• Wifi Signal Map at My Place

    Today I used the free Ekahau HeatMapper on Windows to map out the wifi signal strengths here at the house. I took the resulting map into Photoshop and made, what I consider, a fairly nice map. (Note that it is not perfectly to scale, because I don’t have an actual floor plan to use as the map.)

    wifi signal map at my house
    Here’s the wifi signal map taken at my house on June 26, 2015.

    HeatMapper seems pretty accurate since the indicated wifi signal strengths match what my devices usually tell me. The program could definitely help to troubleshoot slow wifi in a crowded neighborhood as it provides channel information for all detected hotspots. I have no crowding here: There are only two other routers I can see and the signal is so low they couldn’t interfere with a gnat.

    What I Did When HeatMapper Found No Signals

    One thing I ran into before being able to complete this fun-waste-of-an-afternoon project is that your wifi chipset has to support monitor mode (or promiscuous mode, as it was called back in the day :). If a chipset doesn’t support it, HeatMapper just sits there waiting for signals and nothing shows up. Not surprisingly, the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230 chipset in my laptop doesn’t support monitor mode. I remembered that I bought a Netgear N300 Wi-Fi USB Adapter last year to help with a project I worked on (which had been buried in the back of the Jeep, long-forgotten). I plugged it in an HeatMapper immediately started picking up signals.

    (Special thanks to Patrick Norton of TekThing for introducing me to HeatMapper! I’m super excited to see him still on the air. You should support his show at https://www.patreon.com/TekThing)

  • Dual-boot Windows Technical Preview (aka Windows 10) on a UEFI-Enable Computer

    I’m really excited about the Windows Technical Preview (aka Windows 10) that was released today. I decided to forgo a virtual machine and dual-boot it on my laptop running Windows 8.1. My laptop is an Asus G55VW and the existing Windows 8.1 installation being setup in UEFI (with the requisite GPT partition scheme).

    I downloaded the image and made a flash drive using the Windows 7 USB Download Tool, but when I booted from the drive and tried to install, I got an error message: “Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is not of the GPT partition style” when I clicked on the empty partition I wanted to install to.

    I realized the flash drive was booting the MBR installer, but I needed UEFI. I realized I needed a USB flash drive setup to boot the Windows Technical Preview installer in UEFI mode. Here’s what I had to do to create the bootable flash drive that does just that:

    1. Plug a flash drive into a USB port on your machine.
    2. Download the Windows Technical Preview 64 bit ISO at http://preview.windows.com (you’ll have to join the free Windows Insider program and click through a few screens to get to the download link)
    3. Download Rufus. Rufus is a small utility that will put the ISO files on a flash drive you can use to boot from and install Windows. While there are other utilities that do this, Rufus allows you to specifically setup the flash drive as a GPT boot device. This will allow you to install Windows Technical Preview on a GPT drive, side-by-side with Windows 7/8/8.1.
    4. Launch Rufus.
      1. Set the Device dropdown to the flash drive you want to turn into a technical preview installer.
      2. Set the Partition scheme and target system type dropdown to GPT partition scheme for UEFI computer.
      3. Click the little disc icon next to the ISO image drop down and point to the Technical Preview ISO you downloaded in step 1.
      4. Click Start and wait until the status says DONE.
    Setup Rufus as shown
    Setup Rufus as shown, using the Windows Technical Preview ISO as the source image

    You should now be able to boot from the USB drive and install the 64 bit Technical Preview in dual boot on most machines that boot using UEFI and have a hard disk with GPT. I’ll leave it to you to find out how to create a empty partition to use for the installation, but at least now you will have a UEFI flash drive installer.

  • Appalachia 2050

    I just had the pleasure of finishing a documentary by Prestonsburg native Ralph B. Davis entitled Appalachia 2050. Davis interviews several influential and educated people in Eastern KY, asking them what needs to be done so that the region will have overcome the issues still present after nearly fifty years of LBJ’s War on Poverty.

    The consensus seems to be that the War on Poverty has indeed improved the well-being of most of Eastern KY’s poor, however, we are far from where the program hoped we would be compared to the current national averages in areas such as education, health, job opportunities, and economic growth. Nearly all participants believe that cooperation within the region is the number one key to helping the area thrive by 2050.

    I encourage anyone who is interested in the future of Eastern KY to watch this documentary. I also encourage Mr. Davis to keep giving us these thought-provoking pieces because they create useful conduits for dialog. I cannot wait to see his next project, whatever that may be.

  • A Fix for Windows Installer Error 3728

    If you ever get a Windows Installer Error Code 3728, I found a really easy fix that might work for you. ( I say might because I’ve had many problems with MSI installers over the years and it has normally been a lot of trial-and-error to fix them.) As with any fix I post, follow these steps at your own risk. There’s no way I can know every single configuration out there and your mileage may vary.

    1. Click Start, type regedit.exe, and press enter (Give the ok for Administrator privileges if you have UAC enabled).
    2. Right-click on the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive and choose Find…
    3. Type (or copy and paste) this key into the find box: {B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}
    4. If this key is found anywhere in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, right-click and Delete it. Very, very important: Do not delete this key from any hive other than HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Doing so may seriously mess up your system.
    5. Re-run whatever you were trying to install that was failing. If the install goes through, you’re good to go. If not, keep Googling because that’s all the medicine I’ve got for Error Code 3728 :)

    As far as why this error occurs, it has something to do with the TrustedInstaller account permissions. The various sources I read to help me fix this issue had a lot of conflicting information and I managed to piece this fix together from bits and pieces of a few of them. I hope this helps!

     

  • Get Rid of Text Formatting (in Almost Any Program)

    Have you ever copied some text from a webpage (or any formatted program, for that matter) and pasted it into another program only to find that all the fancy formatting simply doesn’t look right in its new location? If I had a nickel for every time that copy and paste between program hasn’t played nice, I’d be a wealthy man…Anyway, I’ve always relied on a trick that most people don’t think about when I want just text and nothing else:

    1. Copy your text from your source (no matter how heavily formatted it may be)
    2. Open Notepad
    3. Paste the text into Notepad
    4. Highlight and copy the text from Notepad
    5. Paste your (unformatted text) into the destination program.

    This tip isn’t rocket science, but a lot of people have never thought if it.

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