Thursday, May 28, 2015

40 small experiments You Should Let Your Children Do for fun and learning


I’ve been reading more this year and recently skimmed through fifty dangerous thing you should let your children do. The idea of this book is that danger is something kids need to learn to handle by experience. The 50 small experiments in this book can potentially cause a minor injury but are never really seriously dangerous. In fact most of them aren’t dangerous at all, but at least they are fun. It’s too bad a book like this is needed today, because kids in today's life live a very structured and constantly supervised existence, and this is a good way to supervise a little danger.



This is the list I like -- buy the book if you want to learn more detailed instructions


  1. Play with fire
  2. Do swimming
  3. Let them use screwdriver
  4. Throw rocks
  5. Deconstruct an appliance
  6. Drive a car
  7. Put strange stuff in the microwave
  8. Climb a tree
  9. Boil water in paper cup
  10. Spend an hour blind folded
  11. Use a knife
  12. Light the stove
  13. Slide down the bannister
  14. Jump on the bed
  15. Hammer a nail
  16. Have a pillow fight
  17. Not wash their hands before dinner
  18. Answer the door
  19. Play in the front yard without you
  20. Cook
  21. Perform on street
  22. Break the Recipe Rule Book
  23. Look directly at the sun properly
  24. Sticking Your Hand out the Window
  25. I let my children fail
  26. I let my kids play in the country
  27. Sleep under the stars
  28. Abseiling: Descending the face of a cliff with only a rope to hold you might enjoy
  29. Paddle a canoe
  30. I let my kids play with scissors and knives
  31. I let them mess around in the kitchen
  32. I let my kids travel alone on the subway
  33. Superglue your fingers together
  34. Make a bomb in a bag
  35. I let my children open and break my computer
  36. Go rafting
  37. Lick a 9 volt battery
  38. Play in rain/Hailstorm
  39. Kiss/Hello like French
  40. Cross Town on Public Transit,
  41. Change a Tire



Saturday, May 23, 2015

How to Lose Fat and Tone in One Body Part




There is no magic bullet that you can use to tone up a specific body part and make fat disappear from there. Life will be so much easy if one exercise can actually do the magic in getting the result you want - but unfortunately that does not work. You can’t just take the fat and burn it right where it sits; because your body must first convert the fat into a form of fuel that your body can actually burn for energy. FAT is stored all over your body- in some body parts its more than other. Its different for men and women because of hormonal differences.

Lets look at how the FAT loss work at high level:  When your body needs energy, it doesn't get it from a single specific body part. Instead it will take fat from everywhere and convert it into free fatty acids which enter your blood stream and become fuel for muscles. That is why it takes more strategic planning if you want to tone a particular body part


So what is an effective strategy to lose Fat and tone in one body part?

Basics:
Find out which part has more fat and focus on that area.
Minimal Rest between workout sets - Light weight and more repetition
Repeat this routine 4-5 times a week
Keep athletic/balanced stand while doing exercise -- achieve your goal without getting hurt.


Steps #1:- Burn phase
 -Do 20-25 minutes high intensity/short/Interval based cardio to burn the calories then do toning so that fat gets used for energy.
- I use Tabata songs for my high intensity internal training (HIT).
- I prefer to do the exercise in the morning because your body is already in fasting mode and its relatively will burn more Fat.

Step#2- Tone a specific part
Perform exercises that specifically stress the muscles of the body part that you are trying to spot reduce. (see list of exercise example for toning arm below)

Steps#3 Diet
Reducing your calorie intake by 500 calories daily for seven days will result in 1 pound of fat tissue loss per week, according to the University of Illinois. You’ll need to maintain current levels of physical activity, or even increase physical activity, to start burning through fat reserves.

- Fuel moderately. Eat more veggies and high quality FAT (e.g Coconut oil, grass fed butter)from morning to late evening.
- In the evening you can have your normal meal  but make sure you finish you dinner before 8 pm. The idea is that your food must be digested before you go to sleep.

Example: Exercise List for toning and losing fat from arm


1. Triangle Pushups 


Counter Pushups





2. Triceps Kickbacks 



Dips 


3. Arm Circle 

4. Side planks 


5. Dumbbell press 


Kettle-bell exercises:
Image result for kettlebell shoulder workout


Resistance Band Exercise:
Image result for resistance band shoulder

Okay, we have got a number of insights, lets round them up in to a system that you can use

Sum Up

Here’s how to achieve your goals with minimal efforts:

1. Learn how to do high intensity training. Do it for 20 minutes
2. Do toning exercise for your targeted body part
3. Buy kettle-bell, resistance band, dumbbell and foam roller for stretching (this will be best $60 spending of your life - trust me!)
3. Eat mindfully. Minimal sugar and processed food. More veggies and high quality fats
4. Use your motivation to repeat this for 21 days to convert the routine in to habit -- and then slowly make staying fit as your ritual 


Thursday, May 14, 2015

How To debug 0x9F DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE BSOD issue


Most of the time, bluescreens (if they are repeatable) are usually a driver and not something in the actual Windows. Some common suggestions to isolate the driver power state issue:

1. Very first thing to do is to get the latest driver first and see if it is still happening.

2. When the crashes are wake/sleep/resume/power related, often you should go to the device driver in the Device Manager and uncheck any ‘allow system to turn off the power of this device’ as a second step if the latest driver doesn't solve it.  This prevents Windows from making calls into possibly faulty driver code.  Power management issues are very common with drivers still.

3. If you get dumps and the crashes are different places every time or random in timing – then you might have bad memory or a bad motherboard that’s corrupting things.

Lets understand  what is 0x9F DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE crash issue:




0x0000009F is a fairly common bug check that occurs when a device driver does not complete processing on an I/O Request Packet (IRP) in ~10 minutes. This can occur for a variety of reasons, but the main reasons are due to kernel-mode drivers not properly handling changes in power states
To transition between states, the system must return to state S0 (ex. Standby -> Hibernate is actually Standby - > Awake -> Hibernate). If devices and drivers do not correctly handle state transitions (or even queries about the current power state), it is possible for the system to crash with the DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE.


For most of these errors, the cause is fairly straightforward and the important information can be determined from a minidump.

Example:  
Go to https://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze and upload your minidump
To do a full analysis Download and install the Debugging Tools for Windows pack
run windbg.exe


0: kd> !analyze -v
*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE (9f)
A driver is causing an inconsistent power state.
Arguments:
Arg1: 00000003, A device object has been blocking an Irp for too long a time
Arg2: 88ce8d60, Physical Device Object of the stack
Arg3: 82b2dae0, Functional Device Object of the stack
Arg4: 88724df8, The blocked IRP

Debugging Details:
------------------

*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for ftdibus.sys
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for ftdibus.sys

DRVPOWERSTATE_SUBCODE:  3

IMAGE_NAME:  ftdibus.sys

DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP:  4ae0760c

MODULE_NAME: ftdibus

FAULTING_MODULE: 9275e000 ftdibus

CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT:  1

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID:  VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT

BUGCHECK_STR:  0x9F

PROCESS_NAME:  System

CURRENT_IRQL:  2

STACK_TEXT:  
82b2da94 82a43054 0000009f 00000003 88ce8d60 nt!KeBugCheckEx+0x1e
82b2db00 82a428e8 82b2dba0 00000000 82b3a280 nt!PopCheckIrpWatchdog+0x1f5
82b2db38 82a7104d 82b48a20 00000000 61ef7a8f nt!PopCheckForIdleness+0x73
82b2db7c 82a70ff1 82b30d20 82b2dca8 00000001 nt!KiProcessTimerDpcTable+0x50
82b2dc68 82a70eae 82b30d20 82b2dca8 00000000 nt!KiProcessExpiredTimerList+0x101
82b2dcdc 82a6f20e 00063037 87b0bd48 82b3a280 nt!KiTimerExpiration+0x25c
82b2dd20 82a6f038 00000000 0000000e 00000000 nt!KiRetireDpcList+0xcb
82b2dd24 00000000 0000000e 00000000 00000000 nt!KiIdleLoop+0x38


STACK_COMMAND:  kb

FOLLOWUP_NAME:  MachineOwner

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID:  0x9F_3_ftser2k_IMAGE_ftdibus.sys

BUCKET_ID:  0x9F_3_ftser2k_IMAGE_ftdibus.sys

Followup: MachineOwner
---------

 
In this case, parameter 4 of the bugcheck is the IRP that is being blocked. We can look a little closer using the !irp extension command:


0: kd> !irp 88724df8
Irp is active with 4 stacks 2 is current (= 0x88724e8c)
 No Mdl: No System Buffer: Thread 00000000:  Irp stack trace.  
     cmd  flg cl Device   File     Completion-Context
 [  0, 0]   0  0 00000000 00000000 00000000-00000000    

   Args: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
>[ 16, 2]   0  0 88cf4038 00000000 00000000-00000000    
       Unable to load image \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\ftser2k.sys, Win32 error 0n2
*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for ftser2k.sys
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for ftser2k.sys
 \Driver\FTSER2K
   Args: 00012200 00000001 00000003 00000002
 [ 16, 2]   0 e1 88cec3e8 00000000 82a90871-896502d8 Success Error Cancel pending
        \Driver\Serenum nt!IopUnloadSafeCompletion
   Args: 00012200 00000001 00000003 00000002
 [  0, 0]   0  0 00000000 00000000 00000000-87bbcf18    

   Args: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000


When we look at the failure bucket ID BUCKET_ID:  0x9F_3_ftser2k_IMAGE_ftdibus.sys
its shows that ftser2k is causing the issue.

 
In this case, 2 pending IRPs are shown, the one with the > is the current IRP. In this case the problem was actually due to the ftser2k.sys driver (not the ftdibus.sys driver that was shown in the main !analyze -v output. This demonstrates an important point... Always check the IRP to determine the driver that is responsible for the hang.

There are many other debugging commands you can also use, and those are all outlined here.  Hopefully this will help YOU out the next time some crazy bluescreen you can’t figure out; and you won’t be re-installing the OS to get rid of it.


---


Other resources:

-The official Microsoft list of bluescreen failure codes with documentation on each one:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff542347%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

-Another list of the various bluescreen failure codes and their plaintext sub-code descriptions with some notes from external folks:
http://www.faultwire.com/solutions_index/fatal_error-1.html#IssueList

-Microsoft Answers forum that has really responsive and informative threads on just about every blue-screen investigation ever done. These guys chew up minidumps all day and can help you track down just about anything that’s going on (if just searching the forum doesn’t do it for you automatically):
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7repair/threads

-Another Microsoft forum that seems to do a fair amount of this kind of debug work:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproperf/threads