hacking the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware

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.

Recently I have started to play video games again

By Josh Highland in video games

When I was younger I would spend days on end playing video games. When I was 7 got my first Nintendo, it was 1987. I played the hell out of it, I fell in love with Zelda. Years later Super Nintendo came out. I was older and had more patience; again I fell in love with the SNES Zelda game. I like the character development and the epic story. In 1994,
Final Fantasy III was release in the United States. I ate the game up instantly. The game play was turn based fighting, meaning that I tell my characters what to do, attack, use magic, use an item, or defend. The enemy would do the same. We would trade attacks until the fight was over. Characters gained experience from the conflicts and grew over time. The story was epic, something out of a legend. The company that produced the game, Square, knew how to build a great RPG (role playing game).

Fast forward 12 years. I havent seriously played video games in about 7 years. Sure I have dabbled, but what geek doesnt play a game here and there. I know that I am behind the times, but I only have an XBOX (not-360). I decided that I wanted to play a good role playing game, turned based preferably like the final fantasy games. The FF series is only available on play station though. I looked and looked and couldnt find a good game to play, every one i tired just sucked. Frustrated and out of luck, I turned to my good friend the Super Nintendo.

With the magic of computers its possible to turn you computer into a Nintendo, or a Super Nintendo by using an "emulator" and a "ROM", which is a back up of the game. Most SNES games are smaller then a single mp3, and most NES games are smaller then an average Microsoft word document! Sure emulators and ROMS are technically illegal, but there is no other way to play most of these games anymore.

I have a windows media center computer in my living room, so I downloaded my favorite SNES emulator, ZNES, and loaded up a game that I remember loving, but I never beat, Super Mario RPG.

Super Mario RPG was released in 1996, and was an effort from Square (makers of final fantasy) and Nintendo (makers of the Super Mario). The result was a game that felt like Final Fantasy, but had the charm and good feeling of Super Mario World.

The game is 10 years old, but is so fun that it doesnt matter that the graphics are pixilated and the music is MIDI based. Super Mario RPG is proof that you dont need a cd quality sound track, full motion video, forced feed back controls, and 16 button controllers to produce a great game that holds up through time. I think that game developers and companyss have gotten to mixed up in the power of the platforms they are working on, they forget about the roping in the players imagination and selling them on the story while making them want to play to find out what happens next, instead of just throwing eye candy at them at every turn.

I have great hopes for Nintendos next platform the "wii", I hope that they bring back the love and magic that make video games like Final Fantasy and Super Mario RPG feel good to play even if they are relics from a simpler time of gaming.

If you want more information on emulators and roms, leave a comment and I'll get in touch with you.

What older games did you think still hold their own today? Please leave a comment, I'd love to hear what you think.

The long road to notPop 2.0

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

I have been talking about notPop 2.0 for a long time now. some people think its just a myth.

The truth is I have been working on notPop 2.0 for some time now, and its going to blow notPop 1.0 out of the water.
Why is it taking me forever? Because every thing from the ground up is new, and massive. The time to code and test each piece takes a while.
notPop 1.0 was developed when I was in college. I had a lot of free time then. These days, I work a full time job coding all day. At night I split my time between remodeling 2 houses, maintaining 5 websites, and spending time with my wife. Im lucky if I can get 30 minutes or an hour a night to work on the new notPop.
I have actually been thinking about taking vacation time off of work devote more attention to coding the new site.

So to the skeptics, Im working on it. Its just going to take a bit longer, so please hold in there and send me any suggestions that you might have.

Where have all the computer nerds gone?

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

The other day I got asked to go to Hollywood and hang out with some other people and talk about my website with Yahoo!

When I was there I met 4 other people who have website. In the 3 hours that I was there, talking with those people, I got more ideas for things then I have had in months. It made me realize something; I miss hanging out with people who really enjoy programming for fun.

Sure I work for a big software company, and there are people all around me who write code but there is one important thing missing, fun. Work is work, you can only have so much fun when someone is telling you what to create and when it has to be done by. Most everyone I know here ends their computer life at 5pm every day when they leave work. I am not close with anyone who runs their own site, and writes their own tools. Basically I dont have any real computer nerd friends anymore. Dont get me wrong, I love the friends that I have, and wouldnt trade them for the world. I just wish I could have more technical conversations about computers with some of them.

In college I was surrounded by nerds, and I loved it. The people I was close with helped me to develop ideas mostly through conversation. If it was something great, we often teamed up and wrote a quick version of it. More often then not it was a tool to mess with other students in the computer lab, or figure out a way to get around the system admins. It was good times.

So here it is. I live in Redlands California (92373). Most of my evenings are free. I love computers, code, robots, electronics, hacking, mods, etc. (you get the picture).

If you want to hang out at a coffee shop or bar and talk about if windows vista is a rip off of OSX, or if the black mac book pro is actually worth spending the extra money on, if you want to argue about php, asp, and coldfusion we can do that also, knoppix or ubuntu?. Basically I want to meet some more people who share my passion about computers and gadgets in my area, simple as that.