Fix audio problems when running XP in Boot Camp

I have Windows XP installed on my MacBook Pro with Boot Camp, and until now I have been having two problems with the audio. One is that the volume is way too low, even at max. The other is that certain programs, such as the Source engine (games like HL2, Portal, TF2, etc.) don't work with the microphone. However I have recently come across a modified driver that fixes both of these problems. I didn't see anything about the mic, but it fixed it for me.

Here's the link: http://www.stuffedcow.net/macbook_audio

To install it, extract the archive to your desktop (it's already in a folder) or anywhere convenient. Then, open Device Manager (Start > My Computer (right-click) > Properties > Hardware tab > Device Manager.) Expand "Sound, video, and game controllers" and double-click "Cirrus Logic HD Audio". When the Properties dialog appears, click the "Update Driver..." button. Choose these responses I have outlined for you here:

1. No, not this time
2. Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)
3. Don't search. I will choose the driver to install.
4. Have Disk...

Now navigate to the folder where you extracted the drivers, and double-click the .INF file. (It should be the only one visible in that folder.) Two options should appear: "Cirrus Logic HD Audio [MacBook, No S/PDIF Out]" and "Cirrus Logic HD Audio [MacBook]". (I'm not completely sure about the name of the first one.) To find out which one to choose, look at your headphones port. If it's glowing red (yes, it lights up) choose the latter. Otherwise, choose the former. It will probably warn you that it's not signed, but just tell it to install the driver anyway. The problems will be fixed, and you shouldn't even need to reboot!

AppleScript: Create an empty file with ease

I wrote this simple AppleScript that lets you create an empty file on the Mac, like you could in Windows. Make sure your script menu is enabled (Applications→AppleScript→AppleScript Utility→Show Script menu in menu bar) and then put it in your Library→Scripts folder. Here's the link:

http://pastebin.com/f67bb99ee

By the way, you don't need to cut 'n paste the whole thing. Just click the Download link at the top!

3D Shading Editor

I've got a new program for you. It's called 3D Shading Editor. I've got a screenshot here, and the introduction from the Readme file, the latter of which should explain the weird colors in the screenshot. Here's the download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/joomnm3xmgk/color3d.zip

As I'm sure many of you know, when using the Windows Classic visual style, you can customize the colors of pretty much anything. However, unlike in Windows 3.1, when you change the color for 3D objects, such as buttons and dialogs, the highlight and shadow colors automatically change with it. This may seem nice, but what if you want to specify your own colors for this? Windows doesn't provide any method for this, except for editing the registry or theme files, which can be very inconvenient when you just want to see what it looks like. However, this program can change these colors independently.

Phallic display at Giant deli

I was at Giant the other day, and as I walked by the deli, I saw a decorative display which struck me instantly as looking quite phallic. If you don't know what that means, look it up. My mom and I both think it was made to look that way as a joke by an employee who has the same sense of humor as me. ;-)

EDIT: I just noticed, the "shaft" even has a picture of a rooster (cock) on it!

Xbox 360 Controller on PC Without Additional Software

Earlier today, I figured out a way to use an Xbox 360 controller on a PC without downloading or installing any additional software. I got the idea when I read (I forgot where) that the controller is a standard HID device, except it sends the wrong class code (0xFF instead of 0x03) so that generic drivers won't automatically connect to it. This is obviously so that Microsoft could require people to use their special software to get it to work. Possibly so they could make you need to use Windows (although this information is written for Windows and, unfortunately, probably won't help if you're not using it.)

But there is a way to tell the generic drivers to connect to it anyway. Simply plug it in and let it install as an unknown device. Then, open Device Manager (Start, right-click My Computer, Properties, Hardware tab, Device Manager) and find your device. Right-click it and click Properties, and then switch to the Details tab. Make sure "Device Instance Id" is selected at the top, and then make note of everything on the top line up to "PID_XXXX" where XXXX can be any four hexadecimal digits (0-9 and A-F). For example, mine says "HID\VID_045E&PID_028E&IG_00\7&29E276DE&0&0000", so I would ignore everything except for the "HID\VID_045E&PID_028E" at the beginning. You can now close out the Properties dialog. Do that, then right-click the device and click Uninstall.

Now it's time to edit your INF file. Go to Start, Run, and type in "c:\windows\inf\input.inf" (without the quotes.) Notepad should open. If not, do the same thing except add "notepad" to the beginning of the string you type into the Run dialog. Scroll down to the section called "[MicrosoftGame]". Now, in a new line in that section, type in "%XXXX.DeviceDesc%=HID_Inst,, XXXX", replacing each instance of XXXX with that hardware ID you wrote down. (And no, I DON'T just mean those four hexadecimal digits I previously referred to in the same way.) Now scroll down to the "[Strings]" section near the bottom, and type in [XXXX.DeviceDesc="Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller"], not including the brackets. (I used brackets instead of quotes since there are quotes in the string itself.) And the XXXX refers to the same thing as it did last time (the hardware ID you wrote down, including but not limited to those four hexadecimal digits.) Now save the file and exit.

If your controller is still plugged in, unplug it and plug it back in. If not, simply plug it in. If a window appears asking if you want to connect to Windows Update, tell it not to. It may also put up a warning about it not having passed Windows Logo testing. Click "Continue Anyway" on any of these warnings. Eventually, it should finish! Now all there is left to do is go into the Game Controllers control panel, select the controller, click Properties, and calibrate it. Have fun!

P.S. I do recommend XBCD. It's another driver, but it's much better than Microsoft's official one. XBCD+ looks promising, but I haven't tried that yet. Oh, and by the way, I'm not referring to xkcd, the popular webcomic. ;-)

Half-Life 2: Episode Two Commentary Blooper

Okay, so I was playing Half-Life 2: Episode Two in commentary mode, and I also happened to have the captions on. But when listening to one commentary node after I got off the elevator in the room with the thumper in the cave (if you played it you'd know what I'm talking about) it said, at the end, "[NOTE: good spot to take over the player's camera to swoop down and spawn some antlions and trigger the vort's attack]". Later on, I came across another one (in the area where you fight the two antlion guards shortly after you exit the cave) which said "[It'd be good to show wireframes of the model, and maybe 'Before and after' images.]" By the way, the model they were talking about was that of Alyx. Let me just point out that they didn't actually use either one of those ideas listed there, although I wish they had! These are obviously notes the developers left for themselves or other developers to see later on, but they seem to have forgotten to remove them! By the way, this is on the Xbox 360 version in The Orange Box; although I doubt it's specific to that version, I just want to let you know just in case.
Pretty funny, isn't it?

Birthday

Just wanted to let you all know today's my birthday...if you want to send me some money as a birthday present, email me and I'll try to arrange it with my dad's PayPal account! ;-)

Convert Windows XP Home to Professional

I recently modified my XP setup to trick my laptop into thinking it was running XP Professional, when in actuality it was running XP Home. This enables several features which were still on my system, but just not enabled. For example, I can now connect to a domain (well, not really, since I don't have a domain controller) and use lusrmgr.msc to configure users and groups. I now also have my Security tab visible in Properties dialogs.

And now for the information you've been dying to hear since you started reading this article: how to do it. First, you must go into c:\windows\i386. On some systems this may simply be c:\i386. Now see if there is a folder called winntupg in there. If there is, you're good to go. Otherwise, get it off another Windows XP CD. It doesn't matter whether it's an OEM copy that came with another computer; it also doesn't matter which edition that disc is. Just get that folder into your i386 directory. Now open up Registry Editor, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then click File > Load Hive. Select the file called setupreg.hiv in i386. Type in a temporary name, and then open that new key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Go to ControlSet001, Services, and then setupdd. Now double-click (Default), and change the 01 and 02 in there to 00's. Click OK, select that key that was created when you loaded the hive, and then go to File > Unload Hive. Click Yes, and then close Registry Editor. Now, look in i386 (on your hard drive) for a program called winnt32.exe. Run this program. When asked, choose to upgrade. Enter your product key (yes, it will be accepted) and install. Now all that's left to do is wait, and then go through that Microsoft Out of Box Experience thing (with the blue question mark icon which moves around the screen giving assistance.) Even if you have an OEM copy of Windows, it will ask you to activate, but don't worry: it will do so just fine. Some features will still be missing, but that's simply because the files for them don't even come with XP Home. If you really want them, copy them off of another computer which runs an honest-to-goodness XP Professional.

Strange bitmaps inside many Windows programs

If you have ever fooled around with Resource Hacker, a free tool to view and edit resources in Windows executables, you may have noticed that many programs contain resources which appear to have been for features which were originally going to be in a program, but then removed. For example, if you look in MSPaint, you can find some removed dialogs, and if you look in that pinball game included with Windows XP, you can find some kind of editor dialog which cannot be opened. But there are a few bitmaps you can find inside of many different executables that I just don't know what they could have been. Look at this one for an example:



I see check boxes, radio buttons, and are those yin-yangs? Whatever this could have been used for, I can't think of. If you want to see for yourself, I took this image from Dependency Walker (DEPENDS.EXE), a tool which comes with Microsoft Visual Studio (and can also be downloaded separately from dependencywalker.com) though I have seen this particular image in several other programs as well.

Download: Alert (command-line message box tool)

I have another program for you: Alert. This program can create message boxes by command line. It is actually an upgrade of another program I had written for my own purposes, which only let you specify text. This one also lets you specify an icon and title text.

Download it at http://www.mediafire.com/?s10ryedzdmf!

Obviously this is intended for batch files and stuff like that. Or I guess you could use it in a scheduled task for a simple reminder system. You could even put a shortcut to it in someone's startup as a prank, to make them think they have a virus or something.

Download: OutCmd

Yes, that's right, another program ending in "Cmd." This one provides functionality similar to the Unix backquote (`) operator. If you don't know what that does, look at the readme.txt file, included along with the program and its source code.

Here's the link: http://www.mediafire.com/?ygxlggxijma

Car hidden in vent?

Well I was wondering what it looks like in my vent, so I got out my digital camera, stuck it down in the vent, and took a picture (with the flash, of course!) What I got was certainly not what I was expecting:




Yes, that's right, there's a TOY CAR in the vent! As of now I still haven't retrieved it (I tried using both my bare hand and the vacuum cleaner) and in fact I think I may have even pushed it farther down. But I'm confident I'll get it sometime soon! ;)

But if you aren't the first owners of your house, especially if any of the previous owners had small children, you can be surprised at what you can find in your vents. I found what looks like another toy vehicle (but I can't really see what it is) and three little plastic people. Several years ago I also found some kind of orange thing with a picture of some character or something on it. But so far all I have managed to retrieve are the people (two I could get with my hands; the other one I needed the vacuum) and that orange thing.

But check your vents — you might find something!

Another download for you: Run with Parameters (RunCmd)

From the readme.txt file:

[RunCmd] is a small open-source program I wrote to add a feature to Windows
that should have been there already. Have you ever wanted to run a
program with command line parameters using the GUI? Well then this is
the program for you!

Download it from MediaFire at http://www.mediafire.com/?4wgdkjjlihw, or from Softpedia using the button below!

Aperture Science desktop theme for Windows XP

I created an Aperture Science desktop theme. For those of you who don't know, it is from a game called Portal. You can look at readme.txt in the file for more information.

Download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?31ni1uihm0w

Transparency checkerboard bookmarklet

Okay, so I haven't actually written a post in a while (i.e. not just had Digg generate one for me.) Well hold your horses! I'm still posting!

Now you know when you edit images in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or (my favorite) Paint.NET, you see that gray and white checkerboard wherever there is transparency? Do you ever wish you had that in your web browser (especially when viewing images as pages?) Have you been looking for something that can add that? Well look no further, as I have bookmarklets (small pieces of code you can bookmark and execute on a whim) that can do that.

Simply drag one of these links onto your Bookmarks toolbar (or your Links bar, dare I say it):

• Checkerboard (gray/white)
• Checkerboard (high-contrast) (black/white)

EDIT: I forgot. The Links bar thing was supposed to be a joke about Firefox being better than Internet Explorer (which it is!) but it turns out these bookmarklets don't work in IE due to their use of the data: URI scheme. IE users, click here. Or, for an alternative solution, click here.

Firefox toolbar removal

For quite a while, I have been wondering how to delete a custom toolbar from Firefox. I finally figured it out, and I am going to tell you just in case you have been wondering as well. It's actually pretty simple, but unintuitive. All that you have to do is remove all of the buttons from it. It won't disappear immediately, but it will after you hit OK. How do you remove buttons, you ask? Simply open the Customize Toolbar dialog (you should know how to open this...after all, how would you have created the toolbar?) and drag the button to the dialog. To remove the toolbar, repeat this for all of the buttons. Wait, do you want an empty toolbar to use as a separator or something? Well simply add a space to it. Yes, you must also remove all spaces/flexispaces/separators to remove the toolbar. Well, that's really all there is to it.

Wii countdown clock

If you've ever been to Gamestop or EBGames shortly before the Wii was released, you have probably seen that big blue clock on the wall. It says "Experience Wii" on it in white text, and counts down to the Wii release date.
Well I was curious who owned it (Gamestop or Nintendo?) so today I called Gamestop. I already have a Wii, so I didn't ask if they had one of those in stock. But I asked who owned the clock. They said they received it from Nintendo, and that Nintendo didn't seem to want it back. So I asked where it was. It was in the back of the store. He then asked me something that I loved hearing: "Do you want it?" I then said yes. He asked me for my name, which I answered. He then said to be there by 4:00 PM. So I went to Gamestop and asked the guy I called for the clock. I told him my name, and he then replied, "You're the one!" He then went into the employees-only section and came out with the clock. I thanked him and went home with it. Now the owner is neither Gamestop nor Nintendo - it's me.

EDIT: I just found on the Internet that someone else got one as well. You can see it at http://revver.com/video/106925/bento-gets-the-wii-countdown-clock/.

Newspaper reference

That concert was featured in the newspaper, and it made reference to me. It didn't reference me by name, but it was definitely referring to me. It errs, however, by saying I am a preteen. I am 13 at the time of writing and at the time of the concert. I can't post the image right here 'cause it's in TIFF format. However, you can download it at http://www.mediafire.com/?02gqdrj00qi.

BTW, I recently dusted off my old UMAX Astra 2100U scanner and my brother gave me the idea to scan the article and post it. So I did! That was from The Washington Post, by the way. The article is also readable from their website at http://tinyurl.com/2u5xrk.

Concert

If you listen to the recording linked to in this post, please keep this in mind: I was 13 then, and I was very excited and nervous at the same time. Some of the things I said may seem out of place; in fact one thing in particular would probably make me come off as some snobbish asshole demanding attention. You'll know what part I mean when you hear it. Just trust me when I say it would make a lot more sense in context. Also, one more thing: my voice isn't nearly as high anymore.

Okay, so yesterday I went to a Nellie McKay concert with my family. I was really enjoying myself. Then my dad asked me if I wanted to request a song. I did, and she attempted to perform that song, but she was having trouble remembering most of the lyrics. By the way, the song was called The Big One, in case anyone is wondering.

Then, she called me up to the stage. I gave out the address to this blog, because hey, free publicity. She asked me to sing the song I requested while she played. I tried, but I couldn't remember all the lyrics either. We eventually just gave up. It was funny. Then she played another song and had me dance with some girl in the audience who was celebrating her birthday. She's not my girlfriend or anything, in fact I didn't even know her, but I figured why not.

That's about all I can remember, but it was fun. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty weird up there, because I just wasn't used to being called up on stage in a concert.

EDIT: I now have an audio file of my part of the concert, courtesy of NPR. Download it at http://www.mediafire.com/?cztmxyrrgzz.

Nellie McKay, if you see this post, which is quite unlikely now considering this was more than 5 years ago, please email me at flarn2006@gmail.com.

Backing Up TI-83 Plus RAM

Have you ever wanted to back up the RAM on your TI-83 Plus without a computer? Well it's possible. This video will explain how.