Ground Control

Greetings from the Night Watch, keepers of the Eternal Flame, guardians of the Green Lantern, watchers over the twilight hours.

Over the last week or so it has come to my attention that several people I know who use a Three mobile broadband connection have been unable to send emails using their own domains. There has been no problem in the past and these people have managed to send emails for quite some time.

Having examined the situation I initially suspected that increased sunspot activity had created an inversion layer in the ionosphere creating a tropospheric duct and the packets were arriving out of phase at the recipients end, I broadcast a sinewave and on my oscilloscope  had no problem displaying a perfect lissajous figure so this was not the issue.

I then suspected some possible sporadic E reception with some of the data arriving twice but this was not the case.

My tachyon detector was showing a blank so there were no trans dimensional warp conduits active and as a further check I connected some new flux capacitors to my orgone accumulator, powered up my anomalous chronographic particle detector, this failed to show any rifts or tears in the space time continuum.

It looked like the problem was going to be even more sinister than that.

A quick telnet check revealed that Three appear to be starting to block access to smtp servers on port 25 and 587, I attempted to reroute the data through a wormhole in Spiral Galaxy 28958, invert it's phase and then reapply it via the reflective surface of Phobos with no success.

There was only one course of action left, I opened up Outlook and used Three's SMTP server as the outgoing mail server.

The address of this server is:

smtp-mbb.three.co.uk

You do not need to use the ninth chevron and no authentication is required.

I hope you find this if use.

Next week we will show you how to make an Ion Propulsion system using an old cigarette lighter, a 6v battery and a Champion N7Y spark plug.

Greetings once more to you from the Night Watch, care takers of the multiverse, guider of the great turtle, lighters of the lamps of eternity

It came to pass that a client called in and said "watcha mate, how do I make my Sony Xperia ring more times before it goes to voicemail?"

After some research I initially suggested that a transmorphic reasonator aimed at the outer edge of the rings of Saturn would introduce a sufficient delay. Unfortunately the local hardware store was out of these and so some more research was needed.

I thought that If we made a delay line using some piezo electric crystal and fed the signal back in on itself with a phaseshift of 90 degrees then took the resultant signal and fed it through a demodulator onto a tape loop then using a single sidband supressed carrier signal we could bounce it off the e-layer recover the signal and then digitise it once more before sending it back out through the network this might do the trick, I set about creating that apparatus but to be honest I couldn't be bothered.

Then a sudden burst of inspiration came up on me, it was either that or heartburn.

Why not enter the following code onto the handset

**61*901*11*NN# SEND

Where NN is the number of seconds before the call goes to the voice mail thingy.

Apparenly this will work on any 02 device, please do not use it on any other network as this could cause a huge positive feedback loop and create a wormhole into the dungeon dimension.

Next time we will show you how to make a half wave dipole using some scaffolding poles, some self tapping screws a length of wood and some sticky back plastic and we will be asking the question :-

If it says on a box of eggs, "Warning, this product may contain eggs", does this mean that occasionally it may contain something else and if so what?

Have fun and due to a temporal anomaly I'll see you again previously

Agent Holt,

The Night Watch

Up here at T'Mill, the Night Watch, guardians of the tusks of the 4 great elephants, groomers of Binky and feeders of Gaspode the Wonder Dog have been made aware of some strange goings on in the world of electrickery and technology.

We initially though that there may be a Quantum Singularity causing the problem and so we instructed Corporal Clegg to power up the mighty Eclipse, engage the Insterstellar Overdrive and Set the Controls for The Heart of The Sun. He asked if he could have a Psychedelic Breakfast from Alan before we started but I told him that at the Heart of the Atom there was the Mother of all problems about to hit us.

We went On The Run to the bridge and took off with the Echoes of our passage through the atmosphere behind us, we were soon high in the sky and Obscured By Clouds and the life support system kicked in so we could Breathe In The Air.

But in the end we found nothing, not a sausage, very little in fact, except the solution to some of the problems.

The first of these concerns Office 2007 and the Open Document Format.

Microsoft have adopted version 1.1 of the format while just about the rest of the entire known multiverse has adopted version 1.2, saving documents in ODF format in Office 2007 can cause data corruption when re-opened in Open Office, the best and safest option is to save the documents in Word or Excel format.

And now back to the world of the Elonex WebBook, I don't know if we still have any Linux ones out there but if there are and they have just updated the OS to version 9.04, you may find that the screen resolution is not quite right. Apparently the Elonex BIOS reports some incorrect information back to the operating system so having discussed this with the head librarian he advised me "Ook".

So this is what you need to do:

You should be able to click on Applications, then Accessories and then terminal.

Then type in sudo bash and enter the password.

Then cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original  This backs up the config file in case we make a mistake

Next you type nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And amend the file to read the following

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Driver “openchrome”
Option “PanelSize” “1024×600″
EndSection

That's all that should be in there, once you've done that press CTRL and O to save the file and CTRL and X to quit the editor.

Restart the machine and all should be well

An update to Evolution has also stopped links in emails opening up FireFox, to rectify this get all the latest updates and install a package called gvfs

Restart Evolution and the problem should now have gone away and Bob is your parents sister.

That's enough for tonight, next week we will go to Wimbledon common and with the help of a mecano set and some lego will make the worlds first bionic Womble.

And remember "My Hovercraft is Full of Eels"

Greetings to you from the Night Watch, guardians of Bifrost The Rainbow Bridge, maintainers of the Avo 8 of destiny, dylithium recrystalisation our speciality.

Last night I was biding my time, and while walking down the beach listening to the echoes of a different time come willowing across the land, I came across several species of small furry animals who were gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict, they asked me if I could solve a problem for them.

The problem was that they could not get their "Matrox Dual Head 2 Go" to display a different desktop on each monitor while using an Intel graphics chipset..

I got on my bike which I can ride if I like and cycled passed a field with a scarecrow in it. I could see my friend chopping down trees so I shouted out, "careful with that Axe Eugene" as I remembered a day when I went to the seaside to watch my niece Emily play.

When I returned home I realised that I still did not have an answer to the problem, so I called up my friend Arnold Layne who reckoned he could fix it for some money, he was saving up for a holiday in San Tropez but was currently a bit short as he had received a large vets bill for his dog Seamus.

Apparently this is not an uncommon problem and it took the dogs of war to get the information out of the suppliers. I said "it would be so nice" if he could tell me how to fix it and he did.

Get the latest drivers from here:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/gxm/software/?os=2&product=56

Uninstall the old ones, reboot and then install the new ones and once complete using the normal windows display utility change the resolution to double the normal horizontal resolution. For instance if it was set to 1024x768 you would pick 2048 x 768, this will just look like a stretched desktop in an LMI session but should display as two separate desktops on the clients machine.

Having got this information I went to the park and played on a see saw, in the distance I could hear a band playing some Jugband Blues.

I decided to go home again as I like to be there when I can.

Next week we will tell how hot to resublimate Thiotimoline to enhance it's endochronic properties.

And yet another competition to spot the Pink Floyd tracks, points will be given for each correct answer and you know what points make.

Points make it possible to convert a dc supply from a 12 volt battery into an alternating current which can be passed through a coil to generate a high voltage and ignite the fuel in your combustion chamber.

Todays prize is just the thing for the dog loving handyman, it's a set of adjustable spaniels

Agent Holt

The Night Watch

We know what we like in your wardrobe