Found in Costa Mesa, CA
Funny parking sign
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Tablet / Cell phone holder for Nissan Maxima 2001
While transferring to my new cell phone, I found a photo of my hack to create a 7″ tablet & 5.7″ cell phone holder for my Nissan Maxima 2001. It consisted of a tablet (or cell phone stand from eBay as pictured), two large binder clips and a pocket kleenex. Turns out you can use a packet of pocket Kleenex to extend the legs of the tablet/phone holder and have it snugly fit in the dummy space in the factory stereo bezel. The two binder clips was just to avoid the unit from sliding sideways. The trick is to use stick one hand of the binder clip to the gap at the sides of the front panel.
Test instrument repair services (Specific models only)
There are a few used test instrument models that I’m familiar with the common problems. I moved onto the higher end, big ticket items so I wouldn’t bother acquiring them anymore.
Nonetheless, it hurts to see a piece of good equipment going to landfill. I’d be happy to repair the following models at a moderate rate (materials included, no fix no pay) below if anybody is interested:
- HP 6515A power supply: $400 for a problematic unit, $300 when you send in a good one for preventative recapping (the capacitors are from 1970s! They are dying.).
- HP/Agilent 54600 series oscilloscope: display got squeezed ($200), unit losing memory/time ($200), blown input channels due to excessive voltage ($300 for 1 channel + $100 per extra channel), unstable/cannot trigger ($500).
- HP/Agilent (Older, non-Megazoom) Infiniium series: replacing OS hard drive ($250), cannot calibrate certain channels ($400 for 1 channel + $100 per extra channel).
- HP/Agilent Infinium 5483X and above: refer to 54830 series post.
- TDS 500, 600, 700 series oscilloscope: SPC fail without other symptoms ($500), Acq/Attenuator fail ($600), Proc board fail ($400), Color screen bubbled ($500), Cal initialization failed ($300), upgrading all possible software options ($200, free with any other service).
Contact me at 650-804-5024. All units must be delivered to Irvine, CA for service (and shipped back/picked up) at requester’s cost.
Symantec Ghost in Windows hangs for mSATA to SATA adapter board Solution: Start Ghost with -NOTRIM
I was trying to image a mSATA SSD with Ghost in Windows (I’m using version 12.0.0.8023 Corporate Edition as I bought the Altiris license) and I ran into internal consistency error 8027 right at the very beginning of the copying process.
For some reason, it doesn’t happen if I boot to the DOS version (provided by Agilent) to do the cloning.
Luckily the status bar tells me what’s going on during the process. I notice it always hangs when ghost tells me that it’s TRIMming the SSD. I looked up the help file (ghost32.exe -help) and noticed that there’s a “-NOTRIM” option. Tried it and the clone completed successfully.
Turns out Symantec is aware of it. The title of the support article is called “Cloning Solid State Disk (SSD) drives fails when using the UEFI 12.0.0.x Ghost executables“.
The summary says it since older versions (11.5.1.x) does not have TRIM, this isn’t a problem, and
“Build 12.0.0.8003 (from GSS 3.0 early build) resolved the issue with the partition restore”
I’m not sure what it means. But the solution is the same as what I did: disable TRIM when copying SSD in Windows (done by the -notrim switch).
Create user account using email address (like your Microsoft account) in Windows 7/2008
If you live in a mixed environment of Windows 7 and 8/10 computers, you might want to set the usernames to be the same so you can share the files/printers without managing Homegroup.
Nonetheless, in Windows 7/2008, if you try to create a user account using the traditional tool (Local Users and Groups) in Computer Management, you are not allowed to use email address as user name because they banned the at-mark (@):
I searched the web for quite a while, came across stuff like UPN (User Principal Name) without luck (No active directory on Windows 7, nor I want to setup a domain controller in Windows 2008 for home network). Turns out the solution is dead simple: use the “User Account” from Control panel to create the user account. No questions asked!