altec lansing ahs 515 cord repair

Headphone cord repair
My headphone has been repaired before in this previous blog post. Now the wire insulation is fraying right after the volume control.

Since the volume control is useless anyway, I opted to cut it out and re attach the wire. Step 1 is to knot the wires together, remove the insulation, and splay out the wires.

Next step is to Identify which wire goes to which. Fortunately, the mic cable only has 2 wires and the while speaker cable has 3 so there's no mixing them up. And the wires are color coded with what looks like varnish. It also serves as insulation.

It was a simple matter to tin the ends of the wires and solder them together. After this, I checked the headset on my PC. I used the audio driver's settings to check if both left and right channels were working.

Next, carefully cover the blobs of solder with electrical tape. I ended up using 3 layers in total.

Last step. I added an ID clip so I can clip the cord or cable to my shirt. This way the cord isn't dragging my head down via gravity.



OK that's it. Instead of buying a new pair of headphones, I just repaired mine. Saved me some money.


the end

Lenovo Ideapad z470 Review - Part 4: hard drive benchmarks

< Back to part 3: 3d benchmarks

OK welcome to part 3 of my review. Hard drive benchmarks. I'm limiting it to synthetic benchmarks. We are comparing my desktop's hard drive, a WDC black 1 terabyte model WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 with the laptop's 750 gig WDC drive model WDC WD7500BPVT-24HXZT1.

For all the results, the first result or picture will be the desktop's hard drive, followed by the laptop.



1. Passmark performance test 7 build 1025 (Disk test only, copied from part 2 of the review)

• desktop: disk = 735.6
• laptop : disk = 623.5

2. Atto disk benchmark v 2.46

3. Crystal disk mark 64 bit v 3.0.1

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

desktop

           Sequential Read :    85.584 MB/s
          Sequential Write :    83.812 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    34.964 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :    53.631 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.438 MB/s [   106.8 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     1.056 MB/s [   257.9 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     0.647 MB/s [   158.0 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     0.892 MB/s [   217.8 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [C: 80.6% (430.3/533.7 GB)] (x5)

laptop

           Sequential Read :    85.577 MB/s
          Sequential Write :    83.692 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    26.986 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :    33.727 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.307 MB/s [    75.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     0.608 MB/s [   148.5 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     0.655 MB/s [   159.9 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     0.644 MB/s [   157.3 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [C: 76.3% (186.3/244.0 GB)] (x5) 

  4. HDTune pro v5 trial

Well pretty much all the tests show the desktop's HD to be faster, but they are quite close. Perfectly acceptable performance for a 2.5 vs 3.5 hard drive.

OK that's it. I'm planning a part 5: wifi file transfer benchmarks

the end

lenovo z470 magnetized spots

magnetized spots

In response to a comment made in my lenovo z470 review, there was a coment about magnetized spots. Using a paperclip I have confirmed that yes there are magnetized spots. I could find 3, all shown as red on the pic above.

Without opening my laptop I really can't tell why there are magenets there. Its far away from the speakers and there are no obvious motors there. Any fan should have shielded magnets.

This probably poses no hazard since magnetic media like floppy discs and cassette tapes are rare these days.

smart bro share it with smart bro prepaid sim

Remember the smart bro share it? If you don't remember, well, the share it modem is essentially a myfi device which has no battery and is powered by a 220v adaptor. It's a combo 3.5g modem and wifi router. It has a sim card slot and it gets 3.5g signal from the smart cellsite and Pc's can connect to it via LAN cable  or wifi (I thing its wifi-G but not sure).

There are some drawbacks compared to smart's current myfi device (see pic above).

• Larger
• Needs a 220v mains power supply
• Only uses one frequency, 850mhz while other more advanced devices can use HSPA+/HSPA/UMTS 2100/1900/900/850 MHz. This is a theoretical limitation since some areas may have congestion. Smart uses 850 and 2100mhz so if the 850mhz band is congested the smart bro modem-router cannot switch to the uncongested 2100mhz band
• This is region locked. However I don't know if the lock is done via the sim card that comes with the device or the device itself
• Being an old model which is incompatible with HSPA+, the max speed is only probably 2-3 mbps

Advantages:

• Has a connection for an external antenna
• Being physically larger than a usb plugit, the internal antenna is much better. During tests, I could get a 5 bar signal versus a 2 bar signal with my smart bro power plugit (zte mf190).
• Has a LAN port

I used to have one, and the speeds were variable. 500kbps-1400kbps depending on the local congestion level. I had it cut and it was gathering dust in my closet. The original sim doesn't work anymore, so I tried to use it with my smart bro power plugit prepaid sim and, guess what, it worked! Speeds were modest since my area was congested. I was getting around 500-700 kbps but around 1 am, I was bursting to 1.8 mbps. I tested using a combination of direct downloads, torrents and Steam.

So if you need wifi sharing and can't afford a myfi device, then reusing this is an option.

Anomaly: Warzone earth cheat

orcs must die cheat

orcs must die cheatengine

orcs must die cheat engine

orcs must die cheat codes

orcs must die trainer

orcs must die steam cheat

orcs must die steam cheatengine

orcs must die steam cheat engine

orcs must die steam cheat codes

orcs must die steam trainer

Anomaly warzone earth is a reverse tower defense game. I bought it on STEAM.

I have not found any cheats or trainers so I'll teach you how to use a program called cheatengine to cheat. Cheat engine is a game utility that can search for values in ram that are used by the game. These values typically are used by the game to denote player attributes like money or health. Once you find it you can change the value. 

First you have to go to my previous Orcs must Die cheat page. The procedure for cheating is more or less the same so study the procedure there. But there is one added step. In the cheatengine program, look for the thing called "value type". The default setting here is "4 bytes". Change it to "Float".


And that's it.

orcs must die cheat

orcs must die cheat

orcs must die cheatengine

orcs must die cheat engine

orcs must die cheat codes

orcs must die trainer

orcs must die steam cheat

orcs must die steam cheatengine

orcs must die steam cheat engine

orcs must die steam cheat codes

orcs must die steam trainer

I finished playing the game Orcs must die, steam version. And I know that my gaming skillz aren't what they used to be. So I needed a little help. I was looking for orcs must die cheats or orcs must die traniers or orcs must die cheat codes in google but the only trainers I could found only worked with old versions, and as you know, steam can autopatch games.


So I decided to use a program called cheatengine. Cheat engine is a game utility that can search for values in ram that are used by the game. These values typically are used by the game to denote player attributes like money or health. Once you find it you can change the value. I'll teach you how to use cheatengine in Orcs must die steam.

1. Run orcs must die and cheat engine (in any order)
2. Start a level in orcs must die
3. Get the numerical value of the thing you wish to change. In this case its "money".
4. ALT-TAB out to cheat engine and click the button in the upper left corner, labeled #1 in the pic above
5. Select the running process which corresponds to the game. Its name will have the words orcs, must and die. And it will be an EXE file
6. Type the value in #2. Leave the Hex check box unchecked
7. Press button #30. The cheat engine will now look at the entire RAM used by the selected process and look for the value typed in #2
8. You will see lots of stuff listed in the space labeled #4
9. Go back to orcs must die and spend something. 
10. Remember the new amount of money that you have.
11. ALT-TAB back to cheat engine
12. Type in the new value in #2
13. press button labeled #5. Cheat engine will now look at all the stuff in window #4 and discard everything except those that have changed their values to tne new amount
14. The list in #4 will be pared down to three entires
15. double click on the 3rd entry
16. It will go to the space labeled #6
17. Change the value of #6. Shortcut is to select it and press ENTER
18. When you go back to orcs must die, your money will change
19. Optional, ALT-TAB out and close cheat engine if you don't need it anymore

Unfortunately, you have to do this again every time you restart a level or you start a new level

the end

Remove Stop censorship black box

Hi, I just changed the template of my blog, and while I was at it I rearranged some of the blog widgets and removed a couple. But actually this rearrangement was brought on by a problem.

You see, I joined the stop censorship campaign. So to join, one way was to add a widget that popped up an announcement. Another was to add a black box linking to the website over the name of my blog.

Simulated picture

Now this was only a temporary measure, even if I still support them. But now I couldnt remove the black box! I emailed them and they said the code to remove the box should be like this:

http://americancensorship.org/images/stop-censorship-small.png);background-position:center
center;background-repeat:no-repeat;"
href="http://americancensorship.org">

But I couldnt find this code anywhere in the blog design template. Honestly, I plain forgot where I pasted the code. Maybe I should have made it its own widget so it would be easy to see and remove. Fortunately, as a workaround, changing the template removed the problem.

the end