Categories
Storage

How to replace the DVD drive in your Nintendo Wii

If you have had your Nintendo Wii for a while now, there is a good chance that it has just stopped reading discs or is having great difficulty or has gotten very noisy. Sometimes a laser lens cleaner disc will fix it, but often times it doesn’t. You *could* send it back to Nintendo, but they’ll charge you an arm and a leg to fix it.

Fortunately, you can replace the drive yourself for ~$35. It’s not hard to repair a Wii. If you can handle a screw driver and are gentle with things, you should have no problem replacing the drive.

Categories
Networking

Testing my Netflix Network speeds

The Netflix NThe news has been abuzz lately with net neutrality issues and realizations that companies like Verizon and Comcast are secretly, but intentionally throttling services like YouTube and Netflix. So how does the average home user check their Netflix network speeds and potentially speed them up if they are too slow? Here are a few things that I tried. The results were not quite what I expected.

Categories
Storage

All the LightScribe templates!

share-all-the-things
Image: hyperboleandahalf

The LightScribe Template Labeler comes with a handful of default templates, but it turns out there are a lot more out there. They used to be hosted on the LightScribe website, but it seems that HP has grown tired of hosting this site, so they took everything down. Here are 43 extra template packs:

Categories
Networking

Resetting two Cisco Catalyst 2950 switches to factory defaults

In my last post on the Cisco CCNA, it was mentioned that an order for two used Cisco Catalyst 2950 switches had been placed. Well, the two switches arrived a few days later. So I plugged them in, but that was all I could do because there were no Console cables (aka. Rollover cables) to be found in the box. Granted, I wasn’t really expecting any since the seller had not mentioned any, but to connect to a switch that I knew nothing about, the smart bet was to connect via the RJ-45 jack (which is actually a 9600 bps serial port.)

If you already know how to physically connect to your 2950 switch, click here to jump to the Catalyst 2950 password recovery procedure.

If you don’t have the appropriate tools yet, this means that 3 things will be needed to get started: a Rollover Cable, a USB-to-Serial adapter, and some Terminal software. This is what I picked:

Categories
Storage

How to use the LightScribe feature on your CD/DVD burner

LightScribe. That fancy feature on your lightscribeCD/DVD burner that writes a monochrome image onto the label side of your CD-R or DVD+R, yet somehow you know nothing about it nor how to use it. How does it work? Good question.