Time Capsule Repair

Some are claiming that Apple's Time Capsule router/NAS devices are dying after eighteen months of usage. The culprit seems to be the power supply. Apple has even decided to replace some that were beyond their warranty, but that's only in the US. Sucks to live somewhere else. No matter where you live if you have a Time Capsule who's LED flickers at power and then goes out then this article is for you.


The irony of something so short lived called a Time Capsule not withstanding , this is a major pain in the ass for consumers. This inconvenience can be compounded when your Apple authorized reseller doesn't know what's wrong and simply suggests you buy another one. Whether they do this out of ignorance or greed is not certain. One major source of frustration is that Apple has not built the devices to be repaired. Once the device has been opened a replacement power supply could easily be installed in minutes.

So what do you do if you have one of these busted little babies? Use an external power supply like the ones used to power external hard drives and a do a little moding to revive your Time Capsule.

1) Peel off the bottom rubber and disassemble the time capsule making sure to remove the hard drive. Get more instructions on this here.

2) Remove the power supply. And desolder the cables shown here.


3) The cables are twisted into three groups.
The single cable is the 12v connector.
The five cables group is the ground
And the four cables is the 5v connector

4) These can be connected to an power supply such as would be used for powering and external power supply.

5) I got the idea to use a molex connector from this site ( as well as all the pinout information)

6) If you want to mount a female molex connector into your time capsule you'll have to enlarge the existing whole.

Installing Windows 7 from a USB drive

Booting from a USB drive has been a goal for many in the past few years. Even before the Days of Windows 7 people were looking at the idea of creating a bootable USB drive for installation, maintenance , testing, or recovery. There have been many techniques developed and many tools release to help people accomplish this task. Most of them are pretty straightforward, but even so the majority require a few steps and some time dedicated to get the job done.
For the person who doesn't have the time or energy to explore all these avenues and wants to install Windows 7 from a USB drive there is another solution, the "Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool". Some people might think that this tool will download Windows 7 for you but that's not the case. It will, however, create a bootable USB drive that you can use to install 7.
You will need : 1) A dot net enabled machine 2) A USB drive, 3) The USB/DVD download tool, and a Windows install image. If you don't have an image cause you didn't buy one you can always create one from your Windows install DVD using ImgBurn.
How it works: 1) Install the tool and then run it, 2)Indicate the source path to your .ISO and click next, 4) Select your USB device and your done. Once the process is finished you can use the USB to install 7.

Blogging With a Focus

I hate winter. In the dead of winter I turn in to curmudgeonly little troll with no sense of humour. Inevitably I go to all the trip advisor sites and try to find a vacation, but it's hard to pick from all the options and hard to trust the pr machine when they tell you they're the best. So what to do? Visit a micro trip advisor that aims to promote and area rather than a service. It's even better if the webmaster of blogger does it on a volunteer basis based on sheer love for the location.
One such site is Best of Bucerias. Best of Bucerias is a pint sized trip advisor that aims to inform and connect you to everything that's desirable in the area. If you're wondering what documents you'll need to travel you can find information on that there. What if you have in mind a non traditional vacation where you rent a villa? You can figure out where to shop, and where to rent your car from on the Best of Bucerias web page.
With most resort getaways you need to meet with the tour guide once you arrive. They give you the low down on where to go and how much things should cost so no one takes you for a ride. All that is available on the site. Even how much tip you should leave. I highly recommend visiting it. Maybe when I satisfy the winter troll with some sun I can start writing about IT again.

Robocopy loop

Because I didn't invest in Vista I missed out on a lot of the new features it had. I am only finding them out since I switched to Windows 7. One new thing I have learned recently is that the long loved xcopy has been deprecated in favour of the new Robocopy. This is great news for techs like me who often have to backup up unbootable machines before reformatting them.

One recent problem I encountered while using robocopy has to to with directory junctions. I had booted a Vista machine with a Microsoft's desktop recovery disk and I wanted to backup the user's folder from the 'users' directory. Every time I tried to do this with Robocopy I ended up with a loop in the 'AppData folder '. At this point in the copy process Robocopy made continuous nested directories of 'AppData'.

The problem is that there is a junction in this directory and I had not used the switch to exclude junctions in directories. That's the /XJD switch. When i got all that figured out I recieved an 'access denied' message in vertain files. This was relieved by using the '/B' switch to run Robocopy in 'backup' mode.

The last switch I had to use was '/Z' switch which runs the command in 'restartable' mode. I suggest using this when the destination directory is somewhere in a network location. This all took some time because Robocopy is far from verbose with it's error messages.

So the final command was robocopy source destination /E /S /XJD /B /Z
Don't forget that path names with space still need to be between quotes. Happy Robo-copying!

Enable God Mode in Windows 7

Admittedly you can look in all sorts of different places within the Windows environment to turn on or off the system's feature. That's the common way of doing things: find out where the option is enabled and memorize it for when you need it, but now there is another way starting with Windows 7. With this version of Windows you can enable 'God' mode. True, it's a stupid name for a feature in a professional operating system, but since 'ROOT' and "superuser' were already taken it seems to be the best fit.

This mode allows you to see and control the whole compendium of Windows features (I think). I haven't seen it compared to an exhaustive list of features yet, but it looks pretty complete. If you want to take a look at it here's what you do. Create a folder and name it, ' GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} '. Once you've done that you can double click it to view the list of changeable features.

PortableApps: Your Stuff Anywhere

Not all of us have gone to a laptop yet. Some people still depend on public computers in schools labs, or Internet cafes. Even if you're not in that category there is something useful for everyone at PortableApps.com.

What is a portable app? A portable app is an application that does not require installation and can be run from a removable storage device. Imagine carrying bookmarks, documents, media, books marks, and applications on a flash drive. It's true that ubiquitous Internet will one day make this kind of development less important, but the present reality is that not all computers have connectivity, or network permission to access cloud stores. In such cases working from a flash drive can be a real asset. Another real benefit of this kind of application is the lack of registry changes that comes with the traditional kind of install. We've all been in a situation where we have to install a piece of software for a five minute job that we'd probably never use again. Even when it's uninstalled some of the changed to the registry remain, but not with a portable app.

Portable apps is not the only site that features this kind of software, but they have packaged it well and provided support so they have my vote. They also have a nicely crafted application launcher that looks a little like the Windows start menu. Why not check them out. If you are giving a gift and want to buy a flash drive for someone why not set it up with portable apps before giving it to them?

Choosing a Web Host

If you decide to have an Internet presence for your company, club, or organization few decisions will affect you more profoundly than your choice of web host. Hosting a website on the Internet is not a difficult task, but hosting one reliably and with the full range of needed services is.

One of the most daunting challenges when picking a host is the sheer number of companies that are out there to choose from. This alone makes many people "tune out" mentally and reduce their selection pool to hosts with a big name, or a big name look. One mistake many individuals make is tuning to some kind of online reference to help them narrow the candidates by popularity. This would be a great idea were it not for the fact that many sites that claim to rank the best web hosts seem to be nothing more than advertising by the hosts themselves. So how does one proceed?

The first step it to document your needs. How much space will you need? Most small business or personal websites require very little space and are well served by the most basic of plans. Do you need to have email addresses on your domain? If you so then you need to calculate how many because hosts vary quite widely on the number of address the assign to each plan. Will you require server side functionality such as .asp or .php? If your website has programmatic functionality then you will need to contact your web designer or programmer to determine what you need.

Once you have made a list of your needs it's time to narrow the pool. One big feature to look for is an uptime rating. Uptime documents the contiguous running time of a service. If their infrastructure has been unavailable then they were termed to be "down". At first, 'uptime' may seem to be a basic requirement for web hosts, but you'd be surprised at the number of hosts that fail even at this basic level.
A second and less technical method for evaluating your future host is to make a short list of providers and then send them a support request. Keep track of when you sent your message an and when they responded. This will give you an idea of how responsive they are to your requests. Make sure that you factor in the time zone that they are in. Also make sure that you already know the right response to your technical question so that you can evaluate not only the timeliness of their response but the value of it as well.

Selecting a host in not always easy, but with some of these points in mind you'll be well armed for the task.