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Richy's Random Ramblings

Y2k Tech: Changing the default dial-up internet connection

January 5, 2013
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I’m adding the details of how to Change the default internet connection in Windows. Although in 2013, this information should no longer be needed (it was back in 2000ish when I originally wrote it). So please be aware this is massively outdated and probably no longer relevant information, but I like to archive stuff 😉

If you wish to decide for yourself which ISP to connect to, the easiest way is to start the connection manually yourself.
Open Dialup Networking by double clicking on the ‘My Computer’ icon from your desktop.
In the Dialup Networking folder you will see all your ISP connections including your Freeserve connection.
Double click on whichever connection you wish to use, enter your password if it isn’t there and press ‘Connect’. (If you make a copy of each connection and put it on the desktop this will make the procedure easier next time.)
Once you are connected you will see an icon in your system tray on your taskbar which looks like two computers connected to each other.
Setting the connection used when Internet Explorer 4 is started
Go to ‘View’, then ‘Internet Options’ and select ‘Connection’.
The circle marked ‘Connect to the Internet using a modem’ should already be checked. Press the button marked ‘Settings’.
From the first box at the top you can select which connection should be used as default.
If you don’t want Windows to dial up a connection when you open the browser, after you start Internet Explorer 4, when the connection dialogue appears, click on ‘Work Offline’.
Setting the connection used when Outlook Express is started
Select ‘Tools’ from the Outlook Express menu bar. Then go to ‘Options’ – under the ‘Dial Up’ tab you will see options listed for which connection to dial.
Dialup connections for all the Email accounts that you are accessing under Outlook Express will be shown here.
You may not wish to connect to the internet when you start Outlook Express, in which case you can select ‘Do not dial a connection’.
If you wish to specify a particular connection to dial for a particular email account, you should do this by going to the ‘Tools’ menu, then selecting ‘Accounts’, then selecting the ‘Mail’ tab. Highlight whichever mail account you want to set the connection for and select ‘Properties’. Under the ‘Connection’ tab, you can specify which ISP connection to use.

Y2k Tech: Removing the Freeserve branding on Internet Explorer

January 5, 2013
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I’m adding the details of how to remove the Freeserve branding from Internet Explorer here for historical reasons. Although in 2013, this information should no longer be needed (it was back in 2000ish when I originally wrote it). So please be aware this is massively outdated and probably no longer relevant information, but I like to archive stuff 😉

To remove the Freeserve branding, you can delete the directory called /signup located in “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer”.
If you just wish to delete the toolbar motif, just delete the file toolbar.bmp from “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Signup\”.
To completely erase all mention of Freeserve from your system, you can remove the appropriate registry settings.
We do not advise modification of registry settings by untrained personnel You can modify your registry settings using the regedit tool. If you wish to do this, from the Start menu, go to Run, and type ‘regedit’. Search for those Keys which refer to Freeserve and, if you wish, remove them. Remember to make a back-up of the registry before making any changes.
Outstanding items that you may wish to remove that are not covered by the instructions above include:

To modify the title of Internet Explorer:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Right click on Window Title to edit.
To modify title of Outlook Express:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express
Right click on Window Title to edit
To remove the Infopane at the bottom of Outlook Express:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express
Remove the key ‘BodyBarPath’ in the same section as above.

Techy: MySQL Error 1045 (28000): Access denied – but the login details are correct

January 1, 2013
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I’ve just copied over my MySQL databases to a new location on my Linux Mint 14 (Ubuntu based) machine and whenever I tried to login as a non-root user (either via the command line or via PHP), I received an error like:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'currentusername'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

I tried resetting the password, deleting that user, re-creating it – all without success.

Then I noticed, in phpMyAdmin, there were three “Any” users. Deleting them allowed the other logins to work correctly.

So – if you get the “Error 1045 Access denied” message from MySQL and you are pretty sure the details are correct, check your database for the “Any” user (also check the MySQL list at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/access-denied.html for other possibilities).

I’m not sure where there “Any” users (which showed in Red in phpMyAdmin) came from, but removing them clears the error.

Personal: Oh – goody, the third thing has failed.

December 31, 2012
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This December, we’ve had two things fail on us:
* The Hard Drive in my wife’s mid-2010 27″ iMac. She purchased it on the 10th of December 2010, and it failed around the 15th of December this year. Just outside the EU 2-year warranty (but would have been within the 3 year AppleCare coverage if she had gone for that). Now we’re having to see if it is worth her just replacing the hard drive manually, taking it into an Apple shop to be replaced or taking it into an Apple shop for a new hard drive and a secondary/new SSD drive (this isn’t something either of us feel safe adding ourselves as we’ll need to practically remove all of the iMac in order to insert it).
* Our hot water tank has burst (night of Saturday 29th). Unfortunately, British Gas no longer hold parts themselves (well, small parts are held in a warehouse in Leicester), so we’re having to wait until Thursday the 3rd of January for it to be repaired (as the earliest “the local hot water cylinder supplier is open is the 2nd for us to be able to order it”). At least we’ve got heating until then, just no hot water (annoyingly, we’ve got a wood-burning fire, a portable electric radiator and two halogen heaters: so we could have coped without heating, but we’ve not absolutely no access to hot water 🙁 ).

and so we were just waiting for the third thing.

And it’s happened, a 1Tb drive (a Western Digital WD10EAVS-00D “green drive”) has failed in my offices’s Drobo NAS. Luckily, the three other drives are keeping it running in a degraded state, but it needs to be replaced ASAP. I’m considering getting a Western Digital 2TB 3.5inch SATA6 Internal Hard Drive – Red as a replacement, but that’s £90 I hadn’t budgeted on spending. Dammit!

Raspberry Pi and RISC OS

December 29, 2012
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For Christmas, my lovely new wife got me a Raspberry Pi Model B from RS Online and today I powered it up. I decided to go with RISC OS for nostalgia reasons (download it from the Raspberry Pi site) which I then copied using Linux Mint using “sudo dd if=~/Desktop/ro519-rc6-1876M.img of=/dev/sdc1” to a Kodak 4Gb SDHC class 4 card (as the 32Gb class 10 cards I ordered haven’t arrived yet). I then put it in a transparent case, powered it up using an Micro USB cable and connected it to our WiFi network using the Vonets VAP11G WiFi Bridge (which I previously configured using Linux: the WiFi dongle got its power from a powered USB hub).

Start it up and turn on networking and all is fun and memorable. The only snags are that it doesn’t seem to support full widescreen display on my Philips HDMI monitor and if I have my Dell USB mouse plugged into my keyboard and then into the Raspberry Pi, then mouse clicks wouldn’t register and the keyboard was repeating: plugging in the mouse and keyboard separately into the Pi and everything worked well.

Now to download some fun free games and browse APDL’s full catalogue.