Translucent Blue Nintendo 64 Controller

A common issue with Nintento 64 controllers is the joystick getting loose over time. In extreme cases this can prevent the joystick from registering a full tilt in a particular direction, preventing characters and cursors from moving at full speed. I stumbled upon several YouTube videos documenting people’s repairs of their N64 controllers, but what many of these videos have in common is that they compensate for the breakdown of the joystick’s crossbar sensors by increasing the volume of the joystick itself. I was shocked to find that replacement joysticks themselves costed upwards of US$10 online, not including postage.

As I am working at rebuilding my Nintendo 64 collection, I end up buying gear off eBay from time to time. eBay can be a treasure trove for nostalgia and cheap tech, but you are often at the mercy of sellers who will bend the truth about the working order of an item to maximise their chance of selling it. The transparent blue controller you see here was sold under the premise of being “in working order”, where the seller’s definition of “working” roughly approximated to “the control stick hasn’t fallen off yet”. The controller’s dead zone constituted of 50% of the controller’s total range of movement. This made the controller impractical for any true gaming, so I decided to take the unit apart and try my hand at fixing it.

X sensor for the N64 joystick

Y sensor for the N64 joystick

Joystick and spring without sensors

Joystick basin showing gears for sensing X and Y activity

Joystick assembly with spring and crossbar sensors

The Nintendo 64 controller is free of any tamper-resistant screws that are present on many of Nintendo’s other products, meaning that you can take apart the entire thing with little more than a phillips head screwdriver. Getting into the joystick housing reveals the issue that causes such a dramatic breakdown in these control sticks: The crossbars that are used to sense the joystick’s movement are worn down to the point that several joystick movements never make contact with the crossbars.

The degraded state of the crossbars makes them fragile. Re-enforcing these bars returns the joystick to its former responsiveness, and strengthens the crossbars for future use. I used a hot glue gun to pad the inside edges of the crossbars, then spent time with my Swiss Card’s scissors and knife to contour the hardened glue into the original shape of the crossbars. This process took a few days (off and on) to get right, as I had to ensure that the surfaces remained smooth enough to ensure that the joystick would be able to brush horizontally through the y-sensor and vertically through the x-sensor without excess friction. I recommend the process if you have a hot glue gun, a magnifying glass and some really small scissors, as it beats either purchasing a new controller purely for its joystick, or purchasing a 3rd party replacement joystick. My transparent blue controller is now in great working order, my friends and I use it to play competitive Perfect Dark, GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64 without any issues. Plus I get to show off my DIY work!

Anyone who knows me (or has stopped me on the street and asked me what annoys me about modern consumerism) will be familiar with my distaste of the culture of tightly coupling mobile phones with network carrier contracts. Over the years, this process has lead to a culture of treating mobile devices as the accessory that is sold alongside a subscription to a mobile network. Contemporary mobile phones are not often built to outlast the length of a carrier subscription, giving the carriers a means to entice customers to renew their subscription by offering customers a new mobile device.

Nokia 5610 XpressMusic in red

The biggest issue with this wonky symbiosis arises when the carriers and manufacturers, while believing in the business venture, refuse to be accountable for each other. A two-year mobile phone subscription with a mobile handset included and paid off over the life of the subscription makes no guarantee for the working order of the handset. Included warranties rarely meet the length of the base subscription, potentially leaving customers with mobile network access that cannot be accessed with a faulty handset.

I’ve used general terms and hypotheticals above, but I wouldn’t be complaining in this fashion if it wasn’t a situation I was all too familiar with. My experience with 3 Hutchinson Australia, along with included handsets from LG, Motorola and (sadly) Nokia, have left me with a string of mobile handsets that have done little more than disappoint me.

Sony Ericsson k850i in blue

Remember my issues with the Nokia 6500 Slide, and how I hoped that the Nokia 6510 would serve me for the remainder of my contract? Well. I had owned my Nokia 5610 for all of 3 months before the issues in its design started to become apparent. Yet another slide-related issue, this phone managed to destroy the integrity of the screen’s cable through nothing more than daily careful use. I knew I had problems when the screen would show static for hours on end, show display elements in the wrong locations, or go blank entirely. Sure enough, the phone’s display gave up entirely a few days later.

3 Hutchinson’s customer support (as one could expect, knowing their customer service practices) had little sympathy for me as my warranty had run out. I would continue to pay for a mobile network subscription that I was unable to use, and their official stance was “you should have bought an extended warranty”. Thanks, guys. I’m no hardware engineer, but I can identify design issues with a phone when I take it apart and find a number of plastic granules from a stressed screw hole fall resting in the shell of the phone. This, as the result of standard use of the Nokia 6510 XpressMusic (sans bumps and bashes – I was careful with this one). All of my previous phones had either been broken, or had been returned on warranty conditions due to having been broken. I had no other mobile handsets to use. Due to 3 Hutchinson’s contention that I was at fault for not having a reliable handset, I took myself to Cash Converters and picked up a nice Sony Ericsson K850i. This phone was inexpensive, proven to be reliable, and above all, was completely unlocked. I’ve managed to customise the phone’s firmware, bringing it back to the generic European interface (the version most widely supported by Sony Ericsson). The only other Sony Ericsson that I have ever owned is also one of only two that did not break throughout their whole lifetime: Clearly I should stick to Sony Ericsson phones in the future.

Nokia is making getting a good phone into a game of chance.

I had my prejudices regarding mobile phone brands in the past, sure. Avoiding LG and Motorola like the plague, respecting Sony Ericsson’s clean-cut design and logical user interface, but ultimately siding with Nokia. My first mobile phone was Nokia’s 6310i, for the prepaid services I enjoyed until I got caught up in the excitement of phone plans. It’s here that the fun begins; and the unnecessesary ties between a phone and a provider are born. Three sold me the mechanically flawed Morotola V3x, which I later replaced with the LG u880, one of the most tediously dull mobile phones I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. I went out and bought myself a Nokia 6233; not branded to any carrier, allowing me to use the services Three offered to me on a more usable piece of hardware.

Late last year, I renewed my contract with Three, and chose to be suited up with the Nokia 6500. A sincere lesson to anyone who will be forced to purchase and pay off a phone for two years: Don’t even think about listening to the salespeople. To this day, the staff at the primary Three store in Southland refuse to acknowledge that the Nokia 6500 has any mechanical faults, and do not wish to entertain any issues that I have regarding phones that they sell. Oh, but I haven’t yet introduced the phone.

The Nokia 6500 sports an unimpressive 2.5 day battery life with moderate usage. Its brushed aluminium shell looks delightful, but will transfer the intense heat generated by the grossly inefficient call handling system straight through to your hand. The back panel is integrated with the “hot swap” mechanism of the internal MicroSD card, un-mounting the card when the panel is removed. Clever? Not particularly; the panel doesn’t guarantee contact with the mechanism switch, meaning that the MicroSD will randomly mount and dismount throughout the day. This makes it impractical (and impossible) to use the internal card for storing photos or playing music. The keypad is first of any Nokia that I’ve used that fails to deliver 1:1 audio feedback when buttons are pressed. By some unfathomable design logic, they have managed to craft a phone with different electronic connectors for the phone’s “open” and “closed” states. This ultimately makes the phone’s responsiveness once opened very hit and miss, often if you don’t open it with an uncomfortable *snap*, there’s no guarantee that any buttons will respond to your keypresses. Software glitches galore cause the phone to freeze and reboot at odd times; navigating the web? Reading an SMS? Navigating through images? In the middle of a call? I’ve had them all. Incredible.

My first Nokia 6500 was returned to a 3 service center a month after its September ‘08 purchase. An “electrical fault” was diagnosed, and I was sent home with a replacement 6500. This replacement functioned as well as could be expected (exhibiting the “microSD dismount” behaviour described above), until the reboot behaviour appeared several times within a two days. “ugh, not again”. The interesting point here was how performing the “Restore Factory Settings” activity seemed to crash the phone completely, making it refuse to initialise past a few seconds of screen illumination.

So I took it back. A “mechanical fault” diagnosis saw me returning home with a second replacement Nokia 6500, after staff there held the belief that they couldn’t possibly replace my faulty phone with one of a different model without authorisation from the Three customer care in Mumbai. This phone, the third Nokia 6500 I had posessed in less than a year, didn’t even make it through the weekend. The phone, “tested to spec”, could not charge the battery. It would respond positively to being plugged in to a Nokia charger, but continuing to complain of low battery, it collapsed in a pile of miserable mere minutes later.

Called Three Customer Care. The quality and speed of the customer service line has really picked up since the Vodafone/Hutch merger. I was dreading hours on the phone with clueless Level 1 techs, but after asking nicely to speak to a supervisor, I managed to sort out a phone replacement in 20 mins flat. Very impressive. I am currently being shipped a Nokia 5610, compatible with the same battery and accessories as my Nokia 6500, but sporting much better utilisation of the battery, and a visibly better build quality. But only time will tell. Can I trust this Nokia?

Okay, so you’ve taken the plunge and bought some garlic bread. Frozen, uncooked, from a convenient supermarket. But alas, you don’t have an oven, all you have access to is a sandwich press and a microwave.

The sandwich press does a good job at cooking the crust of the garlic bread, especially if you rotate the bread half way through so all four of the long edges are cooked. The first flaw of this is that your garlic bread takes on the shape of a rectangular prism. The second is that the garlic bread does not end up being cooked all the way through, leaving large clumps of butter inside, unmelted with the rest of the bread.

The microwave leads to even less desirable results. Having to first remove the aluminium foil is a pain, but the garlic bread ends up rigidly solid all of the way through. On top of that, the overly excitable butter melts into a pool on the bottom of the plate, leaving me curious as to how it managed to seep through a material I can barely break through by biting right down on it.

I think that the key will lie in being able to microwave the garlic bread for a very short space of time, 20-30 seconds, and then transferring it to the sandwich press.

A demonstration of notify-send immitating GlaDOS

It’s that time of year again, to pick a Linux distribution and attempt to install it, customise it, use it, and give up after spending a week, frustrated, trying to get it to perform some task or activity that seems rudimentary, but requires compiling from source –with-black-magic.

Except this time, things are going pretty well.

I’m still having trouble with a few things, but they’re not important. It appears to me that some laptop audio chipsets (including the HDA Intel ALC660-VD on the Asus F3JV) don’t easily allow you to mute the speakers when music is playing out of the headphones. I’ve tried changing the model in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf several times, but alas, no success. Still, I have OneNote and Word 2007 working through Wine, so that’s pretty good. I’m also getting more familiar with bash scripting, and playing around with the “notify-send” program. Good fun.

Several people at least know that I’m a fan of the Tango Desktop Project icon set. They have crisp edges, they’re colourful and easy on the eyes, and have a consistent drawing style.

Outside of the base icon set there is a large wealth of additional icon sets available. Many DeviantART users have crafted Tango icons for popular applications, games and filetypes. Check them out here:

• DarKobra’s gallery
• Unit66’s gallery
• xTom’s gallery

(Oh, and the DeviantArt logo? There’s an icon for that.)
Other Tango icons:

• The Unofficial Tango Project Blog
• Vinicius Depizzol’s Blog:
  • Some Tango application icons
  • CodeTango icons for code file types
  • Bonus Tango icons
  • Tango chat program icons

The Tango icon theme, as well as the themes included with Linux Mint Felicia eventually led me to the Gnome-Colours project, including the Gnome Colours icon set. Well worth a look!

I did some work ensuring that some stuff over at code.sinclairstudios.net that shouldn’t be publically accessible is not, so that’s good. Also got a Twitter plugin working, so that should be pretty nice too. Now time for me to have a shower and go outside.

I’d like to make some shout-outs to some friends of mine, namely Bob and Kon. Thanks to these two for the help they’ve given! Always appreciated.

Bob’s blog: ROFLOL

Kon’s blog: Outrospective.org

Ahoy. This is I, just testing out Wordpress. Got a neat theme called “inove” which I’ve customised to support the Nav Tube. More customisations as they warrant.

The templating engine for Wordpress doesn’t seem to be as complicated as the ones for say Mercurial or phpBB, which should make the themes more frequent and easier to produce, but the source code looks ad-hoc and unclean. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by templating engines like Smarty.

One of the goals of this website is to remain xhtml strict, as much as these plugins will allow, on top of other usability goals in mind. But we’ll address that later.

-AJ