Nikhil Dev

Last week I had a problem, that just drove me mad. This is what happened.

I was defragging my 80Gig iPod, and my desktop at home for some reason froze. I had to hard reboot, but to my horror, all my music, the songs and the videos now do not showup on the ipod. I connected the ipod again and I could see them in iTunes. Even media monkey showed that the music was there on the ipod. The ipod stats also showed that the content was there. Why the hell is the ipod library not able to detect the media. Is it that the library got corrupted. If yes, then there was not way to rebuild an ipod library. So my only solution was to copy all the music off the ipod to my work desktop using Yamipod. After that I had to restore my ipod to factory settings. And then put all the music back on the ipod. I dont use Auto sync. So it was even more tough for me. Things went smoothly until just 2 days back when I connected the ipod again to my home computer. The same thing happened again. All the music appeared to be gone. This time it was nothing that I screwed up. All I did was just update a few albums on my iPod.

This is the time, I had to research on this. I brought out my Compaq 3228AU. Connected my iPod to that and copy just one song to the iPod. Miraculously, the library now showed up on the ipod. So what went wrong??

This is really interesting. What I did not realize was that I had upgraded the ipod firmware from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 which was the latest firmware for iPod 5G and 5.5G. Now when I connected it to my work comp, the iTunes version there was 7.5 whereas the iTunes version at home was 7.3. There is a major incompatibility between the iTunes earlier to 7.5 and the 1.2.2 iPod firmware update. If you want to stick to an iTunes version lesser to 7.5 you should not update the firmware to 1.2.2. If you want to still use 1.2.2 firmware, you better upgrade the iTunes to 7.5. I think this is a nasty way Apple is forcing the consumers to use the latest versions of software.

I have been able to fix this problem after quite some research. If you are having the same problem, do comment. We will try to fix it together. If you have already fixed it, it would be great if you can share it.

Just a simple list of steps to fix this again:-

1. Upgrade to iPod firmware 1.2.2.

2. Upgrade iTunes to 7.5

3. Connect the ipod to iTunes 7.5 once and disconnect. Or just copy one song so that the library is rewritten.

4. Disconnect the iPod.

Voila!!!!

—–Update——

Just today I noticed that apple has released it Firmware version 1.2.3 for the ipod 5Gs. I have’nt  had any problems till now. but just in case there are any surprises, Will surely post.

As usual, when there is nothing to read, there is Digg. I was goin through one of these articles in that and something interesting that I saw there interested me. Microsoft has secretly launched the Service Pack 3 for Windows Xp. As for now this is available to only a selected number of users and is possible through a hack. Thats why I thought that I will write some detailed instructions on how this is achieved.

1. Open Notepad and type in the following into it

@echo off
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
echo XPSP3 registry key has been set. Please check for updates in Windows Update - Kudos to nikhildev.com
pause

2. Now save that file with any name like “windowsxpsp3.cmd” . Make sure that you have the double quotes and the .cmd extension.

3. Now double click on that file and let it do its work.

4. Once you have confirmation, log onto the window update website and look for any Windows update available.

5. You will see that Windows Xp Service Pack 3 is one of them listed. Just install that and reboot the computer once everything is over.

Thats all that you need to do to install the new Windows Xp Service Pack. Microsoft says that in the new Windows Xp Service Pack 3, it has included a lot of bug fixes and few features from Windows Vista. I I havent tried any of the features as I am writing this before rebooting my computer. Will keep the results posted about the Service Pack 3 for Windows Xp.

Do comment, if you need help or are stuck in some step.

All this while what I have been looking for in a video playing software is codec support and stability with a lot of features. But just today I came across this WONDERFUL software that adds a whole new definition to what a video player should also do.

This one is called Miro and has been recently released and can be downloaded from http://www.getmiro.com/. The best about this software is that its a complete package fro video lovers. It can play almost any video format from MPG, DivX, 3GP, .MOV and lot more. In addition to this, Miro gives you the option to subscribe to video feeds that services like YouTube and Google Videos offer. So now I no longer have to go to the you tube site to watch a video.

Another awesome feature that Miro has is the ability to download YouTube video to your desktop. Just search up for a video and click on it. The video is downloaded from YouTube to your local hard drive in the .flv format. You can later play this directly from Miro of convert it using some encoder.  I have always been looking for good reliable firefox extensions to dowloaded YouTube videos to the local computer but Miro has made it the easiest. And now that YouTube is allowing higher quality video uploads, you can use YouTube as a Video storage and download them back anytime using Miro.

Go Ahead. Give it a try. I am sure you will love it.

A lot has been talked about Adobe Air. I was so impressed with its features whe I saw it for the first time on one of my friends computer that I wanted to try it out. But when I intalled that on my laptop, the applications would not work and threw some error message. Just today while going through one of the online blog, I read about this wonderful applications calle Mozilla Prism that I believe holds a promise to the future of web applications.

I have always been a heavy Firefox user and impressed with all the extensins that I are avaialble for download for free. Mozilla is try to take this one step ahead and spread the good culture to the web applications as well. Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight are wonderful no doubt. But the main problem is that they are proprietary. Mozilla breaks this barrier with Prism. Prism was previously called Webrunner but has been renamed not. I would be writing about it in the future blogs as I start exploring it even more.

Meanwhile, if you want to try it out all by yourself. here is the link to download it.

Just stay connect and read regularly as I will post more about it in the future.

Apple is working really hard to spread its market in india as well. It is recently heard that Apple is planning to open its stores in at least 10 locations in India. This would allow it to spread the aware of its products at least which were otherwise available either through online stores or thrid party vendors. There is a store already in Bangalore. I had visited that when I was in Bangalore. Its not upto the Apple standards though. But I am sure that once apple gains momentum with this mega project, they will definitely discover a new market in India.