Iphone 3GS and iOS 5 ... activation required? But my phone has been unactivated for 6 months!

Well I ran into an interesting scenario today.  I have an old iPhone 3GS with a dead cell radio, so I've been using it as everything but a phone (since my temp phone, a Palm Pre Plus is just a couple ticks north of pure garbage, notwithstanding WebOS, which is sufficient), meaning it's an iPod Touch now.  So today I thought it might be cool to go ahead and pop iOS 5 onto it....oops!

The installation seemed to go okay, but when powering up after the install, it wanted to activate the phone. There was no emergency dial screen, there was nothing but an activate now prompt (and in iTunes, it just said "iPhone" and "Activate").  Following the steps on the screen was futile..pick a language and location, wireless network, but no SIM installed, so that's where it stopped.  Hmmm...did I just brick it?

I thought I was totally hosed because we've since left AT&T (my wife is sporting a brand new iPhone 4S with a crappy battery) for redder pastures with Verizon, when I remembered that I hadn't sold my wife's old 3GS on eBay yet.  I popped the SIM card out of her old phone, put it into mine, and so even though the SIM was not active (just says NO SERVICE in the upper left), it allowed the "activation" of the iOS 5 install to proceed.

Well that was fun...NOT!  Scary as all-get-out is what it was!

Firefox 7 rules, and I finally got my TouchPad ordered!

I installed Firefox 7 today, and in a word, it FLIES!  It is so much quicker than any other version, ever, that it rivals Chrome in terms of speed....on all fronts...it launches faster, loads pages loads faster (cute, eh?), and is just much more responsive.  Me likey!


...and HP employee TouchPad day finally arrived, and while it took me and everyone else in the US that works for HP way too long to get it done, I finally got my order confirmation through on my 32GB TouchPad.  I can hardly wait for the fun to begin!  Now to count down the days until it arrives (could be as much as 2 whole weeks...due to overwhelming demand).

Jamming to Replay, the new album from The Outfield

Available now from iTunes, June 28, is Replay, the latest album from The Outfield.  It's got that classic album sound...soaring vocals from Tony, catchy pop hooks from John, and distinctive percussion provided by Alan.  The trio is at the top of their game again, now if John can just lick cancer for a second time, maybe they'll cross the pond to the US and I (ok, we) can see them in concert for the first time since 1986.

In the meantime, winamp is just pumping out the tunes!

HP TouchPad demo video showing the exclusive features offered by WebOS

My iPhone 3GS is now a 32Gb iPod Touch

Well, the cell radio inside my 23-month old iPhone 3GS has finally failed, after 2+ months of increasingly erratic behavior.  This effectively turns my iPhone into an iPod Touch, which is fine, since everything else, including the Wi-Fi, on the unit still works just fine.  I did not purchase an Apple Care package for it, since you don't expect a $300 phone to completely fail within 2 years, so there are no repair options available  Since I have a Blue Mikey 2.0 microphone attachment for exceptional recording, I'll be holding onto this unit for the foreseeable future.

I popped the SIM card out, and it still turns on and brings up the home screen, so I suspect I'm not going to have to do anything else to it to keep using it as an iPod.

I am, however, relegated to trying to get my old Motorola flip phone back in service...assuming the batter will hold a charge.  If not, I'm off to eBay to pick up an old used phone to hold me over till upgrade time arrives.  I AM NOT looking forward to texting on an old numeric keypad once again!

We are moving to Verizon from AT&T, since they now have the iPhone, and our contract is up in only 5 more weeks, but I don't want to settle for the iPhone 4 when the 5 is rumored to be available no later than September.  My wife's 3GS is still going strong...well as strong as can be had on the AT&T network.  So we will, most likely, be waiting until the iPhone 5 is available before making the move to Verizon.  I'm eyeing either a 4G Android handset (Thunderbolt), the HP Pre 3 running Web OS, or the iPhone 5.  I haven't decided, but after 4 years of iPhone life, I'm ready to look at different options.

iTunes decided to stop recognizing my iPhone after the 10.2.2 version update....here's how to fix it

Well, hopefully Apple monitors the Discussion Forums because more than a few of us have experienced a rather hopeless situation where, following the update to iTunes version 10.2.2, it decides to stop recognizing the iPhone.

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, and my iPhone 3GS is on 4.3.2.  I accepted the "recommended" update one time recently when I ran iTunes, and the next time I tried to sync my iPhone, iTunes did not recognize it.  I was able to pull the pictures off it, no problem, but could not do anything with it in iTunes.

Thankfully there is a solution, albiet not a very straightforward one.  If you have updated iTunes to version 10.2.2 (or even 10.2.1 apparently) and your iPhone 3G, 3GS, or 4 no longer shows up when you connect it to your computer, here's what you can do to fix it.   The steps are outlined (kind of) in this Apple discussion forum post. I followed the instructions there, but ended up with an error that there is already a newer version of AppleMobileDeviceSupport installed, so I had to improvise a bit. Here are those steps:
 
1. Uninstall all Apple applications through the Control Panel.  My list included iTunes, Bonjour, and Apple Application Support, and Apple Mobile Device Support (AMDS).  For some reason, AMDS was not listed in mine, and yet, he is the problem.
2. Reboot your computer
3. Download the latest version of iTunes, 10.2.2 (at the time of this post) from Apple, making sure to select the correct installer, 32-bit or 64-bit, for your Windows version.
4. Download iTunes version 10.0.1 (all versions between these 2 seems to have the same version of AMDS) from Old Apps
5. Download UniExtract from Legroom Software
6. Install UniExtract
7. Right-click each (one at a time, of course) of the iTunes programs you downloaded, and select "UniExtract to SubDir".  This will create 2 new folders, named the same as the program name, containing the individually extracted installation packages.
8. Go to the new folder for version 1022 and delete file AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi (if you are using a 32-bit version of windows, the filename will probably be AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi)
9. Go to the new folder for version 1001 and COPY file AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi to the folder for version 1022.
10. Now that the AMDS package has been replaced, it's time to reinstall iTunes v10.2.2.
11. Go back to the new folder for version 10.2.2 and double-click iTunes.msi (or iTunes64.msi).  Install as usual.

That should do it.  When I did this, even though I had already been on version 10.2.2 for a couple of weeks, the first time it ran, it did a database conversion, further proving that the automatic update process was incomplete from before.

So, it remains to be seen if further updates to iTunes will fix this problem, or if some of us will be left out in the cold, required to manually replace the AMDS package each time before updating to the newest version of iTunes.  Only time will tell. 

Many thanks to Apple Forum member "ra1larson" for figuring all of this out and sharing with the rest of us how to work around Apple's software pitfalls.

No Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 for me....yet

I've decided against the upgrade to VideoStudio X4 for now.  In the few days I used it, I didn't really see any benefit over the X3 and X2 combo that I have now....certainly not another $50 worth, which would essentially have put my upgrade at $100.  I'll wait for another sale at Corel that includes the PaintShop Pro upgrade (I currently have X2) as well as VS X4, hopefully for around $70 or $80.

Corel VideoStudio X4...less than a month after I buy X3? Crap!

As luck would have it, Corel released VideoStudio X4 within a month after I upgraded from X2 to X3 for $40.  Hmmm....maybe that's why the upgrade was so cheap!

I've now downloaded the free 30-day trial version of X4 to see how it performs when I run it through it's paces.  I called Corel support and they told me my only option was to by a Tech Upgrade for $50, which gives me a full box copy and a new license, so I can put X3 on a different computer.  It might be worth it...we'll see.

I'm currently capturing some more VH1 Behind the Music episodes with the capture option, so I'll see how that goes.  My initial impressions aren't really that different than X3 in terms of rendering speed.  The fact that the DVD disk creation has been integrated back into the program instead of relying on MovieFactory 7 SE might just be reason enough to plunk down the cash (that and the extra license).  No doubt I will one day have a laptop that can handle video editing, and it would be nice to have an app available to install on it.

Where are all these .event files coming from? The answer is "Corel" and how to stop it (kind of)!

OK, so I was TOTALLY excited to finally upgrade my Corel VideoStudio (Video Studio) to version Pro X3.  After all, I'm running Windows 7 with a 4 core processor with hyper-threading, and the new version would take advantage of all that horsepower!  YEAH!

So I bought the upgrade on a great price from Corel online.  I did the "disk in mail" option because I expected to get a new manual, but no dice on the manual...that's OK, I have the manual from X2, so it will probably work.

So the installation also came with a new utility called DVD Factory Pro 2010, which has backup capability.  I thought I could use the backup utility to burn data DVD's, since I want to get away from using Roxio (although I still use the lightscribe label creator).  So I ran DVD Factory Pro 2010, and it immediately started scanning my system for media files. WHOA!  I have TBs of data, and I didn't want that happening, but there was no way to stop this thing short of killing it in Task Manager.   I killed it and thought, I'll never run that again.

Well, a short time later, I noticed this file with an extension of .event in one of my folders.  Hmmm, I wonder where that came from.  I then started noticing them everywhere..picture folders AND music folders.  The ONLY thing that had changed was the installation of VideoStudio X3, so I had a pretty good idea where they were coming from, and this article at Corel proved it.

Well, I deleted all the .event files in my music folders.  The next day my daughter had a DVD project for me to do, and so I ran DVD Factory Pro 2010 to try and create the DVD.  It didn't work so well (I ended up using MovieFactory 7 SE), but the next day I noticed more of the .event files being created in NEW music folders I was creating.

I knew there had to be a monitor process of some sort running in the background, but Task Manager didn't show any such process with Corel in the description.  I checked for a "service", but there was none that matched the description.

Upon further investigation in Task Manager, I stumbled across processes MLEMonitor and MetadataMgr.   I was able to determine that these are the guys responsible for those darn .event files that are cluttering up my music folders.  They are easy enough to kill in Task Manager, but you must kill MLEMonitor first, then kill MetadataMgr  (otherwise, MLEMonitor will relaunch another instance of MetadataMgr).  It even has it's own folder in the Corel program group > Program Files(x86)/Corel/MLE/.

I was also able to confirm that they are ONLY launched when DVD Factory Pro 2010 is run.  There does not appear to be any way to configure these scanning processes NOT to run, and the program has no Preferences or Settings options.  It appears that they will only scan your configured "Libraries", but since I have 12 folder locations (consisting of over 2TB of data) defined in my Music Library, it's going to scan and monitor them all (hence the reason I was getting .event files in folders I had just created).  I looked for a way to deinstall JUST DVD Factory Pro 2010, but it does not show up in the uninstall list, and it appears to only be runnable from inside VideoStudio X3.

I registered as a user in the Corel support forum so I can reply to that thread with the answer on how to stop the .event files from being created, and will also suggest they modify it so that you can turn off the monitoring.  Most people probably don't even know they have these .event files because they are hidden, but PowerUsers like me turn off all that hidden crap off in explorer.

Windows 7 Explorer error "Could Not Find This Item" when deleting a file...

Have you run into this little Windows 7 Explorer bugaboo yet?  When you try to delete a 0kb file you get an error window pop up that says "Could Not Find This Item".   I had 3 of these little gems hanging around my downloads folder, all of them without extensions, and I couldn't get rid of them...Delete didn't work, F5 to Refresh didn't work, trying to move them to a new folder didn't work, and DEL from the command prompt didn't work.  I thought about booting into SAFE MODE, but I found the correct solution first:

1.  Shift+Right Click on the directory where the offending file resides, and choose "Open command window here" from the menu.

2. Type command DIR /X   (this command will generate a listing slightly different than just DIR, in that you will not only see the "Windows" filenames, but the 8-letter DOS filenames as well, which is the one you want).  In the example, file V.A. cannot be deleted, but the DIR /X command gives me the DOS filename as  well:
[example]  11/10/2010  11:45 AM       0  VA2E96~1       V.A.

3. Type the DEL command, using the DOS filename from the listing: DEL [DOS-filename]   (so I typed DEL VA2E96~1)

...simple as that

Testing Firefox 4.0 BETA

I decided to test out the new Firefox 4.0 Beta.  I've been using the Firefox browser ever since 2004 when IE allowed my system to be mercilously infected with Adware, forcing me to reinstall from scratch.  I've loved using Firefox, but lately I've noticed that Chrome and Opera were much faster.  I was hoping that the new release of FF would do the trick, and based on my early (one day) impressions, it has.  I find it to be much more responsive than before.

What I like:
The built in tab view page
The see-thru (aero?) style of the top bar
Paste & Go right click menu option (finally)
The overall speed...big improvement!

What I don't like (yet):
The tabs being moved above the address bar (I just have to move my mouse further...yuk!)
The status items that used to be in the bottom right hand corner are now part of the navigation bar
When you hover over a link, the destination now appears in the address bar.
I'm used to looking at the bottom of the window for these last 2 items, so it's going to take getting used to looking at the top to see them.

All-in-all, it looks like a huge thumbs up on the FF 4.0.   Hopefully my add-on makers are on the ball so I don't have to wait too long for some of those functions (thankfully NoScript -- a requirement these days -- is already a go).

Overclocking my i7-920...an exercise in "good enough"

Back in January 2009 I built me a new desktop to upgrade from my seriously aged 2.8Ghz P4 system. After much deliberation I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and go with the latest and greatest that Intel had to offer....the brand new Core i7. The CPUs brought a premium price for sure, but with 4 cores and hyper-threading, I figured I'd be safe for a few years.

Fast forward 2 years and I decided it was time to see about upgrading my socket 1366 chip. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the 1366 did not have a desktop upgrade path. What? It wasn't THAT old?!? Was it? Intel only released one generation of processors for it, switching to the LGA1255 socket shortly thereafter. That SUCKS!

So since I have the low-end 920, it has plenty of head room, right? I read everywhere about OC'ers hitting 4Ghz on this chip...well, the d0 stepping anyway....and of course, because I was a very early adopter, I have the c0 version. More SUCKAGE!

I have the "more than adequate" Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R (rev 1.0) board, so I figured I'd hit a pretty good number, right? I researched several sites that outlined how to overclock that chip on that board, and I made all the recommended adjustments. I even upgraded the fan on my CoolerMaster Gemini II cooler to a 2600 RPM model.

I'd been monitoring the thermals on the system prior to any changes, and the core temp at "rest" was around 32 degrees C. Pretty good, so I figured I had plenty of room. However, following all the steps in the tutorials, I was only able to get a stable system at 21X multiplier and Bclk 160 @ 1.375 V, which comes out at 3.3Ghz. Any higher and it would eventually BSOD with a hal.dll error. Oh well, some is better than none, I guess. Running 8 cores full blast, the core temps top out at around 70 degrees C, which is still well below TJMax. I can live with that. I reenabled all of the "peformance" and "energy saving" settings in the BIOS that you disable to find a stable OC, so most of the time, the multiplier drops down to around 12X anyway.

Maybe this will hold me over for another couple of years.