How to fix portable air-cond "P2" error

If you have a portable air-cond, and one day it's compressor automatically shut off and stopped functioning, showing the error message "P2" on its display panel, don't be panic.

Your portable air-cond normally has a self-evaporative system to recycle the condensing water to cool the condenser. However, if the self-evaporative system is not functioning well, water collected at the container below the appliance will get full, and the portable air-cond will shut itself off with the "P2" message.

When you see this message, you can try to empty the water container by disconnecting the portable air-cond from wall socket, moving it to a place suitable to drain out the water (such as your bathroom or outside your house), then unplug the water draining outlet at the back bottom of the appliance to let the water flow out. You might need to tilt the portable air-cond a bit to ensure the water is totally drained out. Then, put back the drain plug to its original location.

You might also want to clean up the portable air-cond to ensure no blockage caused by dust or dirt inside the unit that might prevent the self-evaporative system from working efficiently.

Try switching on the portable air-cond again. It should function well if the "P2" error is really due to water tank full problem.

Disabling GNOME Desktop Manager (GDM) when Ubuntu is booting up

If you are using Ubuntu Linux system with GNOME Desktop Manager (GDM) installed, the computer will automatically go into GDM X Window GUI interface whenever it boots up.

If you prefer the computer to boot up into text console terminal interface instead of GDM, you can create a new text file /etc/init/gdm.override and put "manual" as its content.

The simplest way of doing so is to issue the command below with root access:

# echo "manual" > /etc/init/gdm.override

This works in my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server.

TP-Link TL-WDR3600 dual band gigabit router now supports both TM Unifi and Maxis Home Fibre Internet

TP-Link TL-WDR3600 is an N600 wireless dual band gigabit router ranged in between the lower TL-WR1043ND N300 router and the higher TL-WDR4300 N750 router. Good news is, it now has official firmware for Malaysia that supports both TM Unifi and Maxis Home Fibre Internet.

At the price of RM17x (selling at All IT Hypermarket) which is just slightly higher than the price of TL-WR1043ND at RM14x, you get 2 major feature upgrades namely dual band WiFi (2.4GHz and 5GHz, 300Mbps each, can work simultaneously) and hardware NAT (providing faster WAN to LAN throughput). The TL-WDR4300 with 3 antennas is still selling at RM2xx.

I have made a table to compare this TP-Link TL-WDR3600 with the stock D-Link DIR-615 router of TM Unifi and stock Thomson TG784n router of Maxis Home Fibre Internet.

You might want to consider this TL-WDR3600 router if:

• the D-Link/Thomson router that comes with your HSBB Internet service damaged and warranty period expired.
• and/or you want to have much better WiFi experience (more stable connection, farther reach, and make use of the 5Ghz WiFi frequency band for your devices that support it).
• and/or you want to have much faster wired gigabit connections between your devices in the LAN.

In order for your TL-WDR3600 to support TM Unifi or Maxis Home Fibre Internet connection, you need to download the latest Malaysia version firmware from TP-Link website and flash it to your router.

After the firmware upgrade, the firmware version becomes 3.13.32 Build 130723 Rel.9433n.

 

 

Setting up for Unifi or Maxis mode is pretty straightforward and easy. You just need to follow the step-by-step instruction in the Quick Setup function.

The Quick Setup function will help you configure the necessary VLAN settings for Unifi to enable both Internet access and IPTV.

You can also plug the network cable connecting to your IPTV set-top-box to LAN port other than LAN1, as long as you configure the LAN ports setting correctly.

For Maxis Home Fibre Internet, it will help you to configure the necessary VLAN settings to enable Internet access, VoIP and IPTV.

Note that you will lost the IPv6 feature in this router after you flashed it with Malaysian version of firmware. This should not be an issue as the Internet is still heavily using IPv4 now.