Sunday, February 21, 2010
Logitech Quickcam Messenger and Windows 7
I dug out my old webcam (Product ID: 861092-0020 )hoping to get it working again for some time lapse fun, only to find out Logitech don't provide drivers for it anymore... Not even Vista drivers! Are they expecting me to buy a new cam? Sure, but it won't be a Logitech this time! :)
How hard would it be just provide the driver?!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Sony eReader and Windows 7 64bit
What a nightmare! Today I tried installing the Sony rereader software on my Windows 7 Pro (64bit) machine, so I could load some books from Books on Board. Download Adobe Digital Editions, and registering that side of things went well! Installing the Sony software seemed to work, but I couldn't get it to actually open up! At all....
After fiddling around on two seperate machines, both running 64bit Windows 7, I decided to give up.
XP Mode to the rescue!
Turns out the Sony Reader software, as well as Adobe Digital Editions play nicely together in the virtual XP mode provided in Ultimate and Professional! Just install everything as normal, and click the USB menu and then the Sony item and everything works as you'd expect! Woo! Now I can enjoy some Terry Pratchett without resorting to actually buying a bit of a tree!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
U3 Drive Hacking
Right, I've been meaning to write about this for ages! One of my U3 drives has a custom partition full of various Sysinternals and other handy Windows based utilities. This is good, because most AV programs flip out when they see Nirsoft's Password revealer software and since it's on a read-only partition; they can't do anything about it! :)
If you have a U3 capable drive (most of the recent Sandisk drives have it these days) then head over to Hak5 and get your hack on! This guide will also rid you of the pesky U3 autostart crap that appears everytime you plug the drive in.
Following on, I attempted to try something a little bit different: Copy a bootable iso directly over to a (normal, non U3) USB key using DD. The results were interesting!
I used DD to copy an XP Pro OEM ISO image file to a memory stick. The resulting flash drive was recognized in Ubuntu and I could browse the discs file system
Windows Server 2008 refused to read the drive at all. Allegedly, it was not formatted. I contend that Windows just wasn't trying hard enough!
Obviously, Windows doesn't like reading ISO 9660 file systems on USB media. Perhaps there is a way around it. It'd be kinda cool if there was? I'll have to keep looking!
