Josh Highland’s Blog

Its not a secret that I have "burning wrist hurt disease". My doctor likes to refer to it as carpel tunnel syndrome.

Lately my wrists have been killing me. At work, I have a dell standard style type of keyboard, and a standard dell mouse with a scroll wheel. My index finger on my right hand is shot from the scrolling motion, and my hands are jacked from typing. I needed some thing better. Enter the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000.

After I did a little research I decided that the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 was for me. The interesting thing about the keyboard is that it has a "zoom slider". The zoom slider is a cool idea but executed poorly. Who wants a "zoom" slider to change the font size of the screen?

It would be so much better if it was a slider for scrolling. I hit the web and found out there was a hack to do just this over at pain in the tech. In a few steps I was able to change the zoom slider into a scroll slider.

I was happy, but I found that a lot of applications still zoomed in on the text instead of scrolling, like outlook. I decided to hack the commands a bit more, and remove the zoom functionality all together, and replace it with scrolling.

To make things better, Here is a copy of the commands.xml file that I am running, so you can share in my joy also.

To change the zoom into a scroll, using my patched commands.xml file:

1. Navigate to the your Intelitype Pro directory, mine is "C:Program FilesMicrosoft IntelliType Pro"
2. Rename the existing commands.xml to commands.xml_OLD
3. Place the new commands.xml into that directory
4. Reboot the computer

With the scroll hack in place, I can scroll a window without having to take my hands off the keyboard. Thanks Miscrosoft for making a sweet keyboard, but no thanks for not making it a scroll slider in the first place. A zoom slider is just a stupid idea.

Alot of people I know dont like firefox because its slow. after following my insteructions here, firefox will be anything but slow:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
   
   network.http.pipelining
   
   network.http.proxy.pipelining
   
   network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

   Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

   Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
   
   Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
   
   Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
   

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
   
   If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!"
   

Its common knowledge that you dont want to drop / slam / or hit your expensive electronics, you might break them. Well, what if your expensive electronics is already broken?

Im writing this in response to the hundreds of comments I received on my blog post about replacing a broken ipod hard drive.

It seems that there is a very unconventional way to fix your broken ipod, without having to open it or spend any money…. beat your ipod up! You heard me right, Slap your ipod!

How to do this:

Hold your ipod so the screen faces the palm of your hand and slap the back of it a few solid times. Thats it.

I personally havent tried this, but based on the response to my previous blog post, its worked for over 100 people so far.

Why does spanking your ipod fit it?

Here are a few of my thoughts on why this might work.

1. Your ipod might have stopped working if the hard drive connection came lose. Slapping the ipod might jar the connection back into place.
2. The hard drive arm might have gotten stuck for some reason. Spanking the ipod might free up that hard drive arm.
3. It might just be magic!

I really dont know why it works but I guess it does. If you have any experience with this post a comment.

To most of you out there, the above string of numbers mean nothing, to me, and the others who find this post through search engines, this is a horrible thing to see on your computer screen. but I have found a fix for it, so don't worry!

In my living room I have a machine running windows MCE 2005. I like it. After installing some patches from Microsoft and doing some minor work to the computer, It started acting funny. The TV output would flicker, so I would have to reboot the computer.

When the computer was booting, after the POST, I would get "L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99" on the screen, and the computer would halt. What an awesome and useful error message!

I found a temporary way around the problem. During boot, I could go into the BIOS, and hit "save and exit", and I was good for one boot. But that's not a solution, that's a hack!

After looking around online, I found that the problem comes from a damaged Master Boot Record (MBR). It can be fixed by booting up from a Windows 2000, or Windows XP CD, going into the Repair Console, and running the "FIXMBR" command.

After I did that, I was able to boot up like normal. I fixed my MCE video flicker problem by updating my NVIDIA Drivers. It feels good to figure things like this out; it makes me feel like I'm actually winning, for a change.

My brother Justin loved his 20 gig 4th generation ipod until he dropped it at the gym one day. It stopped working all together and would make clicking noises when he would try to start it.
He had gotten it as a gift and didnt have the reciept for it, so he couldnt take it back unter warrenty I guess. Apple said that it would cost $250 to fix. Instead of fixing it, he spend the money on
a 30 gig 5th generation. I asked him for the broken ipod so I could tinker with it. After I got it from him, I decided that it would be cool to own an ipod, and that if i could fix it for less then the
retail price, I would be a head of the game. I documented my adventure of trying to fix my ipod, check it out.

1. When I would start the ipod, I would get an icon of a folder and a warning sign. The ipod would then make a bunch of clicking noises. That make me think that the hard drive was crapped out.
   
   
2. Since it was already broken, why not take it apart and try to make it work. There was no clear way to ebter the ipod, so I decided to pry off the metal back using the thinnest screw driver I could find.
   It wasnt that hard to work the screw drive between the metal and the plastic. I worked the screw driver down the side of the case, until it popped off.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. I flipped the ipod over, and opened it up slowly, I noticed that there was a ribbon cable connecting the guts if the ipod to the jacks mounted to the metal back. I was careful not to mess this connection up.
   
   
   
   
4. The ipod uses an ide harddrive, the connector pulled directly off without any problems. I now hard the bad harddrive free,
   
   
   
   
5. The drive had blue rubber bumpers wrapped around it, and on the back, there was a foam mat that was glued to the drive.
   
   
6. Removing the bumpers was no problem, they pulled directly off with out any fight.
   
   
7. I tried to pull the foam off the drive by pulling on it, but that wasnt working, so I desided to get a razor blade scraper and screape it off. It worked well.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. Once I had the foam off, I could see that it was a toshiba drive. Model MK2004GAL. I looke dofr replacements online, but was only able to find the model MK2006GAL. I compared the MK2004GAL and the MK2006GAL, and didnt see any big differences, so I ordered one. 3 days letter I had my new drive. It didnt have the apple logo on it, but who cares, it was only $100!
   
9. The blue bumpers went on with out a problem, and fit like a glove.
   
   
10. To get the foam to stick to the new drive, I went super ghetto and reached in my desk, and came up with a glue stick! Hey, it goet the job done.
    
    
    
    
11. The new drive went in, just like the old one came out. I connected the IDE connection, and I was ready to close it up.
    

12. I put the back on, and pressed down on it evenly. The back snapped without any problems.
    
13. Next, I downloaded the ipod updater (11-17-2005) from apple.com, and installed it. I hooked up my newly rebuilt ipod, and did a restore. It went really fast.
    
    
    
    
    
    
14. After the restore, I had to hook up my ipod to the wall charger. I didnt have one on hand so i tried all kinds of methods of going around it. In the middle of me trying to hack around it, My buddy chris called, I told him to bring over his wall charger.
    
    
15. 5 minutes later Chris showed up with a charger. I plugged in the ipod, it reset itself, and then I was up and running with my newly rebuilt ipod.
    
    

I was really supprised at how easy it was to replace the hard drive in a 4th gen ipod. Im sure that someone is going to call me an idiot for opening the case that way. I dont care though. I got this thing working and that all that matters, and I did it for under $100. Screw apple for wanting to charge $250 for 20 munites worth of work and $100 worth of parts.

I hope that through my experience, someone else can bring back to life one of their dead ipods.