Last weekend I was looking at my stereo and thinking, “When was the last time I actually put a CD in this deck?”  I also thought, “Why does this stereo have a tape deck, anyway?” (it’s a 2003 model, by the way).

The article states a number of potential issues with it which I’m hoping will get cleared up.  Of course, I don’t have a bluetooth receiver for my car either, which could be a drawback.

In any case, the announcement was made a few days ago on Google’s Mac Blog.  There is a small app that Google is distributing for making the setup process super easy.  I’m going to give it a shot and see whether this will get me using iCal again.  It certainly would be nice to have this calendar available on my iPhone, especially when I’m somewhere that Google Calendar won’t load due to lack of network connectivity (which seems to happen pretty often for me).

Try out this iPhone Translator in your browser or on your iPhone.

1. Open http://m.mikebrittain.com/tr in your iPhone.
   
2. Select a combination of languages you want to translate between, e.g. from English to Japanese.
3. Bookmark the translation page for quick access when your out on the run.

I have a trip planned to Vienna later this year, and it would be really nice to have a quick German to English translation tool on hand. This would be promising if only I had an international data plan.

Other supported languages include Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese.

Please try it out and leave feedback in the comments section below.

(Thanks to DryIcons for the icon I’m using on the site for iPhone and iPod Touch home screens.)

Hmmm… thumbs down, I think.

The battery meter was never quite right, either. Directly after charging the battery, the meter might read less than 1/4 full. As music played, the meter would rise for a bit. Or, sometimes when the meter was at about 1/2 full, the battery would suddenly quit.

I named my iPod Lazarus. When I replaced the broken hard drive, it got a 2nd life. (No that doesn’t make me Jesus, that’s not where I’m going.) It was time to revive this little guy one more time.

I bought a new battery on eBay. There are a number of suppliers who sell new batteries that fit all varieties of iPods. These come with plastic tools that are useful for prying open the case. I only paid about $12 for this battery, including shipping.

It took only about 10 minutes to open the case and replace the old battery. The new battery actually has close to 50% more capacity than the original battery. It easily holds a charge through 8 hours of play. Good as new… more or less.

My iPod is just over 2 1/2 years old. It’s now had 2 major surgeries and purrs like a kitten. As far as I’m concerned, this thing could easily last another 3 years with regularly scheduled “maintenance”.

Who needs video, anyway?

For the first few weeks of running Parallels, I solved this by writing a very simple .bat file that would execute at startup of Windows XP. It ran the Windows time manager and told it to check one of the time servers on the Internet and reset the time on my laptop. I don’t run on a domain or any fancy network at home, so I don’t have a local server I can use for syncing the time.

Anyway, here’s how to set that up:

1. Open a new text file in Notepad
2. Paste the following command (without the quotes) into the file: “w32tm /resync /rediscover”
3. Save the file as synctime.bat. You may find that Notepad automatically helps you by adding on the default .txt extension. If that happens, just rename the file and take off that extension.
4. Put the file somewhere in your path, maybe c:Windowssystem32.
5. Create a shortcut to the synctime.bat file and put it into your Startup folder.

When the operating system is restarted, a command prompt will briefly appear showing the w32tm process running, and then it should go away after your clock has been updated.

Voila!

Well… not exactly. After running this for a few weeks with no trouble, I found that the clock was no longer updating. I opened the command prompt today and entered the w32tm command manually and found the following error:

The computer did not resync because the required time change was too big.

A quick Google search landed me at Microsoft’s TechNet article for Windows Time Service Tools and Settings, which provides in-depth detail on the switches and parameters for using the w32tm utility. Since I’m not running my own time server, most of it was irrelevant to me. I found a couple of registry settings that would correct the issue. These are MaxNegPhaseCorrection and MaxPosPhaseCorrection, and they are found in the registry at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesW32TimeConfig

The default (decimal) value for both of these keys was 54,000, which is 15 hours. This means that if your local clock and the Internet clock that you are syncing to are within 15 hours of each other, the time on your PC will be updated. If they are more than 15 hours apart, forget it.

The TechNet article highlighted a special case for this setting: “0xFFFFFFFF means always make time correction.” So fixing this issue is just a matter of editing a couple of Registry keys.

1. Open up the Registry Editor. (From your Start Menu, select “run” and enter “regedit”.)
2. Browse down to the “config” key to find the phase correction settings.
3. Double-click on MaxNegPhaseCorrection to edit the value. It will read “d2f0″ in the hexidecimal value, or 54000 in the decimal value. Select “hexidecimal” and enter “ffffffff” in the field.
4. Click “OK”.
5. Make the same change for MaxPosPhaseCorrection.
6. Close the Registry Editor

Re-run the synctime.bat file and you should fine that the time in Windows has been updated.

If there is a better way to do this, or a different setting that should be used, I’m happy to hear about it. This seems to have fixed my problem with time syncing in Windows, but I’m also pretty new to how Windows manages time syncing on a local network or on a managed domain.

If you have a better suggestion, please post it in the comments area below.