Category: Hardware

iPod Freeze

If your iPod freezes up, as mine did several times before dying completely, follow these instructions:

To reset iPod mini, iPod mini (Second Generation), iPod photo, and iPod (Click Wheel)

Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

Tip: If you are having difficulty resetting your iPod, set it on a flat surface. Make sure the finger pressing the Select button is not touching any part of the click wheel. Also make sure that you are pressing the Menu button toward the outside of the click wheel, and not near the center.
[note: this is the tip that got it unfrozen for me]

If the above steps did not work, try connecting iPod to a power adapter and plug the power adapter into an electrical outlet, or connect iPod to your computer. Make sure the computer is turned on and isn’t set to go to sleep.

Continue reading

Can’t install OS X on a newly partitioned firewire drive

Since upgrading to 10.3.5 and Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD I have been having no end of problems with Final Cut crashing on launch (solved that one here) and with “log and capture” freezing toward the end of a tape.

I decided to revert to using OS X 10.3.4, and attempted to install it on a new 200 GB Firewire drive I had laying around.

I started up using the Panther install disk, then opened Disk Utility, and partitioned the drive. Then I opened the installer and attempted to install OS X onto it. However the three partition icons for that drive all had the little red “stop” sign over them, and selecting any of those icons got me this message:

“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot startup your computer using this volume.”

Quitting the installer and then restarting it made it recognize the partitions as bootable, and the problem was solved.

Continue reading

Scroll wheel changes selection in drop-down menus

In some of the Questionmark quizzes I’ve made there are “selection” questions, which are simply pull down menus with several possible answers to a question. I started getting emails from scroll wheel users complaining that Questionmark was changing their answers.

It turned out users would make a selection, then immediately start scrolling the wheel without deselecting the menu, so the scroll wheel would scroll within the menu. I didn’t want to disable the scroll wheel or something like that, so I looked for a way to jump the cursor out of the menu when something is selected.

Continue reading