Bah Manual: Fill & Download for Free

When I was a kid, I bought some parts to put together a new PC. I waited with bated breath, compulsively checking tracking numbers, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the doodads for my new tool/toy.When they finally arrived I could hardly contain myself. I vigorously unboxed and slagged them all together with gusto, set the jumpers, connected the case buttons and pressed go and WHIRR!, lights went on and fans started spinning and … nothing else happened.No video output, no BIOS error beeps, nada … just lights lighting up, and spinning things spinning. My stomach turned. How could life be so cruel and unfair?I went through the motherboard manual a second time, then a third… I checked and re-checked every jumper. I retested some parts in other computers. I decided the motherboard was at fault.My 13-year-old-gamer heart sinking at the injustice of multiple days of OEM replacement shipping, I called Asus technical support, who of course wanted to walk me through endless lists of things I had already tried. I started to get frustrated.“No, there’s really no BIOS beep error code.” I told him. “If there were a BIOS error beep code, I wouldn’t have to call you!”“Do you have a speaker plugged into the motherboard?” he asked.I paused. “I thought that was built into the motherboard.”“Nope, sometimes they are, sometimes they come with the case and you have to connect one.”Bah! The case I had bought did not have one. Okay, I thought… maybe I have one somewhere.“Hold on a sec!” I said. I didn’t want to lose him, as I had waited on hold for half an hour beforehand. “Let me see if I have one.”Rummaging frantically through my graveyard of computer bits, I found that one of my old cases did have a dusty old PC speaker in there. Huzzah!In there rather snugly, as it turned out.“Just a sec… don’t hang up… I just need to…”Oh no. Oh dear, oh dear.In my haste and enthusiasm to get the doodad out, I had applied a bit too much force, and the solder points where the wires connected to the speaker came loose. This was definitely the only one in my parts graveyard. My mind scrambled to think of a way to accommodate the situation immediately. I tried to think of anything else I could use as a makeshift PC speaker.“Don’t hang up! I can … um … I can hold both the wires against the speaker with my fingers while I boot the computer with my nose.”Silence.“You still there?”“Yes”, said Asus technical support, facepalming. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to get a reliable BIOS error signal by holding the wires on the speaker while you boot the computer with your nose.”Oh, ye of little faith! But then, maybe this chap was right… holding the wires against the torn lumps of solder wasn’t going to be a reliable way to diagnose the BIOS error. Perhaps my eagerness to game was clouding my judgement and this support person was the voice of reason. I was about to give up and sulk… and then it struck me: the random thing I now know about computers that few people do.I took the two wires and placed them on my tongue and booted the computer. The BIOS signaled my tongue with one long, then three short, electric shocks. Eureka!I told the Asus technical support person this excitedly. He promptly ended the call without a word. I looked this sequence up in the motherboard manual which immediately revealed the problem. I don’t recall now exactly what the problem was, but the motherboard was not defective and later that day I was triumphantly gaming away.So, in a pinch, if you don’t have a PC speaker handy but your BIOS is trying to tell you something, just put the wires on your tongue. It’s only 12 volts, which doesn’t hurt at all, and it was remarkably easy to identify which beep code I had been missing. Who needs a PC speaker anyway?(Updated to correct the actual BIOS error code: one long and three short, with thanks to Terry Lambert for knowing what it really was)

Two stories here:I’m working my first job as an attendant in a petrol station. My schoolmate, Pat Strickland, is doing the same job in the station just over the road.One Saturday morning I saw him (heard him!) working an old Holden EH and killing himself laughing. On my break, I went over to ask Pat what had happened.“Guy tells me to fill her up and check the oil. After we’d finished under the bonnet, the guy says, ‘That’s strange. She only takes X gallons.’”The fuel line, which runs through the boot (trunk, Yanks) to the tank, had fractured. When they opened the boot they found the guy’s Saturday shopping floating on petrol.(We had not gone fully metric at that time. Stores were closed on Sundays.)A relative, Glenn, lent me his shitbox old box Ford after my Suby had been written off by arseholes joyriding in a stolen bomb.It would start from cold just fine but never start from warm. This made getting petrol problematic.Glenn had never had the problem. I drove to his place and he started it just fine. I drove away scratching my head and, sure enough, when I tried to start from warm again at Mum’s place, no go.It took me a week to figure it out. (I had tried to start with the headlights on.)The Ford was an automatic. I only buy manuals. (Stick-shifts, Yanks).Manual drivers always start the engine with their foot on the brake. Apparently auto drivers do not.The Ford had just enough electric power to start the motor provided that the brake-lights weren’t on.Bah!

A short while ago, I had an unlikely (pointless but funny) revelation that was a full 20 years in the making.If you grew up in the 1990s and had a NES or SuperNES console, you probably remember this…Yes, I’m talking about the Metroid game series.This franchise was big back then. Capital-B-big. And I played the heck out of both the NES and the SuperNES versions. To the point that I could basically recite all the lore from memory. The monsters. The zones. The upgrades… you name it. And you better could. The games were hard, and you wanted every bit of info you could get your hands on.Not that it was overly tricky to remember. After all, the setting was evocative, but the actual lore was comparably sparse, and pretty much every power-up had an almost trivially simple and straightforward name. Such as “Ice Beam”, “Power Bomb”, “High Jump Boots” and so on.With one notable exception:The thing you see on the screenshot up there. The “Varia”.If you pick it up, it will enhance your combat suit, permanently granting you additional protection and immunity against certain environmental hazards. But why was it named “Varia”? Heck, what is a “Varia”, in the first place? The game didn’t tell you. Not even a hint. The Varia was just… sitting there, looking mysterious as f*** to teenage-me. What was it?A name, obviously. But of what? Some fictional super-material? The name of some powerful alien race that made this thing? The name of some fundamental physical force, maybe?Nope. Nothing.This was long before the internet really took off, so I had no way of finding out. But oh well, we grow up, and we move on. So did I, until I had mostly forgotten about the Varia…However, luck wanted it that, for some entirely unrelated reason, I began learning Japanese… and many, many years later (and some days ago), I then chanced upon a scan of the Japanese version of the old Metroid manual in the interwebs.Grinning with nostalgia, I flicked through the pages, until I hit this:…and immediately remembered the profound Varia mystery.I thought “Wow.” I mean, this was the source. And I could freaking read it, too. The original lore. The first gospel truth, not some dumbed-down, abridged version printed on cheap german paper. Maybe this would have more information, and would finally shed light on this enigma from my yout-……… wait.バリア ?Yes, I was reading バリア there.Baria. Not Varia, as in the English version.It was Baria.Bah-reeh-aaa.Baaaaaaaaah Reeeeeh…*intense cringing followed*I probably wouldn’t have realized it a few years ago, but having reached my current level of Japanese proficiency, it was glaringly obvious to me what I was looking at. The original word was “Bareeah”: Baaaaaaah-reeeeeeh-yaaaah… or rather, the english word “Barrier”, spelled in the peculiar but inevitable sound-syllables of the Japanese language.So much for secret and mysterious super-materials. So much for powerful, otherwise unmentioned alien races. So much for enigmatic forces. Nope: Barrier. Fullstop.Thus, a pleasant enigma from my youth was reduced to the mere brainfart of a remarkably clueless English translator. Well. At least I will die a little less stupid, now.