my new (used) laptop

By Josh Highland in hardware, Josh's Rambling

toshiba_satellite_a100_le4.jpg
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!

My router is running linux

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, linux, software

tomato_linux_router.jpg

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.

BACKUPS ARE GOOD

By Josh Highland in hardware, software

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

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.

Fix your ipod by spanking it?

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, iPod, tutorials

Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland

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?

I’m 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. That’s it.

I personally haven’t 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 don’t know why it works but I guess it does. If you have any experience with this post a comment.

Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland