Peter's Useful Crap

With storage, bandwidth, and the quality of network connections and solutions getting better, CDs and DVDs are being shared — hopefully legally — and backed up more frequently. These often take the form of *.iso, *.bin, *img, *.udf and other files, freeing you from having to carry discs around.

There are programs such as Alcohol 52% or 120% (which also enables you to create backups) and the unsupported, Microsoft-released “Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP”, which enable you to “mount” the backup files as virtual drives. This is useful if you don’t have a CD / DVD drive on your computer or you simply don’t want to wastefully burn a disc. My favourite such program for Windows is Virtual CloneDrive.

With the sole purpose of emulating a CD / DVD drive, Virtual CloneDrive is efficient and simple to use.

Its options are straightforward, it’s a lightweight program, and it’s free.

Once you’ve mounted the disc image, it will appear like any other actual drive on your computer, as if a disc was inserted into that drive.

The Bridgeport Canada Line SkyTrain Park & Ride in Richmond is actually the River Rock Casino’s multi-level parking garage.

This may be obvious to many people, but for me, who’s used to the outdoor lots at the Scott Road and King George stations, it was a bit confusing the first time. The lack of clear signage and the politically-sensitive naming of the station (“Bridgeport” instead of “River Rock Casino”) added to the confusion for me.

Technically, the casino’s address is 8811 River Road and the Park & Ride’s address is 8888 River Road. The casino’s parking garage is directly connected to the SkyTrain station. If you’re a visitor to Vancouver or simply heading to the station for the first time, just think Bridgeport Canada Line SkyTrain Station = River Rock Casino.

Canadian consumers often complain about hidden non-governmental fees such as system access fees in cell phone plans and airplane ticket surcharges. Ticketmaster takes the trick of false advertising one step further with the non-disclosure of its order processing fee.

If you’ve purchased tickets from Ticketmaster before, you might already be familiar with its facility charge and convenience charge. These are silly enough, especially after you read the explanations for those fees. And one theory states that Ticketmaster is happy to take the blame for the fees as it’s the easiest way for both Ticketmaster and the artist or event organizer to charge the actual, higher, final fee. But at least Ticketmaster discloses these charges in the first step of the order process (this example happens to be exempt of a facility charge):

When you get to the billing step, however, Ticketmaster tacks on the order processing fee. This fee is described as covering “the cost to fulfill your ticket request when you purchase the tickets online or by phone”.

Steps 1 and 2 of the Ticketmaster online order process both occur… online. This means that you are going to pay the order processing fee if you order online, no matter what other options (such as shipping method) you pick. Remember what step 1 is hiding from you.

If you’re looking to buy a computer in Canada, or more importantly a laptop, you will probably look at things like brand, screen size, battery life, hard drive space, operating system, CPU speed, RAM, and other even more technical aspects. However, don’t forget to look at the keyboard layout.

Many computers in Canada come with a bilingual keyboard layout, which is different than a US-style, “English-only” keyboard. If you or the person you’re buying the computer for is used to the US-style keyboard, certain properties might be difficult to adjust to. Here are two of the most obviously differences in those keyboard layouts:

Tall and narrow bilingual Enter key and the short and fat US Enter key:

Narrow bilingual left Shift key and the wider US left Shift key:

If the bilingual keyboard layout (or US layout, to be fair) really bugs you regarding a computer you already own, you can search around for a replacement keyboard with the layout that you want. You’ve got to be careful when replacing laptop keyboards, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Recently, I moved a Linksys SPA942 VoIP phone to a new physical location and network. Portability and customizability being some of the advantages of VoIP in general, they can also get you into trouble when you fiddle with the settings.

I troubleshooted a couple of issues and here are some notes to help others who might be similarly flailing. The notes below assume that you know your phone’s IP address and that its web interface is enabled. Both of these things are well explained in the phone’s manual.

Got other problems? Talk to your VoIP provider first, then check the Linksys Community Forums. And be sure to document any settings you’ve changed as you go so that you don’t create new problems.

Upgrading firmware

Before upgrading your phone’s firmware, make sure you actually need to upgrade the firmware. There’s no use upgrading something that isn’t broken and where the new version does not contain any new features that you need.

That being said, you can download new firmware from here [source]. You might need to upgrade first to the 5.x version and then to the 6.x version.

The firmware package comes with an executable program that can push the update to your phone’s IP. This works well, but you might have problems in sending the firmware file to your phone if your network has a restrictive or complicated firewall (you might get the message “Upgrade Failed: No Response From SPA”). You can alternatively push the firmware file by accessing “http://phoneipaddress/admin/upgrade?http://addresstofirmware”. For example: “http://192.168.2.100/admin/upgrade?http://www.yoursite.com/spa942-6-1-5a.bin”. You’ll need a publicly accessible URL for the firmware file, and if you don’t have a hosting account or Dropbox, there are many free file hosting services available.

Stuck on “Answering…”

If you can make outgoing calls fine (both sides can hear each other), the phone rings for incoming calls, but for incoming calls neither side can hear each other OR only one side can communicate (and the phone is stuck with the message “Answering…”), check the “Display Name” setting for that extension. You might have to fix some incompatible syntax (it should usually just be your name, like “Yann Martel”), or you might have to leave that setting blank.

Lost connection after each call

After hanging up each call (which was perfectly clear), the line would lose its connection to the VoIP server and I’d have to reboot the phone to make or receive another call. The solution was to make “NAT Keep Alive Msg” empty (instead of “$NOTIFY”) for each relevant phone extension.