Fix a Happauge Wintv-PVR-150 which do not initialise correctely on linux

Maybe you have a Wintv-PVR-150 card on your Linux box, and you regularly encounter some "initialization" problems, even if the card is correctly recognized by linux.
Symptoms may be:

• no mpeg2 output (empty video file in mythtv)
  
• only snow (channel can't be selected?)
• black picture
• picture stretched or distorted
• black and white image

To fix this problem there are two things you can do:

1. Move your card on another PCI slot and see if things improve
2. Change your motherboard

For sure changing the motherboard is not something we want to do, but sometime,  you have no choice.

I had this problem, and if changing the PCI slot reduced the ratio of bad initialization, it didn't fixed it completely. After my system died, I changed the motherboard and CPU, and now everything works perfectely.

How Windows 7 is better than Linux

Ok, this is some training documents from Microsoft for resellers, and this is so good... Microsoft FUD at its best.

Ubuntu Wine

That's it!

How to prevent auto-replies to be sent when spams are received

This is a simple solution to not send auto-reply messages when you receive a spam, using spam assaassin, postif and webmin auto-reply system.

Here, I consider that you use webmin to manage your server and auto-replies , that your mail server software is postfix and spamassassin is configured and works. Since the default way spamassassin works is to add some text to the subject of your emails if it is detected as a spam, I consider that the text which is added is "[SPAM]".

To prevent the autoreply system set by Webmin to send a reply to emails detected as spam, just add the following code in file /etc/webmin/postfix/autoreply.pl at line 77:

if ($header{'subject'} =~ m/[SPAM]/) { exit 0; }

If your spamassasin system add another string to the subject, change [SPAM] for a string corresponding to your system.

Once everything seems to work perfectly, you have to modify the file autoreply.pl stored in the library folder of webmin, since webmin will replace the thew one you already modified by the one in its library folder every time an autoreply is created/modified. To do that, just copy the one you modified over the one in webmin library folder:

cp /etc/webmin/postfix/autoreply.pl /usr/libexec/webmin/postfix/autoreply.pl

That's it that's all...

Gnome Panel auto-hide stop working

Something boring with gnome panel is that it stops hiding automatically quite usually.
A simple way to restore the hide/unhide function quickly when it happens is to use the command:
killall gnome-panel

This command will kill gnome-panel, and it will restart automatically. It's not very nice, but it works.

To ease the process, just create a launcher with this command. This way, you will be able to restore you gnome-panel functionality with a simple click.

Gnome Panel advanced customization

Ok, lets start with a few tricks to customize your gnome panel.
I will talk about few parameters of the gnome panel which can't be changed from the gnome panel configuration interface.

The things I really don't like with gnome panel and which are not customizable from the configuration interface are:
- the time it takes to start showing/hiding
- the fact that the bar can't hide completely
- the slow movement of the panel
- the time it takes before hiding


To change these parameters, it's necessary to launch gconf-editor. To do that press alt+F2, then type gconf-editor in the text area, and press enter.

The following windows will appear:

Then, browse the the folder tree on the left to go to: /apps/panel/toplevels/panel_0
The interface should look like that:
If you use more than one panel, you may have panel_0, panel_1, ... folder. Choose the one which is the panel you want to customize.
If you don't know which folder is which panel, just change a few values. Since changes are effective in real time, you will quickly see which panel you modify.

To change a parameter, just double click on it.

Now here are interesting parameters:

• animation speed: define the speed of the show/hide movement. Can be slow, medium or fast. If you want the panel to show/hide instantly, uncheck the parameter "enable_animations"
  
• auto_hide: check if you want your panel to hide automatically when the mouse leave it
• auto_hide_size: very useful, it's the size of the bar when it is hidden. Set it to 0 if you want the bar to disappear completely
• enable_animations: If you want the panel to show/hide instantly, uncheck it
• hide_delay and unhide_delay is the time the panel takes before hiding and unhiding in milliseconds (1 second = 1000 milliseconds)

All other parameters can be changed from the panel configuration interface.

Intel Q6600 overclocked to 3.6Ghz on air

The Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 is a nice cpu which is, in most of the cases very easy to overclock. When I talk about overclock, it's not a 10% or 15% overclock, but a 50% overclock.
In this news, I will explain how I have been able to overclock my intel Q6600 from 2,4Ghz to 3,6Ghz safely and with a small investment (no need for a water cooling system).

Overclocking a quad core cpu create a lot of heat. The first thing to do is to insure the system will be able to cool the cpu correctely. To do that, I replaced the stock air cooling system with the OCZ vandetta 2 system:

This cpu cooler has very good cooling capacity, is quite cheap, fits in my case (on the P5N-D motherboard, the cpu is not far away from the PSU and many CPU cooler with 120mm fans can't fit) and is sold in my computer hardware shop. I chose a cooling system with a vertical fan to have a very good air flow in the case.

To be sure the cooling capacity will be used efficiently, I used Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease. OCZ provide a very good one, but my hardware store didn't have it in store.


Now we have the good cooling system, we have to insure it will be correctly supplied with fresh air. Like many people, I have a Sonata III 500 case which is a good one for the price:

Unfortunately, for heavy overclocking, the case do not provide a sufficient air flow. Fortunately, this problem can be fixed very easily, and at a very low cost. Indeed, my system only uses one of the three 5"1/4 bay and none of the two 3"1/2 ones. So I decided to put my dvd player on the top 5"1/4 bay and left all the other bays open to optimize my air flow:
With this solution, the air enter by the front panel, goes directly to the cpu cooling system, and is evacuated by the rear fan. This solution will need you to keep the front door open when your computer is in use. To improve air flow efficiency, I added a 120mm fan at the back of my drive bays.

I fixed it at three points (two on the bottom fan screws and one to the 5"1/4 bay case) using small tie wrap:
This way, the fan if firmly maintained.


Now, we need to install an air filter, to protect our cooling system from dust and make the case not too ugly. To do that, I bought an air conditioner filter foam:
The advantage of this foam is that it will be easy to fix it in the case.
I cut the foam a little bit larger than the drive bays I've to cover. To fix it, it's just necessary to unlock the front of the case. It's not necessary to remove it, just unlocking the top of it is enough. Then I put the foam between the front case and the metal chassis and lock back the front of the case to fix the foam. That's simple, and the result looks like that:
It's not very nice but it's the less expensive solution.

Now, the case is ready, and we just have to configure the bios.

Be careful! Apply the following configuration at your own risk. Any misconfiguration or bad cooling may destroy your system. This is given only as information. It worked for me, but parameters may vary from one computer/CPU to another. I'm not responsible for any damage which may happen to your computer.

Here is my configuration for voltage on my P5N-D motherboard:
Vcore voltage: 1.48750V (value set in the bios)
Dram: auto (I overclock the CPU, not the ram)
HT voltage: 1.48V
NB chipset voltage: 1.48V
SB chipset voltage: 1.60V

For frequency:
FSB-Memory clock mode: unlinked
FSB: 1600 Mhz (with P5N-D it'S 1600, but with other motherboard it can be 400)
Mem: 800 Mhz (no overclock on my 800Mhz ram)
CPU multiplier is kept at x9

Enhanced C1 (C1E) is enabled (disable it at first if you encounter problems)
Speed step is enabled (disable it at first if you encounter problems)

Now, it's time to restart the computer, but before, be sure that your fans are set to run full speed in the bios.

When the system is idle, the temperature of the CPU is 37°C, and the warmest core is at 40°C. You can see that the speedstep option reduce the speed of the CPU to 2.4Ghz when idle. You can see that when idle, the vcore voltage I set at 1.48750V in the bios is at 1.44 in real conditions.

Now, to be sure the system is stable, it's necessary to launch a stress test. Using compression software or any other software not dedicated to stressing the CPU is not efficient. To stress my CPU, I used cpuburn, which is a software provided in ubuntu repositories. This software really stress the cpu and increase the temperature much more than any other software not dedicated to cpu stress test can do. Cpuburn is really the best way to verify if our system is stable. I run one cpuburn for each core. Since I've a modern intel cpu, I run burnP6. After 3 hours of stress test, my system is stabilized to 61°C with the warmest core at 66°C, which is really good, since my cpu will never be so much stressed in normal use.
As you can see, on heavy load, the Vcore voltage dropped to 1.38V.

Debugging:
I'm not an expert in overclocking, but here is my experience regarding this overclock.
I used 1.48750V for the vcore, since with lower voltage, the system had a hard reboot after 20 minutes of stress test.
It worked with 1.5V, but the lower the voltage is, the better it is. Lower voltage will create less heat.
For other voltage, it's a guess I made with all the information I found on internet.

It's possible your system may not work at 3.6Ghz, it really depends on your CPU. You may be lucky or not. For example, I haven't been able to run my system at 3.8Ghz even if the CPU was still quite cool and some people can.

You may need more vcore voltage or less, it depends on your CPU too. Try to lower the voltage as much as possible.