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10368 discussions

DVD-RW drive refuses to read CD-R disks
by Srdjan Todorovic 25 Jul '09

25 Jul '09

Hi everyone, I'm perplexed - I've got a DVD+RW drive that refuses to read CD-Rs and other CDs, but these disks can be read in my laptop's DVD+RW drive. Manually mounting such CDs gives me: mount: No medium found I know I can read some factory-pressed CD such as the EF2000 CD (lovely game). My drive is: LG HL-DT-STDVD-RAM GSA-H55N and was purchased in very early 2008 I believe. Laptop drive is: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T40N (Which I believe is also an LG) Is this likely to be a hardware fault and I have to buy a new drive? Thanks Srdjan

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Re: [ALUG] appalling service from 1and1
by James Elsey 23 Jul '09

23 Jul '09

I've been using 1and1 for about 3 years now and must admit I haven't had any issues with their service. They had an outage with their servers but after a quick and friendly phone call my sites were back up within the hour But then again, I haven't tried moving any domains/packages etc J -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of mick Sent: 22 July 2009 19:48 To: Steve Fosdick Cc: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] appalling service from 1and1 On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:45:59 +0100 Steve Fosdick <lists(a)pelvoux.nildram.co.uk> allegedly wrote: > On 21/07/2009 22:16:40, mick wrote: > > > I also had some feedback from MJ Ray that 1and1 (my main provider of > > DNS management, mail and blog) could be difficult. I'd never had > > much problem with them, except for their habit of "forgetting" to > > tell me that they had improved their packages when prices changed, > > so thought no more. > > Do I take it you mean they have reduced the price of the package to > new customers but forget to tell you and continue to charge the > higher price? Yes - but slightly more subtle than that. They introduced a "new" package which offered better services (more mailboxes, more webspace, more traffic) at a slightly lower charge. I was not offered the new service. When I noticed the new services (from a magazine ad as I recall) I contacted them and was the told that I had to cancel my existing package and move to the new one. Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt --------------------------------------------------------------------- __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4267 (20090722) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4267 (20090722) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com

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appalling service from 1and1
by mick 22 Jul '09

22 Jul '09

Some while ago I sought the list's advice on good commercial hosting services (full root access, with as few restrictions as possible). I had a few recommendations and eventually settled on a VPS from bytemark as offering just what I needed. (As an aside, I also now have a VPS from rapidswitch which is also excellent value - and gives a bigger monthly bandwidth allowance that bytemark). I also had some feedback from MJ Ray that 1and1 (my main provider of DNS management, mail and blog) could be difficult. I'd never had much problem with them, except for their habit of "forgetting" to tell me that they had improved their packages when prices changed, so thought no more. But, I have recently had cause to complain, and loudly. I have tried to move one of my domains (I have several with them) to bytemark so that I can have greater control. The process is unnecessarily complex (and for a naive customer would probably be impossible) but the worst part is that having unlocked the domain at their end and posted it as "pending transfer", they now refuse to answer any DNS queries despite still being authoritative for that domain. That domain has fallen off the edge of a cliff and may as well not exist. Their reponse to my complaint so far is "thank you for your patience". Guess who loses my business. Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back this coming Monday (20th July) at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich, not far from our old haunt - The Milestone. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. I've been playing with FreeBSD a little this month, so happy to chat a bit about that. Firefox 3.5 has some cool new features too. Plus I've been playing around with an ePub creator which might be of interest. Remember to call or email me, if you're arriving later and want to ensure I don't wander off, which I have a tendency to do if the turn-out hits rock-bottom ... Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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kmail
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Jul '09

18 Jul '09

It really seems that the kde team have taken leave of their senses. I just upgraded to squeeze in the continuing effort to deal with xsession errors - they have changed now in kind, but there are still a bunch of them - one side effect of which was to update kmail. The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible! A bit of google searching revealed an obscure button and a setting deep in the bowels of the thing which let you turn them both off and get back to something that looks like a normal email client. But really, what on earth has happened to these guys? Kmail used to be, out of the box, a nice simple email client packaged with a quite decent calendar. You can still get back to that, but you have to make an effort. Al

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Re: [ALUG] kmail
by Peter Alcibiades 16 Jul '09

16 Jul '09

It is kmail Version 1.11.2. Not running KDE as a DTE - though I have in the past. I seem to have got rid of the most brain dead features now, except that for some crazed reason when you pass the mouse over the folder pane, it insists on delivering you a popup that tells you what each folder is, in case you had suffered from memory loss since the last time you did it. But of course, preventing you from seeing half the pane. This is maddening but just about manageable as long as its limited to that pane. The developers of this thing should be forced to use it as shipped for a few months, it would be enormously educational for them. This was a true Victor Meldrew moment. Another one happened in the ongoing process of this upgrade to sqeeze. Imagine this. You are running Gnome perfectly happily but notice some oddities here and there. Like for instance the screensave appears to be disconnected, and you get xsession errors about themes not being installed. So you try dpkg-reconfigure, and are told that Gnome is not installed! "I don't believe it!" you cry, before you can stop yourself. Peter

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"YouTube Medley"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 14 Jul '09

14 Jul '09

Greetings all! What I want to do: 1. Download a certain series of YouTube videos and store them locally in a suitable format (MP3?) such that each can be viewed from the local file. 2. Merge these into a single video DVD to make a "medley" which can be played straight through from the DVD. Advice on how to do #1, and (if that is possible) how to proceed to #2, would be most welcome! Platform: Debian Etch or Lenny (both available). With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Jul-09 Time: 11:40:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] [Fwd: Re: From Ipswich Freecycle Mods: : Offer two pay as you go mobile sim and top up cards felixstowe]
by Chris G 13 Jul '09

13 Jul '09

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 03:23:30PM +0000, Martin Pike wrote: > i have a couple of observations on this. > > first, if he didn't post a taken to the previous one, then that post is > still 'active'. > It's surely not a requirement to post a taken message is it? > we could also consider adding sim cards to the same category as vouchers, > i.e. they don't save anything (much) from landfill. > > cheers > > --- On Mon, 13/7/09, Angelika <freecycle2(a)angelika.co.uk> wrote: > > From: Angelika <freecycle2(a)angelika.co.uk> > Subject: [Fwd: Re: From Ipswich Freecycle Mods: : Offer two pay as you > go mobile sim and top up cards felixstowe] > To: "Ipswich Mods" <Ipswich_Freecycle-owner(a)yahoogroups.com> > Date: Monday, 13 July, 2009, 4:16 PM > > What's the policy when someone claims that "it's a different one from > the one I offered yesterday"? > -- Chris Green

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Putting a SATA drive in standby
by Barry Samuels 12 Jul '09

12 Jul '09

I have, in the last few days, changed my 2 x 250 GB IDE drives for 2 x 1 TB SATA drives. One drive is used once a day to mirror the other. Previously I used hdparm to spin down the mirror drive after a short period of inactivity and I've tried to do the same with one of the new drives but I suspect it isn't working. If I issue the command 'sg_start --stop /dev/sdb' I hear a click from the computer as if the drive is being switched off but can't detect any difference in noise. That could be because the drive is ultra quiet but if I then try to mount a partition on the drive it mounts instantly. With the previous drives if I did that there would be a significant pause whilst the drive was spinning up to running speed. Does the fact that there is no pause of any sort when mounting the drive mean that it hasn't stopped? I've also tried 'sdparm --command=stop /dev/sdb' with the same results. If I issue the command sdparm --command=ready /dev/sdb then it comes back with 'ready'. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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How things have changed
by Steve Fosdick 10 Jul '09

10 Jul '09

I've just bought a couple of new bits of hardware and was very pleasantly surprised how things have changed for the better. I got a wireless trackerball and a UPS both with USB connections. I plugged the trackerball receiver in, pressed the connect button and it started working. That wasn't a great surprise but obviously nice. I plugged the UPS in and, before I had a chance to check that it had been detected and then look for software for it an icon appeared telling me the UPS was fully charged and also reporting on the batteries in the wireless trackerball. For simplicity this beats having to install software from an accompanying CD in order to get the same features. It seems when manufacturers adopt standard protocols or are more open about the protocols and interfaces they do use the pace of development increases dramatically. Steve.

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