I went about fixing my Cantenna today. I made the hole much bigger than the element, and re-soldered the element to the N connector. Results are quite good. So good, in fact, it justified me going out and buying a tripod to mount it on. Per the pictures from the Cantenna page I just secured it with a random piece of metal I had (one of the pieces you take out when breaking in to a new 5.25″ bay on a PC case) lying around and some zip ties. From the back of my apartment I can see the AP in the back of ardent’s apartment. Just the results I was looking for. Long live the Cantenna.
In other news, and in light of my recent exploits with the BIOS, I
decided to get ballsy and edit the BIOS on my laptop. I wanted to
keep it from suspending when I closed the lid. There was no option in
the BIOS by default, and there was no way to easily disable the switch
short of breaking it off. (At least, none that I could see.) BTW,
the laptop I was working on was a Twinhead P98 laptop. I’m not sure
which variety it was, but I suspect it to be a Slimnote GX3 or
some such. (While I’m rattling off model numbers, I believe it has a
MX29F002T flash chip. This according to AMIFLASH.COM; see below.)
I figure there’s probably either an option in the BIOS that I can
enable to keep it from suspending, or maybe I can actually replace the
“Power Management” section of the BIOS with that from another similar
laptop that does have the functionality. (That second one actually
makes me laugh in retrospect. What are the chances of that working?)
For starters, none of the three or so AMI flash utilities that I had
been using was able to auto-detect the chipset and part model numbers
for the laptop. I also tried the latest
UniFlash.
Or, at least, I thought this was the latest at the time; now I see
that there is apparently a newer
UniFlash which I
did not try. Anyway, the UniFlash I tried (1.17b I think?) gave me a
runtime error and was generally useless. So I downloaded the P98TF
1.07 AMI BIOS
from Twinhead. This BIOS came with a
program called AMIFLASH.COM which is a very small file that
appears to be good for precisely one thing: flashing the BIOS. I
suspect it can backup too but I didn’t bother checking in to what
incantation invokes this behavior.
I jammed the BIOS image, AMIFLASH.COM, and my trusty
AMIBCP75.EXE onto a floppy disk. Booted in to DOS. Used
AMIBCP75.EXE on the BIOS image and enabled a whole bunch of
options — including one to apparently turn off APM all together.
Flashed it onto the laptop with AMIFLASH.COM and rebooted. (There
was actually some praying in there, but I digress.) Wonderfully my
modifications had worked; the menu items I had enabled were all
there. Some of them seemed kind of inaccessible, as in grayed out,
but the important ones were there. I disabled ACPI which then allowed
me to disable APM. There was no option for “don’t suspend when I
close the lid.”
I’ll take this time to note that these notebooks are (A) cheap as shit – and you’ll get what you pay for; and (B) these notebooks tend to eat fucking batteries. Something inside goes coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs and apparently destroys the charging circuitry. This in turn destroys your battery within a few hours, I’m told. I’ve never observed this because I manage to only get the laptops after this has happened and they’ve already got absolutely no chance of battery power. In other news one of the hinges for the screen completely broke off tonight, threatening to make the laptop just that much more useless.
I will say that after disabling these options, I was able to boot into Linux and keep it running with the lid closed. No problem.
Installation tomorrow morning. (OK, OK, so it’s really at 1200. That is my morning.) I guess I’ll head over to bed.
Oh, I almost forgot. I talked to the person that I was ranting about last night, the one who was supposed to flash BIOSes. He basically told me that no, he didn’t flash the computers, and no, he didn’t say he had. He said I needed to test it and tell him if it was OK, then he’d go flash everything. I was kind of perturbed since I think he was going to flash them then give me a flashed one to look at, but then found himself unable to flash it. So rather than tell me, “hey, I can’t make this work,” he changes to, “hey, go ahead and test your BIOS.” It bothers me when I perceive that people aren’t admitting fault, perhaps because I’m so ready and willing to do it myself. Anyway, another one slips through my fingers.
Uh. Hm. I just realized that I have no idea how to get to the new customer I’m going to tomorrow.