Now, I knew that Battlefield 4 has had a rough start. It crashes a lot, it’s hard to find games, bugs in the game stop it being enjoyable but the latest Amazon sale tempted me for a few minutes until I scrolled down..
I’ll buy it in a year or two, perhaps. Anyone for a game of Bad Company 2?
TL;DR If your computer is freezing after installing an SSD change from AHCI to IDE mode in the BIOS.
Argh! This has been driving me slightly mad for a while. I bought a Samsung 840 SSD a few weeks ago to make things a bit faster. It does too, mostly to the boot up (which I rarely do, this machine is on 24×7) but it feels smoother in day to day tasks too.
I keep the Lightroom catalogue on the SSD, Windows 7 is on there too but most apps, all games and all photos are on other drives.
It worked fine for a while but then it started freezing and stuttering without warning. It was usually when I had a few dozen Chrome tabs open, Firefox running, Skype, xchat, and various services going. The mouse cursor would disappear and the keyboard would stop working for about 5 seconds. Then the problem would go away for a while.
It came back this morning with a vengeance. If I reloaded a browser tab I was guaranteed to freeze my PC.
I had gone searching for solutions before. I’m not the only one with this problem but forum threads were usually:
I made sure my SSD firmware was updated (it was) and updated the BIOS of my ASUS P8Z77-M motherboard for the first time to no avail. No change. I was getting ready to put Windows back on the original disk.
Finally, one last desperate search later, I came across this thread and in the same search this page suggesting two methods I hadn’t tried. I did not try disabling LPM (some sort of power saving mod) but I did change the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE. Supposedly the SSD won’t work as well, but it fixed the stuttering and freezes, probably because it apparently disables power saving mode too, or so I’ve read.
Phew. No more stutters! If I hit any performance problems I’ll try the LPM trick with the registry.
Another cracking video from Republic of Telly.
Minmus is a tiny moon orbiting Kerbin in the game Kerbal Space Program. There’s a closer moon, Mun, that I’ve visited in the past but this was my first time getting to Minmus. This moon is so small it has a tiny gravity. A Kerbonaut can jump 10 metres with a single bound! ‘Course, sometimes that leap can land him in trouble..
On a previous attempt to land I noticed my solar panels weren’t working. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the sun was blocked by the Mun, how was that possible?
Damn, a lunar eclipse, what are the chances? (and if this was Reddit someone would probably tell me!)
Oh yes. If you’re playing KSP and you’re in a Steam chat, please disable your engines before pressing shift-tab. The sudden take off from the surface when you hit shift can be upsetting.
OK, so I really didn’t put Kitkat on my S4 but I did put Android 4.3 on there. Most people will be able to upgrade the S4 with an OTA or KIES update but if you’ve modified your phone by rooting it then that doesn’t work without intervention.
That intervention relies on flashing a “stock rom” on the phone which is just as risky as flashing the new rom so I decided to wait until it appeared here and then grabbed the file, backed up my photos, music, settings from various apps and with some trepidation fired up Odin.
Odin is the tool used to flash Samsung Android phones and once begun, the process is painless.
So, Knox started complaining about the apps on my phone that needed root access to work. Get rid of that then! Thanks to CF Auto Root that was easy. Flash that on there with Odin and Greenify works once more and Facebook is hibernated. I sent Chainfire a donation too as I’m sure this is about the third time I’ve used his tools.
I haven’t noticed many differences, or really any except that Disk Usage works a lot faster now because of the TRIM being done on the flash memory.
Oh yeah, before I forget. I won a bar of chocolate with that KitKat. Got myself a nice Yorkie this morning. Didn’t win that time though. Ah well.
Edit: Noooooo! Knox stopped Disk Usage from scanning / which requires root. Greenify still worked which is more important but I guess Knox has some parts of the system still locked down.
Chainfire has more info on Knox and how to disable but also this bad news that disabling Knox may void any warranty on the phone. Grrr.
While the rest of the world is waiting for or installing Android 4.3 on their Samsung Galaxy S4 phones I decided to skip ahead and put KitKat on my S4. In the end it wasn’t too hard either.
Meanwhile, if you’re not able to upgrade but you’ve rooted your phone you can use the photosphere function in the Google Camera from the Nexus 5 to shoot great 360 degree panoramas. Here’s one I shot near Blarney Castle this morning.
You’ll need the camera APK from here and since it will likely force close go here and download that zip file. Copy the required libraries to /system/lib/ on your phone and photosphere will work on your stock S4!
You can try the Android 4.4 Launcher too but I haven’t. Nova Launcher works well enough for me at the moment.
Oh, and sorry 🙂
A few weeks back I was sorting out the drives on my Linux server and as some of the directories were created through various configurations of Samba by Windows clients the permissions were a bit odd. Some archive files were executable, some directories were rw only for the owner. You get the idea, it was a mess. How do I fix them quickly?
I’d like all the files to be 0644 and directories should be 0775 please. Oh, and I’d like all that done with the minimum of fuss through a Bash shell, with or without a cherry on top.
Luckily I’m not the first person to ask this as user stress_junkie in this thread had an answer:
For directories only do this.
find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;For files only do this.
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
There’s also this useful chunk of code to avoid hitting . and .. but I didn’t care about that in my case so the above code worked perfectly:
find . -type d -name \* -exec chmod 775 {} \;
And finally, user Gethyn pointed out that this command will add execute permissions to directories.
chmod -R +X
I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to this post in the future, just like I’ve had to check my directory comparison post a couple of times recently.