Josh Highland’s Blog

A guy I know, “dave”, had an iPod that was acting up. On top of that, his warranty was was almost up, and he was worried that the iPod would live just long enough to go out of warranty before fully breaking, leaving him with out an iPod.

He was looking for a way help to speed up the failure process of his iPod, so he could make use of the warranty. Knowing that I have a back ground in working on the inside of iPods he hit me up for advice… advice that got him a new iPod

Based on the experiments and hundreds of comments I have received on my previous blog posts (here and here), its clear to see that when an iPod hard drive comes loose, the entire iPod goes nuts, and doesnt work (it cant read the music, so there is no music to play!).

1. I suggested to Dave that he take a guitar pick (This is an old photo I am reusing where I used a screw driver for my example.. DONT USE A SCREW DRIVER you will scratch the metal part of the case!), and force the pick between the metal and the plastic, being careful not to scratch either surface.

   

2. Once the guitar pick (NOT SCREWDRIVER) is in between the case halves, twist the pick and move it slowly along the seam to release the internal latches. Take your time, so you don’t mark up the case, or Apple will know you were up to something.

   

3. Once you get the case apart, be careful and move the case halves a part, keeping the plastic side down. Be sure not to break the ribbon cable joining the halves.

   
   

4. Next, find the hard drive, it should be easy to see. At the top, it is attached with a large ribbon connection. This is where the magic happens! We need to unplug this cable from the drive, but still leave it semi attached. Pull the cable straight out, unhooking it completely. gently push it back on. enough to hold it in place, but not make a complete connection.

   

   We are trying to simulate what happens when some ipods are dropped. In some cases, the hard drive shifts and the cable becomes unplugged, creating a messed up iPod.

   To test this, gently pick up the iPod and press the scroll wheel. If you can see your songs, you pushed the cable back in to far, unhook it and try again. If you get an error, you did everything just right!

5. To put it back together, flip the metal side over the top and gently squeeze it all together. The case will snap back into place.

   

6. Your iPod should not play, and it looks completely broken.

   

If you return it to Apple under warranty, they should give you a new one. If they wont replace it, open it back up, re attach the hard drive cable and enjoy the dying days of your old iPod.

I haven’t tried doing this this, and I don’t really suggest doing it. I’m posting this for educational purposes, and because it is both an interesting hardware and social hack. I’m guessing that Apple might change their policy if they see a lot of this happening. You probably should just buy a new one. (I hope that covers me legally!)

While we are talking about iPods, subscribe to my podcast!

Last June, I got a new (used) Toshiba M55 laptop.

I got it for an awesome deal because the hard drive was broken, and the screen flickered a lot. I figured for the price it was worth the gamble, even if I had to replace the screen it was still a bargain price.

The hard drive was DOA, and was replaced immediately. I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Gusty as the main OS with windows as the second OS. Easy enough to do.

The screen flickered a bit, but if i messed with the lid enough, moving it back and forth, I could get a good picture. Over time the picture just got worse and worse. It was time to do something about it. I did a quick google search and found a Toshiba M55 LCD replacement guide.

I figured it had to be something with the connections on to the screen or board because when the screen was working, it was working good. The image was great, but it took a bit to get it there.

I followed the guide exactly. I powered it on when I had it torn apart and it worked! It seems that there was to much stress on the LCD cable connection, causing it to freak out when the lid was in specific positions.

I followed this guide to open up the keyboard. (steps 6 - 8 only). I was able to give the cable a bit more slack, and every thing started working like it should! I put it all together and it’s like I have a new laptop, and all it took was an hour of my time and the guts to do it. I should have cracked this thing open 6 months ago if i knew it was going to be this easy!

I hope this helps someone else with a similar problem.

I’ve owned the famed apple iPhone for about 3 weeks now. In that time I have grown to both love and hate aspects of the iPhone.

I understand that this is a first generation phone with the 1.0 software running on it. Despite knowing this, I dove right in and bought it.

I’ve had enough time with the phone to fully explore it.

below are the biggest problems with the iPone that I have

• ring tone is too quiet even when on full volume
• vibrate mode is too discrete, i want to to shake longer
• text message notifications are to quite
• no notification of missed text messages without turning the phone on
• text messages can only be sent to one person at a time
• horizontal keyboard mode is only avaliable in safari

I guess that isn’t a very large list of things that I want changed in the iPhone. Actually those are all software problems that could be fixed through a software updates. Apple hasn’t released any updates to the iPhone as of yet, so we will see if the problems I am seeing, are ones that Apples feels like they should fix.

Over the last weekend, I overhauled a “broken” laptop that I got of craigs list for a steal. Its a Toshiba m55. 1.6 ghz pentium M, 1 gig of ram, wide 15in glossy screen, 2 batteries, charger, needed a hard drive, $200… stoked! (I replaced the hard drive with a 120 gig western digital)

I’ve been wanting a laptop more and more recently because I feel like I could be getting things when I am away from the notPop Labs (aka my computer room). I end up spending a lot of time on my cell phone (t-mobile mda … http://www.mdaTweak.com), but never really getting anything accomplished. Now I can use my phone as a cellular modem, and use my laptop to get some work done.

I think having a decent laptop also opens me up to the world of coffee shops. I always seemed to do my best school work in a coffee shop, lets see if that holds true when it comes to working on my personal websites.

Look out world, Josh Highland is computing wirelessly now again (this is my 4th laptop in 10 years)!

update: On top of getting the laptop for a great price, my friend Luis Majano just hooked me up with a super sweet laptop bag for it. woo woo!

Its no secret, I like to install Linux on things that should be running Linux, like my iPod.

My friend at work, Stephen, recently told me about installing Linux on a linksys router. To be honest, I looked into my router in the past, but it was years ago, and required soldering wires and things inside of it. I don’t have the best luck when it comes to hardware mods, so I didn’t do it.

Stephen turned me on to a new Linux based firmware for older linksys routers called “Tomato”.

Tomato is a 3rd party firmware that voids the warranty on your router, but lets you do some awesome stuff you weren’t able to do with the original firmware.

It took all of about 5 minutes to download the firmware and reflash my router with it. You can get a copy of it at http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

The interface is ajax based and really clean. Because its all powered with ajax, there is some really cool monitoring features, like real time bandwidth monitoring (flash movie)

If you have a weak wifi signal from your router, you can use the tomato firmware to crank up the output of the signal.

All in all you turn your $50 router into a $500 router with this open source firmware.

You have to have a Linksys WRT54G, version v1-v4. Newer ones are v5, so before upgrading be sure to check yours.

If you aren’t a big geek, this mod is kind of useless, but how awesome is it to say that you are running Linux in your router.

I should have posted this last thursday, but in the Christmas rush, I havent found time until now…

Last week, I was at home working on my computer (creating a new version of notPopular.com actually) when my system froze. It was a bad kind of freeze. The kind of freeze where you know something major just went wrong.

I hit the power button to reboot. The bios posted with no problem. Then my raid controller came online…

CRITICAL ERROR: ONE OR MORE OF THE DISKS IN THE ARRAY HAS FAILED

Press esc to continue booting

HOLY CRAP! One of my drives died! THANK GOD for RAID

Side note on RAID:

RAID stands for: redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks

RAID is a data storage scheme using several hard drives to gain increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity compared to single drives.

There are many configurations of RAID to achieve different tasks. For me the best solution was "RAID 1" which is mirroring. Simply, one drive mirrors another. I had two identical drives in my computer but the computer would only see one, but any data stored, would be saved onto both drives. This allows my data to be redundant and fault tolerant in case oh say…. one of my drives fails; I have an exact copy of the data, and no down time.

ok ok ok, back to my story… OH CRAP! One of my drives died!

I was stunned, but I wasnt worried, that why I have backups and use RAID 1, for a situation just like this. In the last 13 years, I havent had drive just stop working. I always heard about it happening to people, but never me.

I booted into windows, and everything seemed the same, and it should, to windows I only had one drive, it didnt know about the hardware raid controller. Awesome, I didnt lose a single file. I immediately started to back up my files onto DVD and onto a larger external hard drive.

Long story short. If you build your own computer or are serious about securing your data get a raid controller and an extra hard drive. You can buy a really good RAID controller card for under $100. My high end motherboards now offer integrated RAID controllers.

I also have an external drive and use syncback, as recommended from lifehacker.com

BACKUPS ARE GOOD

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.

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.

I have been running MythTV (knoppmyth) since June 2005. It rules. It was tricky to get set up, I was rusty on my Linux admin skills, its been years since I really used it. There were a few things about myth that I wasn’t really into, but I lived with.

• couldn’t get my 802.11g nic card to work in Linux
• I had a hard time playing video files over the network from my windows 2000 computer up stairs
• Couldn’t get the build in media player to play work that well (mplayer)
• NES emulation wasn’t that great
• Hard to get the Hauppauge 350 remote to work
• I had to hard time redirecting the output of the media player to the Hauppauge 350 audio out
• Difficult redirecting the output of the computer to always go to the TV

I’m not complaining, it was fun to figure this stuff out. It took a really long time, and some of it I never
really figured out. My MythTv setup was awesome for recording TV. I’m proud of it, and I love it.

Earlier this month a guy at my work is a Microsoft die hard (he runs a .Net developers group) he got me a demo copy of windows media center 2005 to check out. I figured what the hell, I had some extra money (my wife just started working as a registered nur$e), I'll build a fairly simple MCE box and put it up against my mythTV.

To make this interesting, I decided to make this interesting, After install and testing, the winner computer stays, the losers OS gets flipped. I was willing to put my myth system on the line and check it out against "windows media center 2005 roll up 2" (damn that’s a long name).

Here is the cheap machine that I built for the MCE

• ECS P4M800-M7 Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 511 Processor (2.8 ghz)
• 1 gig DDR400
• pny GeForce 6200 (crt, dvi, s-video, component)
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE-Kit (tv tuner + MS remote)
• A random left over 20 gig IDE Maxtor hard drive
• A stray IDE-to-SATA adaptor
• A spare dvd drive rom drive
• A dusty old computer case in my garage

So for about $400 and some old parts I hacked together an ugly machine, but hey it booted, and that’s what counts.

Installing:

Windows MCE 2005 is a full install of windows, so it took a while. Much slower then installing knoppMyth (it took me 15 minutes to get knoppMyth installed the first time). WINNER knoppMyth

Set Up:

knoppMyth required me to signup with a company called zaptoit.com to get a channel listing. The software didn’t tell me to do this, I had to find out about it through message boards and a wiki. MCE asked me my zip code, then it asked what cable company I had. Then it programmed my tuner, and downloaded the TV listing guide.
WINNER MCE

Remote Control:



The mythTV uses a Hauppauge 350 remote, which isn’t bad. The MCE uses the Microsoft 2005 remote. The Microsoft controller wins hands down. The shape of it is much nicer, its balance is good. The mce receiver seems better then the 350 receiver. The mce remote also has dedicated buttons for jumping around in the mce application, there is also a button to launch the mce application if its not running or is minimized. I wish all my remotes were this nice.

WINNER MCE

Live TV:

I’m going to give this one to myth for ease of set up, but overall go with a tie. To get the MCE running, I had to download a mpeg 2 decoder. That was pretty painless, but I had to dig through some websites to figure out why the hell it wasn’t showing TV. The mythTV was great because I was using hardware based decoding that came with the pvr-350 TV tuner. Once I got MCE up and running, there was little difference between them. MCE did change channels faster then the myth though.
TIE

Recorded TV:

I like the myth interface for showing what shows I have recorded, but I like MCE better for setting up recordings. MCE has an option that allows you to start the recording a few minutes early and end it a few minutes late, WHEN AVALIABLE, just to make sure that you get the whole show (some times channels don’t start and stop exactly on time). If you have 2 shows back to back, it won’t record the overhang. If you have any overhang on the myth, it will report a conflict, and not record the second show. This has bitten me several times with the myth
WINNER MCE

Video Files:

I’m going with MCE on this one. It plays wmv, mpg, and avi files without any trouble. To get QuickTime working, all I had to do was download the QuickTime alternative and change one registry key. Now basically any video file I throw at it plays full screen and looks great. Myth on the other hand, I had a hard time getting videos to play. wmv files and avi still look like garbage. I had to modify a bunch of things to get the video and audio to play through the pvr-350, only to marginal satisfaction.
WINNER MCE

Audio player:

If you’ve seen one, you’ve scene them all. There isn’t a huge difference in these.
TIE

Interface:

MCE looks a lot cleaner then myth. If anything, Myth tries to copy MCE in many aspects but falls short. Something that MCE has that myth does not is the ability to shrink down the video that is currently playing, and continue to navigate through MCE, until you select something else to watch. Its just more polished and refined. It looks better when its up on your screen.
WINNER MCE

MCE Bonus Features:

"movies": MCE will look at the guide and see what movies are currently playing across all the channels that you get. It goes out to the internet and pulls down artwork and a synopsis of the movie. This is an awesome and impressive feature in my opinion. You can then watch, record, or drill deeper into information on the movie. You can see what actors are in the movie, you can see what other movies they were in, you can see when those movies come on, and set up a recording for them.

MythTV Bonus Features:

"games emulation": I loved the fact that I could play all of my old NES roms. The emulation was a bit slow and laggy, but it was awesome to play them again. I didn’t use this feature as much as I anticipated.

The Winner in My Eyes:

OVER ALL WINNER : MCE

Based on my experience of running knoppmyth next to MCE 2005, I'm going to have to go with the MCE as the over all winner. It’s not often that I back a Microsoft product over an open source project. What can I say though? Microsoft has done their homework and has put out a pretty solid application that does what I want it to, in a clean way that even my wife can use. Hopefully in time as mythTV matures and grows, I will switch back to it. Until then I'm going to run stick with my Windows MCE 2005

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.