Posts Categorized: Hacks

Raising dead pixels on a Canon DSLR

September 15, 2011

Learned a super awesome trick today for Canon DSLRs that get a hot/dead/stuck pixel on the sensor. It’s not foolproof and might not fix the issue, but it turns out that it has fixed the problem for many people including a friend of mine today, so that’s good enough for me!

  1. Take off your lens, putting the lens cap on to protect it.
  2. Put your body cap on to cover your camera’s sensor.
  3. Turn your camera on, and go to the second “wrench” setting page on the menu.
  4. Scroll down to “Sensor Cleaning”, Select it.
  5. Select “Clean manually”
  6. Click “OK” when it tells you the mirror will open up.
  7. Let the mirror stay open for about 30-60 seconds, and then turn off the camera.
  8. Put the lens back on the camera, turn it back on, and take a few pictures
  9. If you’re lucky, you will have risen your pixel from the dead!

Should we call it an excerpt from the NecronomiCanon? ;)

Redmine (with Subversion) on Dreamhost

June 11, 2011

I absolutely love Redmine. I’m not sure if it’s a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome, since it took it’s fair share of cursing and bellyaching before I got it running for a company I’m currently contracting for, but since I’ve been using it, it’s got every feature that I’ve needed in small projects to keep myself organized, and my team connected.

It’s got a Wiki, Task Management (to track both Bugs and Tasks), Time Management, Repository Integration, and strong Access Control, all of which are compartmentalized by Project (of which you can have an infinite amount). That’s just scratching the surface of the features, there’s so much more available if the team were to grow larger.

Dreamhost is a pretty good host too, for many reasons, (price, featureset. The speed hit from page loads is a bit frustrating at times, but I’ve yet to find someone on the east coast that can beat them out, feature for feature, so I continue to stay a customer of theirs. (Something like 6 years and counting…)

Now, it’s really best if you start this setup with a brand new account (with SSH enabled), or you’re prepared to move a bunch of files.

Case insensitive autocomplete in OSX terminal

September 19, 2010

I’ve been spending a bit more time in the OSX terminal, and one little annoyance is that the autocomplete is case sensitive. Since many folders are capitalized, it’s just not as fast as I’d want it to be when I’m trying to navigate through the folders.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix!

Open up your terminal, and throw in:
echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

Restart Terminal, and you’re set!

(Credit)

Resetting VMWare Fusion

September 30, 2008

Long story short, I wiped my XP partition on my MBP and installed Vista. Part of it was because I had created the partition too small to be able to play any games on the Windows side at my leisure, part of it was because I’ve got a friend at Microsoft who says Vista SP1 is much more of a complete product than what everyone seems to be complaining about.

Since I had jumped for a copy of Ultimate way back when, but became too apprehensive when all the reviews started rolling out, I finally installed the beast, and have had it running since.

Only problem was, VMWare Fusion wasn’t booting it because it still had remembered that my Boot Camp was originally Windows XP. Here’s a quick fix:

Turn off VMWare Fusion
Delete /Users/<your username>/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Disks/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm
Restart VMWare Fusion
Boot your Windows Partition

Enjoy!