Nokia E72 and gmail working again

My Nokia E72 recently stopped retrieving email from gmail. A short google search revealed that an update is required. This can be downloaded from here. Once installed email retrieval worked again.

Link to original message: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mobiledevices/forum/mdnokian/sha2-support-on-nikia-c5e71-and-e72/4521fcec-b8e4-4c4a-a5a9-08d1f26118e0

Brother MFC-7860DW: ‘replace toner’ message

The last few days my printer was telling me that the toner was low and that I should get ready to replace it. Finally, today the printer refused to print any more and instead just displayed ‘Replace toner’ on it’s display. I was very annoyed about this as I was quite sure that there was still plenty of toner in that cartridge as there were no streaks etc. on the last few printouts I made. So I went looking and discovered that there’s a simple setting that will cause the printer to carry on printing even so it believes (for whatever reason) the toner is empty. Basically, you will have to enable ‘Continue Mode. Here are the steps:

http://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=gb&lang=en&prod=mfc7860dw_all&ftype3=2043&faqid=faq00002828_000

This should work for other Brother models too. I know for sure that this also works for the MFC-7360N.

Auerswald Compact 3000 Tip #2: D-Kanal Dekoder

Auch wenn der Name es nicht vermuten laesst: der D-Kanal Dekoder stellt nicht nur die D-Kanal-Informationen dar. Zumindest seit Version 2.5.2 Beta kann er auch die laufenden Logeintraege anzeigen. Das hat mir z.B. geholfen meine Emailprobleme zu beseitigen.

Auerswald Compact 3000 Tip #1: Log files

Um an die Log-Files heranzukommen, einfach im Menue Service->Servicedaten das sogenannte ‘Tk-Anlagen Image’ herunterladen. Beim Speichern am Besten gleich die Endung .log durch .tgz ersetzen. Dann kann man die Log-Dateien entweder mit 7-zip (Windows) oder ‘tar xvzf ServiceData.tgz’ (Linux) entpacken.

Update: Leider hat sich scheinbar das Format mit einer neueren Firmware-Version geaendert. Es ist nicht mehr im .tgz Format.

How to disable ‘call waiting’ on UPC phone line

After a number of phone calls I finally got in contact with someone in UPC who could actually tell me how this can be achieved. You simply have to dial ‘#72’. Happy days at last.

Note:  This might not work for everyone (they guy mentioned that this depends on the type of switch your phone line is connected to).

How to suppress the User-Agent in Thunderbird

Simply add a new preference ‘general.useragent.override’ and leave that string empty.

Advantech PCI-1620 and Ubuntu

Mate of mine gave me one of the above mentioned PCI cards. This particular card provides 8 serial ports. It was quite easy to get the card working (no need to patch the kernel anyway). Here are the necessary steps:

1. Download the ‘Linux Driver for ICOM Cards’ from http://support.advantech.com.tw/Support/DownloadSearchByProduct.aspx?keyword=PCI-1620A
2. Run ‘tar xvzf ‘Adv950_Source_V3.30.gz’ (yes, it is a compressed tar file even if it doesn’t look like one)
3. Then ‘cd adv950_source_v3.30/2.6/’ (for a 2.6.x kernel)
4. ‘make’
5. ‘sudo make install’
6. And finally a ‘make test’ should result in the following:
   /dev/ttyAP0 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP1 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP2 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP3 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP4 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP5 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP6 is RS232
   /dev/ttyAP7 is RS232
7. Now copy the kernel module into the right place ‘sudo cp adv950.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-28-generic/kernel/drivers/serial/’
8. Run a ‘sudo depmod -a’
9. Happy days!

Note: This is how it worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04.