As I was learning the nuances of Android, I ran into an issue where any time I plugged in the phone via USB to my computer I could no longer use any phone applications that needed to access the SD Card. What perplexed me was that I was choosing, via HTC’s Sense UI popup, that I only wanted to charge the phone. What was even more frustrating was that any time I wanted to listen to music or watch a video from the phone’s SD Card I would have to unplug the USB cable. I could not charge my phone while using the applications I wanted to.

After looking through multiple settings on the phone, trying to find the cause of the problem, I finally stumbled on the cause and solution. I had, upon purchasing the phone, installed doubleTwist as my media player replacement. What I had not realized is that doubleTwist has an option to auto mount the SD Card any time you plug in a USB cable that is attached to a computer. As soon as I changed the setting in doubleTwist my problem went away. So what setting do you need to change?

Open doubleTwist on your Android phone. Open the Menu and choose Settings. Under the Settings look for Auto USB drive and uncheck the box. This should prevent doubleTwist from auto mounting your SD Card when you plug in your Android phone via USB.

I spent a little time looking into the problem and it all came down to the same source as the culprit, Windows 7. It turns out that Windows 7 has a new feature that when it thinks you’re communicating with someone, ie. voice chat in TF2, it automatically reduces volume of all other applications by 80% as a default. You can change this by going to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Sound -> Communications. You have the option to mute all other sounds, reduce the volume of all other sounds by 80%, reduce the volume of other sounds by 50%, or do nothing. I personally have chosen to have Windows 7 do nothing.

If you happen to like this feature and want it to happen most of the time you can always open your game or communications software first, and then open your other application, such as Windows Media Player or TF2, and it won’t modify the volume. I hope this helps those of you out there experiencing the same problem.

cPanel has recently updated to version 11 and introduced a much better user interface with quite a bit of error checking. For example, when I tried entering two email addresses into the forwarder address box it kindly let me know that ; or , as a separator were not acceptable. After a little research I discovered that you simply create two forwards for the same email address. One pointing from the desired forward blog@domain to my email, and another pointing again from blog@domain to John’s email. This actually creates a single forward entry within the operating system, but cPanel keeps it recorded as two separate fowards. This now also means that both John and I will be able to moderate the comments so they should show up much quicker.

MuvEnum Address Bar is the ultimate replacement for the missing address bar in Windows XP SP3.  It recreates the experience of the original address bar to help you quickly open files, folders, programs, websites, bookmarks, browsing history, web searches, and more from your Windows Taskbar!  Easily activate the toolbar using a global system-wide shortcut.  Includes support for the most popular browsers, keywords, themes, a calculator, and more!

MuvEnum Address Bar (x86 and x64 compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 2000, 2003, and 2008)

Last updated: 07/03/09

Product Home: http://www.muvenum.com/products/muvenumaddressbar/

Download Latest Version

View Version History

Post bug reports and suggestions at: MuvEnum Address Bar UserVoice

If you have changed the Tweak Settings option “When visiting /cpanel or /whm or /webmail with SSL, you can choose to redirect to:” to Hostname or SSL Certificate and you navigate to a hosted domain at https://www.domain.com/cpanel it will redirect to https://servername.com:2083/, however, it will not be using the SSL certificate that you just installed.  “But why?”, you may ask.  The reason is because you installed the SSL certificate for Apache, but you did not install it for the WHM/cPanel interface.  The installation for the cPanel/WHM SSL certificate has been moved to a different section of WHM. This is because cpsrvd handles SSL requests for WHM/cPanel whereas Apache handles SSL requests for normal domain traffic.

Under the Service Configuration section of the standard WHM theme there is an option for “Manage Service SSL Certificates”.  Navigate to this page and you will see it lists certificates (self-signed) for Exim, Courier, FTP, and surprise… WHM/cPanel!  This is where you need to install your newly purchased SSL certificate. If you click on “Install New Certificate” you will be taken to the standard WHM SSL certificate installation form.  If you have already installed the certificate through the standard domain method then all you have to do is click on “Browse” next to Domain this CRT is for and select the servername from the list.  This will install your previously installed SSL certificate in the correct location. 

If you did not already install the SSL certificate you will have to do so by pasting the necessary information into the form and submitting it. If you haven’t already changed the Tweak Settings option to redirect make sure you don’t forget it. At this point you should be good to go!

This issue actually affects more than just Team Fortress 2, but my exposure to the problem was limited to this game.  The solution is a patch provided by Microsoft which I had installed on my previous instance of Vista, and was the reason I had not experience crashing prior to my reinstall.  Hopefully if you’re reading this you’ve taken the initiative to research your problem rather than trying to do what I did.  I have been running successfully with no crashes since installing the patch.  With that said, install the patch and get back to the game!

Microsoft KB Article 940105 - Virtual address space usage in Windows game development

1. Make a smart playlist called “All Files” with this rule: “Artist” is not “123456789″ (or any nonsense name that won’t be in your library).
2. Make a static playlist called “All Live Files”.
3. Make a smart playlist called “Missing Files” with these rules: Match all of the following rules, Playlist is “All Files”, Playlist is not “All Live Files”
4. Select all the files from “All Files” and drag them into “All Live Files”. The dead files marked (!) will not copy over.
5. “Missing Files” will contain all of your dead files. Select all and delete. Voila, a nice clean iTunes library. A few more steps are needed since iTunes 7.4.3 doesn’t appear to let you delete anything from a smart playlist.
6. Make another static playlist called “Dead Files”.
7. Select all, right-click and choose “Add to playlist” and choose the “Dead Files” static playlist.  Why don’t I have you drag them from the “Missing Files” smart playlist to the “Dead Files” static playlist?  iTunes won’t let you, but for some reason you can do it by right-clicking on them and sending them to the playlist.  Kudos to the Itunes software engineers on that one.
8. Select all the files in the “Dead Files” and delete.  Now you have the nice clean iTunes library.

I have these four playlists in their own folder. Whenever I gather more than a couple dead tracks for whatever reason, I delete all the tracks in “All Live Files” and repeat steps 4 through 8.

Not as nice as the much needed “Sort by (!)” feature but it works like a charm and it’s pretty simple.

Steps 1-5 taken from an anonymous comment on http://simra.net/blog/itunes_is_crap and updated with steps 6-8.

UPDATE 1/16/08
I’m not sure when exactly this was implemented, but as of iTunes 7.6 you can now sort by the (!) column. Now you can manage your dead iTunes tracks without so much hassle.

Now how do you disable UAC? 

1. Click on Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> User Accounts -> Turn User Account Control On or Off.
2. Uncheck the box next to “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer”
3. Click on “OK”. 
4. It will say you need to reboot, and it isn’t kidding so go ahead and reboot.
5. Once you’ve rebooted into Vista, install Windows Messenger 5.1 and then follow the same instructions above, this time placing the check in the box, to re-enable UAC.

Be careful though, Windows Messenger 5.1 doesn’t like to work very well when a scrollbar appears in a chat window.  This is somehow tied to the “don’t give out your credit card information” message.  More on that later if I can find an easy answer to how to fix it.

It turns out that it was a simple Windows Vista configuration error of not having Line 2 set as the default.  It appears that Steam/Team Fortress uses whatever Windows has set as the default recording device, and in my case it wasn’t set to anything.  I would click on “test microphone” and it would immediately turn on and then off without actually testing it.  As soon as I opened “Recording Devices” and chose Line 2 and clicked on “Set as Default” in-game voice chat started working.  Hopefully this post will help someone out.  Also, if anyone knows what you may install that would suddenly cause hl2.exe to crash constantly (regardless of being Team Fortress 2 or Counter Strike:Source) I would appreciate it.  I ended up just reinstalling Windows Vista and I’m sure there was a much easier method to fixing the issue.  Recently I had installed AIM, and the newest Creative Soundblaster X-FI drivers from October.

• Open a command-prompt with administrator priveleges (right-click, run as administrator).  If you have UAC disabled then you can open a regular command-prompt.
• Take ownership of notepad.exe using takeown /f c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe
• Grant yourself full access rights using cacls c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe /G <username>:F (replacing <username> with your username)
• Using Explorer, replace notepad.exe with the editor you would like to use after renaming it to notepad.exe
  • If you are using Notepad2 to replace Notepad you would just rename Notepad2.exe to Notepad.exe