Let me start off by saying that I didn’t ever plan to do a post on faulty products.  I did want to do a post on “products I like”.  We’ll get there.

But I’m very observant.  I don’t miss much.

And I just noticed that I went into my first floor bathroom, which days ago I had closed the heat vent off and shut the door to save energy since I rarely go in there, and it is just toasty warm in there!  I noticed lately that the heat is always off and the door closed to my son’s bedroom, but every time I go in there, it’s warm.

So that’s my first defective product to list.  The floor-mounted close-able heat vents that appear to close but do not impede the flow of heated air.

More to follow.

Today I replaced the button cell (A013 / LR44) batteries in some of my laser pointers.  Most of the batteries were dead and leaking, so now there is a contact way down inside the laser pointer barrel that’s now corroded, but is very difficult to reach.

Here’s an idea:

Instead of loading the batteries in the pointer with the negative contact (cathode) in where the leaks originate, reverse the laser polarity so the batteries can be loaded with the positive terminal in.  Now the inevitable leaking will still damage the contact, but it will be on the part you can get to and clean easily.

If your Nexus 7 (2013 – second generation) doesn’t show up correctly in Device Manager when you connect it  (“Unknown device”, “This hardware cannot be installed”) because the driver isn’t found, the solution is to identify your device and add one line in the correct .inf file which will allow XP (Pro SP3 32-bit in my case) to load the driver.

Not sure if it’s required, but I did enable the USB Debugging option in the Developer options.  It wasn’t necessary to change from MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) to PTP.  Incidentally, my device is an August 2013 model running 4.4.2 (KitKat) which as of this post is the latest OS.

Download and execute the Microsoft USB identification utility “usbview.exe”.  I found it on this page: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/335A90747734097886257070006415B9

My device's ID was this:
Device Descriptor:
bcdUSB:             0x0200
bDeviceClass:         0x00
bDeviceSubClass:      0x00
bDeviceProtocol:      0x00
bMaxPacketSize0:      0x40 (64)
idVendor:           0x18D1
idProduct:          0x4EE2
bcdDevice:          0x0228
iManufacturer:        0x01
iProduct:             0x02
iSerialNumber:        0x03
bNumConfigurations:   0x01

The Vendor ID is 0x18D1 (Google).
The Device ID is 0x4EE2.

Then you edit the file c:\windows\inf\wpdmtp.inf

and edit this:

[Generic.NTx86]
%GenericMTP.DeviceDesc%=MTP, USB\MS_COMP_MTP

to append the line that makes this device a target of this inf.

[Generic.NTx86]
%GenericMTP.DeviceDesc%=MTP, USB\MS_COMP_MTP
%GenericMTP.DeviceDesc%=MTP, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4EE2&MI_00

(At first, I was not sure what the &MI=0 does, so I just left it unmodified).  At this point, the ‘Found New Hardware Wizard’ using Automatic settings will install it, and then you can copy files to and from the device’s Internal Storage.  An additional step is needed to set up for Android debugging (see below).

I’ve had to edit the .INF before (for other devices) to add new lines to use the same drivers when the PCI Device ID, Subsystem Vendor ID, Subsystem Device ID, etc. change.

Thanks to the post here for sending me in the right direction: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/andreasliebigapps/FERbuAQfTnk

Update on 12/18:

I noticed my Nexus 7 was still showing up with a yellow ! under Other in Device Manager, and I couldn’t see it when I ran “adb devices” from the command line, which is necessary to develop Android apps.  The driver installation dialog was still coming up when I plugged it in, so I investigated this further.

“&MI_” was referring to ‘Matching Device ID’ which you can see in Device Manager (Properties, Details tab).

The missing driver was for the Android Composite ADB Interface.  The driver zip has been removed from the Asus site, so I had to get it elsewhere (from the ASUS Nexus 7 Tablet ADB USB Driver 6.0 download page).

Later, I found this Google link, but didn’t try it: http://developer.android.com/sdk/win-usb.html#top

The Google version (in source.catalog) is Rev. 8; the other one is Rev. 6, but they are binary exact  driver files (only the date changed), with the only exception being the .inf and .cat files (which as I understand it, specify new compatible devices).

Again, the .inf needed to first be edited to include this new device’s Device ID.  In the file android_winusb.inf, add one line to the end of the [Google.NTx86] section, which pertains to 32-bit XP, for this Nexus 7:

;Google Nexus 7
%SingleBootLoaderInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E40
%SingleAdbInterface%        = USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E41
%CompositeAdbInterface%     = USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E42
%CompositeAdbInterface%     = USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E42&MI_01
%CompositeAdbInterface%     = USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E44&MI_01
%CompositeAdbInterface%     = USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4EE2&MI_01

I am only installing XP 32-bit drivers (x86) and not 64-bit, so I did not modify the following section at all, although the general concept is the same.

[Google.NTamd64]

Prior to doing this, my Nexus 7 was in Device Manager (Other) with a yellow !

Now it correctly appears as a Nexus 7 under Portable Devices, and also under Android Phone, as Android Composite ADB Interface. (Android Debug Bridge).  Here’s a screenshot.

I didn’t try connecting to the device in recovery mode yet.  The following article describes that it may be necessary to add yet another entry in the .inf to load the driver for the device in recovery mode:
http://blog.dantup.com/2012/10/fixing-adb-device-not-found-with-nexus-7-in-recovery-mode/

Another update (01/14/15):
I’ve recently switched to Android Studio for app development, which I’m running on Windows 7.  Again, to use the Nexus 7 (2013) as a debug target, it was necessary to modify the wpdmtp.inf file as described above, and also the device driver for the Android Composite Interface.  The Google driver that comes with Android Studio worked for me; just browse to the driver from Device Manager to clear the yellow !, as described here:

http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/oem-usb.html#InstallingDriver

I’ve had this for almost 40 years, but have no idea what it’s called…

Last week, my dad was visiting and I almost gave him this monitor to take to electronics recycling, but thought I should see if it was worth anything on ebay first (which is always a good idea).  Seeing that it was, I listed it.

Here it is being tested on my old but still-working 386-40 (with Micropolis ESDI drives!)

In two days, someone did ‘buy it now’… for $388!
Makes me wish I would have kept more of them.

I used these in the 90s to debug VGA graphics chips and DVD boards, and to debug video drivers when it was the only way to have two video adapters in the same computer.

12/12/13.   I worked for hours to set up a system to test this.  The post office destroyed it.  It was protected with me for 14 years here and didn’t make it 100 miles to New Jersey.  I didn’t make $350.  I lost $32 in mailing and this lovely thing is gone.
Devastated.

This should have been a museum piece.

Why is it every time I spend four hours to give some treasured piece a good home, it’s just destroyed?   Buyer and seller, get nothing.  WTF.

This should not be so difficult:

ls -ald */

barry1:/srv/www/htdocs2/xblkx # ls -ald */
drwxr-xr-x 7 blk root 4096 2010-12-01 00:29 wp-admin/
drwxr-xr-x 5 blk root 4096 2013-11-03 21:01 wp-content/
drwxr-xr-x 7 blk root 4096 2010-11-30 22:26 wp-includes/

This is mostly a note to myself about how to do that, so I don’t forget.

http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/taxonomy/term/1/0?page=9
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man8/fdisk.8.html
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/dd.1.html
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/2-methods-to-clone-your-linux-hard-drive/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery
http://www.switchroot.com/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-scalpel-ubuntu

I thought I had started a list of links and software I like, but I can’t find it, so I will put it here.

Links

WordPress theme selector: http://wordpress.org/themes/tag-filter/

PHPBB style selector: https://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo/3.0/?from=submenu

Free Software

One of my favorites is a software program called PDF Redirect, which lets you print out PDFs from any application.  It installs as a printer, and when you print to it, you get a PDF.  For free!

Atomic Clock Sync (set PC clock to time server): http://download.cnet.com/Atomic-Clock-Sync/3000-18512_4-14844.html

Speedfan (CPU voltage and temperature monitoring utility): http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Putty (SSH and telnet client): http://www.putty.org/ and WinSCP (SFTP and FTP client for Windows).

Firefox extensions and add-ons: FireFTP, FireSSH (caution: doesn’t work well with emacs), Download Helper,  SQLite Manager, Google/Yandex search link fix.

RealVNC (remote access client): http://www.realvnc.com/

VLC Media Player (player for video and audio files): http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html and FFDshow codec pack: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/

To resize, crop, rotate, adjust image files: Faststone Photo Resizer (http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm)

For disk partitioning and data recovery, Mini Tool Partition Wizard (http://partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html) and Ubuntu Rescue Remix (http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/).

Music Tools

For ripping audio CDs to a lossless flac library, I recommend Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) and the scripting front end AutoFLAC (http://www.legroom.net/software/autoflac).  Once set up correctly to work together, you can go through a stack of CDs in a hurry.

Check your audio CDs for authenticity and discover which ones were created from MP3 files with True Audio’s Tau Analyzer.

For music file tag management for many file types, MP3Tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) is indispensible.  I only rename my music files manually, but if you want to automate it, MP3 Tag&Rename is also useful.

For music file format conversions: Trader’s Little Helper (http://tlh.easytree.org/) is awesome.

I purchased AlbumPlayer (http://albumplayer.com/) jukebox software to play and manage my music library.  After trying out every program I can find, this is the best thing there is, and the support and license terms are excellent.  I’ve used this program almost every day for more than 5 years and it’s one of the best programs I’ve ever found.  It supports every audio and video format I tried, after installing BassAAC and BassALAC (http://www.un4seen.com/) (see also: AP forum topic).

Other computer resources

After dealing with an unbootable Windows 7 drive (a line of garbage displayed on the screen and then not booting), I discovered a Microsoft utility “bootrec“.
Executed “bootrec /fixmbr” and “bootrec /fixboot” from the command prompt, and this fixed the problem.  Startup Recovery did not detect any errors.