Neave Engineering Ltd

Fix: Macbook, Windows 7 and Black Screens

I was recently given an old Macbook (late 2006) and after upgrading it with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard disc I Boot Camped the crap out of it and installed Windows 7. As expected pretty much everything worked after installation, something I have come to expect of Windows 7, however any time I closed the lid of the machine or returned from sleep and hibernation the screen was black though the computer otherwise responsive.

It was only by chance I stumbled upon a now obvious solution to this, look at your screen under sunlight; under certain conditions you will see a picture still as the backlight is switched off. Press the brightness buttons (fn and f1 or f2) and you will likely get your screen back, this even works at logon. As for closing the lid, in power options set “Close lid” to “do nothing” and it will not switch off the screen. Seems to work for me and hopefully will help anyone reading this blog in the same predicament.

Good luck.
Keegan

Logitech X-540 5.1 Surround Speakers

As my audio/video needs are being satisfied by an Zotac ION and now the case is finished I figured it was time to sort out the audio. Until now I’ve be using an old set of Creative 5.1 speakers that has it’s own decoder and connect using SPDIF. This sounds good, pardon the pun, but led to some peculiar issues with lipsync and had no remote. Enter, the Logitech X-540s.

These are quite cheap (I got mine for £70 from Novatech) but the sound quality is superb, even from a basic source. Watching Freeview with “Matrix Mode” on does some funky processing and gives a pretty good surround sound effect. The bass can rattle the windows or switch it off completely, as I live in a flat (apartment to any passing Americans) and don’t like to piss off my neighbours too much switching it off is a fantastic feature. For that reason alone I can recommend it to anyone in a shared block or house with thin walls.

These speakers are quite dumb, other than Matrix Mode they do no processing, and require outputs from the machine itself. From my perspective this is great as it gets around the issue mentioned above with SPDIF. The motherboard does a fantastic job in decoding audio from Bluray films and sounds great. Watching Black Sheep I’ll admit to jumping when a sheep bleated in my ear…

The only issue I have with these, as mentioned in every other review for these, is the length of the speaker cables. For use in a living room they are too short, for bedroom or study use they may be fine. Thankfully Logitech have used RCA connectors rather than some proprietary nonsense which means buying or creating extensions for them would be a breeze. I’m planning on wall mounting the rears so an extra 5 meters will be very handy.

In conclusion, for £70 you can’t go wrong. Just make sure your sound card has 5.1 analog outputs.

Keegan

Jukebox HD

In a previous post I gave a brief review of the Zotac ION board I purchased for my new Media Centre and now it’s in a case…

Some pictures from the construction below; I made a new backplate as the old one wasn’t in a great state and this allowed me to mount the motherboard on it too. I used a couple of nuts as spacers to raise the motherboard to allow some airflow behind it and drilled a few holes in the top for ventilation. The board is fanless so relies on convection currents for cooling. The gaping hole in the back isn’t pretty but no one will see back there and it means I can have the beast closer to the wall. Plus, a lot easier than rewiring the connectors to the case…

In the last picture you can see the BlackGold dual USB tuner and the Sony BD-ROM drive. It’s a snug fit, there are a few gaps, the hard disk isn’t permanently mounted (a job for tomorrow) and the power switch just dangles out of the back but it lives which is enough for now! Long term plans also involve a plate to cover the gap next to the BD-ROM drive which should house a few USB ports for easy access. This has been a project years in the making though so I can’t imaging that will happen for a while.

Good enough for now though.

Keegan

Automatic Mute on Lock/Unlock in Windows 7

Like a lot of self confessed geeks I listen to music while I’m working on my PC. At home this isn’t so much of an issue though at work where locking your machine when you leave your desk it gets a little irritating as if I don’t want to irritate my work mates I have to mute or pause what I’m listening to before locking an undo it when I get back. Today, I figured a way to automate the process in Windows 7. It may work in other operating systems too, I haven’t any handy to test this on.

Get a command line tool to mute system volume, I’m using the freeware tool “NirCmd” from Nirsoft
Open Task Scheduler (open the start menu then type “Task” or via the control panel
Create the “On Lock” task

Right click on “Task Scheduler Library” and select “Create task”
Name it “Mute On Lock” or whatever you please
In the triggers tab, click New then in the combo box select “On workstation lock”. Click ok.
In actions click New then enter the following then click ok;
nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 1
Click ok to save the task

Create the “On Unlock” task

Right click on “Task Scheduler Library” and select “Create task”
Name it “Mute On Unlock” or whatever you please
In the triggers tab, click New then in the combo box select “On workstation unlock”. Click ok.
In actions click New then enter the following then click ok;
nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 0
Click ok to save the task

Job done.

Keegan

Media Centre and Apple Trailers

Before I got hooked on Media Centre I used to use an iMac and I never really got on with it, I’ guess I’ve always been a Windows guy at heart which worked out pretty well for me. One thing that always impressed me was Frontrow, it was polished, worked well and had a great interface for viewing movie trailers direct from Apple.com. As Windows 7 Media Centre blows the polish off Frontrow I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the latter functionality into Media Centre for a while and someone has perfected it.

www.mediabrowser.tv

I’ve used it in the past and been impressed though now it gives me armchair access to Apple trailers and also podcasts it’s here to stay. It’s been a good week for my Media Centre, let’s hope it continues.

Keegan

Zotac ION Windows 7 MC

So, since University I’ve been a fan of silent computing and a stickler for wasting power. When I first heard about the ION chipset I thought that both my goals may come together in one package and early reviews seems positive, results I can now back up.

In the picture (right) you will see my “old” Media Centre, a 2.3GHz AMD dual core running on a 780G chipset, HDMI out and only one fan which was quiet at best. It runs at about 40Watts while watching TV and slightly higher for HD content. The only problem is that the 90Watt PSU tends to crap out at 100% CPU. I figured it could be put to better use in a desktop machine and lo! An excuse to buy a Zotac ION board, revive an old project and gain a new desktop PC at the same time.

The picture above also shows the Zotac ION board (Atom N230, fanless, 2GB RAM) along with a 160GB hard disc and BD-ROM drive. I figured for £50 quid Blu-Ray was a no brainer! It’s currently running without a case because all the parts had been delivered, I’m impatient and I’m no stranger to a computer running outside of a case as you can see from my Home Server prototype! (left)

The Zotac is currently in the same plastic chassis the Home Server used, it seemed a waste not to use it and keeps the board a little safer until its new case is complete. I’ve put the Zotac through its paces this weekend watching and recording TV, listening to music and watching a number of BluRay discs. So far I’m very impressed.

I installed the Windows 7 RC operating system because, well, why the hell not? It installed in no time at all and after 20 minutes for the OS and a little longer for the latest drivers the system rating to the right was run. Now, 2.2 isn’t great however the processor in this board (Atom N230) isn’t the important thing here, the GPU is going to be doing almost all the work. Something it does very well.

At 4.2 and 5.1 the graphics scored a lot higher than my previous media centre which topped out at 3.2 and 3.4. Plugging the new machine into a power meter I discovered it runs at 30~35 Watts regardless of what you throw at it, live TV and BluRay included. I have even got hibernation to work under Media Centre which I gave up on previously.

Many years ago I built the first incarnation of the Jukebox based on a project on Mini-ITX.com where someone made a similar machine for listening to music and where I purchased my Mini-ITX boards from.

The picture to the left shows the case as it currently exists, awaiting an upgrade. I’m planning on getting the lightstrips shining for the first time in a few years and hiding the remote receiver in there too along with the BD-ROM drive. The nasty silver case underneath is an old case recently returned that will house the old Media Centre guts, after a good clean. I think the Jukebox will be easier than cleaning the old case, years of dust await me though worth the work.

It’s been a while since I’ve got my hands dirty with such a project and longer still since I’ve done any electronics work. The LED lightstrips and PIC based power button to use IR codes to bring the machine out of hibernation should keep me busy for a while and hopefully a lot of fun too.

Stay tuned for more.

Keegan

Keegan Ales

No, this isn’t a post to announce my plans to open a brewery (not yet…) but to share a wonderful convergence of my hobbies I’ve found.

www.keeganales.com

It’s a micro brewery in New York state called “Keegan Ales” and more importantly they also have an ice hockey team! As a long suffering (until recently) fan of ice hockey this was too strange a coincidence not to note. I’m hoping I’ll be able to visit them at some point in the future, sample so of their brews and maybe even catch a Growlers game!

Go Growlers!
Keegan

Keegan’s Brew Boiler

I’ve been brewing my own beer on and off for a while now and I’ve decided it’s time to hack my brew boiler. I brew my beer from a full mash rather than using kits which makes things a little more involved. I could explain it but I’d never do as good as job as the Drunk Rhino video series, I’d recommend you give them a watch if you are interested in the specifics.

I have an Electrim homebrew boiler, it’s basically a big plastic bucket with a heating element and thermostat. The plastic is quite thick as is has to withstand the high temperatures of the boil but it leaks heat making it less efficient. To that end, a hacking I did go!

I bought a cheap camping mat and wrapped it around the boiler attached with good old duct tape. A few weeks back I was visiting the Home Brew Shop in Farnborough and was lucky enough to find they had a hop strainer and sparging arm in stock, the latter rarer that rocking horse crap. The strainer means that I no longer have to use a hop bag while boiling and after boiling the hops will drop to the bottom and act as a filter. Which is nice.

Not shown is the bottom of the boiler, I added a layer of insulation underneath as well. Hopefully this will mean that I can get my boiler to mashing temperature and it should (hopefully) stay there for long enough for a decent mash.

Results in a future post.

Keegan

New(ish) Welder

Our community at work never ceases to amaze me, I sent out an email asking if someone had an old arc welder they no longer used and within a few minutes I had a few people offering theirs up!

Just goes to show one mans junk is another mans treasure, now I just have to learn how to weld…

I have a few projects planned which I intend to write up and post details of here, so far I’ve planned to build a bike trailer, barrel rack and LCD TV mount. Watch this space, though it may be a while as I haven’t power in my garage quite yet!

Jason

Copenhagen

So, I’ve had the idea of finally getting jedibowler.com up and running with a blog and today I arrived in Copenhagen for work. I also started playing with Live Photo for the first time and made the above image from four pictures I took from my hotel room window.

So far I’m impressed, with the city and the software!

Keegan