Joel Mama's Blog

I have two clients that I’ve grandfathered in working on their PCs. Everyone else I told — in much prettier language — to get a Mac or go to hell. One of those clients experienced a nice little BSOD stating: “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_DEVICE … Stop: 0x000000ED (89d28900, c000009c, 00000000, 00000000)”.

Ugh, with windows crap like this, I could care less about what caused it and why. Let’s just cut to the part where I found the solution to this problem. I found the answer on how to fix this at MSGOODIES. I wanted to dupe their info here in case that page goes away. All credit goes to this post on MSGOODIES!

1. Boot off of a XP CD
2. Type “r” to go into recovery console
3. Run these commands:
chkdsk c: /r /p
fixmbr
exit (which reboots)
4. Done.

That fixed the issue for me. Hope it does for some other poor windows souls. Thanks guys!

I’ll just preemptively ask that you don’t post comments asking for assistance. The above information is all I know or care to know. Like I said before … Windows can go to hell! 😉

Don’t even get me started on “Document Compatibility” in Internet Explorer 8. In my opinion, flagging content as kosher for a specific version, of a specific browser, on a specific operating system, flies in the face of everything Web developers have been pushing for in the last decade plus. But I digress.

What’s the definition of irony? When you’re in an editor and click on the “learn more about document compatibility” link, which opens in your default browser (Opera 9.6x) and this is what you see. Yes ladies and gentlemen, the following screen shot is of a document labeled (and all about) “Defining Document Compatibility“:

Seriously … Microsoft … is this some kind of giant Andy Kaufman-esque joke that I don’t get?

I’m working on digitizing my 700+ CD collection (oy vey!). I may go into greater detail about that whole process in another post, but here’s a quick tip for now. If you want to isolate the songs in your iTunes library based on their file type (like MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, etc.), you can do so with a Smart Playlist. But there’s a bit of a trick here, you need to know the magic string to type into the “Kind” field of the playlist. The folks over at Mac OS X Hints have done the work for us. Here’s a pretty table:

File Type	“Kind” string
AAC	AAC audio file
AIFF	AIFF audio file
Apple Lossess	Apple Lossless audio file
Audible.com	Audible file
MP3	MPEG audio file
Radio Stream	MPEG audio stream
WAV	WAV audio file

Another way to get the magic string is to simply view the Get Info window of the file in question. But as Doug Adams of Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes pointed out, you can’t copy and paste that. So he whipped up this bit of code. Paste this code into the Script Editor and run it while the track in question is playing in iTunes:
tell application "iTunes"
display dialog "Current track's kind is:" default answer ((get kind of current track) as string)
end tell

If you have other file types not listed here, please comment with their magic string so I may compile them here. Thanks!

When trying to install the newest version of the ProxyButton extension for Firefox, I received this error:

Incompatible Extension

“ProxyButton” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates

Luckily a solution exists over at Idea Shower. Add a new boolean key using about:config and restart. Easy-peasy. More at Idea Shower.

Update 2011-09-03: There appears to be a free GUI app available, DfontSplitter. And hey, it’s even cross-platform (Win & Mac)! I have no personal experience with it, so downloader beware. Thanks to Matt T. in the comments.

I was able to use a Mac OS X “.dfont” font file on windows by using a simple FOSS software to convert it into standard TrueType format (.ttf). The app is called Fondu. It’s actually a set of many command line programs rolled into one, but I only used the main fondu app. Couldn’t have been easier:

Update 2009-10-14: To clarify, these instructions are for Mac OS X. I do not have any info on running fondu from windows (if that is even possible. I suspect it isn’t). Perhaps windows users could run fondu on a linux virtual machine/box they have lying around? Maybe a linux live CD?

1. Download & Install .pkg file
2. From Terminal, cd into the directory where the .dfont file lives
3. Run fondu MyFont.dfont
4. Marvel as a .ttf font is spit out next to your .dfont file

Thanks Fondu!

Update 2009-05-22: Please note that the fondu binary lives in “/usr/local/bin/” by default. Either add this path to your environment, or prepend the path to the fondu command like this: /usr/local/bin/fondu MyFont.dfont