Misc: Resynchronise the HP 2.4 GHz Wireless Optical Mouse FHA3510

Totally off topic but if you’ve had the misfortune to have one of these stop working on you then never fear as the solution is below.

Symptoms:

The USB receiver is inserted and installs fine but one day the mouse appears to give up the ghost and no longer connect.

Cause:

The mouse has become disassociated with the receiver, there are no obvious “sync” buttons on the mouse. As th mouse functions on 2.4 GHz, it may become disrupted by anything else using this frequency band e.g. microwaves, bluetooth, cordless phones etc.

Fix:

Set the mouse close to the inserted USB receiver and hold down the button just behind the wheel – it has a little paper icon on it, as shown in the image below. The blue wheel LED will start to flash – keep holding the button until it has stopped blinking – your mouse is now functional again!

HP FHA3510 Mouse

 

Android: Updating Nook Simple Touch (NST) to Software Version 1.2.1 (UK)

So I just bought one of these from Currys for £29 but trying to update it to the latest version of firmware wasn’t happening.

You put the update.zip into the root directory of the NOOK and apparently it falls asleep then does an update; problem is that nothing appears to happen, you check the version and it’s still 1.2.0 and your update.zip has disappeared from the root directory.

Turns out that this is a software update from the US site and doesn’t want to be installed – you can force the issue by downgrading to version 1.1 of the firmware and then applying the US firmware file for 1.2.1 but you will then be on US firmware and I don’t know what that’s going to do for you.

So!

  • Grab the UK firmware update from here and copy it into the root directory
  • Turn off the NOOK by pressing the button on the back once
  • Wait for 20 or 30 seconds – you should see the update process starting
  • NOOK will reboot and when you log in you should have a bubble message on the notification bar telling you that you’re on the latest and greatest version!

image

 

 

 

 

 

Job done. Now ROOT that mother!!

 

Linux: Kill a Process from the Command Line Without Knowing the PID

So we have a script – myscript.sh – which is running on a linux box and we want to kill it quickly with the minimum of fuss:

root@linux# kill $(pgrep <script_name>)

Here is the explanation:

We use “pgrep” to grep the running process list and returns a process’s PID :

[root@linux]# pgrep myscript.sh
20104

And combine it with the kill command to make a one-liner:

[root@linux]# kill $(pgrep myscript.sh)
[root@linux]#

More info on pgrep and kill on the man pages:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/pgrep

http://linux.die.net/man/2/kill