Sony Ericsson K800i

A few weeks ago I moved my mobile phone contract from O2 to T-Mobile/EE at the Carphone Warehouse. It was the first time that I’d ever moved networks since I first got a mobile phone in 2001 or 2002, and the process was very simple. I wanted to keep my old number so this is what I did:

1. Contact O2 to ask for a PAC. I did it online using their live chat facility.
2. Buy new mobile phone contact.
3. Phone customer service on new network (T-Mobile) and tell them the PAC.
4. Wait 24-48 hours for the old number to transfer over to the new SIM card.

However, I discovered that the SIM card was still reporting the ‘temporary’ T-Mobile number rather than my original number, and it turns out that Android doesn’t provide a way to edit the number stored on the SIM card.

After a couple of hours of searching on Google, I ordered an old Sony Ericsson K800i phone on eBay as it turns out that this device does allow you to edit the number stored on the SIM card. It arrived a few days ago, as did a micro-to-SIM card adapter and today I popped the SIM card out of my new Google Nexus 4 and edited the number on the SIM.

Here’s what I did on the Sony Ericsson K800i:

1. Contacts
2. Options
3. Special numbers
4. My numbers
5. Select your main number, it may be called something like “My mobile” or “Line 1″ or similar, and press Edit
6. Enter your new number, e.g. +447123456789
7. Save

And it worked: Android now reports my original number. I’ve done the same for Jane’s phone too, as she moved from O2 to T-Mobile a few months earlier and experienced the same issues.

Jane has a Samsung Galaxy Ace running Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread) and it would appear that on this phone/operating system it is essential to make sure the date and time are set correctly otherwise it won’t connect to the internet and will report a “no connection” error.

I’m posting this in case it helps anyone else. Oh, and does anyone else need a third-hand Sony Ericsson K800i?

Well, it would appear that we won this week’s round of our new neighbourhood game: ‘who hasn’t brought in their green wheelie bin by the following morning’.

Yay! Go us!

About a month ago I took delivery of a new, much faster PC from PC Specialist. Now I’m getting around to reinstalling games, and I’ve just discovered a neat trick to install Steam-powered games on a second hard drive.

My last PC had served me well for about six years but it was creaking a little around the seams and was being pushed very hard particularly when gaming. It was time to upgrade.

And after upgrades comes the often arduous task of reinstalling applications.

dual-boot or not dual-boot?

On my last two PCs I’ve always set up a dual-boot environment. One partition (C:) was for day-to-day applications (email, web browsing, web development, image editing, etc.), the next (D:) was for games. My reasoning was:

1. Clean installation of Windows with minimal, and only essential, drivers.
2. Less distracting. If I wanted to play games then I would need to reboot the PC into the games partition.

However, in practice what it meant was:

1. Twice as much work, keeping two versions of Windows up-to-date, with both Windows updates and driver upgrades.
2. It was such a hassle to shut down everything and reboot that I rarely ever played any games. The only people to play were Reuben and Joshua when they played the LEGO Star Wars games.

So I decided on this PC to single-boot (Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit) and install everything side-by-side across two hard drives: my main applications are on C: (120 GB SSD); most of my data plus games are on D: (1 TB Western Digital SATA drive).

So far, so good. I’ve played games more in the last couple of weeks than in the last couple of years, but contrary to my fears it’s not distracted me from my main work on my PC.

However, this evening I realised after installing the Steam client for the first time that it was about to install all 7.8 GB of Call of Duty: Black Ops onto C.

No, no, no, no, no!

Moving Steam to a second hard drive

It turned out to be a pretty easy task to move Steam from C to D. I found the instructions on the Steam support website.

By default Steam installs to C:\Program Files\Steam (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam on 64-bit editions of Windows) and the games install to C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps.

“During the installation of Steam, you have the option to install Steam to a location other than the default. Since Steam relies on the game files residing in the SteamApps folder, your game files will go to whatever folder you have Steam installed in. The game files must be in the SteamApps folder in order to function.”

So, here’s what to do, assuming that you’ve already installed Steam to C:.

1. Log out and exit Steam.
2. Navigate to the folder where Steam is installed (by default: C:\Program Files\Steam\; or C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\ on 64-bit).
3. Delete all of the files and folders except the SteamApps folder and Steam.exe.
4. Cut and paste your Steam folder to the new location, for example: D:\Program Files\Steam\.
5. Launch Steam.
6. Steam will briefly update and then you will be ready to play.

Conclusion

I’ve just done this and it worked.

Jeff Hanneman in rehearsals (Photo: Slayer website)

Yesterday was a particularly sad day for me. Not only did I attend a memorial event for our friend and former neighbour Ian McKie (I’ll write more about that at a later date, once I’ve processed the news a bit more), but I also learned of the death of Slayer guitarist and songwriter Jeff Hanneman.

The first time I heard Slayer was in a church basement in Whitley Bay. The album was Reign In Blood, which is still regarded by many as the definitive thrash metal album. The album was released in October 1986 and as I was on a Borders Scripture Union summer camp I guess it must have been 1987.

Slayer was the first metal band I saw in concert, at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1988, promoting their South of Heaven album; Nuclear Assault were the support act.

Jeff Hanneman suffered a spider bite in 2011, which resulted in a condition called necrotizing fasciitis, a rare and horrible flesh-eating disease which almost immediately put his life at risk. As was reported on the Slayer website recently,

for a couple of days after he went to the ER, things were touch-and-go. There was talk that he might have to have his arm amputated, and we didn’t know if he was going to pull through at all. He was in a medically-induced coma for a few days and had several operations to remove the dead and dying tissue from his arm. So, understand, he was in really, really bad shape. It’s been about a year since he got out of the hospital, and since then, he had to learn to walk again, he’s had several painful skin grafts, he’s been in rehab doing exercises to regain the strength in his arm. (Source)

Despite his rehab reportedly going well, and making an appearance at The Big Four show at Coachella in 2011, Hanneman never rejoined Slayer in a full time capacity. His place in the band was filled on tour by Exodus guitarist Gary Holt.

Sadly, the news broke yesterday that he had died from liver failure, although it was made clear on some reports that as yet there is no clear indication whether this was directly related to the spider bite.

This is the news currently on the Slayer website:

Slayer is devastated to inform that their bandmate and brother, Jeff Hanneman, passed away at about 11AM this morning [Thursday, May 2] near his Southern California home. Hanneman was in an area hospital when he suffered liver failure. He is survived by his wife Kathy, his sister Kathy and his brothers Michael and Larry, and will be sorely missed. (Source)

He will indeed be sorely missed by many.

I know I’m a metalhead, but this is just such a beautiful and perfectly written song.

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold

So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold

See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold

I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I’ve broken
But I swear in the days still left
We’ll walk in fields of gold
We’ll walk in fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold

#1 The eye-watering operation

On Tuesday 2 April I drove north with Jane to Stracathro Hospital (52 miles north of Anstruther, on the A90, 38 miles south of Aberdeen) for what would be the first of two minor operations within a week.

This first procedure, which would see me admitted to hospital for the first time since I emerged into one on a very cold and dark morning on Remembrance Day, November 1971, was for a ‘gentlemanly operation’ to ensure that no more little Saunders’s would be making an appearance in the years to come—at least not from this branch of my family tree; a procedure, under local anaesthetic, which would sever the vas deferens but make a vast difference.

With Jane having suffered from post-natal depression since 2008 it was the least that I could do to remove at least some of her anxiety about what lies in the future. Still, I have a further three months and two samples to go until I’m given the all-clear…

Oh, and there is the small matter of two nasty post-op, NHS-sponsored, iatrogenic infections that have laid me low for most of April.

On the day

I was remarkably calm the day of the procedure. I had half expected to be very anxious on the morning of the operation but I really rather enjoyed our drive up to Dundee, crossing the Tay road bridge in the warm morning sunshine and then skirting our way around Dundee to the east to meet up with the A90 towards Aberdeen. It was a pleasant change to have Jane to myself in the car, no children interrupting every few moments, although they are usually very polite in doing so, “Mum! Mum! Mum! … excuse me?” I was also surprised to see so much snow still piled at the sides of the road, when we had had so little this winter and what we received had always melted within hours of falling.

Stracathro hospital was surprisingly far away. (Are we nearly there yet?) It was built in 1939 as an emergency hospital for WWII military casualties. It reminded me very much of Peel hospital, at Caddonfoot situated outside Galashiels between Selkirk and Peebles, built around the same time for the same purpose.

Seemingly the first patients at Stracathro were victims of an air raid on Montrose in 1940, followed by civilian casualties from London, Birmingham, Coventry and other English cities, and later by soldiers from all theatres of the war, all delivered by train to the nearby station at Brechin.

We parked the car and navigated our way to the day surgery ward in time for my 08:30 admission. The waiting room wasn’t much more than a large abandoned ward with a handful of chairs pushed to the edges at the far end.

The operation

“Ah! Hello!” came the cheery greeting from the nurse in charge. “You’re first here, so you’re first on the list that’s how it works here.”

Seemingly Stracathro carries out a number of minor operations for three health authorities: Fife, Tayside and Angus, and on Tuesday mornings they alternate week-about chopping off the bits of men from Fife and Tayside, four men every 90 minutes. That week it was Fife’s turn. And as it turned out I was not just the first to arrive, I was the only one to arrive. Two had phoned to cancel, one just didn’t turn up. Cowards!

In theatre, besides the surgeon there were two nurses. One was assisting the surgeon, the other it would appear was simply there to sit in the corner and talk incessantly about the weather, and the snow, and how she had spent an entire afternoon digging out her cul-de-sac, where all the old folks in the street had stood watching from the comfort of their living room windows and where none of them had made her a mug of hot chocolate.

During the operation the surgeon asked me if everything was all right.

“This is very odd,” I said, grimacing.

The surgeon looked at me.

“Certainly… unusual.”

“I’ll accept unusual,” he replied.

There was a slightly awkward silence.

“I mean… I’ve not had this done to me before.”

The surgeon burst out laughing, stopped what he was doing, looked at me and said, “No. No you wouldn’t have.” He smiled then returned to chopping up my bits and melting the severed ends with a soldering iron.

The nurse in the corner took that as her cue to continue with her epic tale of shifting snow.

And I can tell you another thing. After all these infections, I’m certainly not having another one!

Next!

After a returning to the ward, and once my stats had returned to normal (my usually-high blood pressure was refreshingly low after the procedure) I was allowed to dress and leave. No tea and toast for me. Not even the whisper of a biscuit. Or nuts! NHS cut backs, eh!

I emerged into the waiting room just as the next batch of men were arriving. Well, two of them, anyway. One rather brow-beaten looking man was accompanied by a heavily-pregnant wife and—very obviously—his mother-in-law.

“She’s expecting her fourth!” the mother-in-law exclaimed to anyone who was listening. “So A’ve come tae make share he gets it cut oaf!”

And so the long road to recovery, and back to Anstruther, despite the information sheet accompanying my admissions papers assuring me I’d be well enough to return to work the following day.

#2 The eye operation

My second minor procedure was simply to remove a cyst that had developed next to my left eye this year. I noticed it in mid-January and by the time it was removed it had doubled in size.

This minor op. was done at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, where all three of my boys were born, during the Monday afternoon ophthalmic clinic and by the Charge Nurse. She was brilliant—by which I mean she was very good at her job, not that she was particularly shiny.

And guess what?! No infection. Mind you, I’ve had so many antibiotics this month I’d probably live through another plague. Or even survive a Big Mac meal from McDonalds.

Recovery

Neither procedure, the vasectomy nor the cyst-removal, was particularly traumatic although I did feel rather sore and wobbly for quite a few days afterwards—certainly more than the one day that the information leaflet suggested; but then I guess that everyone is different.

The post-op infections, however, really did knock me for six: everything from pain to fever, shaking and confusion. A skin infection to begin with, followed by a particularly nasty UTI for which I am now on my third course of antibiotics, which will last another three weeks.

Thankfully, though, I am now on the mend and greatly looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow morning.

Hello Name Name, It looks like you’ve forgotten your password…

It does indeed look like I’ve forgotten my password, Jolidrive. But it looks very much like you’ve also forgotten my name.

LEGO… something for Windows

In a few weeks time I’ll be migrating my data to a new PC and since my two older boys, twins Reuben and Joshua, love playing

• LEGO Star Wars I & II: The Complete Saga
• LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars
• LEGO The Lord of the Rings

I was keen to make sure I knew how to reliably transfer their current saved games to the new computer when it arrived.

Current v future setups

My current PC setup sees me dual booting between Windows 8 Professional 64-bit (on C:) and Windows 7 Professional 32-bit (on D:).

The first partition is my main day-to-day setup for web development, email, writing, image editing, sound recording, etc. The second is simply known as “the games computer”: it has a very clean installation of Windows 7 with only the essential drivers installed plus a few games.

I’ve yet to decide exactly how to configure my new PC, but I expect that I’ll drop the dual boot and simply run everything under Windows 8 Pro 64-bit.

So over the last couple of days I’ve installed these three favourite games of the boys and trialled copying the saved games over. And I’m delighted to report that it worked.

Process

What I did was:

1. Back-up the files (as detailed below) on my Windows 7 installation.
2. Install each game on my Windows 8 installation.
3. Run the game, so that it could create new save locations.
4. Back-up the default save location files.
5. Overwrite the Windows 8 save location files with the ones I’d backed-up from Windows 7.

And it worked!

LEGO Star Wars I & II: The Complete Saga

Here is the directory that I found all the files that I needed to copy, where {USER} is the name of your Windows Vista, 7 or 8 account:

C:\Users\{USER}\AppData\Local\Lucasarts\LEGO Star Wars - The Complete Saga\

It contained the following directory and files, as we had used only one save slot:

• \SavedGames
  • \SaveGame0.LEGO Star Wars - The Complete Saga_SavedGame
• \Mappings.dat
• \pcconfig.txt

As far as I can tell the SaveGame0.LEGO Star Wars - The Complete Saga_SavedGame file stores the actual game progress: characters unlocked, canisters found, bonus levels accessed, etc; Mappings.dat stores any customisations made to keyboard and gamepad controls; and pcconfig.txt stores information such as screen resolution, graphics and sound customisations.

LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars

Saved files for this game can be found in

C:\Users\{USER}\AppData\Roaming\LucasArts\LEGOStarWarsIII\

It contained the following directory and files again we had used only one save slot:

• \CachedShaders
  • (1,100 files with hex address filenames, e.g. 0x00ae4b5d.shader)
• \SavedGames
  • \Slot1
    • \GAME1.LEGOStarWarsIIISaveGameData
• \Mappings.dat
• \pcconfig.txt

I didn’t copy over the CachedShaders files, but I let the game build the cache again afresh. The other two files were the same as above: games controls plus video and sound configurations.

LEGO The Lord of the Rings

Lastly, I copied over our progress in the Lord of the Rings by access these files:

C:\Users\Games\AppData\Roaming\Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment\LEGO The Lord of the Rings\

which consisted of these files:

• \CachedShaders
  • (278 files with hex address filenames plus .shader, .pcode and .vcode suffixes)
• \SavedGames
  • \Slot1
    • \game1.legothelordoftheringssavegamedata
  • \Slot4
    • game1.legothelordoftheringssavegamedata
• \Mappings.dat
• \pcconfig.txt

Again, I didn’t copy over the CachedShaders files, but I let the game build the cache again afresh. The other two files were the same as above: games controls plus video and sound configurations.

My old PSU sitting on my desk, post-operation, alongside Reuben’s toolkit.

Early on Sunday morning I switch on my PC and nothing happened. Nothing. Not a sound. Not a spark. Nothing. All a bit worrying really given that I wanted to get some prayers off my hard drive for use in the 08:00 service that morning.

Troubleshooting

I tried not to panic and think about it logically. What could the problem be? Okay, the power comes into the power supply unit which then feeds the motherboard and the various components (DVD, hard drives, graphics card, soundcard, USB devices, etc.) But the PSU is in standby mode until it’s supplied with a load which only happens when I push the on/off switch. There are my first two candidates: PSU and switch. And it it’s not them then I guess it could be the motherboard?

I took a look at the switch. It looked and sounded fairly solid. I then hunted down another power cable and swapped that out. Maybe the fuse had gone, I reasoned. And remarkably, my PC started (after two or three failed attempts). That immediately ruled out a dodgy motherboard.

It was looking more and more likely that the PSU was the source of the problem.

Review

So I searched online for the make and model of my then-current PSU: EZCOOL ATX-600JSP and was astonished to read a review on Amazon UK which described something very close to the problems that I had been experiencing for the last couple of years.

For the last couple of years I’ve had a intermittent issues whereby I’d switch on the PC and it would start only to switch itself off a few seconds into the boot sequence. I’d put it down to my not pressing the button hard enough, or even thinking that perhaps there was a problem with the button itself.

Here is what Bukkithead said on Amazon:

For the love of all things holy, don’t buy this power supply. Hamsters on running wheels are a more reliable source of power than this.

Fortunately, I didn’t buy this. I borrowed it from a friend as my old PSU was only 450W and couldn’t handle my new NVIDIA 8800 GTX graphics card.
For about a month, everything was fine. Admittedly sometimes the computer wouldn’t turn on, but it did after pressing the button again and I attributed that to the case rather than the PSU.
However, after this time of false happiness, I was using my computer one day and the power just died. I was surprised but assumed it was a power surge or something similar. Then after a while it would cut out as the computer was turning on or within the first few minutes of running. It was fairly annoying having to have two or three attempts to turn my computer on, and this happened more often than not.
After getting used to this for another couple of weeks, the thing really started to die, a few days ago it turned itself off twenty times, accompanied by a worrying fizzing sound. I tried switching power cables but this made no difference whatsoever. Now it’s more useful as a doorstop and I look forward to destroying the damn thing.
In the last few days I have bought and installed a new Corsair HX series PSU, which never turns off, drastically improved the performance of my computer and is actually silent, unlike this one which claims to be but is far from it. An added bonus is that the inside of my computer no longer looks like a jungle thanks to the modular cabling. The Corsair is highly recommended and is well worth the money, albeit a fairly large sum.
Cheap things are cheap for a reason. Please save yourself the trouble.

New PSU

I ordered a new PSU, the Corsair GS800 80 Plus Bronze Certified Power Supply 2013 Edition which arrived this afternoon.

Reuben helped me to fit it; what a sweetie! You can see from the photo above that he brought his own toolkit to my desk to help.

The operation was pretty straightforward:

1. Unplug everything from the back (and front) of my PC.
2. Remove the two side covers.
3. With anti-static wristband on, carefully remove the existing power connectors: the motherboard had two (24-pin and 4-pin), graphics card (6-pin), soundcard breakout box and floppy drive (small 4-pin), DVD drives (molex 4-pin), SATA hard drives (SATA connectors).
4. Unscrew and remove the old PSU.
5. Fit new PSU.
6. Carefully attach the new cables.
7. The Corsair website was useful in discovering that I had to split the new 8-pin connector marked “CPU” so that it could fit the 4-pin ATX 12V socket on the motherboard.
8. Screw the PC sides back on.
9. Connect the cables again,
10. Switch on… and pray that it works.

It did! My PC is now disconcertingly quiet. It starts up with a whirring flurry of noise before almost immediately dropping down to an almost inaudible whisper. So quiet was it the first couple of times that I thought my PC had switched itself off. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the screen flicker into life and I watched the power-on startup test (POST) begin.

Next…

Having recently upgraded my RAM too—doubling it from 4GB to 8GB—which involved some first class customer service from Crucial, my PC is slowly getting a new lease of life. Not had for a machine that I bought about five or six years ago:

• Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU
• Crucial 8GB DDR2-667 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB graphics card

Next up, I want to upgrade the graphics card from an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (still a remarkably capable graphics card) to something more powerful. I’ll be sure to report back.

VLC media player

When I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro I wanted to make sure that I could still play DVDs. Now that I have upgraded I’ve moved from using Windows Media Player to VLC media player. Here’s why.

Having read up a little about Windows 8′s support of various media I was fairly confident that if I installed the Windows Media Center then I would be able to continue to play DVDs in Windows Media Player, as I did in Windows 7. I was wrong.

Having bought the upgrade early (back in October 2012) I was offered a free upgrade to Windows Media Centre — woop! — which saved me a whole £6.99. However, as I discovered, it only enables DVD playback in Windows Media Centre, not Windows Media Player.

On my old Windows XP machine I used Cyberlink PowerDVD, which costs between £30-£70 depending; I got it free, bundled with my graphics card, if I remember correctly. It was fairly easy to use, and the controls were pretty intuitive. When I moved to Windows 7 I discovered that this version of the software wasn’t compatible with that version of Windows and I was reluctant to pay for an upgrade and so I started to use Windows Media Player, which had a really terrible, confusing interface but was free.

And so once again another Windows upgrade requires me to find another application that will enable me to watch DVDs on my PC. A quick Google search suggested that I try VLC media player.

VLC media player ticked both boxes: it’s free and it’s really easy to use. The interface is incredibly clear, much simpler than Windows Media Player 10 and 11, and it’s incredibly fast.

I also really like that the software is created by the VideoLAN organisation, “a project and a non-profit organization, composed of volunteers, developing and promoting free, open-source multimedia solutions.”

I definitely recommend VLC media player, if you are looking for a free, user-friendly replacement for Windows Media Player on Windows 8 (or, indeed, any version of Windows from XP SP2 onwards).