Robert Wenger's Computing and Tech Blog

Does This Blog Need a New Look?

January 22nd, 2012

Hi everyone! I’m currently writing what I believe is already the longest post I’ve done to date, but I thought I would ask an important question while I’m finishing it up.

I’m thinking that my blog could use an update in the theme department. To me, the look is starting to get old. When I created it, I was just playing around with some effects in GIMP anyways, so I’m not very attached to it.

Please vote in the poll and tell me what you think! Please be honest! Leaving your comments below would also be great.

Should this blog be redesigned?

Yes (100%, 3 Votes)
No (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 3

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2012 – New Year, New Resolutions

December 31st, 2011

Last year around this time I decided to make a resolution. However, I knew that most resolutions tend to fail after about a week, so I wanted to make mine simple. I decided on something that I thought wouldn’t be too difficult: Do everything better in 2011 than 2010. I think it worked out fairly well.

Programming is the first thing that comes to mind, as I have recently been working on creating a PHP-powered CMS from scratch with my friend Dakota (xSSKT). It’s been going well and I feel like I’m understanding programming now like I never have before. I was also hired for my first job at a Barnes & Noble college bookstore. However, the best decision I made all year was attending the was attending the BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries) at Virginia Tech. Not only is there a plethora of regular food-serving events to attend, but the services are solid and the messages are good. Naturally this year hasn’t been all great (It was probably one of the worst of my 19 years, to be honest), but I believe having the plan to improve upon 2010 helped me do things better than I would have otherwise.

Now looking forward to 2012, I look forward to doing a number of things, but mainly I look to do them with consistency. I have my moments when I can program fluently, win a ping pong game (yes, Dakota, I know it’s rare), or get a lot done, but I seem to not be able to do such things on a regular basis. Consistency is one of my two resolutions for this year – I want to learn to consistently do things such as sleep, study, blog, program, and think about others before I do or say things. Basically, I want to do 3/4 of this on a regular basis.

My other resolution is to get out of some ruts I have gotten into over the last few years. I have some things I constantly end up doing that I would really like to start mixing up with different things. For example, I always tend to eat the same foods. I want to try some new things, or if you want to get really cheesy about it, expand my horizons.

Finally, (ending the post on a completely different note) I want to mention that this blog will probably be going in a slightly different direction in the future. We’re not saying much about it at this point, but that project I’m working on with my friend is going to be a more technically-oriented website. With that said, posts with a more technical twist that may have ended up on this blog will probably be posted at the new site in the future. This blog will stick around, but there will be a certain difference on which I have yet to completely decide. Expect it to remain about computers, the internet, and the like, but the content will change slightly.

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Why Facebook Will Never Charge Its Users

September 25th, 2011

Facebook will NEVER charge for users to access their accounts.

I saw this status pop up today:

FACEBOOK JUST RELEASED THEIR PRICE GRID FOR MEMBERSHIP. $9.99 PER MONTH FOR GOLD MEMBER SERVICES, $6.99 PER MONTH FOR SILVER MEMBER SERVICES, $3.99 PER MONTH FOR BRONZE MEMBER SERVICES, FREE IF YOU COPY AND PASTE THIS MESSAGE BEFORE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. WHEN YOU SIGN ON TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL BE PROMPTED FOR PAYMENT INFO…IT IS OFFICIAL IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU .!

Why would you ever fall for that? Facebook will never require users to pay for basic access to their site, and here’s why.

1. Users Would Quit

The biggest reason for Facebook never requiring a subscription would be that nobody would pay for it. Think about it – would you pay for a service you can get elsewhere, such as Twitter or Google+? Heck, even MySpace would start looking relevant again if you had to pay to use Facebook. Many people threaten to quit every time a little feature is introduced even though the service is free. ALL of those people would quit for sure if Facebook charged for their services.

2. It doesn’t fit their business model

Think about it – how does Facebook make their money? They don’t sell anything, therefore they have to rely on their revenue from ads. When you see “Sponsored” on the right-hand side of Facebook, someone has paid for those links. Advertisers have the option of paying per 1,000 impressions (every time it shows up on somebody’s screen it’s an impression) or per click. Therefore, depending on how the advertisers set up their ads, Facebook gets paid every time someone clicks on or views an ad. A huge part of the Internet works this way, with ads generating many thousands of sites’ revenue.

The way to earn more money with ads is to make a balance of being useful to visitors and getting as much money as possible out of advertisers. When Facebook makes a change, you can bet it’s either to generate attention to their services so that people will use Facebook more and click/view more ads (note that even the “I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK!” comments keep the attention on Facebook itself), generate more revenue from the ads (It’s rumored that Facebook will soon stop delivering business updates into your feed unless you interact with them a lot, meaning that they will have to buy advertising on Facebook), respond to features of another service (Facebook is changing a LOT in response to Google+), or improve their performance (meaning their servers don’t have to do as much work). All of these things are driven by money.

However, there IS a way that Facebook could charge for some things like subscriptions to integrated music and TV services such as Spotify and Hulu. Remember Facebook credits in games and such? It’s rumored that they could use that system to allow users to pay for stuff like music.

In short, Facebook may charge for some things eventually, but access to your account and normal activities will definitely not be one of them.

Update: Shortly after publishing this post, Facebook released a comment on their page saying “A rumor on the internet caught our attention. We have no plans to charge for Facebook. It’s free and always will be.”

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Customize Your “Send To” Menu

August 21st, 2011

Have you ever right-clicked on a file to send it somewhere, just to find that Windows won’t send it to your preferred destination via the Send to menu? I encountered that problem a little while ago, and I decided to figure out how to fix it. If you find yourself moving files to the same folders over and over, using Send to menu can be very useful and efficient – especially when it includes the folders you want.

Fortunately, editing the Send to menu is very simple. First, press the windows key and R (or click the start button and “Run”) to bring up the Run dialog. Next, type shell:sendto in the run dialog. The list of shortcuts appears in an explorer window allowing you to add to or delete from it. Now all you have to do is create a shortcut of the folder you want to add to the menu, add it to the SendTo folder, and delete any old shortcuts you don’t need.

What will you add to your Send to menu?

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Toshiba Satellite L305-S5919 Laptop Repair [pics]

July 20th, 2011

I got a call from a guy two days ago about his Toshiba Satellite L305-S5919 laptop. He said the DC jack was messed up, and he wanted me to take a look at it. When he brought me the laptop, I looked at the jack and it was extremely loose. It looked like a fun soldering job, so naturally I got started fairly quickly.

The first thing I did (of course) was to remove all of the components from the bottom of the laptop. In this case, all I had to remove was the RAM and the hard drive (there was no battery in the laptop when I got it).

Removing Components from Toshiba Satellite

I had never worked on this particular model before, but I was assuming that taking the plastic bottom off of the laptop would be the logical next step. To do this, I removed 13 screws labeled “F6″ and three (under where the battery should have been) labeled “F3″. Some of them proved difficult to remove from their inset holes. In fact, one screw refused to come out of its hole. After this attempt appeared to be fruitless, I started looking for a different way to get into the laptop. I finally discovered that the bezel on the top of the laptop came off.

Laptop Bezel

After removing the bezel, all I had to do was remove two screws, then pry the keyboard up. Next it was just a matter of folding it over:

Laptop Keyboard folded over

…then, detaching the ribbon cable and removing the keyboard.

Laptop with keyboard removed

I decided to remove all of the screws I found under the keyboard. The top cover appeared loose, so I started to pry the cover off starting with the plastic at the hinges. It didn’t want to come open, and I then remembered the screw that wouldn’t come out. I tried to coax it out for a little while longer, then gave it up. I wondered if the screw was just not coming out of the plastic, but wasn’t holding anything together, so I pulled on the top cover gently and I felt it give away a little bit. I then removed the touchpad cable and the wire to the speakers, and the top finally popped off. Success!

Inside of Toshiba Satellite without cover

Then I took a look at the DC power jack. Look at what I saw:

Laptop DC jack slipped out of slot

The jack had just popped out of its slot! All I had to do was slip it back in, and I was done.

Laptop DC jack in proper slot

…or so I thought. Apparently I had dropped a screw down in the laptop. Dropping a screw into a laptop is pretty much a computer repairman’s worst nightmare – particularly when it goes into the CPU fan. That’s exactly what I did, of course. I ended up having to take the motherboard completely out, then turn it around to dump the screw out of the fan. If you haven’t had the pleasure to remove a motherboard from a laptop before, let’s just say it’s a balancing act of putting enough pressure on the board to figure out what’s keeping it from popping out (there’s always something in the way) and not putting too much pressure on the board so that you don’t break it. Anyways, while I was at it I thought you might enjoy seeing the gutted laptop.

Gutted Toshiba Satellite L305-S5919

From there, I just reversed my steps to put the laptop back together. I didn’t get to do any soldering, but it did turn out to be a fun disassembly of a laptop. After I put the laptop back together, I discovered that even when plugging the adapter into the DC jack it wouldn’t turn on. I tested the adapter, and I discovered that both the adapter was bad too. My guess is that when the wire inside the adapter broke, the customer wiggled the cord to the point where the jack came out of its slot.

I ordered a new adapter, and the shipment was here in two days (thank you Amazon!)

Toshiba Satellite Screws

P.S. The customer picked up the laptop this evening, and he seemed pleased. I was happy to give him a quick turnaround while working during the day, especially since I even had to have the adapter shipped!

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