Author: Matthias Gall

Two good reasons to finish DVW

I bought my first Samsung SyncMaster 204b about one and a half years ago. Although I had some problems with it, I decided to complete my set and get a second one. As you might recognize, I did not get the colors to match exactly yet, but I’ll try twiddle with that later. The wallpaper is from mandolux.com. If you ever need excellent dual monitor wallpapers, this is the place to go. I have downloaded some of them, and while I’m writing this, I have already changed my wallpaper again because I cannot decide which one I like best. The actual reason for buying a second 20″ was to have a little more screen space for programming again after my CRT smoked away some time ago, so: happy coding!

BlackBerry 8800 woes

I have a BlackBerry 8800 for work which is generally a good thing. I can read and write email, notes and calendar entries from anywhere, surf the web, get a route calculated from my current position and so on and so on. Still, it’s a work gadget, so it would be just half the fun if it hadn’t a micro SD card slot and wasn’t capable of playing music and videos. So I installed a 6 GB card and copied some music on it. When I reinserted the card I was presented a message box saying, “Media card has been inserted that contains errors. To correct the errors please use a disk error checking utility on a computer.” (or “Es wurde eine fehlerhafte Medienkarte eingelegt…” in German). In case you ever run across this message, make sure that your files on the media card have no spaces in it. The BlackBerry obviously can’t deal with them. Moreover, I removed all special characters from the files as a precaution. It worked for me then.

Enabling StereoMix with SoundMAX drivers

Since my posting on the SoundMAX BSOD issues has become quite popular, I have decided to write another posting on my more recent experiences with the drivers in Windows XP. The problem was that it did not crash anymore but it did not let me record my cards output (which is called “StereoMix” or also “What You Hear” as a recording device). Here’s how to fix it.