Archive for May, 2008

Free Lunch

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Aaron works with our buddy Pete at Rapid Creek Cycles in Palisade, and also happens to go big. Well, bigger than everybody in our group (except Tom):

Posted in mtb | No Comments »

Hall Ranch blowout

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

The bead came off the rim, the tube swelled out the side and wrapped around the axle, but I didn’t get the cameraphone out before it exploded…

Posted in bike, humor, humour | No Comments »

woot is awesome

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Those scamps over at woot included an awesome graphic to enhance the appeal of one of the woot-off items today:
woot

Posted in humor, humour | No Comments »

What to do when iTunes hoses your USB port

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

For whatever reason, iTunes sometimes just screws up the the USB device I plug my iPod into. It’s toast, and no device will work; not the iPod, not a flash drive, nothing. No amount of being careful with iTunes and “ejecting” the iPod will help.

Rebooting the computer fixes it, but this happens with such regularity I’d be rebooting several times a day.

But I discovered that if you disable the USB port/device, and then enable it again, the problem is also fixed. Going through the device management dialogs is incredibly cumbersome, so I wrote a script.

fixusb.bat:

@echo off
echo "disabling usb device..."
devcon disable "@USB\VID_0424&PID_2504\5&18F4DAC0&0&5"
echo.
echo "enabling usb device..."
devcon enable "@USB\VID_0424&PID_2504\5&18F4DAC0&0&5"
echo.
pause

The @USB\VID_... bit is the USB device ID. To get the device ID, you’ll have to go to the Device Manager dialog. Figure out which device the iPod is attached to (I don’t remember exactly how I did this; sorry). Then on the “Details” tab of the device “Properties” dialog you can get the “Device Instance Id”.

I have to use this all the time, so put a shortcut to it on the desktop.

Posted in hacks, itunes | 1 Comment »