A while back I bought a used 20GB iPod off eBay and loaded Rockbox on it. Everything worked great for about 7 months but then it started powering up with the exclamation point folder icon. I could hear the hard drive trying to spin up but then it immediately shut down (clicking.) I figured the HD must be toast so I went back on eBay and bought a 60GB 4G color iPod (never used). I then put the broken one up for sale on craigslist and had a guy e-mail me. He said to give it a good thwack because the HD cable often comes loose on these iPods. Since I already had opened the case, I went ahead and checked the HD cable. I couldn't tell if it was loose, but I pushed down on it anyway. All of the sudden the iPod booted and Rockbox loaded up! Apparently the cable was loose beca ...

I've been successfully dual booting Vista and Linux (openSUSE) for a while now.  The trick was to install Vista first (already done when I bought the laptop) and then openSUSE.  GRUB was automatically installed and handled the dual boot situation well.

But after all the problems I've had with Vista not running programs that work fine in XP (Joint Ops, SSH/SMB port forwarding--see my other blog entry, my Hauppauge TV card) I decided that I also needed to be able to boot XP.  But how do you get XP installed without clobbering GRUB or anything else? Turned out to be trickier than I thought...

First step is to use Vista's Disk Manager to shrink its partition and make room for XP. I was able to free up about 13GB of space which will be enough for now. Then I formatted it as NTFS.

I knew that installing XP was going to clobber GRUB by overwriting the

I'd been using OpenSSH running under Cygwin for quite a while now and just recently started port forwarding SMB so I could copy files between local and remote computers over an encrypted tunnel.  More accurately, I wanted to sync files between Windows boxes and a remote NAS device running NSLU2-Linux using robocopy.  This involved installing a loopback adapter, assigning it an IP address (10.0.0.222), then running SSH:

ssh -L 10.0.0.222:445:localhost:445 user@remoteip

Once connected, I can see my remote Windows shares by specify a UNC path (\\10.0.0.222) in Windows Explorer.  This was all working great until I installed Vista patch KB942624 which fixes a security issue in SMB.  It fixes it so good th ...

Why did I think it'd be a good idea to upgrade to Vista when I replaced two of my computers?  Probably because every Windows upgrade I've ever done (since Win3.1) was never this troublesome!  My main issue?  User Account Control.  In theory it's a great idea (stolen entirely from Unix/Linux.)  The problem is that many, many programs won't run correctly with it enabled!  My favorite game won't even run because Punk Buster boots me off the server.  Haven't found a fix for that yet.  Do anything in the Command Prompt?  Better learn how to open it in Administrative mode and even then you may have problems.  I've finally turned off UAC... we'll see if that makes my life easier.

Windows Media Services (WMS) Directory Browser is an ASP.Net application (HTTP handler) that allows you to view and stream multimedia files when using IIS directory browsing mode.  Please click on the link under My Apps to the right for more information.

Does your computer sit idle much of the time?  If so, consider putting that idle time to good use:  join the World Community Grid and the Shooting Star BBS team!

Ok, for all those people who have Microsoft Windows computers that run slowly and produce pop-up advertisements all the time, I'm going to do you a big favor and tell you what you need to do.  The best part: ALL OF THESE SOLUTIONS ARE FREE!

1)  Check your hard drive

Open a Command Prompt (click Start, Run, and type "cmd" then hit Enter) and run "chkdsk c: /f" to check for file errors on your hard drive.

2)  Run Windows Update

Go to Start, Programs, and click the Windows Update icon.  You'll need to be connected to the Internet for it to work.  Make sure you download all the Critical Updates, regardless of how long it will take!
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