Resolving the Factory Restore Disaster

If you were unfortunate enough to have performed a factory restore on your Linksys SPA-2102, there is one chance for survival that I know of. If your sunrocket service has not completely quit on you, mine was working as of Friday when I switched my settings. You should leave your router on and hooked up as normal overnight. The router should provision itself with sunrockets settings again resetting the admin password back to what I had posted earlier.

I will scour the web and see if I cannot find another solution to this epidemic that has become the "Brinksys" VOIP Router.

Unlocking your Gizmo(Linksys SPA2102) to work with ViaTalk

As promised, here are the directions to unlocking your gizmo(Lynksys SPA-2102 VOIP Router) to work on ViaTalk's servers.

Step 1: Enable web access (perform functions on home phone)
1. dial ****
2. dial 723646#
3. dial 78778839# or 78676259# or 79309925#
4. dial 1#
5. dial 1 to save


Step 2: Remove access restrictions
1. Go to 192.168.0.1/admin/voice/advanced
2. Enter admin for user and 7UprUtew for password
3. Click on system. Delete the contents of Restricted Access Domain so that it is blank.
4. Hit Submit all changes.

Step 3: Load updated firmware
1. Go to http://itrealm.net/spa2102-5.1.9.zip (or from Linksys support) and download to desktop
2. Right click on zip file, extract here.
3. Double click on upg-spa2102-5-1-9.exe
4. Enter 192.168.0.1 for IP hit ok
5. Enter password 7UprUtew hit ok
6. Router stats are displayed, hit upgrade.
7. Hit ok to close utility.

Step 4: Configure Gizmo
1. Go to 192.168.0.1/admin/voice/advanced
2. Enter admin for user and 7UprUtew or qwe%zxc5 for password
3. Click on Line1.
4. Change proxy to the server name provided by viatalk.
5. Change outbound proxy to the server name provided by viatalk.
6. Change display name to whatever you wish.
7. Change password to the password that was provided by viatalk.
8. Set use auth id to no.
9. Set user id to your new viatalk phone number. Don't forget the '1' at the beginning.
10. Click submit all changes to save your settings.
11. Click on provisioning.
12. Delete the contents of both profile rule and upgrade rule so they are blank.
13. Click submit all changes to save your settings.
14. Click on Router.
15. Click on WAN Setup.
16. Change primary ntp server to north-america.pool.org(or pick a different time server from ntp.org)
17. Change secondary ntp server to pool.ntp.org (or pick a different time server from ntp.org)
18. Click submit all changes to save your settings.

All done. You should see your phone settings light up.

Sunrocket Shuts Down

The second largest digital phone service provider, SunRocket Inc., has begun the process of closing its doors. Leaving over 200,000 subscribers without phone service. This action came without any warning to their subscribers.

If you attempt to call SunRocket, you will hear “We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye.”

SunRocket lured in many customers with their offer of digital phone service for a year for $199. As early as Monday the 16th, SunRocket customers began making complaints that they were receiving patchy service or no service at all.

As a subscriber to SunRocket myself, I was very disappointed to hear the news. I quickly researched what was happening. I found ViaTalk, they offered very similar service to SunRocket in comparison of price and features, plus they offered a contract buyout of my remaining SunRocket service. ViaTalk will offer me up to 6 months of their service in match with how many months of service I had remaining with SunRocket. What a deal, I say.

I signed up with them and reconfigured my SunRocket gizmo to work on their service. I just submitted the paperwork to port my SR number. I have already began using their service and I am pleased. I know I need to tweak my settings some because I have not been able to successfully send a fax transmission yet.

I will post in a later article on how to unlock your Linksys SPA-2102 (Gizmo) to work with ViaTalks service.

Doc

Personally, I was a subscriber and my phone service was up and running till I switched over to ViaTalk yesterday.

IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING SUNROCKET

After significant effort by the Company to avoid this result, SunRocket is in the process of discontinuing its operations as you know it. Therefore SunRocket will no longer be able to provide its customers with the phone service that its customers have been accustomed to.

However, two service providers are assisting and offering to provide SunRocket customers the opportunity to sign up for their services. Both providers have agreed to become preferred providers with special pricing for the SunRocket customers to enable them to migrate their telephone service. Of course, there are other providers and each individual customer can make their own decision as to which carrier they wish to transition to.

Emails to the SunRocket customers are currently being sent with more detailed information on how to sign up with the two service providers. The email address of the SunRocket customers that is on record is the address being used to send emails to the customers.

We realize this is a very difficult and uncertain period for the SunRocket customers. With these two preferred providers, the customers will have the opportunity to transfer telephone services.

An affiliate of Sherwood Partners, LLC is managing the process as the Assignee for the benefit of creditors.

Creditors to SunRocket will receive a notice within the next 30 days in regards to the general assignment and for the filing of claims in the liquidation process of SunRocket.

Saitek P2900 Wireless PC Game Pad

I have never purchased anything from Saitek, so I was interested on how well this game pad would perform against the competition. So, I will begin with the install:

Installation
1. Insert the driver CD that came with the device.
2. When the auto run screen opened, select 'Install drivers and SST Programming software.
3. Follow the prompts.
4. Insert the P2900 wireless transmitter into one of your computer's free USB ports.
5. Open the battery compartment on the back of the P2900 and insert one AA battery.
6. Flip the switch on the back side from 'off' --> 'on'
7. If you experience interference, press the 'scan' button to scan for the transmitter.
8. Play!


First try, the installation installed without any hickups. Alright, time to try it out! Launch EA Sports NHL '07. I navigated through the menus and started a game. The controller was recognized with no problems, automatically configured to the controls that I am used to. I was impressed.

What I did notice that I appreciated, was when you load NHL '07, if you dont have your game pad plugged in when you launch the game, your game pad is not recognized in the game. But with the Saitek P2900, the transmitter acts as if the game pad is plugged in all the time. So even if you launch the game with the game pad switched to the 'off' position, you can power it on and begin playing without having to restart the game. Nice feature.

After probably about 30 hours of game play, the controller held strong. Maybe 1 out of ten games, I experienced a 3-6 second frequency interference where the game pad had a hard time responding to my controls. The controls seem to be pretty accurate and precise.

One other note, while playing I realized that what would be the 'start' and 'select' buttons are rather close to the action buttons (X,Triangle, Square, and Circle on the PS2 Controller). I found myself hitting 'start' and 'select' to often. Start paused the game and select pulled my goalie. Rather frustrating. I think it took me about 4-5 games until I began to get used to the button layout.

Conclusion
For the price, I consider this gamepad a no brainer. Despite the learning curve provided by its button layout, this game pad performs well, and is quite convenient.

CSS Bug: IE6 Div Height Less than Line-Height

I had developed a site for a client recently using css positioning for the layout. I was pleased upon completion, that the site did not differ greatly between Mozilla 2.0, IE7, and Opera 9.1. So I finished the site, uploaded it to production and notified the client it was complete.

A week passes by, my client contacts me and says that the website did not look right. I said ok, what browser are you using? IE6. Hrmm.. He stated that the logo had a blue background and that the text was overlapping. I was surprised. So, first I had to view the site in IE6. Both my desktop and laptop had IE7, so I had to resort to my 4 year old daughters computer which I had remember I had not upgraded to IE7. Wow he was right, so I investigated.

I discovered 2 things. The logo did have a slight blue background and where I had used a div to provide a spacer or a dividing line, it displayed in IE6 as 1 standard line in height. So I researched.

I found that IE6 does not support transparent background for .png images which explains the aqua colored background. I changed the image to a .jpg and that resolved that problem.

Next, I learned that when you have an empty div tag, IE6 inserts an empty text-element. So even thought there is no text, it is viewing as if there is an &NBSP in the div.

The workaround:
There are two really. You can use CSS to set the line-height:0px. Or you can enter a html comment into the div tag. I opted for the html comment, and it worked flawlessly.

WOOT! for the Masses

Have you ever went to a retail store looking for a specific item. After searching the entire store, you find that special item on the clearance rack for 60% off? Success, one point for the consumer. Leaving the current score at 4312 vs. 12 in favor of the retail store.

What if you could even the score a little bit? Well you can, and you can do it with a woot! At woot.com you can purchase an amazing deal everyday of the week. In the months that I have been following woot, I have seen name brand computer systems, projectors, home stereo components, printers and many other devices sell for 30-60% less then your typical retail store. Not to mention $5 dollar shipping charges per item for every item no matter how big.

Now your next question is, why the name "woot"? Well, imagine you were just completing the analysis of a scratch off lottery ticket and you found yourself to be a $10,000 winner. Now jump out of your chair and yell, "Woot!". How do you feel? That is exactly the feeling the the staff @ woot.com are trying to simulate. A more in depth analysis of the word woot can be found @ answers.com.

So take time out of your busy schedule and take a stroll on down to the newly renovated woot. Gaze upon the item of the day and find yourself slowly but surely becoming a wooter.

Cheers!

--Doc

Ruffles My Feathers...

A friend of the family came to me as a last resort to fixing her laptop problem. She believed that the laptop was infected with a virus and/or spyware. She consulted two professional computer repair techs, their answers were simple, reformat and reinstall the OS. In many instances, I may have offered the same solution. But, in her situation being that she is a school teacher and it being mid session, this is not a viable solution.

On my first inspection of the laptop, it did not appear to be acting out of the norm. I just began my normal maintenance routine. Cleaned useless icons off of the desktop, disk cleanup, removed pointless programs and obvious spyware from Add/Remove Programs, changed unnecesary services to 'manual' from 'automatic', cleaned out temporary internet files and internet history, and lastly made some tweaks on the Windows OS to gain some more performance. It wasn't until I went onto the web via Internet Explorer that I noticed anything abnormal. It was then that well known websites were unable to be displayed. I made a few attempts to access Lavasoft's website to download the renown Ad-Aware Software but my attempts were futile. So I took a new approach to this endeavor. I rebooted the laptop and proceded to enter "Safe Mode with Networking" by pressing 'F8' just before Windows began to boot.

Safe mode can prove to be a very handy tool to battle spyware and viruses because the operating system only boots the necesary processes required for the OS to function. This is important because if a computer is infected with spyware or viruses, there is a good chance that the infection will not "Activate" while in safe mode, leaving it in a dormant state.

While in safe mode I was able to open IE and navigate back to Lavasoft's website with no problems what so ever. I downloaded and installed Ad-Aware Personal SE. I updated it, scanned and it found about 40 critical objects, good start.

Next step was to get Grisoft's AVG Antivirus from their website. Now, the only downfall is that AVG uses windows components to install that are not available in safe mode. So I used safe mode as an avenue to download the software to the desktop. Rebooted, installed, updated, and scanned. Found 5 viruses, it was able to clean them.

Here is what ruffles my feathers! 2 computer "Professionals" both looked at her laptop and said that the hard drive needed to be reformatted and the OS reinstalled. One of the "Professionals" came to his conclusion by installing Microsoft's Beta Antispyware software onto the laptop. He figured that if that software couldn't fix it, then there was nothing he could do. First off, never count on beta software to fix any problems, especially from Microsoft. Lastly, he didn't even attempt to see if it was a virus that was causing her woes.

Total time spent at the keyboard freeing her computer from the grasps of viruses and spyware, approximately 45 minutes. It's "Profesionals" like that, that ruin the reputation of IT Profesionals everywhere. If you "Profesionals" are reading this, please pick a new carreer, I here waste removal is nice this time of year.

Cheers!

--Doc