MS Office 2007 has a very good reference manager, but changing the inline citation style is absurdly complicated. Standard practice for citations in an engineering paper is “[#]” where # is the reference number. Unfortunately, the default citation option in Word 2007 is “(#)”… so I needed to change it. If you need to do the same thing, just download this file, move it to the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style\” directory. You should then see a new “Style” option under the “References” tab called “ISO 690 – Numerical with Square Brackets”. Bingo… that’s all you need to do.

I had my Masters Defense yesterday and to my great delight, I passed! It involved a 30 minute presentation followed by an hour of questions from a panel of 3 professors. Now I just need to make a few edits to my thesis and I’ll have completed my MS degree! 8) Oh yeah, and I posted the slides from my defense presentation here.

I hate optical media. I hate its sensitivity to scratches, I hate its loud loading noises, I hate sorting through stacks of discs.

I’ve now found an excellent (albeit somewhat complicated) hack that allows me to save/load my Wii games to/from an external USB hard drive! The final results look a little something like this. I’ve worked off of the guides found here and here and am using a WD Passport hard drive. This was especially difficult for me because, despite the fact I already had the Homebrew Channel installed, I had the Wii system menu 4.0 installed (latest as of the time of this post). Alright, enough yapping… here’s how you can duplicate my results.

First, we need to trick your Wii into thinking it’s running an older version of the Nintendo software. This overcomes the fact that we’re running system version 4.0! We’ll also install “The Homebrew Channel” at the same time.

1. Copy the contents of SD1.zip to a FAT formated SD card.
2. Insert the SD card into your Wii and click on the system icon (lower left corner).
3. Navigate to “Data Management” –> “Channels” –> “SD Card” and wait a moment.
4. Agree to load “boot.dol” to execute the LoadMii environment.
5. Select “DowngraderIOS35.dol” and run it by pressing “A” on the WiiMote. Choose “Downgrade IOS35” and then let it go. After it’s done, select “exit”.
6. Now select “WAD Manager.dol” and, using default settings (e.g. run as IOS250), install “IOS35.wad”. When it’s finished, hit the “Home” button to exit.
7. Run “WAD Manager.dol” again, but this time select “IOS35” when prompted and install “CIOSv7.wad”. After that’s installed, hit the “Home” button to quit.
8. Next, run “WAD Manager.dol” one last time. This time, select “IOS249” for the IOS version and install both “IOS36.wad” and “HBC.wad”.
9. Finally, restart your Wii and you’ll see a new link to “The Homebrew Channel”!

Now that we have “The Homebrew Channel” and the necessary IOS files, we can install the USB loader.

1. Delete everything from your SD card and extract the contents of SD2.zip to it.
2. Insert the SD card into your Wii and launch “The Homebrew Channel”.
3. Execute the “cIOS36” application and follow the installation instructions.
   1. Be sure to use the “Internet Installation” option to get the very latest custom IOS files.
   2. If you have any problems with this step, it’s probably because you’re using the Nintendo System Menu 3.4 or later. Make sure you’ve successfully completed phase one of this tutorial!
4. Restart “The Homebrew Channel” and execute the “WADman” program. Using this tool, install the “USB Loader-USBF VForwarder.wad” file.
5. You should now have a “USB Loader” channel in your Wii System Menu. This is how you save/load game discs.

Alrighty… we’re done hacking the Wii! Now we just need to get the USB hard drive ready for use.

1. Install the Wii Backup File System manager from here.
2. Plug the hard drive into your PC.
3. Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”.
4. Click on the “Disk Management” option on the left
5. When your disk drives have loaded, right click on the drive to be read by the Wii and choose “Delete Volume”.
6. Now right click on the disk drive to be used and click “New”.
7. Be sure to assign a drive letter to your drive, and to choose NOT TO FORMAT the drive when you create your new partition.
8. Using “WBFS Manager”, select the correct drive and click “Format”.
9. Now plug the USB drive into your Wii and start playing around with the “USB Loader”!

I hope you find this tutorial useful! I’ve been waiting for a good Wii game saver/loader for a while now, so I’m really excited about this tool. If you have any questions or problems, just leave a comment!

PS: I’m providing this information so you can run games that you OWN from a hard drive. If I find out that any of you are using this to pirate games, I’ll personally find where you live and leave a sack of flaming dog poop on your doorstep!

Now for a bit of useless information:

1. Go to facebook.com
2. Type the following characters:
   ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A ENTER
3. Now click or type anywhere, useless eh? (but still strangely amusing)
4. Refresh the page to disable Konami Mode

I was doing some random internet reading earlier this weekend (as I’m often prone to do) and stumbled upon an interesting technique that model car hobbyist use to dye plastic components. It occurred to me, if one can permanently dye plastic car pieces… what else might he be able to color-ify? My answer… a Wiimote! Here’s what I did.

1. Remove the four screws from under the Wii remote battery cover.
2. Carefully unsnap the front and back plates, being sure not to break off the tabs on the top.
3. Set aside the Wii controller mainboard, rubber button stoppers, and metal battery contacts.
4. In a large pot (that you DON’T use for cooking) heat 8 cups of water to a boil.
5. Mix in 8 fl oz of Rit liquid t-shirt dye (color of your choice).
6. Turn heat source down to medium and mix liquid dye thoroughly.
7. Add plastic Wii controller pieces to dye and allow to simmer for 5 minutes.
   1. Be careful not to splash… the dye will stain everything it touches!
   2. Continue to mix non-stop… don’t let the pieces settle or you’ll get uneven colors.
   3. Always wear rubber gloves when working with the dye… it’s not good for your skin and will make you multi-colored for a long time.
8. After the five minutes are up, remove the plastic pieces and wash them thoroughly in cold water.
   1. Don’t forget all of the pieces!
   2. 6 buttons, 1 trigger, 1 d-pad, 3 large shell pieces, 1 wrist-strap.
9. Dry all the components and reassemble the wiimote.
10. Enjoy your new, uniquely colored controller!

The above photos are of a Wii Remote Controller I dyed earlier this evening. What do you think?

Note: The various wiimote pieces are made of different types of plastic that take on different shades of color. The front plate will be the lightest, followed by the back plate and batter cover. The buttons and trigger will be slightly darker than the back plate. The D-pad will be the darkest by far.

Swine Flu…

…past tense of…
Pigs Fly!

As a followup to last night’s post, this document will walk you through the installation of the latest Ubuntu build (8.04) within a Virtual PC environment. I had some trouble figuring this out, so I hope that my posting this here will help anyone else out there who likes playing around in different operating systems without pain of rebooting into a new OS.

 Ubuntu 8.04 on Virtual PC 2007

I’ve seeming always wanted to run a virtual OS within my primary OS, but have been stuck with VMWare to date. While VMWare works, it’s sluggish and doesn’t obey any GUI guidelines (a major sticking point for me). Well, Microsoft recently released “Microsoft Virtual PC 2007”, an entirely free… extremely well written virtual machine.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc

Go check it out… it blows VMWare out of the water!

Want to run Ubuntu on your EeePC? I did, and here’s how I did it.

1) Create a bootable Ubuntu USB drive with UNetbootin. (mirror)

2) Run the RiceeeyTweak utility to customize Ubunutu for the EeePC. (mirror)

That’s it, all your hardware should now be configured and your system optimized. 8)

So, I’ve always been very oppose to Apples emulation of the OS X interface in their Windows version of iTunes. It’s poorly implemented, slows down iTunes, hogs system resources, and is just buggy. So rather than continue to complain, I’m doing something about it. I’ve started a new programming project I’m dubbing kTunes. Essentially, I’m attempting to clone the iTunes interface using entirely windows GUI elements, while keeping the core iTunes system under the hood. The end result will hopefully be a custom, Windows-friendly frontend to the iTunes backend which should provide quicker response time and a more unified system environment.

As an example, here are two screenshots. The first is Apple iTunes in Windows Vista upon just being launched (the black regions will clear up as I start playing music, but represents a MAJOR bug). The second image is an early version of kTunes. I’ll post more as I continue development.