Switched to WebFaction hosting and LightWord theme
Because 1and1 are asses when it comes to allowing SMTP (and other things), I switched my blog over to the WONDERFUL WebFaction hosting service. I also gave the blog a needed facelift with the LightWord theme.
Silencing Frigidaire mini in-window compact room Air Conditioner Model FAA065P7A
Instructions on Silencing Frigidaire Mini In-Window Compact Room Air Conditioner Model FAA065P7A - 6000 BTU MSII
If you look at reviews for this otherwise nice, small A/C unit, you'll see lots of people complaining about a loud beep every time you press a button on the unit or the remote (e.g. changing fan speed or temperature). It's a high pitched, noisy, piercing, annoyingly loud beep, which wakes spouses and babies. I know of no way to disable or turn off this "feature". I looked for a wiring diagram and didn't find anything promising, so I decided to slightly disassemble the unit and hope to find a speaker. I wound up fixing it and here's how you can to!:
Tools required:
- Phillips screwdriver
- Flathead screwdriver
- Glue (I used a glue stick)
Time required: about 10-15 minutes
Skills required: Basic Handyman. Having said that, here's my disclaimer: Only skilled, certified electricians should attempt to fix electronic equipment. These units may contain capacitors which hold electric charge. Do not touch any of the electronics. I am absolutely not responsible for loss of property or person, damage to this unit or your cat, accuracy of these instructions, nor do I guarantee that this will even work. Opening this unit may void the warranty.
Steps:
- UNPLUG THE UNIT!
- Swing open the front vent like you're going to change/clean the filter and then gently and slowly swing open further to pop the two bottom hinges until it comes off. Set it and the filter aside.
( First swing open, then remove vent )
- Remove 3 large screws and set aside (be careful not to brush anything up against the fragile aluminum vents).
( Location of the 3 screws to be removed for removal of outer plastic ring )
- Remove 4 (there may only be 3) small screws around the control panel and set aside.
( Location of the 3 (or 4) small screws needed to remove the control panel )
- Pop off the outer plastic front piece which has the top vents attached. Do this by gently inserting a flathead screwdriver from the inside into the slot about half-way down on the right side until that side comes off. Repeat for the left side. Then, the trick is to try and gently pull this outer plastic piece up (there are two tabs along the top like there were on each side). Be careful as there is a wire which attaches this piece to the rest of the unit, so orient it so that you don't put any tension on this wire.
( From along the inside, press tab with screwdriver to assist in removal of outer plastic ring )
( Set plastic ring gently aside -- there's a wire connected to it )
- Remove 3 screws (there may only be 2) which were behind the control panel and set aside.
( 2 (or 3) screws to remove from electronics plate )
- Lift slightly (there are two hooks along the right edge) and carefully pull out this plate with attached electronics only far enough so that you can see and can just access to the small, black cylinder (about the size of an Altoid mint). This is the PCB mounted speaker.
( View of the hole to plug with glue (looking down) )
- Take your glue and make a small (about the size of a grain of rice) ball and place on the end of your flathead screwdriver.
- Carefully use the screwdriver to apply the glue ball to fill the hole which is at the center of this piece (don't get glue on anything else). Be sure to pack enough in the hole to muffle the sound (about 2 grains of rice worth).
- Now, carefully reassemble the unit in the reverse order.
NOTES:
- I would not test your success until you have at least the two electronic panels securely screwed back into place.
- For my two attempts at this, one left the beep barely audible and the other reduced the volume by half.
- I did all this while my units were installed in windows.
- If not obvious, this is basically irreversible.
Good Luck!
Firefox, setup secure google search in quick search box
Google now has encrypted Google web search. Here's how to enable it in the quick search box in Firefox:
In Mac OS X, edit this file /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml, (on Windows you should find it at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\google.xml ). Go to the 7th line and add an 's' after 'http', so that it looks like this when done editing.
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://www.google.com/search">
Save this file and relaunch Firefox.
Skydrive is kinda featureless…
Micro$oft's latest addition of editing online docs to compete directly with Google is great, just check it out:
Edit, 05 June, 2010:
Wow, just wow, it's been 3 weeks and it still looks like that. Stay classy Microsoft.
Mounting Windows portion of data DVD/CD from Mac
I have a data driver disk (CD / DVD) which has both Mac and Windows (i.e. a hybrid disk) portions with their respective driver files. When you put the disk in a Mac, it mounts only the Mac portion of the disk. I want to also copy files off the Windows portion. So, this is how to get access to the Windows files by mounting as a iso9660 format disk in Snow Leopard (version 10.6.2)
1. Put the disk in the drive and let it mount normally.
2. From a Terminal Window (yes, we are using commands on the command line):
Get mounted disk location, e.g. " Name: /dev/disk1 " (to be used in third command):
drutil status
Make a temporary mount point:
sudo mkdir /tmp/foo/
Mount the disk:
sudo mount_cd9660 /dev/disk1 /tmp/foo/
You now have access to the Windows files in the Finder.
When done, unmount the iso9660 portion:
sudo umount /tmp/foo/
Then unmount the rest of the disk as normal in Finder.
You can use this command to remove the temporary mount point, (or it should automatically get deleted upon reboot)
sudo rmdir /tmp/foo/
HOWTO: Hookup two wireless routers
I have an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router. Because I have an iPhone (it can't connect via 802.11n), I had to have my Airport Radio Mode set to "802.11n (802.11b/g compatible)", which means when the iPhone was connected (and maybe at other times) the Airport was broadcasting at the slower b/g protocol speeds. Well, I also have a spare Linksys WRT54G v2.0 wireless router. So, I flashed it with dd-wrt firmware, and following these instructions I've configured the Linksys as a Wireless Access Point (WAP) and connected an ethernet cable from one of its LAN ports to a LAN port on the Airport (serving as the "main router"). I now have a 802.11g router (Linksys) for my iPhone to connect to, and my Airport's Radio Mode is now set to "802.11n (5 GHz)" for my Macbook Pro and Macbook to connect to at their fastest speeds. Goodness.
Eclipse with Aptana plugin and SFTP support, a free website editor
A friend wanted a good, free web development IDE for Mac. Personally, I use Coda and love it, but it's not free.
I found this resource as a starting point.
I quickly found that although KompoZer and Nvu were good for her because they were WYSIWYG editors, they both don't support SFTP, which was required in this case (and most cases really), and were also lacking a little love. SeaMonkey and the rest below that on the list were either too simple or too complex. For me, this left three: Aptana, Komodo Edit, or Eclipse to try.
The Komodo Editor is actually pretty good, but I felt didn't have a very good remote connection tool. Aptana doesn't officially support SFTP without paying $99/yr (I tried using their free SFTP plugin, but it didn't work in Eclipse 3.4.2). So, since I use Eclipse for my Python projects, I wanted to see if I could get Eclipse with the Aptana plugin to work. I found this blog with the answer.
These are the shortened steps I followed:
- Download and install the Eclipse SDK ver. 3.4.2 (Ganymede)
- Install the Aptana Studio as an Eclipse plugin
- In the Aptana Perspective, 'My Aptana' tab, select 'Plugins' at the top, then choose to install 'Aptana PHP'.
- Using the Eclipse Software Updates, install a new remote site, Remote System Explorer, by adding this URL: http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/updates/, but you only need to select the 'Remote System Explorer Core' and 'RSE SSH Services' portions, found under the 'RSE_Runtime' when selecting features to install.
- Now, with the Remote System Explorer perspective selected (top right of the IDE), on the left side, in the Remote Systems tab, right-click and choose 'New Connection...', then input the settings to connect to your remote webserver.
- Once you've logged into your site and see the files, right-click on the one(s) to edit and choose 'Open With', then 'Aptana PHP Editor'
- You can now edit with all the syntactic highlighting, auto complete and other features of Aptana Studio.
Get rid of that annoying dashed line around objects when clicking in Firefox
How to get rid of that annoying dashed line around objects when clicking in Firefox:
In the url Location Bar, type 'about:config'.
Then in the filter box, type 'browser.display.focus_ring_width'.
Set its value from 1 to 0.
Tolstrup.us
Shameless plug for the writings of my grandfather at http://tolstrup.us. You'll find stories and pictures of him growing up in the midwest in the early part of the 20th century.
Mac OS X: Mounting FAT32 external hard drive via Terminal command line
I have a 150GB USB external hard drive (IDE/Parallel ATA disk in an enclosure) which was formatted as one partition, FAT32 in Windows XP. I wanted to extract the files off of it using my Macbook Pro running Apple Macintosh Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.6).
However, when I plug it in, I get a dialog box which says:
Disk Insertion
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.
Initialize... Ignore Eject
I saw many references to there being a 127GB or 128GB partition limit for FAT32 for Mac to successfully mount.
Also, a potential problem was that when using Disk Utility it shows up on my system incorrectly as formatted as a Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G).
diskutil list disk3
Output:
/dev/disk3
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *149.1 Gi disk3
1: Windows_NTFS 149.0 Gi disk3s1
It did however mount automatically and show up when I was running a virtual machine, for example Parallels and Windows XP (I used VirtualBox and Windows 7), but copying over files this way proved to be very slow.
So, after spending a lot of time on the internet looking for solutions, I just tried mounting it from the Terminal (command line) with success!
First, make a mount point:
sudo mkdir /Volumes/EXT_HD
Now mount (your device numbers may be different, e.g. /dev/disk2s1 -- you can determine what it is as it will the the highest number when you issue the command 'ls /dev/disk*'):
sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/EXT_HD/
It eventually showed up in Devices in Finder, but just to let you know, when I tried ejecting (unmounting) it when I was done, even though I had closed all programs I got the error:
The disk "USB_DRIVE" is in use and could not be ejected. Try quitting applications and try again.
Unmounting via he command line also failed:
sudo umount /Volumes/EXT_HD/
umount: unmount(/Volumes/EXT_HD): Resource busy
So I had to reboot.
I hope someone finds this information useful because I sure didn't find any help...
EDIT (01 Oct, 2009): Apparently there is a way to enable native NTFS read/write support in 10.6 Snow Leopard (and this may work for Leopard). However, I would recommend not allowing write ability (and thus read only) when using this method as it may corrupt your NTFS files. To set to read only, follow the directions in the link but instead of using 'rw', use 'ro', e.g. UUID=123-456-789 none ntfs ro