Hacks
Downloading earlier versions of iPhone OS
0If you’re ever in need of downloading an earlier version on the iPhone OS, iClarified has a list of iPhone firmware files for download from Apple’s servers. This is great if say you need to downgrade your iPhone 3G from iOS 4 back to iOS 3.1.3.
Grain of sand: 0, Canon SD800 IS: 1
0Our 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
0We 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.
Resurrecting an IBM “Deathstar” Deskstar 75GXP hard drive
0I have a bunch of hard drives from old PCs that I’ve kept around since I’m a pack rat. I really should just burn what I need to keep onto DVD and recycle of all these tiny-by-today’s-standards 10-40GB hard drives. It’s amazing to think of how much more data you can cram into the same physical drive now a days — a few weeks ago I loaded 4-750 GB drives in our NAS at work. Even my dinky USB thumb drive can hold 4GB. Anybody remember 5.25″ floppies (I was a bit too young to experience the 8″ floppies)? +10,000 points if you had colored floppies, even.
Anyways, I had an old 40GB 7200RPM IBM 75GXP Deskstar , which later came to be known as the IBM 75GXP Deathstar due to their high failure rates. I somehow lucked out and didn’t have one fail on me when it was the primary drive in my PC at the time. Fast forward to the present, and I hooked up the drive to an external USB enclosure to try and find a Word doc that I couldn’t locate elsewhere. The drive spun up but wouldn’t mount in XP. I thought great, it turned into a Deathstar.
I spent hours trying a bunch of different things to get the drive to mount, but no luck. I finally googled around and came across some eBay pages where people were selling the logic board to this drive. Ok, so replacing the logic board was an option. Awesome.
I flipped the drive upside down and took a look at how hard it would be to swap out logic boards. It was then that I noticed that one of the solders connecting the the IDE pins to the logic board was bad & wasn’t making a solid connection. I hooked the drive back up to the enclosure and pressed down on the loose pin (actually the entire row of pins) with the edge of a credit card, and lo and behold the drive mounted. Even better, I was able to find what I was looking for on that drive. 
Turning the Linksys WRT54g into a wireless bridge
0I wrote previously about wifi problems with my MacBook Pro on my home network, so I ended up getting a new 802.11n router (a D-Link DIR-655). Turns out the router ultimately wasn’t the problem (my MBP didn’t like WPA2 encryption), so my old Linksys WRT54g was still working.
With my old network, I had it set up so that my Airport Express was acting as a WDS repeater for my network & used its built-in Ethernet port to connect my Xbox 360 to the network (the Airport Express was connected to my home theater receiver so that I could stream iTunes to it).
The D-Link didn’t support WDS (my old Linksys WRT54g did only because I reflashed the firmware w/ Sveasoft’s Alchemy firmware), so Xbox 360 wasn’t connected to the network anymore. To get the Xbox back on, I converted the WRT54g to a wireless bridge, using the DD-WRT firmware. It was pretty straightforward (much easier than setting it up with WDS), so now I’m back to where I was before my whole network started acting all goofy. w00t.
