Workspace Upgrade: New 27'' Monitor

Today, I finally went out and got myself a nice big 27 inch 4k IPS monitor for use at home. I'd been stewing and investigating move this for several weeks now (though the idea of getting a larger external monitor for use at home has probably been floating around over half a year now).

Gah! Stupid HP Design Flaws

Earlier in the week, I randomly started getting some nasty creaking/snapping noises everytime I opened or closed the lid on my laptop. Last night, I finally discovered the cause: the plastic base-plate was coming away from the rest of the case in the top left corner (below the power button)! Basically, every time the lid opens and closes, it looks like the left hinge is forcing open the casing (currently by 1 - 1.5mm, along a 2-3 cm stretch from the top-left corner). For now, I can still nudge/snap it back into place after each open/close cycle; there's also a bit of a rattling sound inside (like some plastic bits have snapped off). Apparently, this design flaw with the hinges+base-plate has caused quite a few people grief.

If the rumors are true that this is because they freaking glued that part of the case together, then that would really suck, as AFAIK, all the heat-producing processors are located there along with some fans. Along with some of the other annoyances I had when setting up this machine (i.e. RSI-causing keyboard, oversized and hard to deliberately-click (yet easy to accidentally bump) touchpad, out of kilter out-of-box monitor colour calibration, and the high pitched eee...errr...eeee....errr whining when it's on standby, to name the most egregious examples), this just further reaffirms my decision to never buy an HP product again. I would also strongly discourage anyone else from doing so in the future as well.

Bye Bye Linux... For Now :(

After postponing for several weeks to let the dust settle down on several projects/commitments, and also to get hold of some external hard drives first, I've finally purged the Linux partitions from my HP Envy 17.

That "H" partition was where my 2 Linux partitions used to be... now reclaimed for storing all my stuff instead (and maybe home to some future Linux virtual machines instead).

[Second Attempt] Getting Ralink RT3290 Wifi working on Linux Mint 15 (and HP Envy 17)

Last year, I posted a short tutorial about a failed attempt at getting a stable wifi connection on HP Envy 17 under Linux (Mint 15) with the crappy Ralink RT3290 card it uses. Initially, things looked promising with that fix... that is, until I was about 90% complete writing that article, and the whole machine locked up, in what I soon came to learn was known as a "kernel panic".

Yesterday, in preparation for a potential repartitioning attempt sometime "soon" to resolve some upcoming disk-space availability issues (i.e. I initially set aside > 500GB of my disk for Linux, but since I'm not using it that much now, the measly 200 GB for Windows is almost exhausted now), I finally got around to uploading to Github the sources for the patched driver I've had running on Linux since my last post.



Quick Links + Instructions
* The sources can be downloaded from:
 https://github.com/Aligorith/ralink3209_drivers/tree/x64_PanicFixesPorted
(NOTE: To be clear, you need to be on the "x64_PanicFixesPorted" branch, NOT the master)

* IIRC, you should be able to just compile that straight (without any further tweaks), and then install it as per the instructions in my previous tutorial.

Office Workspace Setup

As promised, here's a separate post with some snaps of what my new office workspace setup looks like. Unfortunately, these were just quickies snapped using my el-crappo phone, since it's a bit of a burden trying to lug both my camera AND a laptop along (though as you'll see, there are ample reasons to consider doing this sometime).

The Taming and Return to Windows 8

For the past 2 months, I've been using Linux almost exclusively for all my serious computing work (not including early-morning web/news/email checkups on my Android tablet). But since yesterday, I'm now spending a bit more time in Windows again. Read on for details of how/why this came up, and what I needed to do to make this a viable option.

Firstly, some screenshots of what this now looks like :)

"File Explorer" opening without starting in one of the blasted "libraries". Note the nice theming on show everywhere. For example, check out all the window border themeing and transparency effects, scrollbars, back/forward buttons, taskbar, etc.

A start menu again - with good access provided to everything that's important. Namely, quick shutdown/sleep access, documents/downloads/pictures access, quick navigation to folders without clicking (via cascading menus on the "Computer" entry)

The "fixed" taskbar - quick launchers for apps without having the confusion that pinning them causes (i.e. pinned app launcher becomes the window indicator), and multiple instances of the same app can be opened without appearing beside each other.

[FAILED] Getting Ralink RT3290 Wifi working on Linux Mint 15 (and HP Envy 17)

After almost 2 months of procrastinating and hoping that the default wifi drivers did in fact work well, I've finally bitten the bullet and gone ahead to replace the wifi drivers for my HP Envy 17 under Linux.

A bit of history:
- When I tried the LiveCD way back in late September/early October, wifi stability was spotty at best - frequently timing out, dropping out, and gradually getting slower as a session wore on.
- After installing Linux for real though, I didn't encounter any more of these stability problems during everyday use. At least for the first month!
- Last month, I started observing a few cases where wifi stability was really crap:
  1) At uni, where not only was signal strength weak, but the connection would frequently drop or refuse to connect, even after I fixed the logon issues,
  2) it was impossible to use the wifi on this laptop in the lounge, especially with about 3 other devices nearby, yet this setup worked perfectly under Windows 8!
- After returning from holiday, my connection has been really bad and spotty. In fact, it's been really hard trying to upload photos and posts on my blog (like the one yesterday), as everything just kept timing out and/or randomly dropping out. Google web apps like Blogger and Picasa seemed to be hit the worst, though even Google+ image loading was affected. All in all, it was a really frustrating experience!

EDIT: Moments after writing the last paragraph of this post, I got a kernel panic. Depending on how things go, I may/may not need to revert these changes if this instability continues...

EDIT 2: It appears that the kernel panics aren't a random occurrence, but rather something more pathological. So, I've been forced to roll back to the crappy and unstable (but non-crashing) default drivers :(

EDIT 3: After some more digging, it appears that my wifi router's firewall has apparently been hell-banning my laptop for apparent DoS activity (usually corresponding with me trying to load image-heavy, Google-hosted sites!) on some of the days when I haven't been able to connect at all. This follows some suspicious activity coming from an unknown (and untraceable) IP address last week. All in all, there've been a lot of weird happenings since I got back!

Assorted Linux Tweaks - Over a Month in Linux

Here's another list of various tweaks I've made to my setup today to get it working with all the hardware I have (and a request for help!)

These include:
* Preventing USB Mouse poweroff on battery power
* Fixing video playback (green screen) issues in Qt applications
* Finding CA Certificates to get eduroam Wifi Working
* Avoiding duplicate entries in Bash up-arrow history

Getting NVidia Optimus + Intel HD 4600 + NVidia 740M on Linux Mint 15 (64-bit) Working

I've been postponing this (fixing up the graphics drivers) step of my Linux dual-boot setup on my HP Envy 17-j007tx process for a few weeks, but today I finally got around to sorting out these issues.

This had been put off several times already, given the various tight deadlines I was facing and the fact that apart from some minor inconvenient issues (i.e. heat issues + shortened battery life + a few OpenGL rendering glitches) there weren't any really pressing issues for which it was essential that I got my NVidia card working (especially considering the price of failure: a non-functioning Linux setup, potentially with a forced return to Windows 8).

One Week of Linux

So, it's been just over a week since I switched my laptop over to a dual-boot setup with Windows 8 and Linux Mint 15. (Has it really only been one week?!)

Linux Dual Booting Adventures: Part 3 - Installing Linux (Tutorial for HP Envy 17-jXXX)

In this post, I'm going to try to document the process I used for installing Linux Mint 15 (Cinnamon) on my HP Envy 17-j007tx alongside the preinstalled Windows 8. Hopefully this will be useful to someone out there, just like the post that I based much of this process on helped me (cheers to Larry Mulcahy!)

I'll start with a condensed version of the process I employed. Along the way, various missteps taken will be noted/numbered, and discussed at the end.

Ok, let's get started!

Linux Dual Booting Adventures - Part 2: Installed at Last!

As of about 2 hours ago, Linux Mint has been installed on my laptop, and as of just under an hour ago, I've managed to get it into a stable configuration so that I can start it up normally :)

Say Hello "hippoalpha"

The setup process has not been without some very hairy moments. And, the setup I've got right now is not actually completely configured correctly yet...

Linux Dual Booting Adventures - Part 1: Getting the LiveCD Working

Last Wednesday, I finally managed to get the Linux Mint Live CD running on my new laptop, after over a week of failed attempts and a lot of reading online. Moments later, there was a strange wind outside, and the sky looked something like below:

Thoughts on Windows 8 and a New Laptop

A few weeks ago, I finally bought a new laptop as the successor for my long serving and well loved Toshiba. As much as I love the computing setup I have on the Toshiba (including what IMO is the best keyboard around. Period.), in recent months, a number of factors have conspired to remind me that eventually, I'd have to find (and adapt) to working with a successor for it.