Solving Bluetooth Device Problem on Ubuntu 17.04

I have an Asus SonicMaster laptop that runs the new Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus and everything is running great except that bluetooth. I want to enjoy wireless music you know. The bluetooth icon shows in the panel bar but does nothing.

Running "lshw" on the terminal got me started. I looked up the lines and found an unclaimed hardware device which is my bluetooth RALINK RT3290. Started searching from the forums and one pointed to install rtbth-dkms driver from launchpad.

So i obeyed and added blaze repo (https://launchpad.net/~blaze/+archive/ubuntu/rtbth-dkms)

//this two lines will add the blaze rtbth-dkms repository 

//on the system and update it along the way

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:blaze/rtbth-dkms
sudo apt-get update

Next step is to install it:

//install bluetooth driver

sudo apt-get install rtbth-dkms

Next step is to reboot your laptop and start the bluetooth once you got in. The instructions are listed here.

# Init
sudo modprobe rtbth
sudo rfkill unblock bluetooth
hcitool dev # check

# Switch off
sudo rfkill block bluetooth

# Switch on
sudo rfkill unblock bluetooth

# Shutdown
sudo pkill -2 rtbt
sudo rmmod rtbth

Once done your bluetooth device will be recognized and claimed by the driver.
Then I paired up my little bluetooth speaker and happily enjoying wireless music! Thanks to blaze for the bluetooth repo.

Motherboard Repair - Acer Borg Iibtdl-borg 13057-1m W/ Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 1007U

So my aunt got this little ACER Mini-ITX pc that was not booting up. I looked at the capacitors and found some bulging 16V 220f electrolytic and I imidiately thought this will be an easy fix since all I have to do is replace those and it will be back to business. I had experience with this before with my AMD K6-2 mobo back in the day.

10 days later and I'm still stuck at figuring out what the heck is going on. Since I already replaced the suspected bad capacitors it still refuses to boot.

To the oven it is! I baked that sucker on a regular kitchen oven at 180 *C for 10 minutes. Cooled it down and hooked the ATX power plug and the powcer button connector. IT BOOTED UP!! So much for the excitement though because after shutting it down to insert the HDD and memory it was back to being dead.

Oven equals heat so I thought it boots when something is hot. My wife's trusty hair dryer came into play. Heated up the board entirely and when it was hot to the touch i plugged the mini board back with the ATX and power button connectors. You're right it came to life. Those beeps where beeps of joy. I diagnosed the problem and the next thing to do is to isolate the search for the failing component.

This time I wasn't sure yet what component needs to be hot so i took my soldering iron waited it to heat up just around 100 *C and started heating up the solid capacitors near the CPU by briefly touching it with the soldering tip. Those solid caps looks perfect from the outside and I don't have the proper equipment to test it inline the board.

Every time i heated a capacitor I then push the switch. Bingo! I found waldo. A solid, good looking filter capacitor was the criminal. You wouldn't even think it was bad. Next time i'm investing on proper tools but for now i got to use unorthodox methods for this job.

I had a 6.3v 1000uf low esr cap that i salvaged from a dead video card lying around so a quick work with the soldering iron is all needed. I decided that i'll skip removing the bad capacitor and instead rig the replacement cap with a wire that will run to the side because i'm afraid i'll damage those little components near the CPU. Ugly but works.

Variation Issue - WooCommerce Update 3.1.0

After the new 3.1.0 update, my custom variation stopped working due to a code update that checks my custom value against the pre-defined attribute values. With a little searching through the code using the error message it produced, i found that they have added the checking in "class-wc-form-handler.php" at around line 828.

 // Allow if valid or show error.
if ( $valid_value === $value ) {
    $variations[ $taxonomy ] = $value;
// If valid values are empty, this is an 'any' variation so get all possible values.
} elseif ( '' === $valid_value && in_array( $value, $attribute->get_slugs() ) ) {
    $variations[ $taxonomy ] = $value;
} else {
        throw new Exception( sprintf( __( 'Invalid value posted for %s', 'woocommerce' ), wc_attribute_label( $attribute['name'] ) ) );
}

I commented that section and added "$variations[ $taxonomy ] = $value;" before that code block and my site is back to normal.

DIY resistor from broken soldering iron

Nichrome (NiCr, nickel-chrome, chrome-nickel, etc.) generally refers to any alloy of nickel, chromium, and often iron and/or other elements or substances. Nichrome alloys are typically used in resistance wire. They are also used in some dental restorations (fillings) and in other applications.

Tools:

• soldering Iron
• Digital Multimeter

Materials:

• nichrome wire from broken soldering iron
• 2 x i inch stainless paper clips (cut it)
• Plaster of Paris
• small tube for mold

First is to measure the ohm value you want then cut the nichrome wire and solder it to the ends of the two stainless so it will be like:

Insert it to the tube centering it with a hard paper with a hole to let through the stainless wire. it will look like this:

The last step is to pour your Plaster of Paris into the mold covering the wires completely and leave it to dry.

Quick and easy Direct Drive Lead Acid Battery Desulfator - Battery Saver

Warning: This device can cause shock or fire hazard. Monitor usage always. The author cannot accept responsibility for any loss or damage arising from the use of this device.

Lead Acid Car and motorbike batteries tend to build sulfate crystals on the lead plates that results into lowering its capacity. This happens when you don't use your car/bike for months sitting in the garage. This is common for all Lead Acid batteries including your UPS backup batteries and there's a way to recover them if there's no shorted cells yet.

This device is consisted of a capacitor bank, diodes and a 12 volt relay and that's it! The relay will act as a very fast on/off switch that will push the charge from the capacitor bank into the battery in a pulsing manner. The pulse is estimated between 90Hz and 150Hz - not much but I managed to save two of my motorbike batteries that won't hold charge  for a day. The power source is my trusted 19V 90W 3A laptop charger.

Parts:

6  x 100v 1000uF  Electrolytic
1  x 12v 10A relay
5  x 1N4008 Diodes
2 x 25V 100uF Electrolytic


Follow the diagram exactly as it is. The desulfator also acts as the main charger so a separate charger is not necessary. Use it once a month to pulse-charge your battery for maximum life-span.

Save the Earth!

Manjaro XFCE: Faster than light

The title is an exaggeration obviously but Manjaro XFCE is really darn fast even on my old Acer 5510 - single core AMD laptop. In fact, i'm doing this blogging thing while on the live usb and installing it to an 8GB micro SD inserted to a chinese clone mp3 shuffle so don't laugh at me.

Manjaro XFCE Desktop

Manjaro Install

The latest Manjaro XFCE has all the goodies for you to start with casual browsing or just a quick tour of its innards and you won't get dissapointed. While Firefox is the pre-installed browser to get you going, you could easily install cromium browser by typing "sudo pacman -S chromium". Connecting to wifi is just a few mouseclicks away thanks to the thousands of devs who wholeheartedly dedicate patching the kernel to get us the coolest stuff in Linux. The default XFCE flat icons are so cool and really compliments the modern look and feel of the entire Manjaro expirience and I fell in love with it on first sight.

Default XFCE Icon Set

Manjaro is based on Arch Linux which is on its own is a little bit to the technical side of things and when i tried installing it reminded me of the old windows 98 days installing from the command line and memorizing all the dos commands you can possibly use to make it run. Well we now have GUIs so the install process is pretty easy even a six year old can do it. But in the CLI install process, you have to do the disk partitioning etc etc which if you're new to linux can get you in a lot of trouble. I just installed and re-installed manjaro four times in CLI and it fails every time it get to the formatting part but maybe because i was using a USB as the boot drive instead of the 'ol regular hard drive.

CLI Installer

Libre office also comes pre-installed so your office tasks are surely covered although I haven't tried connecting a printer to it yet because my printers are broken but i think that printing is plug n play so you can start printing lorem ipsum immidiately or your class project if you will. USB devices and other peripherals are instantly detected like they always should. The fonts are great for my taste but sometimes i need  to install specific fonts just for the heck of it. Steam also comes pre-installed so you can start playing your linux  games and i read some popular games will be coming to linux this year.

If you're a student on a budget or one that needs flexible, light and secure system, don't look anywhere else and install Manjaro XFCE.

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/manjarolinux/files/release/0.8.12/xfce/


Website: https://manjaro.github.io/