Matt Gehrisch Online

I’ve wanted to start a podcast for about four years now, but, until now, I havent’ been able to come up with a good idea for content.  My area of expertise is, of course, computers and technology.  The problem though, is that there are enough technology podcasts already.  I feel that the category is saturated.

I discovered audio books this past year, and have enjoyed listening to audio books from Audible while commuting to and from work.  This gave me an idea!

I would like to produce a podcast of original short stories.

Here’s the catch: I have always been a facilitator.  I have the technical skills to produce the show, but I accept the fact that I don’t have the prolific creativity to produce enough content on my own.

Have you written any short stories?  Would you like to publish them online as an audio book?  Please let me know!!

I will be setting up a “studio” to produce the recordings.  Authors would always be welcome to read their own stories for the podcast, or I can voice the recordings myself in the studio.

I picked up a couple of SD cards on sale today at Radio Shack so that I could use them to take advantage of the ReadyBoost feature in Windows 7.  When I inserted the card, windows told me that the device didn’t install properly, but the SD card showed up as a drive.

Flash drives are shipped pre-formatted using the FAT32 file system because FAT32 tends to be a universally supported format.  I tried to reformat the drive to the new exFAT filesystem (a new Windows file system optimized for flash drives).  The format failed.

As I tried to troubleshoot the issue, I realized that ReadyBoost wasn’t working right.  When restarting the computer, the system would hang on “logging out” until I ejected the card.  The card was quite unstable.  The file system kept becoming corrupt, requiring multiple attemps to reformat it.

I happened to notice some unknown devices in the device manager that hadn’t been there before.  A little while later, I inserted the card into the other card reader slot.  More unknown devices showed up, and the system told me that the hardware didn’t install properly again.   I realized I was on to something!

The card reader hardware wasn’t working properly because Windows 7 didn’t have the right driver included.  A little bit of diging and I came up with another idea.  Most computer manufacturers try to reduce costs whenever possible.  Just like car manufacurers, they reuse parts across different models when they can.

I couldn’t find a Vista/7 driver for the Acer Aspire One netbook that I have, but I was able to find a Vista driver for another acer model that I guessed was probably using the same card reader hardware.  My guess was right!

I found the driver that I needed for the built in Jmicron card reader on this page.

If you have an Acer Aspire One laptop and your card reader slots aren’t working right, grab that driver.  It should fix the problem, and allow you to use ReadyBoost too!

I heard about this video and had to go find it.  Once I saw it, I decided it was worth sharing.  It’s unbelievable! Enjoy!

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should write down the things I do after a fresh install of Kubuntu to get it ready for general day to day use.  I’m writing this article based on what I have done with my Kubuntu 9.04 installation. Click to read more …

The new release of Ubuntu (and subsequently Kubuntu) came out a few days ago.  I decided to wipe the Linux partition (running Kubuntu 8.04) and install a fresh copy of 9.04. Click to read more …

A friend of mine posted a link on twitter to an interesting news article today.

Three of the four local news producing stations in Central Ohio are joining forces to make more efficient use of their resources in our troubled economy.  It seems you can blame anything on our troubled economy and everybody just nods their heads understandingly.  It must be true, right? Click to read more …