All Australians with an interest in game classification should take the 15 minutes to fill out a submission to the government on the addition of an R18+ category for games.
Personally, I think it’s crazy we continually have issues with the top games coming out because they are unsuitable for minors. The game industry has changed in the last 30 years and now adults are being prevented access to some of the best (and worst) games simply because they are unsuitable for a child. This is ridiculous. I’m not in favor of removing classification but surely adults are able to make their own decisions instead of being treated as children.
I was pretty excited to try out the DLNA on my new Samsung TV, but ended up disappointed to find that it only seemed to work with the Samsung applet on my PC, which severely lacked some fairly critical features (like transcoding). Today, I was happy to find the magic hacks for TVersity which let it work like a charm with the somewhat esoteric nature of the DLNA support built in:
According to this thread, edit the profiles pharmacymg.com.xml in the TVersity folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\TVersity\Media Server on my machine) and add the following before the last </profileList> entry:
My XBox 360 Wireless Receiver for Windows died. No more green light, no more being recognized by the OS when I plugged it in. Weirdly enough, the first one I got was like this on purchase so I exchanged it for this one which worked fine up until now.
Luckily, I found this fix from Eding1 which worked brilliantly. Amazing the fuse blows so easily, and so irrevocably and yet nothing else on the USB chain had any issues at all. Bad Microsoft hardware I guess!
Opening the receiver (use a knife or something to lever the top off):
Unscrew and turn the circuit board over then solder across F1:
Notes from the comments:
You can test whether this will work by connecting something like a paperclip across the fuse without desoldering it, then plugging it into your PC.
Apparently you can use foil paper and electrical tape to connect across the fuse. Personally I’d recommend soldering, but if you don’t have a soldering iron it’s worth a try.
If “lever the top off” isn’t explicit enough for those not insane enough to pull apart everything they own, to get the case off jam, and I mean JAM, a butterknife in. Wedging it in the crease that is above the wire (between grey and white). Getting it in there good then wiggle and twist all about until the glue gives way. Because every inch other than where the wire is was thoroughly glued down. The circuit board is recessed so no need to be gentle, just don’t angle down.
Be warned folks. Just tried this trick on mine and it was the receiver that was causing the short. Just fried a USB port on my computer. Everything else seems okay for now.
Found this video on YouTube:
(Make sure you give the video maker appropriate kudos, btw)
Having purchased Jade Empire from Steam for the cool price of $15, I was having all sorts of trouble trying to get it to run. Basically the configuration program would crash every time I attempted to run the application, and it refused to run the actual application without running the configuration program.
Searching on the net proved pretty much worthless – turned out quite a few people were having the problem, but no one seemed to know any way to fix it. Other people were saying it ran fine if you just skipped the config program but the issue is you can’t skip the config program on the “first run”. That was the trick – how to convince the game it was no longer the first run.
First stop, good old post-moretem debugging with Windbg. Sadly, this told me that it was crashing trying to free a block of memory that had either not been allocated or had already been freed (the call stack was inside HeapFree, and through a few compatibility layers Win7 had tossed in for me). No help there, and telling it to ignore the exception didn’t make matters any better – even to get it through the “first run” stage.
Next stop, Process Monitor (one of those evil apps that daft DRM companies like SecuRom decide shouldn’t be allowed because they may actually help you fix their games for them I guess?). The last file it tried to access before crashing was SystemInformation.xml in the game’s data directory. Turned out that file didn’t exist, and so was a big clue about what the game used to determine whether the config had run or not.
Nothing to lose – create a blank file with Notepad and save it as SystemInformation.xml in C:\Program Files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\jade empire\data. Attempt to run the config program and it still crashes. Next, attempt to run the main game and it skips the config and actually starts and plays without issue (at least to character creation so far).
Cool – not a waste of $15 after all!
Edit: As pointed out in the comments, make sure you run Notepad as Administrator to create the file or it won’t do what you think. Thanks to Blog Kindle for the tip.
Yeah, this will be a technical one, but thankfully pretty short.
I noticed today that both my Vista sp1 machines (one x64 and one x86) were getting a bunch of errors in the log claiming that
The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.
and
The server was unable to allocate a work item 1 times in the last 60 seconds.
This was rather disconcerting as it was making it difficult to copy files between the machines without errors. A quick google search showed I wasn’t the only one and after a little bit of digging, I came on the quick and dirty issue – Vista appears to have some sort of memory leak in the new SMB2 server that makes it eventually reach an internal limit and refuse to allocate any more. This makes network shares break.
Not wanting to just disable the SMB2 sharing as it’s amazingly fast at copying files across gigabit networks, I went looking for the more simple solution but wanted to get some data first. Firing up poolmon to look at the nonpaged pool before and after and restarting the “server” service, I noticed the entry marked “LS2w” dropped from 256k of allocated nonpaged pool to 0 allocated nonpaged pool – fairly obviously the source of the leak (LS2 is pretty clearly an acronym for Lanman Server 2, which is really old school naming).
In any case, the easy solution is to just go into the “Services” part of managing “My Computer” and just restart the “Server” service. Makes the problem go away for another week or two.
In the end, although it didn’t really give me any information to work on the issue, it might be useful for someone at Microsoft if they’re eventually trying to track down the bug. Hope so…
