Youch!

I had already spent a bunch of money fixing my Zune the first time, so I wasn’t too eager to spend more money.  Since the original accident Microsoft began offering a repair service for broken glass and screens… for $80.  I opted for a cheaper solution in every sense of the word.  Instead of replacing the front glass, I decided to remove the broken pieces and simply put the Zune in a clear plastic case.  I clicked around Amazon.com and found the a cheap clear case for $3.27.  (As of today, the price is $3.10.)  The whole deal as $6.25 with shipping.

The first step in the repair was to remove the broken pieces from in front of the LCD screen.  I began to take apart the Zune, but then I thought I might be able to pick off the pieces with a small pick—I used the flathead screwdriver that came with my Rapid Repair kit.  The process was oddly reminiscent of pealing a hard-boiled egg.  Note that I was only able to peal away the glass because it was the cheap Rapid Repair stuff.  The glass that comes on Zunes is much stronger and stays in one piece even after it cracks.

After I got all of the pieces off I sprayed a bit of Windex on a paper towel and cleaned  up the remaining dust.  (The blemish at the top of the frame is from when I replaced the glass the first time.)

With the case on my Zune is basically as good as new.  My only concern now is that dust will get up under the cover and I’ll have to clean it out.  Time will tell for that.

As for the case itself, the only problem that it seems to have is that it makes the hold switch inaccessible without something like a toothpick or paperclip.  The case does come with the necessary parts to clip the Zune to a belt, so it might not be a big deal if I decide to do that.

I almost decided to ditch this Zune, an 8GB model, for a larger 16GB model, but I hear a new model, the Zune HD, is coming out later this year.  I’ll be paying close attention to that as well!

It must have been the only one in the house like that.  An unused cable in the basement was pretty tightly-packed.

There was also a receptacle in the family room that had three cables in it, likely for some old cable system.  There was just no working with it.  The two black cables seemed to go up, while the only cable going down was white.

Enter a new idea!  We have speakers in the family room that are fed from a stereo in the basement.  Their cables go through holes where the wall and floor meet (hidden by the baseboards), into the ceiling of the basement, and on top of the ceiling tiles of the basement to the stereo.

I knew what to do.

Yeah, well my mom drilled the hole, but I could have done it myself!

So then I fed the cable through the hole . . .

. . . and then removed some ceiling tiles in the basement and fearlessly dug around for it blindly in the insulation in the top of the basement wall.

Remember the unused black cable I was talking about?  It was at this point that my dad and I discovered that we could find it at the top of the ceiling.  The plan was to attach a string to the end of the black cable where it comes out the wall, pull it out from the top of the ceiling, and then attach the Ethernet cable to the string at the top of the wall and pull the string out from the wall until the Ethernet cable popped through.  Great plan, except that the string came undone halfway through.  After a good 30 minutes of fussing around, trying to make the cable go through the insulation (make the sharp turns that the old cable took down to the hole) we decided on another solution.

I routed the cable along the top of the wall, which would be out of sight when the ceiling tiles were put back into place.

I brought it down right above the TV.

It wasn’t the best solution, but it worked!  I hooked the cable up to an old 4-port network hub, and brought one cable to the Xbox, and another one to my dad’s computer, so that he could use a wired connection instead of wireless.

Even though my desktop computer’s connection to the network is still wireless, since I made the one segment of the data trail for Media Center wired, the performance of the Xbox as an extender for Windows Media Center has increased noticeably.

This is me excited.