Archive for May, 2010

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Installing EEMame to play MAME games on Nokia 9300i / Turn your Nokia mobile to arcade game statition

Monday, May 31st, 2010

EEMame Nokia 9300i

Since I’m keen on old school arcade games I checked online if I can install and play MAME (Multimedia Arcade Machine Emulator) games (roms) to my Nokia 9300i mobile.
The information on the topic on the Net is pretty much muddled so it took me a while until I found that in order to install a MAME port for Nokia 9300i I will have to use EEMame – MAME for Symbian Mobile Phones .
The first thing I came across before I finally found EEMame was EMame 9210 .
Emame is a port of Mame that is compatible with Nokia 9300i since the 9300i mobile has backward compatibility with the older 9210 phone.
To save memory since the Nokia 9210 has low memory capacity the Mame 9210 application is actually separated in 4 applications each of which containing a set of drivers for a number of mame rom game files.:
The whole application Emame9210All.sis is separated into the following parts:

EMame9210Set1.sis
EMame9210Set2.sisEMame9210Set3.sis
EMame9210Set4.sis

For convenience the developers has provided also a .sis file containing all the up-mentioned 4 parts in one .sis archive
For some convenience I have created a mirror from which you can download EMame9210All.SIS

Though the Emame9210 would install on the Nokia 9300i and you’ll be able to run each of the 4 exe files from the Nokia file manager I couldn’t make the application work with any of the listed roms that are marked as a tested on the Emame9210.
Honestly I didn’t really spend much time trying, so it could be my fault that I couldn’t bring the Emame9210 on my 9300i mobile. Be aware that trying to run some rom files downloaded from romnation.net and listed as compatible with the 9210 arcade emulator led the Emame9210 programs to crash.
So assume the Emame9210 is not really compatible with the Nokia 9300 phone. Anyways this first time though mournful was just a plunge-board to the “real deal”, e.g. the real joy experienced when I found out that the EEMame port is available for Nokia 9300i
To install the EEMame on my Nokia 9300i I downloaded and installed the eemame-series80-1.1.SIS . The file is also available through EEmame’s official website download section along with few other EEmame for a few other Motorolla and Nokia powered devices.

Another thing I really liked about EEMame is that it’s released under the GNU General Public License

So far so good ’till now I was having a complete working version of MAME to my Nokia 9300i mobile but I was lacking any games and I was absolutely lazy to scrape through the internet to find some working rom files for the EEMame, not to mention that only a exact set of rom files is compatible to the device and you have to check and download the compatible games one by one … this is pretty much insane especially if you’re a busy man as I am.
I assumed somebody has already done the hard task of downloading and creating a pack with rom files that run on the EEMame so I spend approximately some half an hour to look for a preliminary prepared pack of rom files that would run on the EEMame mobile (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).
The original announce for the availability for download of eemame 218 rom games which are compatible with EEMame could be red here

You can download MAME_S60v3_and_working_ROMSET_by_herbalb.rar here

Herein I will include herbalb original message found along with his 218 rom games pack for EEMAME :

Some time ago I made a romset that includes 1320 of 1321 Roms known to work with EEMAME (also included). Hope some of you will like it and have fun playing these original arcade games (i.e. Wonderboy, Ghost N Goblins, Joust, Arkanoid, 1943, Burger Time, Contra ...).
By the way, when starting a game and you read 'press OK to continue' just push left and then right on the directional pad on your phone and the game will start.

I tested them (many of them) on my N95.
You can also try this version of EEMame to use with the Set above (I have not tested this version as i am using the one includet in the set)Happy new year and peace to everyone.

herbalb

NOTE: I am happy if you share it with others but please do not say it would be your own work. It took me hours to do find all necessary games for this set, so please be social, thanks.

As you can see in herbalb’s message the ROM games for EEMame are not tested with other mobile phones except the N95.
I downloaded and tested his EEMAME rom pack set and I have to confirm almost all the game are loading with EEMame perfectly fine.
However there is two minor down-sides of the EEMame on Nokia 9300i. First you will probably have to play the rom games without a sound, because when sound is enabled almost all the games will work slow as hell, and second most of the MAME emulated games will occupy just a small portion of your screen and you won’t be able to enjoy the joy of playing the game on a full wide screen on your cellphone.
Anyways life is not perfectly anywhere, being able to play all this wonderful oldschool arcade directly on your Nokia 9300i mobile turns your mobile into a sophisticated game station and guarantees you a lot of fun.
I have prepared a list of all the rom files included with MAME_S60v3_and_working_ROMSET_by_herbalb.rar, you can check the whole list of roms available for EEMame on Nokia 9300i here

I have also made some few modifications in the readme of the herbalb’s archive and have included the necessery sis file to install and run EEMAME on Nokia 9300i the new archive can be downloaded here.

Just in case if you need to download some specific rom files from the whole collection please select your preferred EEMame ROM file here
Well, That’s all folks! All left now is to truly enjoy your classic nitendo & arcade games playable directly on your Nokia 9300i mobile! 🙂

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Posted in Entertainment, Mobile Phone Apps & Games | 8 Comments »

Manage tasks and processes on your cellphone with TaskSpy

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

TaskSpy on Nokia 9300i, Nokia 9300 TaskSpy
I was looking for a decent freeware program that will be able to manage my processes (a task manager) and be able to show statistics about memory and cpu usage for my Nokia 9300i.
Until recently I used a cracked version of BestTaskman which did quite a good job until recently when the program started crashing on my cellphone.
I remember last time how much time I spend to find a decent crack for the BestTaskMan taskmanager and this time I decided to check if there is something similar to BestTasman that could handle my processes and doesn’t need to be cracked.
I was happily suprised to find TaskSpy which is a superb program and was exactly what I was looking for. It even has some extra capabilities compared to BestTaskman though it is a bit less unconvinient while switching tasks, since every time the user is required to switch to the TaskSpy and from hence choose if he desires to switch to another application, kill an application monitor the mobile etc.

Here I will include a short description on what to expect if you install and start using TaskSpy:

TaskSpy is a completely free task manager for Symbian OS devices.
It allows you to get more control and information over running tasks on your mobile phone.
You can quickly switch tasks, kill processes and threads or free unused memory, as well as display detailed information about system resources.
Other features, such as tracking cpu load and free memory, though aimed to developers, may result of interest to advanced users.Another really handy feature is that TaskSpy is able to reboot your mobile.

Currently TaskSpy supports the following mobile architectures:

* Symbian 6 Series 60
* Symbian 6 Series 60 1.0
* Symbian 6 Series 60 1.2
* Symbian 7 Series 60 2.0
* Symbian 7 Series 60 2.1
* Symbian 8 Series 60 2.6
* Symbian 8 Series 60 2.8

If you’re interested into TaskSpy and you’d like to download and install it on your mobile, please follow this taskspy download link
I personally had a great experience with the program on my Nokia 9300i, hopefully you will enjoy it too.

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Posted in Mobile Phone Apps & Games | 1 Comment »

Substitute for Putty SSH client on Nokia 9300i

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

I’ve recently had issues with my Putty for S80 on my Nokia 9300i.
Though the port of Putty for Symbian is quite good looking it has many down falls. A major down side is it’s slowness, a connectionto an SSH server would take up like 5 to 7 minutes time.
As they say time and money and loosing time is annoyance and this is especially true if you have to quickly do something on a server via your mobile.

I looked online for good SSH clients that might be a substitute to the PuTTY SSH client In my search I came across this list of SSH clients compatible with the Symbian’s S80 phone architecture

Mocha Telnet client for Nokia 9300, 9300i and Nokia 9500

I haven’t tested all of the provided clients but I was blessed to find what I was looking for, I found the Mocha Telnet for Nokia 9300/9500 which is a really nice SSH and Telnet client. I had to acknowledge, it’s interface and it’s SSH session management interface is a way down uhandy but in general the Mocha Telnet is a quickly connection handler able to communicate with the remote SSH servers on Nokia 9300i.
Usually to establish an SSH connection to a server it tooks like 1 minute using the Mocha Telnet this is really quick compared to the 6 minutes waiting while using PuTTY.

Here is a list of the capabilities of the Mocha Telnet client for Nokia 9300 / 9500 (a quote from Mocha telnet’s website):

Mocha Telnet Features:

* VT220 emulation.
* SSH2
* Autologin with scripting parameter.
* User defined function keys.
* Screen mode 24*80.
* Online Help.
* Many trim parameters.
* Small and fast.
* Free upgrades to new versions of the product.

To download the Mocha Telnet SSH for your Nokia 9300i check here

The Mocha Telnet creators Mocha Sof provides also a nice vnc client for Nokia 9300i you can download the program from here

But wait there is even some more glad glad tidings about Mocha Telnet and the Vnc. It seems since the programs product cycle is over and there are no new versions of the programs developed for the Nokia 9300i and a few other old school Symbian powered Nokia phones, MochaSoft decided to liberate the applications as a freeware by providing a freeware registration codes for the programs to benefit from the codes and register both your Mocha Telnet you can use:

Freeware license key for mocha Telnet for Nokia 9300,9300i/9500:

License name: freeware
License key: A15761

The Freeware license key for mocha VNC for Nokia 9300,9300i/9500 is:

License name: freeware
License key: 142449

In case if you’re curious, how administration of a remote Windows server will look alike over a VNC client, here is also a nice screenshot of Mocha VNC for the Nokia 9300i mobile:
Mocha Vnc Nokia 9300, 9300i, 9500
There are a few other interesting applications for other mobile phones again by MochaSoft, check them here

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Posted in Mobile Phone Apps & Games | 6 Comments »

How to reset to factory defaults (hard reset) hanged Nokia 9300i device / How to format your Nokia 9300i

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Today my Nokia 9300i device became completely useless, after a reboot. Yesterday I installed on my 9300i an application called AppMan which according to it’s description looked like a superb program.
After installing it few of my applications stopped working. I decided to leave it that way and continue playing with the phone on the morning so I went to bed.
This morning when I woke up I decided to install the Psiloc HotSpot Finder cause I needed a handy application to connect to the wireless networks.
After installing and trying to learn some of all the installed applications I received the re-occuring error:
“system: unable to find the specified object.“.

I thought a restart would fix it so I restarted the phone by unplugging the phone battery without switching on the phone using the front swith on / off button.
Just a bit later I red online that in order to properly reboot the Nokia 9300i device it’s necessery to first: Switch off the front panel and then unplug the battery ..
I plugged in the battery again and switched the phone it booted okay and prompted me to enter the current date. I filled in the date and confirmed it.
A message reading:
system: unable to find the specified object. followed by a Continue button poped up right after the date dialog. I pressed it and another dialog poped up … just a few seconds later the screen started messing up and froze.
I waited for a couple of minutes and when I got really irritated I restarted it again, again unplugging the battery with the hope it was some temporary hang.
Well pitily I was wrong next time the phone switched on and when I entered current date in the date dialog it hanged once again… Well I thought okay let me try to restart once again, so I restarted.
This time even the set date dialog doesn’t appeared but the screen messed up after the phone showed up the Nokia logo and the boot progress bar, the progress bar was completed and the phone froze showing up part of the Nokia Logo and partly something from my Desk.
I restarted once again the phone and started experimenting if I can somehow recover the nokia to boot normally once again.
I red in the internet in a forum that there is a possiblity to fix an unbootable nokia 9300i, with restart unplugging the battery and keeping the Front located Switch on button on the phone.
Though this prooved untrue for me pressing the switch on button produced no results.
Seeing that this won’t make the 9300i phone boot I decided to try to remove the Mobile MMC card and try if it’s gonna boot without the card, however this didn’t worked.
Then I tried to remove both the sim card and the MMC Mobile card and try to boot the phone with only the battery but without the sim card but it seems without the sim card the phone doesn’t even start booting.

I red many forums online and tons of other tries among which I tried to cancel the application that was hanging on the phone with the key combination:

1. SHIFT + CTRL + K
2. SHIFT + CTRL + CHR key + K

The two upmentioned key combinations are embedded into the 9300i and 9500 application and would close the last active application on the symbian OS.
I tried both holding for a minute the shift + ctrl + k and shift + ctrl + chr + k and pressing them many times during the phone was booting.
One of the times I was able to kill all the applications except the one responsible for the telephone book, then I tried pressing the telephone Desk button hoping that this would make the Desktop application to launch, but again it didnd’t launched.
Having the phone book available I tried to switch on the front panel of the phone but the panel won’t switch on in that “emergency” mode.

The situation seemed desparate .. my phone was completely dead. Anyways I was lucky that I found in Google some guys who shared how they have achieved to reset the Nokia 9300i to factury settings using the embedded Nokia Format phone program.

To use the embedded format to reset the device to factory settings I had to keep pressed:

3. SHIFT+CTRL+F

for some time after plugging in the phone battery. It’s really imporant to keep the keys pressed before the Nokia Handshake logo appears.

Some people say it’s necessery to press and hold shit+ctrl+chr key + f before the Format dialog shows up, however I tried and this and this key combination wasn’t working.

After I succesfully invoked nokia’s built in format program a blue screen appeared with the options:

Format and Cancel

I proceeded and selected the Format and the device formatted, the format took only 20 or 30 seconds and therefore I suspect this format as nokia has called it is not a real format but it’s just some quick way to restore the original factory firmware to the mobile.

Currently after the succesful format the phone started booting in normally once again and my front panel of the phone is working once again.
Unfortunately some of the programs which were installed on the Phone’s C: drive are missing or not working, but I was lucky to install most of my applications on my 1GB MMC card
It’s probably worthy to note that during the phone format I formatted the phone without the external 1GB MMC card, because I have worries that the format could somehow erase data from the MMC card.
It’s really nice that after the factory firmware was reversed when I plugged my external MMC card with all my software installed on it works without any problems with the phone. Even the installed applications on the MMC works perfectly fine.
But wait even there is a positive thing from flushing the phone Nokia 9300i with back to it’s firmware! Now my mobile firmware Symbian OS works a way faster 🙂

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Posted in Mobile Phone Apps & Games | 24 Comments »

Resolving vnstat “Error: Database load failed even when using backup. Aborting.” on FreeBSD

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

I’m using vnstat to track my inbound and outbound traffic for quite some time on my FreeBSD powered router systemat home.
Until this very day it worked completely flawless, so almost every day I issued the command:

vnstat --days

To check the internal and external flow of traffic to my FreeBSD node. The advantages of using vnstat this ways are numerous,
maybe the most notable benefit is that you can keep an eye on the increase of traffic to your webserver,
that’s absolutely handy if you try to better rank your websites and increase monthly traffic to your Apache.
The above command will show up data for server accessbility since, vnstat started to build databases and if a drastic dropdown in network traffic to your system is observed this would be an indicator for some kind of problem with either your networkor some of the network services your server provides.

Well as I said today I tried to once again examine the yesterday statistics of vnstat, but instead the statistics the following error appeared:

pcfreak# vnstat -u
Error: Database load failed even when using backup. Aborting.

A quick research in Google led me to some other complains of the error and some explanation that the error is caused of some vnstat database flaw which is encountered on 32 bit and 64 bit architectures.

In order to solve the problem I had to:
1. Remove the old vnstat databases, using command:

pcfreak# rm -rf /var/db/vnstat

2. Rebuild vnstat database for my network interface

pcfreak# vnstat -u -i em0
Error: Unable to read database "/var/db/vnstat/em0".
Info: -> A new database has been created.
And we’re done, vnstat should start working as expected once again.

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Posted in FreeBSD, System Administration | 3 Comments »

ASCII PacMan (Pac-Man) for Linux and FreeBSD / Play online ASCII Pacman

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

ASCII Pacman image

Since just few days ago it was the birthday of Pac-Man game (The abolute classic game among ’80s arcardes).
I decided to try to look if there is an ASCII Pacman available somewhere.
Luckily there are number of ASCII versions of the classic arcade PacMan for both Linux and FreeBSD, I thought,it doesn’t worth the time to check if ASCII Pacman is also available for Windows OS.
For all the ASCII game fans out there I’ve installed ASCII PacMan FreeBSD version on the Play Cool FreeBSD ASCII games free page From there you can play a number of cool ascii art games online via telnet, the reasons I took the time to add the ASCII Pacman to the list of possible games to play is that it’s a shame that the list misses one of the most notable games if not the most notable ever made.

For Linux I’ve found three version of ASCII Pacman:

1. The best looking one is probably ASCII Pacman Linux clone game available on sourceforge.net
You can download ASCII Pac-Man 0.9.1 from here

I’ve included 2 files with instructions on installation and usage of the game. I saw that as a completely necessery since,the game controls of the elsely nice looking game are hard to get. To play the game you will need to use the game controls:
z,x – to move right and left and m,k for up and down .

2. A bit more ugly and less interactive is another version of ASCII PacMan called:
Pac-Man for Console or simply Console Pacman

This two compiled without any troubles on my Debian GNU/Linux squeeze/sid Linux .
Unfortunately the up-mentioned ascii version of pacman won’t work on FreeBSD

3. The ASCII Pacman that is running and compatible with FreeBSD is called Pacman ASCII and herein is it’s home page

PacMan ascii is a way less sophisticated, so don’t expect too much of it. Originally Pacman ASCII was a project by some French guy in with the main task to learn C++.
Anyways he did a good job, since his little ascii pacman game is compatible with FreeBSD as well.
You can download ASCII Pacman for FreeBSD here

I did some minor modifications to few of the ASCII Pacman .cpp files in order to change the default help and game language from French to English, since French would be cryptic to most of the non-french users.

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Posted in Entertainment, FreeBSD, Games Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

Play pacman arcade fork in Google

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Google Pacman Game Arcade

Check out www.google.com/pacman/ .
It appears Google has introduced a new “service” a google search engine with embedded pacman in it 🙂
This guys are serioulsy insane. A friend of mine has sent it to me via Skype and at first I thought google hassimply made http://www.google.com/pacman to open up google with an image of pacman instead of Google.
Few moments later I realized, that the banner in www.google.com/pacman/ is actually not a banner buta completely playable copy version of the original world famous arcade game Pac-Man
The game even support 2 players :). In order to play the game you’ll need to insert a coin just like in the good old times, in Pacman powered Google search engine interface you will find the insert coin button which substitutes the usual I feel lucky one.

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Posted in Entertainment | No Comments »

Resolving Wildcard DNS subdomains in Virtual hosts in Apache webserver (WildCard Virtual Hosts)

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

The company for which I’m employed as a free lancer, has a requirement to start-up a new website on a different Debian Linux powered server.
In connection to that they needed to change the DNS records to point to the new IP address of the server.
That was a piece of cake, all I had to do was, edit the domain name zone file and change the A (Active) record to point to another IP address
The trouble was that in this concrete scenario the website domain has previously had Wildcard DNS record enabled earlier on.
So domains like bla.exampledomain.com, asdf.exampledomain.com you-name-it.exampledomain.com was configured to resolve to the IP address determined for the exampledomain.com
Therefore it was necessery that Apache is configured to serve any incoming request on any *.exampledomain.com subdomain accessed.

Fortunately this is really easily achievable and is described in Apache Named-based Virtualhost documentation

In short all you need to make your Apache start serving all incoming requests to any subdomain is to edit your Virtualhost on Debian for the default subdomain that would mean to edit:

edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default

debian-server:~# vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default
# Therein you will have to add the following line

ServerAlias domainexample.com *.domainexample.com

That’s is all necessery, now restart the webserver as usual for the new configuration to take affect.

debian-server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Congrats, now all your subdomians for the domainexample.com like for instance:

http://bla.domainexample.com or http://somerandom-word.domainexample.com should open http://domainexample.com .

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Posted in System Administration | 1 Comment »

Human Pacman & Mario Watch out this funny reproductions of the classic arcades

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Yesterday a friend of mine (Static) has passed to me a really funny videos in Skype.
The idea behind the videos is quite interesting, so it’s worthy to explain it in a few words.
Some hard core arcade gamers has found there dedication to the arcade games to a level, where theydecided to reproduce (play), there favourite arcades in a real life situations.
Some of the guys involved in the bizarre ideas, dressed up with a customs of the arcade game heroes,like Pacman, Mario, Luigi etc. and started re-create scenes from the famous Video games:

Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros
as well as other games reproductions.

I’ll post just two videos of what exactly the insane guys has done just watch the videos, I guarantee you a real hard laugh 🙂


a Human Pacman game – How Pac-Man would like if it was in real life 🙂


Human Super Mario Bros. (reproduced) – How Super Mario bros would look like in the real life 🙂

Enjoy! 🙂

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Posted in Entertainment, Various | No Comments »

Pentecost (The Descent of the Holy Spirit) to the st. Apostles

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Pentecost, The Descent of the Holy Spirit over the st. Apostles

Today here in Bulgaria as well as in the rest of Orthodox Christian world, we celebrate one of the most bright Christian feasts Pentecost!
The celebration on this feast 50 days after the Glorious Descension of the Lord Jesus Christ to heaven, whenst the our Lord and God’s Son has sat on the Right Hand of God.
The word Pentecost is probably derived from latin is a word (pente = five) and is describing the glorious event that happened on the 50th day after the descension of our Lord to heaven.
On Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection on the exciting Jewish feast of Pentecost, while the desciples and many other followers of Jesus Christ were gathered together to pray, the Holy Spirit descended upon them in the form of “cloven tongues of fire”, with the sound of a mighty rushing wind, and they began to speak in languages that they did not know. There were many visitors from the Jewish diaspora to Jerusalem at that time for the Jewish observance of the feast, and they were astonished to hear these untaught fisherman speaking praises to God in their alien tongues. This account is well described in the book Acts of the Apostles – chapter 2
Another interesting fact is that on this date we in the Orthodox church have the so called “faithful kneel” in Church for the first time since Pascha.
The “faithful kneel” service which is served right after the evening service following the liturgy is followed right after that with this “faithful kneel” prayers on which we the believers kneel to venerate the Holy Spirit and direct a prayer to God that he forgives us and prevents us and save us through his holy Spirit.
It’s an interesting fact that Pentecost is historically and symbolically related to the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot which is a feast on which the God’s giving of the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai is commemorated, this according to jewish orthodox tradition is exactly fifty days after Exodus.
In practice Pentecost is the day on which the Orthodox Church, e.g. the True Church of Christ was born.
On that date when the Holy Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit which was earlier promised by our Lord Jesus Christ to the faithful desciples.
When the Holy Spirit descended and sat upon each of them. The desciples of our Lord was filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak in other nations tongues.
When that event occured, there were many visitors from the Jewish diaspora to Jerusalem at that time for the jewish observance of the feast, and they were astonished to hear these untaught fisherman speaking praises to God in their alien tongues.
Here is what is recounted in Acts 2:1-4 and how the event was described in the Holy Bible.

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.Happy Feast to all Orthodox Christians!

And for the glorious event that happened, glory be to the Father, To the Son and Thy Holy Spirit now and unto ages of ages! Amen!

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Posted in Christianity | 3 Comments »

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