Nothing is more aggravating than recording a video and then finding out later that your video is ruined due to an overly bright recording light. With the Kodak Zi8 pocket HD camera, this problem seems to happen quite often.  You cannot record in low light or record any glossy type surfaces due to the record light being so bright. All of the videos have a red tint or a red dot right in the center of them.

Fed up with the red cast and red dots in my videos, I decided to do something about it. I was going to put tape over the light but then I realized, tape would eventually come off and then it’d leave a sticky residue on the camera. So the next best thing to do was to paint the darn thing! I didn’t want to paint the outside because I figured it’d be more work than what it is and it’d also take away from the over all appearance of the device.  I found out you can remove the lens cover and gain access to the light post from within the lens cover.

Video after the jump.

]]> http://www.knoxware.org/how-to-hide-zi8-record-light/feed/ 6 http://www.knoxware.org/wireshark-and-firefix-release-new-versions/ http://www.knoxware.org/wireshark-and-firefix-release-new-versions/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:13:19 +0000 snowman http://www.knoxware.org/wireshark-and-firefix-release-new-versions/ Two big software releases came down today starting with Wireshark 1.2. They have added a bunch of new features including a 64 bit installer as well as better Mac OS X support. They have also added a number of new protocols as well as filter auto completes. Two of the more interesting features are geoip and open street map lookups. I don’t know about you but I am looking forward to trying this new software out.

The other release today of course was Mozilla’s stable release of Firefox 3.5. Spouting many new features from every orifice and little issues with add-on functionality (none if you install nightly tester tools as I do) it seems to be a great step forward if only some of the skin developers can keep up. I plan to test weave just as soon as possible but as with my last article this is being written from my touch which is helping greatly on my quest of daily contributions. *** this just in after installing the stable version of FF I had to no addons issues whatsoever***. For a full scoop either install it yourself or head over to lifehacker and check the articles comment section that’s where I always fund the little things I have missed.

For full detail check out the source site

Simple, turn on the international keyboard. I found this little feature that could possibly be a little bug in the Notes application. What does this all mean? Let me walk you through it.

This is what Marker Felt looks like in the Notes application.

While it’s not terrible, it can be an eyesore at times. Now I’ll demonstrate how to change the Marker Felt.

Go into your settings.

Go into the general tab.

Now go down to the keyboards tab.

Keyboard panel view. From here select the international keyboard tab, then scroll all the way down to the Chinese (Simplified) tab. Then you’ll want to select the Pinyin option and turn the slider to “ON”.

Once you have selected the keyboard option, you can now hit the home button to return to your home screen. Now you can open the Notes application. If you begin to type, you’ll notice nothing has changed, except there is a new icon on your keyboard. What you need to do now is, start typing. Hit the “globe” icon on the keyboard, choose any character and press it. Now delete that character you just made. Voila! Your text has suddenly become readable. See pictures below

New international icon on the keyboard.

Globe icon has been selected. As you can see the bottom keys have changed. Once you press any letter the other language will pop up.

Once any letter is pressed it will change the Marker Felt font. You can delete the letter you just created and then go back to using your native keyboard by pressing on the globe icon again.

There you go. This isn’t permanent, any time you create a new note you’ll have to do the last steps in order to get the font from being Marker Felt. This isn’t a big hassle really. I don’t know why they chose not to allow you to change the type for the application. I hope this helps anyone out there that doesn’t want to jailbreak their device.

Maybe we’ll get the ability to change the font in a future update. Let’s hope.

-ghostshadow

Materials Needed

Dead 9v battery
Pliers
22AWG Wire (preferably a red and a black wire)
Soldering iron
Solder
Hot glue gun (optional, but works well in assembly)
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How To

First, take your dead 9v battery and start prying at the seam of the battery, starting at the bottom until you can get the battery all the way apart, like so:
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Next, what you want to do is take out and keep the bottom plastic part and the top plastic part (the part with the connectors on it). You can recycle the rest of the battery, you won’t be using the rest of the contents at this time.
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Now lets take a look at this connector. We have a positive and a negative. The positive on the 9V battery is the “Round” connector and the negative is the “Star” connector. For this project we have to change this so that the positive side is the “Star” connector and the negative is the “Round” connector. This is why it’s a good choice to use two different colored wires (red & black in this case).
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Now that you know the “Star” side is the positive side and the “Round” side is going to be negative, you can flip the connector over (remember which side is which). In the photograph below, the “Star” side is on the right.
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Now you are ready to put this thing together. Heat that soldering iron up and get ready. What you want to do is take the red wire and solder it into the “Star” side connector. Do the same with the black wire with the “Round” connector. If you find the solder is not sticking to the metal area, you might need to rough it up a bit. My connector had a coating on it and I had to sand the connector a little and the solder connected to it. Just take some sand paper and rub it a little and your solder should adhere to the connector.
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Now that both connectors have the wires attached there is one more step before assembling the final product. You should flip the wires to the other side (see the photo). This puts less tension on the wires when the battery snap is being used.
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Next step is to put this thing together, so heat up that hot glue gun. What you want to do is get your other piece of plastic ready and you’re going to put hot glue on the part that has the wires connected, dab just enough glue on there so the other piece of plastic will hold. You’ll want to squeeze both plastic pieces once you put the glue in since hot glue dries fast. Once it’s dry you should have something like this:
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Now you are done and ready to test your projects or attach the battery snap to your project, etc. Here are a couple of pictures of the new battery snap in use.
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Remember to properly dispose of your batteries. Please recycle when you can.