Carl’s Blog

I had the idea of sending myself an SMS message anytime I received an email. I know that can be overbearing for some, and even me for my non-personal email. Since I don’t really get anything but person-to-person emails there, I figured it would be worth it to try. Also, I got my cellphone before AT&T Wireless was bought up by Cingular. Therefore I’m still on an old AT&T plan which doesn’t charge for incoming SMS messages, so it wouldn’t cost me anything. I’m running my personal email through a hosting company (DreamHost), so I decided to try using procmail to do it. Another option was to rely on a client to forward the messages. While this may be straightforward for some, I had no experience at all in procmail. Read on to see how I got it to work.
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I’ve had a problem with my Motorola V551 for quite awhile. It was difficult to get it to charge. I don’t mean “to hold a charge” because it lasted for a couple days just fine. I mean that I couldn’t get it to charge. The charger wouldn’t make a good connection. The Motorola chargers aren’t like Nokias that actually plug in. They clip in near the curved edge. From the first time that I tried with the phone, I noticed that the charger didn’t quite clip in solidly and it would wiggle around. Then about a month ago I noticed that it would take some fiddling with the charger connection to get it to start charging. This progressively got worse until earlier this week it took me 10 to 15 minutes of playing with it until it would start charging. Today the problem came to a head and had to be solved.
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In my previous post about my laptop I had described some stability problems. I was finally able to figure out what was causing it. I found eventually that it is most likely the Netgear WG111v2 wireless USB network adapter. It all started when the computer crashed occasionally. Originally I thought it was the new memory that I installed. I ruled that out after I installed some different memory. The strange thing was that the blue screen was sometimes not showing any driver and sometimes showing synTP.sys (touchpad), wg111v2.sys (wireless usb), and a couple others. I detail below my process for figuring this out.

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Quick update on my new Dell B120 laptop. CompUSA had a sale this past weekend on Netgear 802.11g USB adapters so I picked one up for $30 (after rebate). I also got 512MB of off-brand memory, which I returned last night to get some much cheaper Kingston memory from CircuitCity ($40 after rebate). Everything seems to be going okay so far. I’m trying to do this “the right way” by having a user account and an administrator account. It’s actually a real pain in the ass to have to jump over the admin account all the time to do any installing. At least fast user switch is accessible with WINDOWS-L.

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My old laptop has been on a steady decline so I finally decided to jump on a deal from Dell. I got a refurbished Inspiron B120 for just over $400. It is their lowest end budget model but it should last for a few years. It’s a 14-inch widescreen 1.4GHz Celeron M with 256MB of RAM, a 40GB drive, and a CD-RW & DVD combo drive. Unfortunately this computer didn’t come with built-in wireless and it doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot. It only has an ExpressCard slot and there are no wireless ExpressCard products yet. This leaves me with either getting a USB wireless adapter or a Mini-PCI wireless card. Unfortunately if you don’t order the internal wireless, Dell doesn’t bother to put in the internal antenna. I found some instructions on how to install the antenna into a ThinkPad so I may give it a shot. Of course I should wait until my 90-day warranty is over. For now I’m using a Linksys WGA11B that I don’t with my TiVo anymore.
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