Fix Broken Buttons on Harmony Remote
Logitech’s Harmony Remote is a really nice remote. I’ve had mine for a couple years but now the most commonly used buttons are wearing out. Since I have a Tivo the most used buttons are the forward buttons that I use for skipping commercials. These buttons are pretty much unusable now, they will work some of the time but only if you press really hard.
It seems stupid to buy a new Harmony remote every couple of years just because the buttons wore out. So here is how you can fix the buttons. These instructions are for the 676, but should work on most other versions too:
- Open the remote by removing the four screws at the bottom (two are under the battery compartment.
- Pry the remote open.
- Remove the two screws that are holding the circuit board on.
- Take the button piece out and flip it over too see the backs of the buttons.
- On my remote the buttons that were broken had some kind of shiny liquid on them. I’m not really sure what this is or where it comes from, all I know is you need to get rid of it.
- Take a Q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol and scrub the keys and the contacts on the circuit board.
- Put the remote back together, it should now be working.
After I performed the above procedure the remote buttons started working perfectly.
Update 4/8/2010: The buttons stopped working again so I tried the cleaning process again. The buttons look very clean but for some reason the buttons still don’t work. I’m not sure why it would work great the first time but have no effect the second time.
I was looking around online and found a product called CaiKote 44. This product is designed for exactly the type of button repair that I needed. It is a paste that you put on the bottom of the buttons and it restores the conductivity. Application is pretty easy, using the included swabs just spread a thin layer of CaiKote on the button and let it dry for a few hours. Once I put the remote back together it was working perfectly again.
The problem seems to be finding CaiKote. The only physical store that I know of that carries this product is Fry’s Electronics. They sell it for $5.99. It was difficult to find, it took two workers a while before we finally found it. If you go it is located in the electronics parts department near some LCD screen cleaning products.
I haven’t found a good place to buy it online. You can but it from the manufacturer, but they have a $25 minimum order. It is also sold on Amazon here, but as of right now the price is very high, maybe it will drop to a more reasonable price in the future.
How to debug a Windows bluescreen crash (BSOD)
I use hibernate when I am done using my Windows Vista x64 machine for the day. Usually I would use sleep but for some reason my DFI motherboard doesn’t work with Vista’s sleep feature. Hibernate usually works fine, but maybe once or twice a month the computer will crash with a bluescreen when entering hibernation. Bluescreen errors are really annoying because Windows doesn’t give the user any useful information as to what is causing the error so it is really hard to fix it.
After some trial and error I’ve figured out how to gain some information on figuring out what is causing the bluescreen. The following steps show you how to determine which binary is causing the error. These steps should work on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows Server:
- Go here to download and install the 32 or 64 bit version of the Debugging Tools for Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/Debugging/default.mspx.
- Wait until your computer bluescreens.
- Once the computer reboots open a cmd.exe window. On Vista you must use an elevated permissions window.
- Type this command at the prompt to allow debugging symbols to be found: set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=symsrv*symsrv.dll*f:\localsymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
- Go to the location that you installed the debugging tools and type “windbg.exe”.
- Select File –> Open Crash Dump.
- Select c:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP.
- Type in the windbg window: !analyze -v
- Windbg will show you information about the crash. I look at IMAGE_NAME to determine what binary is causing the problem.
Usually I will see a binary that starts with “nv” which means nVidia. My graphics card drivers are usually the ones that are causing the problem. If you don’t recognize the binary then try searching for it online and you’ll probably be able to figure out what it is.
If you can figure out what it is then you can try installing a newer version of the program or driver to see if that helps.
Google Chrome error: The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005)
Update: I have confirmed that Rizal’s suggestion in the comments fixes the problem. Add a “--no-sandbox” argument to the Chrome shortcut and Chrome should start working. To do this right click on the Chrome desktop icon. In the Target box add “--no-sandbox” without the quotes to the very end of the box.
Update2: Chrome’s sandbox is an additional security feature that restricts each browser process from accessing anything on the system that it is running on. So disabling it is usually not a good idea. But in this case the browser is so new that people are mostly using it as a test and to verify website compatibility so I think most people are ok with disabling it. As far as I know using the “no sandbox” argument is no worse than browsing with the current version of Firefox or Internet Explorer. Google or Symantec will fix the problem in a future release and you can re-enable the sandbox at that time.
Original post:
I installed the new Google’s new Chrome browser within minutes of being released. It installed ok but it wouldn’t run at all. As soon as it started up I would get this error:
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click ok to terminate the application.
This appears to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP). Unfortunately I am running this on a corporate machine and there is no way for me to disable or configure the Symantec software.
Uninstalling SEP is always an option to get Chrome to work. Another less drastic method that was posted online:
I was able to go into SEP – Change Settings – Centralized Exceptions,
click Configure Settings, and add c:\documents and settings\<username>
\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
to the list. However I had to reboot the machine to be able to open up chrome w/out the error message.
For more information read this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/google-chrome-help-troubleshooting/browse_thread/thread/41ef35857180e154/.
Gutter Covers: Leaf Guard review
The gutters on my house are under a lot of trees. So they get clogged up all the time which causes the rain to overflow the gutters. I’m tired of going up on the roof to remove the leaves and pine needles from the gutter so I’m currently looking for one of the gutter cover products that are supposed to protect the gutters from leaves.
For some reason there many, many brands that all seem to be about the same. I checked out the websites of a few of the ones in the area such as Leaf Guard, Leaf Filter, and Gutter Helmet.
I contacted Leaf Guard and they came out to my house recently to give an estimate. The guy was nice enough and took all the necessary measurements. For some reason he wanted to give us a PowerPoint presentation on Leaf Guard. This was my first key that these guys are probably a rip-off, but I went ahead and watched the presentation. It was the usual stuff: Leaf Guard is the best and all the rest are terrible and worthless. After the waste of time presentation he gave me the quote and wanted me to buy it on the spot. That is the sure sign that these guys are a rip-off. The quote was for $5000, including a $700 buy right now discount. Of course I just told him I wasn’t going to buy today and he left. Now I know that these guys are just con artists trying to get a huge markup on people who don’t know much about gutters.
From what I hear from other people all of these gutter cover companies have huge markups like this. So I recommend avoiding all of them. I did hear about one product called Leaf Relief that is manufactured by the Alcoa corporation (a large, well know company). I figured Alcoa wouldn’t want to ruin their reputation on rip-offs so I found a couple of contractors on their website who could install the product. Both quotes were for about $2000, less than half the price of Leaf Guard which seems like a reasonable price. They could go even cheaper if you have existing gutters and just want to install the covers. So far Leaf Relief is the only legitimate gutter cover company I can find. If anyone knows of any others then please leave a comment about the company.
If you don’t want to pay a contractor you could go even cheaper with a do it yourself project. You can buy Elko Gutter Genius guards online here. Or if you don’t want to install anything then how about having a robot clean your gutters. The robot sounds pretty cool, but I have no idea how well it works. Please post here if you have used either of these products.
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with Vista x64 and WMA Lossless
Recently I tried setting up Exact Audio Copy (EAC) in Vista Ultimate x64. With disk space being so cheap nowadays I also wanted to use WMA Lossless encoding. With lossless encoding no audio fidelity is lost and I can always convert back to the original WAV files if I want to in the future.
The first thing I did was go to the Windows Media Encoder website so that I could download the encoder. Since I’m running Vista x64 I grabbed the x64 version of the encoder. Unfortunetly this is a bad idea. What they don’t say on the site is that if you use the 64 bit encoder then all your other software must also be 64bit. Since EAC is only 32 bit I never was able to get it to work with the x64 encoder.
Finally I gave up, uninstalled the 64bit encoder and reinstalled the 32bit encoder. After I did that EAC worked fine. The Configuration Wizard in EAC detected and set up the encoder perfectly.
The annoying thing about EAC is that when using an external encoder it pops up a new command window after every track is extracted. This makes the computer practically unusable because new windows keep popping up all the time. I looked around and found under File –> EAC Options –> Tools there is an option called “Do not open external compressor window”. This sounded like exactly what I needed so I checked it. Unfortunately this completely broke the external compression. The resulting WMA files would be corrupted after being encoded. I’m not sure if this option works on other OSes, but if you are using Vista x64 don’t select it!
Here is the solution I found to the popup window problem:
- Hit Ctrl-Q to bring up the Compression Queue Control Center.
- Check the “Make all compression tasks sleep” option.
- Close the dialog.
- Hit F9, then go to the Tools tab.
- Check the “On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background” option.
- Optional: Set the number of simultaneous external threads equal to the number of CPUs that you have.
Now when you extract a CD all of the tracks will go into the compression queue. When you are done extracting all your CDs, go back to the Compression Queue Control Center and uncheck the sleep option. This will make all encoding tasks start (then go eat dinner or something else that takes a while).
Spelling Error In English Vista SP1
Spelling errors in Microsoft Windows are rare, but I recently found one in an error dialog. In Vista’s “Windows Fax and Scan” program my scanner doesn’t work and for some reason and I get an error message that says:
An error occured while setting scanner properties. If another program is scanning, please wait for it to complete and try again.
“Occured” should actually be spelled “occurred”. These scanner error messages are probably rarely seen at Microsoft so they didn’t catch it. You’d think this would have been fixed in SP1, but I guess it will have to wait until SP2.
Vista SP1 English Spelling Error