Symbol Engine

wmii has been the my window manager of choice ever since I first saw it. I recently got a shiny Dell M1330 and as anyone can guess Vista did not live longer than 2 hours on it. I had never used wmii on a laptop before and I saw that the default scripts are were obviously coded with desktop user in mind.

• There is no battery indicator
• You can't watch the CPU temperature
• and you can't set the CPU frequency governor

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Popularity: 20% [?]

I finally had the time to try out Spaceman Spiff's Color Fix on my DTV. So I took my DTV apart , heated my soldering iron and tried to focus my eyes on the teeny weeny resistors. First let me tell you this: Piggybacking Surface mounted resistors is NO PICNIC.

You need completely steady hands, eagle eyes or a stereo microscope, a really good tweezer to grip the tiny resistors, a soldering iron with heat control and a good quality soldering& paste flux. I had& none of them. After 2 hours of agony I could only solder one (1) resistor into place. Then when I accidentally touched the one I soldered when I was trying my luck on the second one, the first one came off… Complete with the original resistor on the DTV board. Talk about pain.

I left everything on the table and fired up my a1200 to normalize the levels of stress hormones in my blood.

The other day I decided it would be much easier to take the original resistors out and solder new ones in than to try to piggyback them. And here it is, the turning point:

Spiff's page says these resistors should ideally be 165 ohms. What I had in hand was the 220 ohms resistors I prepared for the easy fix. The ones on the board where 680 ohms, so I decided to try my luck. 220 ohms is much closer to the ideal value than 680. I soldered them in and as I thought it was much easier.

The result is as anyone can guess, not as good as the original fix, but is much better than the original buggy board. It would have been much better if I had resistor with a closer value to 165 ohm. So I dub this fix Half a Spaceman Spiff's Ghetto Color Fix, or HaSSGCF.

So the moral of the story boys and girls is, it's much easier to replace SMD's than to solder them piggybacked if you don't have right tools.

Popularity: 78% [?]

I got meself a PAL DTV recently. These things are pretty cool out of the box. But if you want to get more out of your DTV, there are many hacks around the net. Here is a checklist of the hacks I want to make for mine. It may prove useful to some people.

I'll add my experiences doing these hack here somewhere when I find the time to do them.  

1- Fix the colors:

    PAL version of the DTV is cursed with a buggy video generator. White is not white at all, and some colors are very hard to distinguish. If you don't like your DTV with ghetto colors, try spacman spiff's easy colorfix: (scroll down to easy and better fix)

Spaceman Spiff's DTV colorfix

Note: I have tried this hack with limited success. You can read about it here.

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Popularity: 78% [?]

Since 1200 schematics were so popular, I made A600 schematics into pdf format too. I have changed the layout of some pages, and joined hard to follow schematics that were scattered on multiple pages. Enjoy:

Amiga 600 PDF Schematics @ Symbolengine

Popularity: 80% [?]

Amigaguide is a hypertext document file format designed for the Amiga, files are stored in ASCII so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software. However it's not pretty to read it with a text viewer, because links don't work and formatting clutters the text.
This little tool I wrote converts uploaded amigaguide files to html and displays them directly on your browser for viewing. If there are external files linked in the document you can just save the output page to the same directory as your guide file and links will work.

I hope you find it useful.

Amigaguide to HTML converter @ SymbolEngine

Popularity: 71% [?]

GP2x is a wonderful device for its portability, power consumption and price tag.  You can do pretty amazing stuff with an out of the box unit. Here is a slice of that:

1. Go to settings/system menu on your GP2x
2. Make sure the IP Address is 10.1.0.1
3. Turn on telnet, ftp, samba and web servers (You wont need samba if you are using a real operating system)

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Popularity: 83% [?]

Copy protection schemes don't work. Companies pay huge amounts of money to develop a new copy protection scheme, only to be cracked on the first week it hits the shelves. Then they want us to pay the companies back the money they used in developing the already cracked copy protection scheme. But we don't want to pay the ridicilous money for a plastic disc with data on it so we copy. 

Alternative:

Companies do not pay huge amounts of money to develop new copy protection schemes that don't work and admit the fact that data on any media will always be copiable, no matter what anyone does, just like the Beta or VHS tapes before them. Because they don't pay for encryption schemes, media becomes cheaper. More people would like to buy original HD-DVD or Blue-ray discs because everyone likes to own the movie they like in its original package. Some people still copy, but they always do anyway.

Just give up the ridiculous fight!

Popularity: 73% [?]

If you like to wear nice kicks like me, be sure to have a look at http://www.myairshoes.com/. Raven updates his site daily with new reviews, images and release dates of brand new sneakers from Nike Air Force One and Air Jordan shoes.

Popularity: 75% [?]

I was looking for a1200 schematics and all I could find was IFF files in a zip on Aminet. I had to struggle to convert them so you dont have to. Here it is:

Commodore Amiga 1200 Schematics in PDF format @ Symbolengine

Amiga 600 Schematics also available.

Note: WOW! 1000 downloads in a month. I'm impressed :)

Popularity: 100% [?]

MMC64. Should you buy it? Here I have listed pros and cons of this cartridge after using it for longer than a year:

Pros

• Inexpensive storage
  SD cards are really cheap nowadays and they are easy to find. A 1gb sandisk that costs about 15$ holds all the HVSC archive and all my games and still have 500mb free space. 

• Really fast loading times
  Faster than 1581, 64hdd and ide64. Actually the only thing it cannot beat must be a cartridge =)

• Cheap, cheap, cheap
  Considering the other options, this is the most cost effective modern storage solution for c64. Shipping is also cheap because of its:

• Small size
  It fits in a standart C= cartridge case. It just needs to be slightly modified to make an sd card slot. It is pretty light so you dont have to put something underneath the cartridge for the fear of breaking the edge connector.

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Popularity: 95% [?]