Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Cleaning macbook keys

Okay, first off, a bit of advice, DO NOT EAT A TOASTED CHEESE SANDWICH NEAR YOUR MACBOOK WHILST IT IS OPEN!
I simply cannot stress this point enough, if I had paid attention to this it would have made my life much less complicated.

Okay, so you have either a bit of hair, or a stringy bit of cheese under a keycap (in my case the 'B') the way to remove it is quite simple.
Tools required:

Mini swiss army knife (I used this one)
Pin (not needle, you need the enamel head)

Using the screwdriver blade, slide it under the keycap and prise it up very gently, not enough to remove it but enough to see the small scissor mechanism.
Use the tweezers or the toothpick to gently press in the scissor legs on the LEFT hand side of the key (on the edge facing you), it will move slightly and the key will pop up away from you, lift it up and slide it to the right to remove it from the clip.

Now clean out all the crap under the key, I had a bit of cheese (see above) and a hair.

Reinserting the key is a different story, its a hell of a lot more difficult! It took me a few goes at it before I had a brainwave. What you do is insert the pin between the legs of the scissor mechanism to prevent it closing. The head of the pin prevents it falling through so just let it sit whatever way it suits you.
Line up the right hand leg/clip thing and slot it in to the left, then just drop the key in place and then press on it gently, making sure that it is lined up. It should click into place and you are now done!

Friday, March 16, 2007

CFeclipse reporting Wrong J2SE Version

Having reinsatlled several machines I have come across a "feature" of the Oracle 9i Administrative Client, it does not play nice and adds its path variables to the start of the $PATH in windows.

This led to much frustration as I *knew* that I had the right version (j2sdk 1.4.2 r10) and it was reporting 1.3.1. CFEclipse would not start and would bomb out with an error reporting an unsuitable java version.

The simple fix to this was to simply add the correct JRE path before the Oracle JRE path. In the majority of my cases it was "C:\J2SDK1.4.2_13\jre\bin" then just run the CFEclipse.exe program and it works!

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Resize NTFS Partitions

Go and get Gparted here and burn it out, its a linux LiveCD with the Gnome partition manager GParted so that you can resize NTFS partitions non-destructively!

DO IT NOW!