Linksys Power Adaptor Failed

My BEFW11S4 Linksys router would restart itself once in awhile for the past couple months. I could not connect to it last week, so I checked the router and found the LEDs were lit up strangely. I suspected it wasn't getting enough power. There was a foul odour emitting from the wall plug. I probed it with a multimeter and found that there was only 2.5V coming out of it.


I decided to take it apart and see what was wrong inside. There are no screws so the only way was to pry it apart. This is what I found inside! The smell of leaking capacitors was overwhelming. You can see all the capacitors inside still leaking away.

Fix for Problem Initiating Webcam Conversation in Live Messenger

Recently, my Live Messenger refused to initiate a webcam conversation. I would get error 0x8100039d. If I tried to click the video conversation button again, I would get another message like this.

現在、Messenger をご利用になれません。後でもう一度やり直してください。(0x8ac70013)

I googled the error code and found that it was due to a incompatibility with McAfee SiteAdvisor. However, I didn't have it installed. So I started backtracking what I changed. Finally I remembered that I reinstalled VMWare couple weeks ago and it had re-enabled the virtual network adaptors.


Once I disabled them, I could establish video conversations again.

Adobe Acrobat Reader for PocketPC 2.0

I'm not sure why Adobe doesn't publish just the CAB file for Acrobat Reader for PocketPC. Anyway, I have extracted the CAB from the installer.

http://rapidshare.com/files/288267144/arceARMen_usr.PPC_2577.CAB.html

Fix for Ventrilo Causing audiodg Memory Leak

Ventrilo causes audiodg.exe in Windows Vista to explode and leak memory very quickly if you are using a Creative X-FI card and don't have "Use Direct Sound" checked in settings.


Once it's checked, it seems to fix the problem.

Edit: It doesn't seem to fix the problem entirely. Audiodg still grows but much slower than before. It grows about about 50-80mb a day, so it's acceptable. I just restart the Windows Audio service to restart audiodg again once in a while.

Update: I have upgraded to Windows 7 and the problem seems to have disappeared. I suspect Vista is to blame.

Pocket PC Weather and Bus Arrival Time App

I recently discovered that translink had released an API to the bus arrival time information.

http://www.mweisman.com/transit.html

Initially I wanted a way to check when the bus will arrive on my phone. I did a search on the Translink website for my bus and stops and then saved the table in Excel after sanitizing all the html artifacts. It worked well until I found out that the times changed and I would have to create another one.

Anyway, I sort of deviated from my original idea and came up with a program that would pull data from Translink and update periodically on one of my PocketPCs that I don't use anymore. It is coded in C#.NET.

I also added current weather and weather forecast using the WeatherBug API as well. Here is how it looks.

The bus times are updated every minute, current weather every 10 minutes and forecast every half hour over the device's wireless connection.

The station ID's are hard-coded but it shouldn't be too difficult to find where they are and change them. The city ID also hard-coded.

Install:
http://www3.telus.net/mrchiu/blog/bustime/BusTime.cab

Source:
http://www3.telus.net/mrchiu/blog/bustime/BusTime.zip

Comments welcome.