Hacks
Grain of sand: 0, Canon SD800 IS: 1
Dec 9th
Our trusty Canon PowerShot SD800 IS locked up the other day in the lens open position and whenever it powered up a “Lens error, restart camera” error message appeared on the LCD screen and the camera would then shut off.
Ends up that there was a single grain of sand that was stuck in between the gears that open/retract the lens. The cover is secured by a few tiny screws so it’s actually pretty easy to open up. Once I got the little bugger out from in between the gears (simply by manually turning the gears by hand), I fired up the camera again and the lens started working again!
Here are some disassembly pics, with the gears that control the opening/retracting of the lens circled in yellow.
Swapping out the hard drive in your DirecTV DVR with a larger one, and copying your content over
Dec 7th
We have DirecTV’s HD DVR service at home but we were beginning to outgrow the stock 320GB drive in our HR21-700 receiver as it is chronically under 10% free capacity. I decided to pick up a Western Digital 1TB Green drive (model WD10EADS) to replace it.
This forum post on DBSTalk.com contains a pretty detailed walk though with photos detailing the removal procedure. Although the photos are of a slightly earlier version of the HR2* series receivers, the steps are pretty much the same.
You can simply swap the drives without copying your existing shows to the new drive, but I decided to copy over my old shows. The directions posted on using GParted worked like a charm. Be prepared for the data to copy from drive to drive though…it took about 2 hours and 15 minutes for me.
