18Mar
I bought my Wii Fit for the Christmas holiday and I have been getting a surprisingly fun workout. I have found that every so often, especially while stepping on the board, the Wii Fit would get disconnected and I get the message “Communication has been lost, hit “A” and power button on the board”. I changed the batteries but that did not help. I did a little research and found some interesting clues to why it might be happening. I had a theory. Since the batteries are at the bottom of the board I thought the vibration of stepping plus the pull of gravity might be loosening the battery connections enough for the board to lose power temporarily. To test my theory I made a shim out of cardboard from a cereal box to hold the batteries firmly in place. This seemed to have done the trick since I have not had the problem since.
Print out the template and trace the pattern on a piece of thin cardboard from a cereal box or shoe box. Cut out the darken shapes on the template. Place the cardboard on the battery cover. The tabs on the Wii Fit battery cover should fit through slots cut out of the template. I used 2 pieces of cardboard to hold the batteries snugly in place. You can use a piece of tape to hold the cardboard in place.
Tags: wii connectivity, wii fit, wii fit losing connection, wii fit lost connectivity, Wii hacks
14Mar
I was getting very short battery life from my blackberry even after replacing the battery. After upgrading to blackberry software version 4.6 the battery life seems to be lasting much longer. Before the upgrade my bettery would not last thorugh the night if it was not plugged in. Last night I forgot to charge it and I expected to see it dead as usual, but to my surprise it had practically a full charge and continued to have full battery the whole day. I am not sure if the new software has better battery management but I am very happy with my blackberry now that it is working as it should.
Tags: battery life, blackberry, blackberry battery
09Mar
A while back I wrote about using twitter for team building and communication in the workplace. Since then I have read the case for enterprise micro-blogging and the case against enterprise micro-blogging .
While both have valid arguments I have had mixed results with trying to implement this at my workplace, so I will present my experiences.
If you ask around about Twitter, you will see two camps. Those who think Twitter is the best thing the internet has ever produced and those that don’t see the point. Unfortunately there are a lot more of those people who don’t see the point in my office.
I twittered, as I normally would, about my lack luster blackberry battery life to the regular twitter.com service. By coincidence my co-worker saw it on his twitter account and came over to my desk gave me a new battery. This is how I envisioned the enterprise twitter service to work. Co-workers tweet about where they are, what they are doing, and what they are complaining about so your co-workers can help each other out and be a more efficient and cohesive group.
Ironically, he was actually on the twitter site to delete his account.
Tags: Twitter; Teamwork
07Mar
Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 RC on March 4, 2009 and is available for download. A list of Notable changes in the new service pack include improved compatibility with some hardware and software. I would personally like to see a service pack that would make Vista suck less. But, if you are going to test out this Release Candidate (RC) make sure you have backed up your system prior to installing the service pack. Microsoft service packs sometimes blow up machines. It would be best if you can make a Ghost image of your machine. Clonezilla is an open source disk cloning tool similar to Symantec Ghost that you can use for this step.
Tags: Service pack, Vista
06Mar
The worm sends you link that appears to come from a friend. Trend Micro (http://blog.trendmicro.com/new-variant-of-koobface-worm-spreading-on-facebook) reports that it looks like a YouTube video and requests that you upgrade your Flash player, but it in fact installs itself on your PC where it has access to your Facebook account and propagates itself to everyone in your friends list.
Get the latest virus definitions and be careful what links you click on to protect yourself from other worms in the future. If you don’t have anti virus on your PC check out Clam Antivirus which is open source software that works just as well as Norton or Mcafee.
Tags: Facebook