work. Issue : You booted up your notebook or PC with win 7. You connect your xperia ray into the USB port and selected the USB tethering option on the phone. Win 7 then detects the presence of a Internet sharing device but takes a long time to connect to the internet. After awhile the network connection fails to connect to the internet. You are out of your wits on this one and wonder what has gone wrong. Problem : Upon connecting your phone to the USB port on your computer and selecting the USB tethering option on the phone, the phone should start serving the DHCP request and issue an IP address. But for some reason this is not happening...

There are times when you have a post that you would like to have it constantly shown as the first post on your blog. Blogger does not have this function ready available but there are ways to get around this problem. Here’s how : 1. Login to your account and go to your blogger post options. Select layout.   2. Click on “Add a Gadget” and add a “Text” gadget. 3. Position the Text gadget just above the “Blog Post” in your blog layout. At this point, you might want to open a duplicate browser session so that you can conveniently switch back and forth between the Layout and Blog post editor. 4. Next, create a “New post”. 5. Start composing your content as you normally would. You can also insert pictures and hyperlinks anywhere you prefer. You can also insert Youtube embed links codes, but you will have to switch it to html mode and locate a spot to insert it. 6. Once you have completed your content, just simply highlight and copy all the content. 7. Next, s...

  Get your SITEX 2012 Show Price List Brochures Flyers collection here. Large collection of price list and product information contained in this collection. Good for researching the price changes or just simply keeping a record of the pricing during the show for future reference : Get it here .   That’s it. Have Fun.

Have a spare DVI/VGA monitor laying around? Thinking of connecting your HDMI output device(e.g android stick, BR player etc) to that DVI/VGA monitor?  There are some constrains that you should know about. For HDMI to DVI-D conversion, there are inexpensive cables out there that are able to do this. Here are some example : -                  You can use HDMI to DVI-D(digital only, single-link or dual-link) cable if what you are after is purely the video output from the HDMI. Those cable will do just fine. The problem arises when you want to include audio output from HDMI. DVI as you know does not have any audio input pins. In such cases, how do we obtain the audio? It is not possible to extract the audio straight out from HDMI without some kind of converter in place. All HDMI signals are in digital and it does not transmit any audio signal in analog. You would need to use a converter to extract the digit...

Are you considering getting a Sound Blaster X-Fi Pro Surround 5.1 Pro USB sound card (with THX SB1095) for your Windows Server 2008/R2 server box and wondering would it work? On the official Creative Site for Sound Blaster X-Fi Pro Surround 5.1 Pro USB sound card , it did not include any drivers for the Windows Server 2008/R2 OS. I did a quick check to see if it would work by plugging it into a Windows Server 2008/R2 server box. The Sound Blaster USB card was quickly detected and stock drivers were being installed. The blue LED on the front panel of the sound blaster USB card lighted up indicating that it is ready. However, only the basic volume controls are available. The audio output sounded like playing back from a CD deck (without any audio enhancement from EQ or Bass/Treble adjustments). The Bass department was lacking considerably to my taste. I had to have access to the equalizer and other audio controls to “enhance” the audio output to my taste. The next thing I did was...

Have been playing around with Windows 8 and I thought wouldn’t it be nice to be able to install it on my old HP Compaq NC4010 notebook. This notebook comes with 1.7Ghz Pentium M processor and 1Gb memory. So, I pop in the Windows 8 media and tried to do a upgrade install from my existing Windows XP pro installation. The installation ran for a while trying to copy some temporary files and finally failed with the following message : “Windows Setup cannot find a location to store temporary installation files. To install Windows, make sure that a partition on your boot disk has at least 939 megabytes(MB) of free space. Error code: 0x80070490 “ After some searching on the internet, I discovered that my nc4010 is lacking a feature that is required my Windows 8 .  Pentium M processor computers have to support PAE(Physical Address Extension) in order to install Windows 8. If the processor bus speed is greater than 400Mhz, there is might be PAE support. Looks like my NC4010...

Are you stuck with a server box that does not come with a sound card? Have you tried to debug some issues and the solution comes in a form of a youtube video and you are not able tell what the heck that video is trying narrate without audio? It’s time to considered getting a sound card for the server box or at least have something on hand that you can quickly add sound capability to your server box. I’m currently using a HP ML110 G7 as my regular workstation and it does not come with any onboard sound card. It is installed with Windows Server 2008/R2 . I had originally wanted to get a pci-e sound card but decided not to as I was looking for a more inexpensive and flexible option. I searched around and found this little low cost USB sound card. But I was skeptical that it might not work on my Windows Server 2008 /R2 server box without drivers. Looking at the price of the usb sound card that I have found, I guess it is worth the gamble to give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, ...

Doing pricing research on I.T gadgets from PC Show 2012 (June 2012) and Comex 2012 (Aug 2012)?  Quite a large number of brochures from the shows are collected and archived into this collection. You can download the brochures from these 2 show here : PC Show 201 2 (June 2012) Comex 2012 (Aug 2012) Feel free to leave a comment.    

Here’s my collection of brochures and flyers from the IT Show 2012 (2012-03-09). In this collection or compilation, there are more than 400 pages worth of IT stuff for you to check it out. Feel free to download it from this link for your IT and gadget shopping research for good deals. Have Fun Guys.    

Chinatown Chinese New Year Lighting Up ceremony on 2012-01-01. Here are some shots.     01 - A Dragon stolling past People's Park. 02 - Wishing everyone 平安 in this Coming Lunar New Year...... 03 - Palm size dragon for those wanting to do some Desktop dragon dance. 04 - 年糕 anyone? 05 - These "dragon" reminds me of elmo......especially the one on the right.........hmmm are they related? 06 - The usual stuff. Be cautious of their increase-the-weight sales tactics. 07 - This is interesting..... 08 - Some Angry Bird 红包 for you??? 09 - Make a fashion statement is coming Lunar New Year with one of these highly fashionable and trendy bags..... Throw out those Coach Bags and get one of these. 10 - The 108 meter long Dragon welcomes you to Chinatown.       For those into photography : All shots was taken with a Canon 40D with 17-85mm Lens, AV mode, RAW. Slight exposure adjustment ...

My first recording of a full fireworks show in video. Shot this at the bay of Marina Bay Sands while at the same time shooting pictures of it with my DSLR. Its about 8 minutes plus of fireworks. Check it out!!!     For those into photography : Shot this with a Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini at 720p. Please do not leech any of the footage. Contact me if you are interested to use them. Thanks.

Here are some shots of the 2012 New Year Marina Bay Countdown fireworks taken along the bay of Marina Bay Sands.   01 – A shot of the river and loads of white balloons lining the river bed.   02 – Light Saber coming from Marina Bay Sands building. 03 – BOOMM!!! fireworks time…. HAPPY 2012!!! 04 - 05 - 06 - 07 - 08 - 09 - 10 - 11- 12 – Loads of fireworks smoke blown into the CBD buildings. Looks a lot like fumigation on a large scale.   For those into photography : All shots was taken with a Canon 40D with 17-85mm Lens, AV mode, RAW. Slight exposure adjustment was done to all the shots during post processing using Canon Digital Professional Software. No cropping done. Please do not leech any of the shots. Contact me if you are interested to use them. Thanks.