Problem on Nanikore

[Fixed for me] Mac rebooting during sleep

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 12:53:27 +0000

Posting this in case it can save someone else some time:

It all started so innocently. I’d bought a Logitech wireless mouse (an M325) and put the tiny receiver into the keyboard USB port for proximity, because I never use those ports. It seemed to work fine and also reduced the number of cables on my rather cluttered desk.

A couple of days later, whilst I was playing Minecraft on my Windows box, I noticed that the Mac Mini was unexpectedly rebooting, so I trawled the Macs logs in the Console.app, and found an odd error message regarding a sleep issue. It wasn’t a one off either - in one evening it had rebooted and actually shutdown three times.

9/24/14 11:35:04.000 PM kernel[0]: Sleep failure code 0x00000000 0x1f006900

I read around on the net about that message, and what it could be related to, and it seemed that some people were having similar issues and suspected USB devices, especially drives, such as for Time Machine, as the culprit.

Of course, the first thing you check for should be recent changes, and there had been some Apple patches go in, but I decided to test the Time Machine USB drive theory first (almost dismissing the new mouse!). In summary:

- Removed Time Machine drive - same problem.
- Removed the Logitech mouse dongle, but crucially, put the old known good basic Microsoft mouse in that same keyboard USB port (previously it was plugged into the rear of the Mini) - same problem.
- Tested disabling sleep to confirm it was sleep related, and yes, confirmed that there was no problem with no sleep.
- Finally, decided to plug the Logitech dongle into the USB hub attached to the mac - and yes, all was fine, no sleep problem anymore.

It would seem that keyboard port does not like USB HID devices.

The bottom line: never dismiss any change, and never underestimate the weird things which can cause issues - [Fixed for me] Mac rebooting during sleep!

Curse you, MX records! Sorry, my fault.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:49:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I put a techie post up on here - shame on me! Here’s one about me doing something stupid, cursing my MX records then apologising for it being my fault.

Like many, I have a couple of email addresses. Actually, I have a silly amount I’ve set up to play with services over the years, but I’ve been slowly culling them. Anyway, I basically have two main addresses now - one which I use day to day for sign-ups, and one based on a domain name I own, and is mainly for friends and family which is now quite a few years old.

That, for a while now has been run from Google Apps, a relatively under appreciated offering from Google as far as I can tell. Essentially what it is, is a Gmail and Google Apps backend for your own company/domain, so all my mail for that address comes and goes from my address @ brightblack.net account, but is purely going through Gmail and gets all the benefits of the spam filter and 7GB+ of storage, for free. I like it - so much better than a Hotmail account or an ISP namespace.

My problem actually started a few weeks ago, but I didn’t notice as it’s not a high volume account, but I wasn’t getting any new mail. Then, last week my parents mentioned they’d actually got a bounced reply. I actually replicated it straight off from my phone thanks to Softbank’s insane timeout setting:

Action: failed Status: 5.2.0 Remote-MTA: dns; brightblack.net (___.___.___.___) Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 5.7.1 : Relay access denied

(IP address obscured there!)

Odd. So I logged in to my Google Apps account, nope, all looked fine there, but no new mail. So I went further up the chain. My domain registrar is called PairNic, who have always been good to deal with, and the www.brightblack.net domain pointer seemed fine. So the next logical question is: what had I changed with this domain - any aspect of it - lately?

Answer: I’d re-set it to point to this blog … a few weeks ago.

Ah.

That’s a coincidence.

From Google Apps, I did a quick MX records test, where it basically does a DNS lookup (of which MX records are a component) on my domain and as somewhat expected, no MX records found. Well that explains why I wasn’t getting mail and people were getting bounced. As far as the internets were concerned, I wasn’t there.

So, I logged in to Pairnic again, went into their DNS/email config, and lo and behold - nothing - so a quick check at both WordPress and Google apps showed me my MX records should look something like:

Priority          Mail Server
1           ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5           ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5           ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10         ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10         ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

So I entered that into PairNIC’s pages, waited only a few minutes for it to replicate, and then the test from Google showed I had MX records again, and a quick email from my phone successfully arrived, followed over the next day by a small deluge as spooled messages came in.

You can actually get some good, simple steps to troubleshoot this in the Google Apps Tech Support area, as I discovered mostly after I’d fixed it.

So how did it break? As I suspected, it was when I re-pointed my old brightblack website address to this blog through PairNic, I missed a large amount of red warning text saying exactly what would happen:

Warning: Enabling any Forwarding features (E-mail or Web site Forwarding or Parking) will remove any previous DNS settings that you may have had with your account. Any previous nameserver, DNS, or e-mail settings will be lost.

How I missed that, I’ll never know - PairNic obviously make it pretty clear, but I must have thought that since I was only playing with NS (website) settings really, my email would be unchanged. I should have re-read that! All in all, I got off lucky - it took me less than an hour in front of the computer to realise what an oaf I’d been and to fix and test it - looking at some of the Google forums, some people have much larger issues.

If nothing else, I’ve refreshed my rusty knowledge of DNS, MX records and how my own email setup actually works, which is no bad thing. It’s also got me delving a little more into parts of DNS I hadn’t really looked at, like priorities, CNAMES, SPF records (sender-permitted-from), and gain a bit more knowledge on the subject of email in general, and some of the changes coming with IPv6!

Read the red text. Twice.

Gaijin Hanzai Informative Magazine

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:06:04 +0000

You’ve probably seen this do - Gaijin Hanzai Informative Magazine. There just aren’t enough superlatives to describe just how awful we foreigners are apparently. Well, I say ‘we’, but apparently no Europeans or North Americans commit crime … just the rest of them. Pages here, here and here.

" Gaijin Hanzai Ura File" as the book is known, may well still be available from such hard core right wing establishments as…er…Family Mart.

All in all, it’s just an odd situation, with these fairly normal shops having to apologise and get it off their shelves to save a bit of bad publicity.

This blog is not really the place for me to go into the ‘race issue’ in Japan, or even my own experiences, and though I would say Japan has an inclination to legalised, institutional racism, I wouldn’t say it’s (personally, physically) dangerous, and I don’t think these people represent even a tiny, if vocal, percentage of the population. That said, some foreigners have committed crimes, and I’m not talking about visa overstays either. However, by far, most crime is committed by Japanese, even by percentage.

Overall summary: kind of sad this book can be published in 2007 in what is a very enjoyable place to live.

8cm CD Stupidity

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 01:22:01 +0000

Maybe it was because I took a day off; maybe it’s because I’m just too curious, but for whatever reason, I decided to try and take a look at the contents of the 8cm CD which came with my new Sandisk 2GB SD card, and within a couple of nano-seconds the combination of it not being sucked into the machine, and it being out of my reach hit me. Oops. I didn’t even need to go to a search engine to know that this drive did not support 8cm discs.

At that moment, my only option looked like prizing the whole thing open and trying to get it out. Not nice. However, the benefits of having a female around the place mean that I have access to a cornucopia of odd shaped beautification tools which include tiny tweezers, which not only can extract nanobots from tiny hair follicles (or whatever), they can also pry 8cm CDs from Mac Minis, put there by complete idiots. So armed with this and a thin flat blade screwdriver for some leverage, I managed to get the offending disc out.

Moral: don’t put silly small freebie CDs into your more expensive computer.

Power Outage in Tokyo

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:43:42 +0000

It seems this morning that Tokyo had it’s biggest power outage ever - potentially 800,000 households according to the BBC. Unfortunately, yours truly here (somewhat thankfully) has no story to tell as our area was unaffected. Indeed, at 0738 this morning when the power-cut happened, I think I was waiting for the bus.

Still, it seems a fair few people were affected, though I find it hard to believe that there was truly chaos as Reuters claim. Although Reuters did seem to claim that a spokesperson stopped the Tokyo Stock Exchange:

The Tokyo Stock Exchange was trading as usual, but calculations of the Nikkei 225-share average were frozen by early afternoon trade due to a system error related to the power cut in a spokesman at the index compiler, Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.

People familiar will know that the TSE computers go do every now and then anyway.

Actually, with it being the Obon holidays, there aren’t as many people around as normal. Certainly that means more work for some, but I still didn’t get one hint of chaos all morning. Indeed colleagues stuck on trains and waiting for trains at stations said it was all very orderly as one would expect, as in similar to when someone jumps in front of a train (sad, but true).

Wait till they release the truth that it was Godzilla and not a crane accident which caused the outage.

Cool Graphics

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 09:52:05 +0000

Since building my new PC, I’ve been feeling like tinkering a bit, and one thing I’m trying to do is keep my PC quieter. As much as the Elsa 6800GS is quieter than an nVidia stock part, it can get a little noisy after a couple of hours play, so I wondered just how much a GPU cooler would cost, and whether there were any decent ones out there. A few reviews led me to the Arctic Cooling 5NV Silencer.

After about 30 minutes I had the new cooler attached (it takes up another space on the back of the PC effectively!), and not only is it much, much quieter (nigh on silent in the case to be honest) it also keeps the GPU and the temperature around it much, much cooler. Here are some very un-scientific numbers I got from the nVidia control panel:

Elsa Cooler vs. Arctic Cooling Silencer

At boot / rest in Windows
GPU core: 46 C 38 C
Ambient temp.: 35 C 32 C

After 3DMark05
GPU Core : 61 C 42 C
Ambient temp.: 41 C 35 C

After 30mins in Half Life 2
GPU Core : 65 C 50 C
Ambient: 50 C 40 C

So as you can see, not only is it quieter under load, it’s much cooler too. The benefits to me of this are that in the summer I don’t have to worry as much(!), that the rest of the PC stays a little cooler, and that if I like, I’ve got a bit of overclocking headroom there.

Ladies Only Carriages

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 01:56:19 +0000

This was a picture I took with my keitai last December when I went to Osaka, but I forgot to post it. Anyway, it’s given me an excuse to create the 2005 gallery folder.

Basically, it’s the sign for where to queue for women only carriages on trains in Osaka. Taken at Osaka station. I only mention it, because I’d heard of these things, but it was my first time to actually see one. Apparently Osaka has a bigger chikan problem than Tokyo.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Hiro — 2005-01-08

The Shinjuku line Subway has a women’s only carriage as well. I believe this turns into the Odakyu line. I just noticed these signs last month when I was back in Tokyo for a visit…

graham — 2005-01-11

Thanks Hiro. I was wondering at the station whether this is a good ting or a bad thing. Undeniably it’s a sad thing. I wonder whether these signs and train carriages just make more convenient targets.