the “good” old days

i cant believe i’m actually giving praise to windows 98.
the operating system with the most BSOD’s.

i finally got a 2.5inch > 3.5inch laptop to regular ide adapter and plugged in an old laptop harddrive to see if it still worked/what was on it.

i put it into a p4 2.8ghz and booted it… to my amazement it chugged along fine and into a working windows enviroment. this would never work with win2k/xp because of the way they install themselves to a specific partition id in the boot.ini file.

when upgrading computers, even when the win2k boot.ini is the same position of ide0 master, it will bluescreen. it causes me much grief when i have to reinstall because of the different hardware causing windows conflicts/errors.

i know switching computers is rare. but damnit, its easy to just unplug the hd and stick it in a new box. its also annoying that windows (and other operating systems) come compressed and have to be slowly copied over and decompressed (and configured) instead of just copy (and checksum) and reboot. also annoying that the cdrom cant write a little flag on the harddrive , so it can reboot automatically, check for the flag, skip install from cd, boot to hd, finish installing… i cant imagine this would be all that hard to implement. why must i babysit the windows installation (yes i know about the floppy disk auto installer crap).

my next os will:
1. autodetect its hardware on every boot (if it detects a change!!)
2. be quick/easy to install

no embedded video in wordpress.com blogs?

guess thats the end of this blog then. cya wordpress.

alternative freedom documentary released

and there was much rejoicing.

http://www.archive.org/details/AlternativeFreedom

havent watched it yet.
says it was uploaded this year, 2008-Jul-06

currently only been downloaded 70 times?! well damn, go watch it now!

macgyver lamp

since clint liked my printer fix so much, i’ll post some more fixed up stuff.

i bought a lamp at target a few years ago, it was a total piece of crap. it fell apart twice, but i wasnt about to spend another $40 on another crappy “made in china” lamp. so i fixed it.

i think i watched entirely too much red green and macgyver as a kid…

click for larger size

this guy’s lamp looks better than mine. follow his detailed instructions next time

canon pixma mp 470 printer scanner all in one

a friend gave me his printer after it stopped working.
every time you turned it on it would say paper output slot is jammed

i searched around and google said a few people had this error.

mostly people just had some junk stuck in the printer. but this printer had no such obstruction. after a lot of wrestling with it, taking out about two dozen screws, i found the sensor!

the “paper output slot” sensor is a small black piece of plastic that tells the printer when it has paper stuck in its rollers. it goes forward when there is no paper and it gets pushed back when there is paper present. the spring on the stick wasnt enough to push the stick in front of the sensor bars.

i cut some electrical tape and put it on the stick. so the tape enough to trip the sensor, but not enough to block the sensor when the paper was in it.

i tested a print or two, screwed everything back together and it works fine now.
a real pain in the ass to take apart however.