Drive Icon for Seagate Expansion External Drives

I saw some posts where people were asking for the icon and Autorun.inf files that shipped with the following drives from Seagate.

• ST305004EXA101-RK – 500 GB
• ST310005EXA101-RK – 1 TB
• ST315005EXA101-RK – 1.5 TB
• ST320005EXA101-RK – 2 TB

If you formatted your drive or are otherwise missing these files, just extract the contents of the following ZIP archive to the root of your expansion drive. Changes may not appear right away. You may need to unplug and re-plug in your drive.

http://cid-9415f61cbb1a8030.skydrive.live.com/embedicon.aspx/Tools/ExternalDesktop.zip

Fixing connection issues when 0.0.0.0 is set as the default gateway

I’ve been happily using various Windows 7 builds for a while now, including the recent release of Windows 7 RC (build 7100). There are many UI improvement that help me be productive – especially on a laptop when not connected to external monitors. The Shell has made significant performance improvements, and while I never found UAC prompts to be an issue I do like that there’s far fewer of them when I’m changing configuration settings while exploring the possibilities.

At home I decided to update our Vista SP1 Media Center to Win7 RC. Almost everything went smoothly except that on boot my machine couldn’t connect to the Internet. When I looked at the Network and Sharing Center, “Unidentified network” showed up. To check my network configuration I dropped into a command prompt and ran “ipconfig /all” only to find that I had a new default gateway address: 0.0.0.0”. Disabling and re-enabling the NIC fixed the issue until the next reboot.

Then I was pointed at KB970313. It seems there’s a race condition at startup – which also seems to have gained a boost with Win7 – where if the Apply Bonjour service starts before my NIC retrieves settings from my router, the default gateway 0.0.0.0 is added. And while their web page claims, “Thanks to Bonjour technology, getting computers and smart devices to work together is as easy as connecting them”, it had quite the opposite effect for me: no connectivity to the outside world.

If you’re having issues connecting and see “Unidentified network”, fixing the issue is fairly easy: disable the service, then disable and re-enable your NIC. Alternatively you can reboot your machine.

1. Click on Start.
2. Type services.msc and press Enter. On Vista you may need to confirm the UAC prompt.
3. Find the Bonjour service. This may be tricky since it’s open source and may not display the same. But you can check suspected services for the typical path “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mdnsresponder.exe”.
4. Right click on the service and select Properties.
5. Change the Startup type to Disabled.
6. Click the Stop button. You can then close the Services window.
7. Reboot the machine.

But what installed it? A disabled service begs the question, why even have it installed?

While perhaps not as impressive as Process Monitor, I have my own set of tools I’ve been working on occasionally. The Windows Installer PowerShell Module exposes Windows Installer APIs to PowerShell. By combining a few cmdlets I can examine objects through a pipeline to find what product installed “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mdnsresponder.exe”.

PS> get-wicomponentinfo | where { $_.path -ieq 'C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe'} | get-wiproductinfo

ProductCode                            ProductVersion      ProductName
———–                            ————–      ———–
{D0DFF92A-492E-4C40-B862-A74A173C25C5} 3.0                 Adobe Version Cue CS3 Client

Unfortunately I can’t remove the product without breaking the Photoshop CS3, but having disabled the service I shouldn’t have to worry about not being able to connect to the Internet.

So much thatch

Yesterday I rented a dethatching machine for the front lawn. It looks as if it hasn’t been dethatched in so many years, and in our second year here I figured it was time to give the lawn some TLC.

I was able to kick up about 320 gallons of densely packed thatch! That’s a lot of thatch.

View Full Album

I didn’t do the backyard because about 1/3 of it is entirely moss and we have a slight drainage problem anyway: much of the rain water collects under the south fence and is rotting the bottom away. I want to till it up and landscape it, giving me a chance to re-contour it and put a French drain under the fence.

Today I’ll be over-seeding and fertilizing the lawn and in the next week or two I’ll aerate.

When it rains, it pours

When it rains, it pours. And news media is the weatherman who embellishes every rain drop. As if the current financial crisis wasn’t bad enough now there’s the swine flu outbreak.

But what’s worse – so worse – is that the news media has been so incredibly negative and reporting the absolute worse through all this. What contributed to the cause of the current financial crisis was bad, yes, but when the news media began reporting on it they painted a much more grim picture. As a result, many more people dumped their stock which sent us further down the spiral. And the news grew worse. Further and further we go.

And now we have the swine flu. It’s serious, but very few people who have contracted the virus have actually died from it. Now tonight they are reporting a global outbreak. But what’s real is that 2 people returning home from Mexico to the UK have the virus and are recovering in isolation rooms in hospitals.

Already the virus is having a disastrous effect on airline travel and their stock, so further down the spiral we go.

News media needs to drop the charade of reporting what they think people want to hear, and start actually reporting good news that people actually do want to hear.

Still no Color Wheel

It’s been quite a while since the color wheel in our DLP died and it still hasn’t shipped. We’ve grown quite accustomed to Hulu but they really need new commercials. I hope it arrives soon, though. My laptop doesn’t have the best screen for viewing nor can I work on it while watching, say, Lost.

The DLP has Died

About 4 years ago Tracy and I bought a Samsung 42” DLP (HL-R4266W). At the time DLPs were much cheaper than comparable plasma TVs and much cheaper than LCDs. Of course, all have dropped in price – especially LCDs – since then. But part of the reason we bought the DLP is because it’s sustainable.

And now it’s time to replace a part but not the part we expected. For a couple of months the TV has gradually started making a whirring or humming noise; so gradual that most of the time we didn’t even notice (plus I’m just over 1/4 deaf). This morning I turned it on and it was much louder and then started grinding just like ball bearings that were shot. And that’s seemingly just what the problem is: the color wheel that sits on ball bearings needs to be replaced.

It seems easy enough to do myself. I used to build PCs and the TV is really not all that different on the inside. I also found instructions online for a similar Samsung model but all seem pretty obvious. By tomorrow I’ll order the new part after I make a call to hopefully confirm my suspicion so I don’t waste time ordering the wrong part. I did already take part of the TV apart to gain better confidence that the color wheel is bad. Even though I briefly stopped the cooling fan and the noise persisted I don’t know if there’s another fan inside without taking it completely apart which I want to avoid until I’m ready so I don’t accidentally lose or jar any other parts.

I’ll probably document the procedure so stay tuned if you’re interested.

An Overreaction: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008

Lead is dangerous. Phthalates probably not so much. But in 2008 both lead in children’s toys from China and phthalates found in most plastics we’ve been using since the 1920s caused a scare like the saccharin scare that peaked in 1977.

At the height of this new scare and while the U.S. economy was already slipping into turmoil, President Bush passed into law the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (summary). The result: thousands if not millions of children’s toys, clothing, and furniture were pulled from resellers like Goodwill and the YMCA. These items can’t even be sold at garage sales.

So with people carefully watching their own budgets when demand for used toys and clothing is higher, there will be no supply. At least, not until mandatory and expensive testing must be done. Manufacturers for a variety of reasons cannot meet the dates and its far too expensive for resellers to test. According to WDBJ7, their local YMCA generates only $800 to $1,000 a month from their used toy selection and testing would cost about $100,000. so logically, they pulled all toys. While they hopefully derive a sustainable amount of revenue from other sales, the consumer is who is affected.

Manufacturers are complaining that the Act fails to take U.S. manufacturing practices already carefully controlled into account – practices that are hardly regulated in China obviously. So it seems rational to cut off the supply of toys from China. Haven’t we bolstered other countries’ economies enough already? This should also contribute higher internal revenue since that money is not leaving the country.

And phthalates? One would have to be exposed to incredible amounts to possibly be affected. The greatest potential for harm, a study shows, comes from exposure during pregnancy. So add that to the list of things to avoid when women are pregnant.

Personal responsibility is key here. So many people – especially in the U.S. it seems – want to blame someone else. If a baby chokes on a toy, is the toy manufacturer at fault or the parents for letting that baby play with the toy? Some level of responsibility from marketing is required to avoid labeling such toys for smaller children, but the buck stops at the parents.

And until people learn personal reasonability, organizations such as the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission will continue tell us what we can and cannot use regardless of the expense to consumers, retailers, and U.S. manufacturers.