February 2023
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Skype Cuts Out With 100 Percent Processor Usage

About few weeks ago I was having a recurring problem with Skype. I would be talking just fine and then every minute or every couple minutes I suddenly could not hear the person on the other end. I could tell when it was happening because it would literally be silence, not even background noise. The silence would only last about 3-5 seconds and then I could hear the person again. It was quite frustrating though because the person I was speaking to could not tell when it happened so they would have to repeat their words quite often for me.

I tried downloading the latest version of Skype, reinstalling and even downloaded the beta to see if it was a bug that had been fixed. Finally I watched the Task Manager and noticed that the processor would reach 100 percent every time the audio cut out. Now that I had some correlation I wondered what could cause this. Because my laptop also felt warm I decided maybe it was overheating. I had been foolishly setting my laptop on my bed because it was late when I was talking (that’s what 15 or 16 time zones away will do to you) and the vents were being blocked by the soft blanket. Everyone should know this and even I knew it and had warned friends in the past to place the laptop on a solid surface to keep the airflow underneath moving. I guess I had used it without issue on the bed several times and forgot my own advice. Setting the laptop on a hardcover book on top of my bed so the airflow is still going did the trick.

I am really only posting this because I searched for a while to find a solution to the problem and never found one online. If anyone else is having this issue, try getting some more airflow to your computers vents. It just may be as simple as that.

Hurricane Dean Hit Jamaica Just Before My Trip

I am leaving for Jamaica tonight but there was a little doubt last week as I heard of Hurricane Dean’s approach to the island. Yes, Jamaica has been sparred for many years and many have become complacent but there will be another big one and you never know when.

I found it quite interesting that I could get very up-to-the-minute coverage of the events. I listened to Jamaicans calling in to report their area of the island on Jamaican radio station Power106 online, watched videos that were uploaded during the midst of the storm to youtube, as well as the weather channel on tv. A good variety of viewpoints.

One video I watched today shows just how insane these storms can be. Everything is fine for the first two thirds of the video and then the storm crashes violently.

Breaking Boards

I’ve been taking lessons for a while from Jungyae Moosul which is down the street from me. I tested for the first time tonight because I have missed the previous tests due to my work schedule. The results are not in yet but I feel I did pretty well. I guess the part I looked forward to the most was breaking the boards. This testing session the break was with the elbow / forearm. We always just practiced against a pad during class so I was happy to finally get to break something! My instructor chose 4 boards for me to break but seeing how easily the single and doubles broke for the other students I wasn’t worried.

Before:

Boards Intact

After:
Continue reading “Breaking Boards” »

Women’s Responses and Their True Meaning

I think this covers the most common responses women give to us guys and what they usually mean. 🙂

Recovering My FreeBSD NAS Server From A Hard Drive Failure

The Signs I Ignored

I was out of town on work for a few weeks and when I came back I noticed a loud click from my server occasionally. It wasn’t constant and I figured it was just something annoying with the fan so I didn’t think much of it.

The Moment It Happened

I decided I should make sure all the applications I installed from the ports on FreeBSD were up to date so I found a program that would do it for me. It took a while but I had it going remotely most of the day while I was at work. Some time in the afternoon my session was disconnected from the server. I tried to reconnect and I couldn’t access it. When I arrived home, I turned on the monitor to find a single blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. I don’t normally have a keyboard attached to the server because I just SSH into it. I decided to just shut off the power to the server and restart it. When it restarted it booted up to a point and then I got a message similar to this

/mnt/usr: bad dir ino 16392 AT OFFSET 512: MANGLED ENTRY
panic: ufs_dirbad: bad dir

It would only reboot after this message so I decided I was screwed.

The Search and Solution

I turned to Google of course and found a page for the panic ufs_dirbad problem. Good. At least I can get a hint of what the problem is. Continue reading “Recovering My FreeBSD NAS Server From A Hard Drive Failure” »