Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2006 December 13

= December 13 =

PSP Memory Stick
I looked at the PlayStation Portable page and couldn't really tell from the wording so I'd like to know if you need a memory stick to save your game on a PSP.

†he Bread 05:28, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * As far as I can tell, yes. It comes with no integrated memory for that purpose, and you can't write to the UMDs. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 07:04, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * No you need some kind of external memory. Personally I prefer something similar to this instead of traditional, expensive flash memory --⁪froth T C  20:29, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, you do need one to save, it does come with a 32 MB Card, which is enough for several games (My game saves folder is only about 5 MB.) However, I would definitely recommend buying a higher capacity stick if you want to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities, and homebrew if you have a capable firmware.  Nothing like a good round of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Genesis emulator during the bus ride to work. Cyraan 21:56, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Cool thanks y'all, I'm gonna buy one in the weekend and was wondering


 * †he Bread 22:20, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Or if you do the upgrade I linked to you can watch every Lord of the Rings Extended Edition and all of the bonus content on your bus ride. If you have a really long commute. And a suitcase full of car batteries. --⁪froth T C  22:44, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Primary master hard disk fail.
When I boot my (older) machine it says "Error, primary master hard disk fail" (this is in the POST, before my OS boots). LiveCDs work fine but I can't see my hdd partitions in them, so I'm assuming that my hard drive has failed. Is there any way, short of getting a new hard drive, that I can still use my PC? Can I tell it to ignore the error? I don't need to save many files, just boot Damn Small Linux and run Firefox, VNCviewer and XChat.


 * I'd suggest taking it to a friend's computer as a slave and formatting it from there (after which you might be able to install DSL). But, to be honest, I think it's kapputt. yandman  12:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, your hard drive has died. I had the same message once.  You might be able to figure out some way of getting the programs you need onto a USB memory stick and using that as the hard drive, although it will run like treacle.  You can pick up hard drives for very little money these days ... if all you want is those programs, you could probably rescue a 5 or 10 Gb one out of something a computer hardware store has thrown out.  Proto ::  ►  13:22, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Sigh... I wouldn't mind as much if this error didn't pop up two days after I bought the machine (yeah, I'm poor, I had to buy a very old PC). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.10.86.63.


 * On the plus side, you probably lost, at most, two days work. I suspect that Ted Kennedy loses 2 days every weekend. StuRat 04:56, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

LED article does not print for me
There seems to be something odd (hidden characters? malevolence?) about the article on LEDs (light emitting diodes). I cannot get it to print on our network (HP colour laser) printer from my workstation, BUT ALL the other articles and pages that I have tried to print (on the same printer) in the last two days have printed without a problem. What am I missing? Unfortunately, I am no geek, so I may have omitted information that you need. Thank-you --BabbyBaby 17:52, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Have you tried the printer-friendly version at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Light-emitting_diode&printable=yes ? Any difference? (The page really should print either way, I think, but this might be a workaround.) —AySz88\ ^ - ^  20:05, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Weird URL in spam
I found a spam forum post with this URL http://1044398194 I thought it was malformed, and I clicked on it to see if it would work. It did, how does this URL work? I used Firefox 2.0. How is it encoded? And what do those numbers actually resolve to? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.202.182.201 (talk • contribs)

wj32@future-31415:~$ ping 1044398194 PING 1044398194 (62.64.64.114) 56(84) bytes of data. --- 1044398194 ping statistics --- 6 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 5010ms wj32@future-31415:~$
 * That's 62.64.64.114, in octal form or something. See, and this page has other odd ways of obfuscating URLs. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 01:13, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Would a paragraph about this at URL not help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.202.182.201 (talk • contribs) 01:39, 14 December 2006
 * A lot of stuff at URL would help, that page is an abysmal shape. I may try and fix it. 68.39.174.238 22:08, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * This is in decimal, and is one of the many IP address representations listed at IPv4. --Spoon! 03:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I didn't notice. And somehow, I converted it to a standard dot-decimal IP address; I must have accidentally assumed it was in decimal. Who knows. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:10, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * lesson: I don't know. --wj32 talk 07:09, 14 December 2006 (UTC)