It is Comex (for those who don’t know, it is a computer show in Singapore)! Went down with my colleagues and picked up two sets of 4GB RAM (Kingston 4GB 1333MHz) at $33 each
My new Kingston DDR3 1333MHz 4GB RAM sticks
First thing I did after stepping back into the house? Dug out the screw driver, went to the study room and start installing the RAM sticks. Upgrading the RAM on the iMac 27-inch is a straight forward process, even Apple put up an article on how to install or remove memory. Just be careful not to drop your iMac while shifting it around.
The memory upgrade process took me less than 10 minutes. System booted up normally and the “About this Mac” reflected the correct amount of RAM.
System now having 16GB of RAM
You might ask me why I need so much memory? I do play with a bit of virtual machines (VM) so having some spare memory is always good as sometimes I boot up multiple VM to try some stuffs.
Well, so do you need to add memory to your iMac? If you are seeing the beach ball more often and Activity Monitor shows that you have low amount of free System Memory. It is probably time to add some memory. 
I guess most people faces the same problem as me – too many remote controllers, too many equipments. If you are having more than three remote controls to enjoy that nice movie or TV show, probably you should consider getting a universal remote, that is, a single remote that controls multiple electronics – TV, cable setup box, multimedia player, Blue-ray player, etc.
The Xsight Touch universal remote came nicely packed!
I just got my first universal remote control – Acoustic Research ARRX18G XSight 18-Device Universal Learning Remote Control with Touchscreen Color Display. Well, you might say “huh?!” when you hear the brand as you might probably be more familiar with Logitech Harmony Remotes like the Logitech Harmony One Universal Remote with Color Touchscreen or Logitech Harmony 1100 Universal Remote with Color Touch Screen. The XSight Touch universal remote is on sale so I guess it is no harm getting one just for the fun of it.
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This is not exactly the latest router they have but since a friend passed it to me, I might as well explore the router a little.
ASUS RT-N16 - Multi-Functional Gigabit SuperSpeedN Router
300k sessions limit! Faster P2P?
The ASUS RT-N16 advertises that it can handle up to 300,000 sessions. This is awfully lot compared to routers of yester-years. Even the Engenius ESR9850 doesn’t match up to the ASUS RT-N16 in this area. The Engenius ESR9850 handles up to 50,000 sessions. High session/connection limits will certainly make P2P applications faster as you can connect to more peers.
The RT-N16′s high sessions feature is probably backed by its hardware specs:
- CPU: Broadcom BCM4718 533 Mhz
- RAM: 128 MB
- ROM: 32 MB
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The Apple File Protocol (AFP) stopped working the day I upgraded to OS X Lion. Network shares on the NAS (DNS-320, ReadyNAS Duo) can no longer be browsed through AFP because none of them supports AFP 3.X calls and the authentication standards required by Lion.
I need a fix fast! Why? My iMac’s 1TB Seagate HDD got recalled and I needed Time Machine (TM) to work before the tech guy replace it on site.
(Re)setup my compiling environment, this time for the DNS-320. Did some compiling, wrote some shell scripts and Time Machine (on OS X Lion) is working with my D-Link DNS-320 once again. Well, it still throws some CNIB warning messages when accessing the share but at least it works now. The CNIB issue is fixed with help from Ben Archer.
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Updated the WordPress Amazon Associate Plug-in to 1.70 and it promptly crashed my WordPress. It prompted the following error when trying to access the WordPress platform
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_get_current_user() in /xxxxxx/wp-includes/capabilities.php on line 1039
Found a solution to the above fatal error caused by Amazon Associate Plug-in 1.70. Simply edit wp-includes/capabilities.php. Add in the following after the comments and before the first class definition.
require_once(‘pluggable.php’);
Save the file and access your WordPress. It should work!
If it does not work for you, simply move the Amazon Associate Plug-in (wordpress-amazon-associate) out of wp-content/plugins. You are effectively removing the problematic plugin.
Reference: [Plugin: WordPress-Amazon-Associate] Auto-update failure
Chinese characters appearing as squares in XBMC for Apple TV (ATV2)? This is because ATV2 does not come with unicode fonts hence unicode characters like Chinese cannot be shown properly. By following this guide, you will be able to view unicode characters on your XBMC for ATV2.
Pre-requisites
- Before we proceed, you will need a particular Unicode font – arialuni.ttf (size: 23560KB). You can easily locate this file on your Windows (C:\Windows\Fonts) or search online for alternative (hint: Google). If it appears as ARIALUNI.TTF, simply rename it to arialuni.ttf.
- You will need to hook up the Apple TV2 (ATV2) to your network and know your ATV2′s IP address.
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