I didn’t notice it before but the new RNS 510 firmware (3810/3814/3816/3818) has a new startup logo for the Volkswagen firmwares:

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I wrote earlier about the startup logo’s on the Volkswagen RNS 510 navigation.

Today I can finally tell you that I succeeded!
I changed the startup logo to the logo from the MFD2 DVD as you can seen on this picture:

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The Volkswagen RNS 315 Navigation has a builtin Bluetooth carkit which is disabled by default. I am not sure why, I presume this is done because VW also sells carkits that integrate into the MFD.

The builtin carkit can be enabled using VCDS like this:

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I recently had some time to play with VCDS and a friend’s RNS 315 navigation. By default there is no test mode or hidden menu with extra features like on some other Volkswagen systems.

Using VCDS we can however (temporarily) enable the Developer mode.

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I have used the WP-Postviews WordPress plugin for a while to keep track of the number of times my blog posts are being read.

But after installing the W3 Total Cache plugin I noticed that the read counters weren’t properly updated anymore. I figured this was a consequence of using a cache.

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I was working on a PowerPoint presentation that included screenshots that were using the Appear animation. I use it to only show a particular screenshot when I am actually talking about it.

However when editing the slide, the screenshots hide the slide text which makes it difficult to edit it.

And in the Animation Pane the pictures are shown as Picture1, Picture2 etc.

So I wanted two things;

1. Rename the object to a more meaningfull name in the Animation Pane
2. Hide the screenshots when I want to edit the text in the slide.

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A while ago I started exploring the firmware of an RNS510 Navigation unit. The RNS510 is an OEM navigation system, manufactured by Continental Automotive and is used in several models of Volkswagen, Seat and Skoda Cars

When the units is booting it shows a startup logo and I wanted to replace this logo with my own picture.

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I ran into an error when I was upgrading hardware on an HP BL460c G6 Blade.

After placing 2 new (larger) hard drives the Array Configuration would hang after saving the configuration (It just kept blinking “Saving Configuration.” forever.

After a reset the Smart Array Controller (P410) halted a very long time on Initializing and eventually failed.

I retried the whole procedure with the same result but this time the controller reported: “previous lockup code 0xAB”.

My next step would be a firmware update and this kb article from HP confirms that it was indeed a firmware issue: HP Serial Smart Array Controllers P410/411/212/712m/410i – May Hang with Lockup Error Code 0XAB Configured in Zero Memory Mode.

This kb article also tells me why I didn’t have this error on another blade: that one had the Battery Backed Write Cache module.

A missing feature in the dUP2 Patch Generator has always been to correct the PE Checksum.

After all if you write a clever search&replace patch but have to include the PE Checksum it doesn’t make any sense.

But then I saw there’s a beta version of dUP2 that supports ome new features one of them being a fix checksum option!

The beta (v2.22) can be found on diablo2oo2’s site: http://diablo2oo2.di.funpic.de/stuff/dup2.beta.rar

As you may know, recent Intel processors have an extension to the x86 instruction set called Advanced Encryption Standard Instruction Set (AES-NI).

AES-NI is basically hardware support for AES based encryption and because I had a chance to run some benchmarks on differing systems I was curious what the impact of AES-NI would be.

I used TrueCrypt for running the benchmarks because this is a real life application and it had support for AES-NI.

I first ran the benchmark on a laptop with an Intel Core2 DUO (P9700 2,80 GHz):

The next system was an Intel Core i7 Q740 (Quad Core with Hyperthreading, so 8 in total) machine.

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