HackerHaus » Tech

Dealing with Stubborn External USB HDs in OS X

Michael — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:48:46 +0000

If you’ve purchased (or have otherwise come into possession of) an external USB hard drive, and you’re having trouble getting Disk Utility to play nicely with it (i.e. reformat it to HFS+), here’s a trick for you. Open Terminal and type the following:

cd /dev/
ls - | grep disk

Take note of the disks displayed. Provided you have no other external hard drives attached, your culprit disk is probably going to be disk1.

Again in the terminal, execute the following:

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ disk1

This invokes the Disk Utility, commands it to erase the disk disk1, rename it as and format the drive as HFS+, or MacOS Extended Volume Hard Drive Format.

Note: Use HFS+ if you intend to use the hard drive on Mac only. If you want to use it on PC or PC/Mac, you’re going to have to choose another option. For more detailed information, check out the Apple developers website.

DIY G1 GPS (OMG!)

Michael — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:06:50 +0000

So the GPS on your G1 doesn’t seem to be working. Here’s what I did to fix mine:

Go to Settings -> Security & Location and make sure that Enable GPS satellites is checked. You can also check “Use wireless networks,” but I find that to be less than accurate.
Turn phone completely off and go outside.
Turn phone on.
Leave phone sitting outside under a clear, obstruction-free sky for as long as it takes to reestablish its connection to GPS satellites. This could take several minutes. If you’re in Arizona and/or it’s over 100°F, I suggest you wait until evening so as not to turn your smart phone into a pop tart.
Open the Maps application, hit the Menu button, and select “My Location.”

Hopefully, your device will now be communicating with GPS satellites properly again and will give a much more accurate reading of your current location. Feel free to comment or drop me a line if you have anything to share.

WordPress 3.0

Michael — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:29:10 +0000

So, I installed WordPress 3.0 and switched over to their new default template. So far, so awesome. The new functionality, the surface of which I’ve only barely scratched, is great.

I only noticed one bug: using the Digg Digg plugin (which I love) causes chunks of jQuery code to display at the beginning of every archived story when viewing by category. My fix? Go into Settings->Digg Digg. Under “Buttons allow display in,” make sure that Category and Archive are deselected. Fixed!

Missing Podcasts on iPod

Michael — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:22:50 +0000

If you’ve recently purchased a new iPod and have transferred files from your old iPod to the new one, only to find that your podcasts are now “missing,” I may have good news for you. The same happened to me this morning, but I found that they were all still there… just hiding. Here’s how I fixed it:

If you try to search for the “podcast” genre or even the specific title of the podcast/episode, it won’t show up. However, if you make a smart playlist based on the genre “podcast,” everything should show up there. Once you’ve done that, select all files in that smartlist, right (ctrl) click on the selected files, and click on “get info.” From there, go to Options, and change the Media type to music. Your podcasts should now show up in your Music folder.

Moji in FireFox 3

Michael — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:30:18 +0000

For those of you who have been using Moji in previous versions of FireFox, but have been disappointed to find that it is unavailable in FF3, here’s a quick solution that worked for me. The fix lies in the fact that FF now requires extensions to use ‘secure updates.’ If you want Moji to work again (pending release of a new version), you’ll have to disable these. Here’s how I did it:

Enter about:config in the address bar.
Add a new boolean option called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set it to false.
Restart FF and hope for the best.

Caveat Emptor: I am not responsible for you screwing up your FF config. You break it, you buy it.

Tokyo: Day III (a.m.)

Michael — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:43:35 +0000

Not much to say this morning. Had a bit of a rough time sleeping.

Up next: Shower, food, Akihabara, Sensoji. If I can get myself back to Shibuya and Shinjuku, I still have more shopping to accomplish. My travelmates’ feet are gonna hate me.

Here’s my Flickr photoset of the previous day’s frivolity. Enjoy. (And please try not to break anything, OK?)

how the internets work

Michael — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:40:44 +0000

I’m going to shamelessly steal something from Einstein and contort it to serve my own self-aggrandizing purposes. Since he’s dead, I don’t think he’ll mind. Even if he weren’t dead… I think I could still kick his ass.

You see, the internets is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. This is how you get ones and zeros. Squeeze/meow = one. No squeeze/no meow = zero. Do you understand this? And WiFi operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

That is all.