Author Archives: Nerdr

How To Search iTunes Radio Stations on Mac – CHEAT

Today I finally figured out how to search radio stations on iTunes on my Macbook.  It’s not easy to do, but here’s the guide for how I did added search to iTunes radio.  You will need: iTunes and a Mac to do this.

First, open iTunes and open the radio list tab at the top.  This will be just the normal list of all the radio stations.  Now, expand out each of the lists of radio stations by clicking the tiny arrow on the left of each row.  Start from the bottom of the list and work up so you don’t have to keep scrolling each time.

Now we need to select/highlight all the radio stations in this huge list.  To select all the radio stations, click on one of the stations to highlight it, then in the top menu choose Edit -> Select All.  Alternatively, you can hold CMD + A.

With all the radio stations highlighted, look at the top menu bar and choose File -> New -> Playlist from selection.  Remember to select playlist from selection and not just playlist.  It will take around 30 seconds and you will now have a playlist made of ALL the radio stations in iTunes!  Give the playlist a name like “radio stations playlist”.

At the top tabs of iTunes, to the left of Radio you will see Playlist.  Press this and you will see all your playlists, including our shiny new radio stations playlist.  Now, if you click on your radio stations playlist in iTunes you can  do a search in the regular search box and it will search the radio stations.

If this was helpful please leave a comment!

Backup Notes and Extract Without Jailbreak From iPod, iPhone and iPad

How to backup notes from your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to your Mac or Windows computer without Jailbreaking.  Here is how I extracted and transferred my Notes files from my Apple device without a jailbreak, email or saving each individually.

Warning and disclaimers:  I used a secure Virtual machine to do this.  I have not tested the suggested iphone backup extractor software for security and it might contain bad things because it is free on the internet.  These instructions worked for me and are here as a reminder in the case of needing to backup my Notes from my iPad again.  I am not responsible for anything that happens to you or your devices by following these instructions.  Stay frosty, check your corners and good luck.

Apple locks down the file system on a raw Apple device.  Without a jailbroken iPhone, iPod or iPad you cannot easily access the filesystem to extract and backup your notes files.

We will take the notes backup process step-by-step.  First, make the backup using iTunes.  Then pull out the notes.sqlite file from that backup.  Lastly, we will process the backup file to a text or html file.  I used Windows XP for this, it will also work on Mac.

Backing up your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch

Install iTunes and make a backup of your Apple device using it.  Do not sync!  Sync is not what we need.  What we need is the backup that will be generated.  Don’t worry about where iTunes places the backup for now.  If you can’t find the option to backup try right-clicking on the iPad icon on the left list and choose backup.

Extracting the Notes.sqlite file from the iTunes backup

To extract the Notes files we need from the backup we will need some custom software.  Search Google for “iPhone backup extractor”.  This will lead you to iphonebackupextractorDOTcom.  Download that.

Here’s the wordy part of iphone backup extractor so you know you’re at the correct site:

iPhone Backup Extractor
Recover lost iPhone calendar events, contacts, photos, videos, SMS messages, notes, location data and app data from iTunes backup files.

Install the iPhone backup extractor software.

NOTE: I am not endorsing iphone backup extractor in any way!  It might be malware or a virus, but it works for what we need.  It is up to you to decide for yourself, but I think I rate it’s safety at 8/10 because it did nothing strange when I installed it and is the first result in Google.

When you install iPhone backup extractor you might get an error of “.Net Framework Initialisation Error – unable to find a version of the runtime to run this application.”  If this happens you will need to download and install Microsoft Windows .net 2.0.  Even if you have .net 4.0 you will still need .net 2.0 because the .net software is not backwards compatible and each version is new and shiny.

Open the iphone backup extractor software and it will find the iphone, ipad or ipod touch backups you have in the top box.  Select the new backup from the list.  Now tap on Expert mode because that’s how we roll.  In the library folder there will be a folder called Notes.  Inside this Notes folder are two files, notes.sqlite and notes.idx.  Tick the box near the Notes folder and hit extract to extract the Notes folder out of the backup.

I chose to extract the notes folder from my backup into “My Documents”.  Iphone backup extractor might give you an error if you try to extract to the desktop.  Something about permissions.  If that happens just make a folder somewhere else and extract the files into that folder.

Reading Notes.sqlite on Windows

For reading my Notes.sqlite file I used Windows not Mac.  For this reason Mac guys are now on their own!  I suggest just Googling for SQLITE reading software for Mac.  Unless you came to this page after doing that…in which case…sorry!

To read a sqlite file on Windows you will need SQLite Database Browser from Sourceforge.  Google for “Sourceforge SQLite Database Browser” and download and ectract the software from Sourceforge.

Open your Notes.sqlite file with the SQLite database browser.  You will see three tabs at the top about the white window.  To see your notes file text hit the middle tab called “Browse Data” and choose ZNOTEBODY.    To extract the notes file as a csv/txt file – in the top menu go to File -> Export -> ZNOTEBODY as csv.  Place that file somewhere.

Once this file has exported, change the end file extension from csv or txt to html.  You can then open this file in Firefox and see all your amazing notes and inventions and crazy ideas for apps as a single page.  The end, leave a comment if this was helpful!

That’s the end of the guide to extracting Notes from your iPad, iphone or ipod touch.  I really wish Apple would fix it and make an export to Dropbox option for extracting and backing up Notes on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Sleeping Dogs Review

Sleeping Dogs: The best story driven open-world game you will ever play

  • 25 hour+ main storyline and side missions
  • 4 mission DLC packs available for around $1 each
  • Winner of Nerdr best voice acting in a game, best story in a game and best open world game

Sleeping Dogs is a game you just need to play to appreciate.  The graphics are amazing, with high res textures available for free through Steam.

I’ve never seen a game look as good as the night scenes in Sleeping Dogs.  Your jaw will drop as you see the lights of artificial Hong Kong reflect in the pools of water as the rain falls.  This game is special and dirt cheap to buy (I got it for $5, with each DLC around $2).

You know how your jaw dropped when you saw the graphical quality of the Just Cause 2 world?  Seeing Sleeping Dogs is like that.  The developers (United Front Games) chose world map density over size (I’m looking at you Skyrim!) and it shows.  The world is full of quality at every turn.

Immersion is just perfect.  The night market is FULL of 100’s of shoppers and life, something missing in modern open world games.  They really nailed the immersion out of the park in Sleeping Dogs.  The location, the story, the people, it’s just so absolutely perfect.  The people speak Cantonese, just like real Hong Kongers.

If you’ve ever visited Hong Kong you’ll see the sights and sounds right there in the Sleeping Dogs.  Now the world map is not a 1:1 of HK, but it contains the 4 main blocks, including central and connects them in an interesting style, including known landmarks like the Hong Kong exhibition center.

Bootcamp Partition Lost Repairing Mac Partitions

Today I changed my Macbook partition sizes and Windows Bootcamp would not show in the Boot menu. Here are the steps I used to fix it. I got these from an Apple forum post.

The 45 page long Apple forum post I used is here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4144252?start=0&tstart=0

Warning and disclaimer.  I am in no way responsible for you following these instructions and breaking anything.  Please read them carefully, if there is anything you do not understand or do not know then please STOP!  Although what we are doing is simple, a mistake can lead to big problems that I do not know how to fix.  Read the instructions carefully and consider your options.

How It Started – Macbook Resizing OS X Partition

I had a partition of Macbook OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 7 on Bootcamp.  I needed more space on the Windows side so I decided to use Disk utility on the Macbook to shrink the size of the Mac partition, and use the spare space to make a third partition in exfat format.  Bad idea! because modifying the core Mac partition modifies the MBR (Master boot record), and removes Bootcamp from the startup menu.

Bootcamp still exists in it’s own partition, it’s just that the boot process on the Mac does not know to look there for a bootable thing.

The solution is to fix the Master Boot Record and tell it that it should add the Windows 7 Bootcamp partition to the bootable drives list it has.

Warning 2 – this is simple, but scary.  We will be using terminal and reading things carefully.  If you can not do either of these two then find someone who can.  I will provide full instructions to allow me to repeat this process to fix the partition MBR if it ever happens for me again, so you know it should be good.

How to Fix the Broken Bootcamp Partition after Resizing Mac OS X Partition

First, we need to download some software to handle the partition fixing.  Get gptfdisk from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/

Download the latest version (I used 0.8.6) and because you’re on a Mac you will need the .pkg version.

Once you have downloaded gptfdisk double click the file and install the .pkg file that downloaded.  That’s all the software we’ll be using.  Now it’s just you and terminal.

NOTICE – Now is a good time to plug your Macbook in to charge, you don’t want the power going out while changing the MBR.  Trust me.  Also a great time to BACKUP everything on your Mac and Windows Bootcamp partition.  I just backed up my Mac side because I like to live dangerously and my Windows Bootcamp partition is just for games and testing.

Now back to fixing.

Open terminal.  For a quick shortcut to open it press (CMD + spacebar) to open the spotlight quick search and type terminal.  That will open terminal.  It has >_ as it’s icon.

Let’s see what the state of your MBR is first.  Type these three things.  After each one press enter.  You will need your password for them because we use sudo.  None of the lines change anything on your computer and are used so you can get information about the state of your MBR and partitions.  Type carefully, and that is a vee vee not double you on line 1, and it is disk-numberzero not disk-oh.

  1. sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0
  2. sudo fdisk /dev/disk0
  3. diskutil list

One shows you disk status and partitions.  Two shows you types and three shows you your hard disk partition setup.  Three is the most important.

Output of line 3:

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *250.1 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS SSD 125.0 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s5
4: Microsoft Basic Data exfat1 24.2 GB disk0s6
5: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 100.0 GB disk0s4

IMPORTANT! note down the number on the left of BOOTCAMP when you do line three above!  For me this number was 5.  For you it might be 4.  This is what we will use to tell the MBR it’s a boot drive.

That’s the setup and preparation complete.  Now it’s time to go deep.  Open a new terminal window.  Anywhere that says <enter> means press enter.

Type the following line to start disk:

sudo gdisk /dev/disk0

r <enter>        go to the recovery & transformation menu

h <enter>        create a new hybrid MBR.

STOP! the next line is the most important.  Use whatever your bootcamp partition was above when we did line 3.  My Bootcamp partition on my Mac was 5.  Yours may be 4 or even 3.

5 <enter>        add partion 5 to the MBR.  Your’s may be different! Use what you got from line 3 above.

y <enter> if you are asked “Place EFI GPT (0xEE) partition first in MBR (good for GRUB)?”

<enter>          accept the default MBR hex code of 07

y <enter>        set the bootable flag

n <enter>        do not protect more partitions

o < enter>       print (display) the MBR.

You will see a message telling you it’s go time to actually write the partition.  It will say “Disk size is …” and list two MBR partitions it will make.   This is essentially a notification of what the new MBR will look like.  Look at it and if it looks acceptable then hit w <enter> to write out the table:

w <enter>     Recovery/transformation command (write partition table to disk)

y <enter>  Say yes to question: do you want to proceed.

It will recommend you reboot your Macbook.  Do it and when it’s booting up hold the left ALT/option key like you always do to boot up into Bootcamp.  It should work.

If it did work, great!  Don’t do it again :)  If it didn’t work…try the link at the top to the Apple forum post.  It’s 45 pages long right now so good luck with that but the guy seems very helpful.

Final disclaimer.  This post is for my personal use only and I accept no responsibility for anything you do with it or if anything bad or good happens because you followed the instructions above.  This fix worked for me once and will hopefully work next time I accidentally destroy my Bootcamp partition and stop Windows bootcamp from booting or showing in the startup choice menu when starting my Mac.

Location of Samsung Galaxy S4 Phone Water Damage Indicator

The location of the water damage indicator on the Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. The moisture sensor paper is under the back cover in a special location. To find and see the water damage indicator paper you will need a Philips screwdriver and your phone.

A plastic pick is also helpful for separating the back casing. I used an old sim card and it worked great, but damaged the old sim card slightly.

Before starting I should say I accept NO liability if you damage your phone, warranty, or anything in any way by doing anything mentioned on this page or any page on this website. You accept total liability for your actions. I am not sure if doing any of this affects your Samsung S4 phone warranty in any way, but it’s your task to find this out before doing the process below to find the water mark warning indicator. You will only be removing 8 screws and removing the back cover with the pick. No electronics are removed or harmed by this process.

Remember to ground yourself before doing anything with electronics because of static electricity. You can ground yourself by touching a grounded central radiator with your hand before starting. A metal door handle might work too, but I’m not sure.

First, turn over your Samsung s4 phone and remove the back cover. Remove the battery, sim card and memory card if you have one.