Digital audio players – Henry Poon's Blog https://blog.henrypoon.com Wed, 05 Oct 2022 02:20:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 83044199 Qt Environment Variables https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2009/12/06/qt-environment-variables/ https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2009/12/06/qt-environment-variables/#respond Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:20:14 +0000 http://henrypoon.mooo.com/blog/qt-environment-variables A long time ago I had come across a project that involved porting Linux on the iPod called iPodLinux (read more at the link).  It basically adds additional functionality than that of regular iPods such as the use of third party apps such as gameboy and NES emulators.  Seeing that I like to mess with these things, I decided to try it out.  According to their website,

iPodLinux currently works on all iPod generations with the exception of the 2nd/3rd/4th generation iPod nano, 6th generation iPod classic, all iPod shuffles and the iPod Touch. Donations always help when it comes to supporting new hardware. Progress can be tracked on the Project Status.

The installation of iPodLinux is somewhat tedious.  They recommend that you download the source code and compile them yourself (instructions on the site), which is what I’m doing right now.  Compiling the source code requires a program called Qt.  I downloaded the Qt4 + MinGW installer to compile the code.  However, when trying to compile the code using “qmake”, Windows did not let me run the program.

Apparently the source of the problem is that my environment variables were not set properly.

The environment variables settings page can be found in Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables.  Click the New… button.

Here are the required environment variables:

Variable Name: PATH (should exist already)
Variable Value: C:\MinGW\bin and C:\Qt4.x.x\bin

Variable Name: QTDIR
Variable Value: C:\Qt4.x.x (whatever your version is)

Variable Name: QMAKESPEC
Variable Value: win32-g++

]]> https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2009/12/06/qt-environment-variables/feed/ 0 99 iPod Only Plays Sound on One Side https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2009/12/04/ipod-only-plays-sound-on-one-side/ https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2009/12/04/ipod-only-plays-sound-on-one-side/#respond Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:37:43 +0000 http://henrypoon.mooo.com/blog/ipod-only-plays-sound-on-one-side Recently I’ve had this problem where my iPod would only play sound on the right side headphone. Most people would probably think that the headphones were broken, which is what I thought too. I went to try my iPod with different speakers and still had the same problem. Clearly it was because of the iPod. I decided to open up my iPod and see.

Once I opened it up, it looked like this:

The problem with mine was that the one of the two orange ribbon cables was too loosely connected to the iPod’s circuit board.  Refer to the image.  When the iPod is freshly opened, the hard drive (the blue thing) should be covering the circuit board.  As noted in the picture, the orange ribbon goes through that little gap.  What I noticed is that as I wiggle around that cable, my left speaker would start playing sounds.  Once I found the “sweet spot”, I immediately stuffed cut up bits of a rubber band into the gap until I could jam up that spot well enough to prevent the orange cable from moving.  I don’t have a picture of what it looks like after it was fixed, and I don’t really feel like grabbing the screwdriver to open it up again.

UPDATE (Jan 5, 2010):

This is what it looks like fixed:

Notice the two bits of green rubber band filling up that slot.

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