A look at business, law and life from a technophile.
Helpdesk
Dell Media Direct won’t Boot Windows – Maybe Bitlocker – Solution
207I’m not sure why Dell can’t actually tell people this. However, if you find yourself stuck booting Dell MediaDirect, and don’t know how to fix it. Try this:
- Turn off your computer
- Hit the button shaped like a home (the Dell MediaDirect button).
Seriously. When the power is off, the Dell MediaDirect button acts a toggle button to boot the other partition. Try to find that on Dell’s site, and well, I couldn’t find it with several good searches.Thanks to GigaMegaBlog.
Fix – Macbook won’t wake up, hear boot sound
0I’ve installed Windows 7 64-bit on my MacBook, which required ripping my factory Win 7 DVD (yes, I’m hosting a launch party) and recreating it without versioning numbers (see Jowie for similar problem fixes). I’ve actually really liked it.However, twice its gone somewhere bad while sleeping. I actually think the problem is that it wakes up while closed and goes back to sleep, causing some indeterminate state. The problem is that I have tried to use the power button to turn it off and then back on. When I do, I hear the boot sound, but no booting seems to occur.Here’s my solution. Turn off the Mac (hold the power button until it switches off). Hold shift while you turn on the machine. Apparently this clears the dynamic bootloader and all things come back together.If this worked for you, please leave a comment below.–Ben
Free Disk Usage Graphical Tool – See Your Disk Space
0I frequently get requests on how to clean up a hard-drive. Its generally something like “Where’d my space go?” or “Windows gave me a out of space error.”
WinDirStat at Sourceforge.
This tool gives two views that rock: a tree view with each folder’s space taken next to its name, and a second graphical view that shows files in terms of size. The graphical view is even clickable, such that it will take you to the file in the other view so that you can identify it and see if you want to delete it. Folders get smartly color coded … seriously, try it out.
Its free from a sourceforge project, so there’s not a lot of downside. Unless you’re the kind of person that’s quick on the delete key. Then, its like pointing a loaded gun at your foot. Foot … meet delete key. Not good.
Anyways, try it out. I like it and use it on my windows partition of my MacBook Pro. With 40 GB, space is at a premium.
–Ben
Monitor Your Website for Hacks – PHP Code Gives a Hash
8I’ve had some friends get their website hacked with a nefarious little code snippet that attempts to exploit the browser of visitors. The site looks no different, but that’s the point. Its difficult to tell that you’ve been hacked.Now, the fix I’ll suggest won’t work very well for dynamic websites. It reads all of the website files and generates a hash. That hash can be monitored by a desktop program. I personally monitor my sites every 30 minutes. Knock on wood that I won’t need to be informed. However, I’ve set it up to email me in the case of hack where the hash doesn’t match.
- Get the PHP hash generating code from WebsiteCDS (hosted by google code)
- Setup info is in the readme – however I suggest you change the email address and password before uploading it to the root of your website.
- Type in the websitecds.php location in your address bar with the password as required in the readme (READ the README)
- I liked the SiteUp website checker for windows, and use it to check for the hash. In fact, I have it setup to run the websitecds.php script with the expected hash. (Other die hards use cron and a script)
- Remember to update your hash everytime you change or add things to your website. Otherwise you will be getting error messages and/or emails.
- Rest easy that you’ll know if you’re hacked.
Good luck. And I hope your ISP is quick on the patches.
–Ben
References:
Webdigi – Web Development Company in London
Google Code – Website CDS (Change Detection System)
Xequte.com – SiteUp -Check if your website is up, even if you aren’t
Fix Dell SoundMax to Record Streaming Audio (ie what you hear) in Vista
21I was trying to record an internet radio show (that my friend appeared on) today and discovered that Dell had nicely “removed” the feature to record what was going through my speakers. After some searching and driver install hacking, I got it to work. Here’s what I did:
- Download the latest drivers from Dell
- Run the EXE, but once it gets to the license screen I cancelled (but you do want it to unzip to a folder)
- Go into the folder and into the i386 folder (for you intel users)
- Go into the vista folder
- back up the ADIHdAud.inf file
- open up the ADIHdAud.inf file and make the following edits:
- change: HKR,AD1983\\Disable, OutR, 1, 01
- to: HKR,AD1983\\Disable, OutR, 1, 00
- change: HKR,AD1983\\Disable, MonR, 1, 01
- to: HKR,AD1983\\Disable, MonR, 1, 00
- change: HKR,AD1984\\Disable, MonR, 1, 01
- to: HKR,AD1984\\Disable, MonR, 1, 00
- By changing these values you will now have a fresh install that includes the stereo mix feature (I believe the 1->0 change told it to no longer disable the feature)
- Save the file
- Go to your device manager in your control panel
- Go to sound, video and game controllers and select soundmax
- hit the delete key on your keyboard
- tell it to delete the drivers (check the box)
- reboot
- go to the directory where you dumped the drivers from the exe (the main directory that was above the ADIHdAud.inf file)
- run the setup program
- now go to the control panel and select sound
- right click in a blank area in the box and select the “show disabled devices” option
- click on the recording tab
- right click on the stereo mix icon (faded icon) and select enable
- download audacity (free) – you may want the LAME encoder as well, if you prefer MP3 audio
- install audacity and run it
- select edit -> preferences -> audio i/o tab -> recording box -> device drop down box -> stereo mix
- hit OK
- hit the big red circle button to record (although I suggest that you have the stream running first)
Phew! I just hate when companies break fully functional hardware. In any case I hope this helped you as it did me.
Here’s the references that I used:
Mac 10.3 and iPod Classic Fix
9Although I am not a mac owner, my uncle is and he just got an iPod classic for his son. As it turns out, if you have Mac OS 10.3.9 and an iPod classic, iTunes refuses to sync to the new iPod and gives an error requiring an upgrade to 10.4 or later. The Mac boards are some help, but it took piecing together a few things to get the iPod Classic to work with 10.3.9. Here’s our outline:
- Have someone format your iPod through iTunes (we went to the SLC apple store)
- Find out your fwid (the SLC apple store was helpful there as well)
- get yamipod and install
- plug in ipod
- tell yamipod that you have a ipod classic
- tell yamipod the fwid
- add songs!
If you don’t have an apple store nearby, I’m not sure what to tell you. Google shows that getting the fwid might be difficult. You also need to have a friend with 10.4 to initialize the iPod.
I can only think of a couple of reasons for the restriction for 10.4. None of them make much sense. Apple wants people to upgrade their OS; Apple worries about the user experience of people taking days to sync their library over USB 1.X and won’t allow it; Apple programmers use a function available only in 10.4 and apple is too lazy to add it to 10.3. With my uncle’s iPod classic playing music and syncing to yamipod running in Mac OS 10.3.9, the restriction is obviously not a hardware problem, but a software restriction put in by apple. Not cool.
Edit: 1/8/2008:
yamipod has a faq on how to find the fwid.