http://danisrael.scekc.com/it/iphone-suddenly-drains-battery-due-to-constant-push-polling.html

This link explains an issue with Calendar items causing continuous contact from the iPhone to the Exchange Server and gives instructions for fixing the problem.  It seems that the problem has a tendency to recur from time to time (as new calendar items are sent to you), but this process has worked to correct the situation when I run into it.

I would personally recommend additionally running the following reset afterward:

Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings

Then re-sync with your mail server.

The Dell Latitude E6400/E6500 and other computers based on the Intel Gigabit 82567LM network card will drop offline during power save modes (including when Windows is set to “Turn off the display”).  It’s an Intel Network Interface technology called SIPS, System Idle Power Saver.  It’s highly frustrating, especially because mapped drives may not reconnect upon restoration from the display blanking power saving mode.  I’m running this on the Nvidia version of the Latitude motherboard under Windows 7, but I’m guessing this same issue may apply to other versions of Windows including XP and Vista.

In certain versions of the driver, the settings are only exposed via the registry in a cryptic area.  Here’s the post I used to fix the issue on my machine:

http://communities.intel.com/message/86578;jsessionid=1F068452291822CA757E55B5FEB8F5E5.node6COM#86530

Since the registry edit is fairly advanced/cryptic, HP has released a utility to do the modification automatically.  Apparently this utility works perfectly on all brands of desktop/laptop.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=nl&prodTypeId=12454&prodSeriesId=3785404&prodNameId=3785039&swEnvOID=2097&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=vc-80464-1

This took quite a bit of digging to find, so I’m archiving it here along with some keywords (specifically Latitude E6400/E6500) that might make life easier for others Googling for the same solution.

I found an awesome case for my iPad.  Check it out… Kensington makes the ‘Reversible Sleeve’ (7″-10″) with model/part number K62911US.  It’s designed for a 7 to 10 inch Netbook, but I eyed it up in the store and thought it might work.  Lo-and-behold, it’s a PERFECT FIT.  I’m very pleased.  It is very minimalist, protects well when throwing the iPad in a backpack and adds almost NO bulk.

I paid $5 (!!!) at MicroCenter, I’m sure it’s available nearly everywhere.  If the MicroCenter link breaks, it’s probably because they discontinued carrying this case.  That’d explain the cheap $5 price, too.

When using an XBox 360 with a computer monitor that does not support audio (over either HDMI or using a DVI-to-HDMI cable), there is no easy way to get the audio out of the XBox.

You can use the original 360 Standard A/V cable, but it’s too large to fit on the back of the system when an HDMI cable is also connected.  This is easily remedied by removing the plastic casing from the Microsoft-Branded XBox 360 Standard A/V Cable.  You can then run the RCA plugs for audio into an adapter to convert them to a 1/8″ (3.5mm) headphone jack like RadioShack item number 274-0269.  Then a female-to-female headphone coupler like RadioShack item number 274-1555 will get you the correct gender of connection for connecting your headphones.  One issue, there is no volume control this way.  Add a headphone volume control like RadioShack item number 42-2559, and you are good to go.  This still leaves you with a big bundle of cable behind the system, and a bunch of excess connections (not to mention the exposed wiring from removing the plastic casing from the cable).  I have tested this method, and it works perfectly.  I actually did this as a proof-of-concept.  I knew from prior experimentation that headphone-level signals are usually “close enough” to line-level to be interchangeable and this proved true in this project.

I wanted something slicker that allowed me to connect my headphones (or computer speakers with 1/8″ stereo headphone jack) nearly directly into the XBox 360.  For some reason, NOBODY makes anything that can do this.  So I decided to build my own.

More details, including full build instructions after the break.

The most important component, and star of this project is the A/V cable that we will be using for hacking.  In poking around at what GameStop had to offer, I found the house-brand GameStop/MadCatz NextGen Universal A/V Cable.

This puppy can connect your Nintendo 64, Gamecube, PS2, PS3, XBox (original), or XBox 360 to your television in the pure, unadulterated, wonderment of Composite or S-Video.  The GameStop website also indicates that this supports Wii, but the packaging I have does not indicate that fact.  I’m too lazy to Google to see if the Wii uses the same connector as the Gamecube and N64.  I’m also too lazy to try connecting it and finding out myself if it works.

This cable is PERFECT for a number of reasons.  First, none of the connectors or junction points are molded in rubber.  They are a molded plastic casing that is EXCESSIVELY easy to crack open.

Second, once the cable junction point is opened, you’ll find that there is a tiny circuit board that is LABELED with the connection colors.  Not only that, but the connection colors are exactly what you’d expect when working with audio and video (at least in the scope of our project).  You are only concerned with the Green (Audio Ground/Shield/Common), Red (Right Audio) and White (Left Audio).

After thinking about it for about 3.14 seconds, I came up with a plan.  This was my result:

I plugged it into my XBox 360, tested everything out and it works very well.  It’s hard to tell in the picture, but what you are actually looking at is this:

The shopping list will take you to two stores… GameStop for their cable as shown above, and RadioShack for a 100K Audio Taper Stereo Potentiometer item number 271-1732 and a 1/8″ (3.5mm) Panel Mount Headphone Jack item number 274-0246.  I also grabbed a project box with item number 270-1801 to hold everything.  My total was around $25, and this included both GameStop and RadioShack and the Potentiometer Knobs that I bought (item number 274-0403).

There are differing opinions on wiring this particular potentiometer.  The wiring I used in the diagram above seemed to be the generally-accepted way to do things.  Some people complained about a sharp taper in audio volume over a short portion of the potentiometer’s turning radius.  I’m seeing some of that in this build, but it’s not enought that I’m overly concerned about it.  The volume is probably going to be the type of thing that I rarely change once it’s set anyway.  If you will be using this adapter with a set of computer speakers (or any sort of outside amplification), you could obviously delete the potentiometer from the mix.

Also, the diagram on the package of the headphone jack neglected a few key items.  Namely what audio channel the various connections served.  A quick poke around with my multimeter revealed that the wiring should be as-follows:

You will see that I’ve modified the RadioShack-provided diagram with a G for ground, L for left (the W is for white), and an R for Right.  The R also stands for Red if you are at all concerned.

Once you have it all assembled and installed into the project box, it will look similar to the following:

The potentiometer is on top, headphone jack on the right, XBox 360 cable exits out the bottom.  I’ve glazed over all of the drilling and notching that you’ll need to do to the project box, but I have faith that you’ll figure that part out.  Here’s what you’ll have once you button it all together:

I have to Dremel the shaft of the Potentiometer before I can install the knob.  Therefore, the pictures on this post do not show the knob attached.

Naturally, there is likely the possibility to expand this project and incorporate a headphone amp (maybe a CMoy?).  This would potentially improve audio quality, and definitely give you more headroom on the volume side.  As it stands in the passive configuration I’ve used for this project, I’m mostly satisfied with the quality and maximum volume.  If I change my mind, I might add an amplifier circuit to the mix.  I have been wanting to build a CMoy amp anyway, and the XBox A/V port provides a +5 volt feed (originally for powering the Optical audio LED).  If I do this, I will need a better connector than the one I used in this project, as the manufacturer deleted any of the contacts that were unused presumably for cost savings.

I don’t know about you, but I’m off to actually USE this guy for a bit.  The PHENOMENAL Need for Speed Shift is calling.

The location that Citrix and Terminal Server copy default registry settings from for each user is:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software

Enjoy.

I had experienced a bunch of issues in my various attempts at getting Windows XP (and other operating systems as well) to boot from a Compact Flash card installed as a hard drive replacement utilizing a CF-IDE Adapter.  I’ve read that CF-IDE adapters, and Compact Flash cards themselves can be very tempermental when utilized in this fashion.  Apparently there are a high number of Compact Flash cards that do not perform well in a UDMA mode.  While I still suspect that some of the hardware I tried was the culprit of the frustration, I was able to make a large portion of my prior attempts work properly (for use as Windows boot devices) by following some of the procedures outlined below.  I found a number of good tutorials, most of which are linked in the following post.  What I didn’t find was something that tied it all together in a concise fashion.  I will attempt to do just that in the following post.

This will destroy all data on the Compact Flash card.  Some of these steps, if misused can be seriously detremental to the health of your computer, or longevity of the data on your computer.  Proceed with caution, don’t come crying to me if something is wrong or if you lose your entire collection of Rick Astley MP3s, weird videos about squirrels that you’ve collected while scouring the web, or that really disturbing picture of you with the lampshade on your head at the company party.  Really, I don’t want to hear it.  Especially the MP3s.  For the purposes of this article, I am assuming the Compact Flash card is BLANK, or that you don’t care if it BECOMES BLANK.  Also, missteps CAN destroy data on your primary hard drive.  To be absolutely safe, I will typically make sure that ONLY the Compact Flash card itself is connected to the computer I’m using when running these procedures.  (Sometimes I’ll have a USB drive plugged in too, to boot from or whatever.)

Strap in, here we go:

Boot from a USB Drive formatted for DOS.  Pre-load with DelPart.exe, FDisk.exe, Format.com, Sys.com, and BootPrep.exe.  FDisk.exe, Format.com, and Sys.com are available from the Windows 98 SE OEM boot disks.  While you are prepping your DOS USB drive, also prepare a Puppy Linux USB Drive.  Alternatively, you can use Puppy Linux Bootable CD versions.  (You can also use any one of the many recovery CDs or other Linux Distributions that contain the GParted utility.)  In my case, I wanted a solution that will work on machines that are not configured with a CD drive.

Run DelPart.exe and remove all partitions from the Compact Flash card.

Reboot.  (Be sure to boot to the DOS USB Drive again.)

Run FDisk.exe

Enable LBA when it asks, Change Fixed Disk to Compact Flash card, Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive, Create Primary Partition, Use all available space.

Reboot.  (Be sure to boot to the DOS USB Drive again.)

Format D: /s /u (assuming that the Compact Flash has drive letter D assigned to it, otherwise, substitute the appropriate drive letter).

Unfortunately, FDisk will not allow you to set anything but the current primary drive as bootable/the active partition.  I have yet to find a DOS program (from Microsoft or ANY third-party) that has this capability.  It seems like they are extremely floppy-centric, they assume you will be booting from a floppy.  If anything takes the place of the primary drive (i.e. the USB stick we booted with), you can’t set any active partitions on the Compact Flash card.  You also can’t use the Windows XP Recovery Console as Microsoft in all of their infinite wisdom does not allow setting of active partitions from the Recovery Console version of DISKPART.  Don’t believe me?  Try it.  Because of this, we will now reboot to our Puppy Linux CD or USB Stick in order to set the active partition on our Compact Flash card.

Once booted to Puppy Linux, go to the Puppy Menu (same place the Start Menu usually is in Microshaft products).  Then select System, followed by GParted Partition Manager.

I usually Left-click on the partition I’ll be working with, to select it and double-check everything prior to making any changes.

Right-Click on Compact Flash FAT32 partition, select Manage Flags.

Check the box for Boot, and wait while the partition is activated.  Close the Manage Flags window, close partition manager, and reboot the computer (be sure to boot to the DOS USB Drive again).

Once back in DOS, run the following command:

Bootprep /dD

(Replace the last D with whatever your drive letter is, mine happens to be D.)  Answer Yes to both of the verification prompts.  This prepares the card for booting directly to Windows XP.

At this point, if you boot to the Compact Flash card, you will get an NTLDR not found error.  This is a good sign.

For my purposes, I’m installing the Compact Flash card in another machine (via USB multi-card reader) and copying the pre-configured Windows XP installation over to it. Once the bootprep has been completed, it seems that you can just do a flat-file copy to get Windows over to the Compact Flash card.  I’ve done this a few times, and it seems to work just fine.

I’m using an NLited version of XP Pro.  I’m using the “safe” setting.ini from IntellaWorks over in the MP3Car.com forum. I also enabled MinLogon.exe and the EWF flash write filtering tools from the XP Embedded Toolkit.  I used the excellent tutorials available at Silvio Florito’s GranTuring blog for these steps.  The whole install winds up being a little less than 600 MB once you disable Paging, delete the Paging File (if necessary), remove the DLLCache directory from Windows, and a few other tweaks that I can’t remember off-hand.  Here’s a tip… Once you have the OS up and running, use Soft-Central’s excellent SC-DiskInfo utility (one of my FAVORITE utilities, I use it all the time) to see where the largest file hogs are in your Windows installation and delete them.  I assume I could get the install even thinner, but I’m fairly pleased with how things are working right now, so I’ll probably stick with where it’s at.

For some reason, once Windows XP is up and running from a newly copied Compact Flash card, I have to re-enable the EWF filter.  To do this, I’ve used the registry edits recommended by Silvio Florito.  I created an EWF.REG file in my Windows\System32 directory in the NLited Windows installation for future use.

After re-installing the registry tweaks, you must also run the following command from the command prompt of the booted Compact Flash Windows:

ewfmgr c: /enable

After running this command, reboot the computer to enable the EWF filter.  This should get you up and running. Even with a relatively slow (10 MB/s read speed) Compact Flash card, I am still able to boot windows in about 24 seconds.  This is most likely due to the extremely low seek times associated with Compact Flash media.

I’m going to try my best to update this site more regularly.  I’ve got so many gadgets, laptops, electronics, etc… that I want to talk about!  Some of it is old, some of it is new, but all of it is interesting to me, and surely interesting to you!  Why else would you be here?

In the interest of full disclosure, this site is NOT advertiser supported, and you’ll note that there are no referrer links on any of these.  This site is funded by me personally, and these links are provided from one gadget lover to another.

Click on More to see the full list.

http://www.bestskinsever.com – Cheap, well crafted, nearly invisible, fully removable protective skins for all of the most popular gadgets.  I love this site, cheap shipping, awesome product.

http://www.shieldzone.com – Overpriced, sells the same thing as Best Skins Ever, but has a better selection of available products.  Best Skins Ever has skins for the most popular products, InvisibleShield gets into more of the obscure stuff.  Note, the ShieldZone (parent company Zagg) warranty is complete garbage.  They make you jump through tons of hoops (especially if you buy their products retail, not through their website), so don’t base your purchase on the warranty.

http://www.sfbags.com – WaterField bags, very nice stuff for gadget and laptop protection.  They also have great prices compared to other sites.  I don’t own any of their products (yet), as I’ve just recently stumbled across them.

http://www.caselogic.com – I probably own more Case Logic cases than any other brand.  They make great stuff, in a whole galaxy of multi-colored shapes and sizes.  Good prices, and very readily available.  They produce a lot of cases from neoprene with foam backing, and that is one of my preferred styles of case.

http://www.targus.com – One of my go-to companies for backpacks.  They make the Gravity Backpack which is my current bag of choice.  I can fit all of my gadgets in this bag, with room to spare, yet it’s small enough to carry every day.  It’s got a padded sleeve for a laptop up to 15.4″ in screen size.  I regularly carry two laptops, and this bag doesn’t even bat an eye.  One laptop in the in-built padded area, one in a separate laptop sleeve.  The build quality of this bag is amazing, I’ve beat the tar out of it, and it keeps coming back for more.  I don’t even think there is 1 stitch out of place.  I’ve owned bags from all different vendors, and NONE have held up as well as this Targus.  If anything happens to it, I’ll definitely be going back to Targus for my next bag.  Their prices are very reasonable, especially compared to other high-quality bag manufacturers.

http://www.tombihn.com – They tend to be VERY overpriced, but cater to a market with higher expectations.  They even offer laptop bags that natively offer storage for two laptops.  They do this with a modular bag insert-system (see the Brain Cell and Brain Bag) that is an incredibly cool concept.  I have yet to purchase any of their bags, or bag systems, but rest-assured I will eventually.

http://www.radtech.com – These guys take precision to a whole new level.  I have NEVER seen products that are this well-fitting.  It’s truly unbelievable.  They tend to cater to Apple, but make products for all manufacturers.  They have the wonderful ScreenSavrz microfiber keyboard protectors which prevent the keytops from marring the screen on your laptop when it’s closed.  They also produce the fitted Sleevz which are amazing microfiber gloves for your laptop.  They offer excellent scratch protection, and add almost NO bulk to the laptop.  I own them for the products that I have where RadTech has them available, and have been continuously amazed as to the build-quality and fitment.  I wish they would let you custom build your own Sleevz, as I would own many more of their products.

I’ll continue updating this post as I find more sites and products! I’m actively looking for a site that offers various-sizes of neoprene sleeves.  I would also settle for a site that has velvet drawstring pouches in a variety of sizes (Think D&D Dice Bags, although I won’t be using them for that!).

Update (11-Dec-2009): I can’t believe I forgot about Skooba Design.  http://www.skoobadesign.com/ They have some really nice bag designs, including some laptop sleeve/skin styles that differ from the competition.  I own quite a few of their products, and have been very happy with every aspect of them.

Matthew mentions Mobile Edge in the comments.  I neglected to link to them in the original article, you can find them at http://www.mobileedge.com .  One of the nice parts about the Mobile Edge product offering are the “Mobile Edge for Her” line, offering a decent selection of bags that are (obviously) designed with women in mind.

When modifying registry entries (potentially from a login script) using AutoIt Script, the RegWrite command needs numbers in the format 0×00000000 if you want it to write the number as hexidecimal.  It will not take just the number string like 00000000.  If you use the format 00000000, it will import the number as decimal, not hex.

For example, the following AutoIt script sets the current user Internet cache to 25 megabytes:

RegWrite ("HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\Cache\Content", "CacheLimit", "REG_DWORD", "0x00006400")
RegWrite ("HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Cache\Content", "CacheLimit", "REG_DWORD", "0x00006400")

I had mistakenly assumed that the REG_DWORD would import as Hex, which it does not.  It defaults to Binary.  Now that I think about it, this makes perfect sense because it is exactly as RegEdit itself would work.

The errors I was getting were:

hda:hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hda: DMA timeout error
hda: dma timeout error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown

… and they would repeat 4 or 5 times with about a 15 second timeout/delay between each iteration.  The device identifier would change each time.

With the help of the blog of Stefan Gustafsson, I was able to correct the issue.  He also walked me through my first Kernel recompile in the same post.  The link to his fix is: http://expisoft.blogspot.com/2007/04/ide2cf-timeout-with-linux.html

Thanks Stefan!

I was running it on an Intel D201GLY motherboard, but this error doesn’t appear to be specific to that board.  That said, the following link was where I found the answer (hint: it’s in the last post):

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23368

The error is:
Searching for Puppy files in computer disk drives…
pup_400.sfs not found. Dropping out to initial-ramdisk console…

The answer is to start Puppy with the switch acpi=noirq, so at the first screen you see when booting (Grub), type the following:

puppy acpi=noirq

Then hit enter.  Things should work better.