Replacing Glass on Casio Edifice EF-308D

My beloved Casio Edifice has been on my wrist for years. And due to “gentleness” on my part, its mineral glass got scratched to the point of impacting readability. It was time for either a new watch or change of the glass. Guess which one I have chosen?

First task was the hardest - I had to find appropriately-sized replacement glass. Diameter was easy as you can measure it with calipers. Thickness was a bit more difficult. Someone doing it properly would disassemble the watch, remove crystal, and measure it. I just eyeballed it and decided that beveled 2.5 mm should fit just fine. And bevel did save me as its “unbeveled” height of 1.6 mm fits nicely in place of Casio’s 2 mm flat mineral glass.

For the new glass, I didn’t just want anything. I wanted to have sapphire as to minimize scratching in the future. And on that front I had choice between generic sapphire glass or a bit fancier AR coated ones. I went with blue AR coating as I felt it would bring a bit of pizzazz.

Once I received my glass, I was ready to begin with process. Instructions for it, of course, I found on YouTube. Disassembly went according to plan as soon as I took the bracelet off to ease handling. I used case opener to get the back off and then spent 10 minutes searching for a small hole to release the crown. With crown out the watch mechanism itself was trivial to remove.

All this was done while wearing finger cots (I find them much more comfortable than full gloves) and with occasional blow from dust blower. With quartz mechanism as one in this Casio, this might not be too important but I read too many horror stories about dust getting into gears so playing it safe seemed reasonable. To protect mechanism and avoid losing small parts I used a small plastic container.

Watch press was the most fidgety part of process because I had to find appropriately sized dies. Pains were worth it because glass did come out in a single piece despite the loud cracking noise.

As I have a good experience with silicon grease from my fountain pen hobby, I decided to get both case and the side of glass generously coated. Not sure whether my glass was better sized than one in video or due to silicone grease but glass was fitted on the first try. I found it so unbelievable that I had to check multiple times it’s really in and fitted straight. While grease probably did help with inserting it also meant I had to spend a few minutes cleaning the excess. Well worth if you ask me.

With glass mounted it was time to reassemble the watch. As expected, the same steps followed in reverse direction were all it took. In hindsight, I should have tested waterproofness before returning mechanism in but I simply forgot. In any case, my son has been wearing it while swimming in pool a few times already thus proving it’s reasonably waterproof. I wouldn’t bet on full 100 m rating though.

With sapphire replacement watch got a new lease on life and completely new look. Polishing the case would probably bring me a step further but I’ll save that for some later time. :)

Here is the list of all parts used in the course of swap. Note I didn’t actually buy all these things specifically for this project (e.g. Calipers, silicon grease, and figer cots I had from before) but I listed them anyhow.

PS: Albeit pronoun I is used all throughout this text, most of work was actually done by my son while I was providing paternal support in form of instructions and warnings. :)

Muting F1 Key

Men are often irrational beings. For example I simply hate F1 key. I know, that key is there to give me help but realistically if I need help I will google for it. Absolutely every time I press F1 it is by accident and it leads to annoying wait for Help to load - especially in Microsoft Office. That key is useless!

Fortunately, deep in Microsoft’s Keyboard and mouse class drivers documentation there is a chapter on scan code mapper for keyboards. In short, there is a functionality enabling us to remap any key just by writing entry in registry without any external programs.

At first I though to simply disable F1 key. But reading a bit further into documentation I though better - why not use F1 key as a mute button?

For this conversion it is necessary to know codes for both F1 and Mute key. A bit of searching later I’ve found that information in USB HID to PS/2 Scan Code Translation Table. This ancient document has exactly what we need under “PS/2 Set 1 Make” column. F1 key has scan code 0x3B while mute is a bit more involved 0xE020 (disabling would be 0x0000).

Format of Scancode Map field is a bit confusing at first, but table examples do help a lot. For my use-case, table would be as this.:

These values would need to be written in registry under key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout as binary entry named Scancode Map. Of course, since binary data has to be little-endian, (hex) value would actually be:

00000000 00000000 02000000 20E03B00 00000000

Or one can simply download prepared registry file for creating mapping and, if necessary, removing the same.

[2017-11-13: You can check codes using Scancode Viewer.]

[2017-11-23: I also made Scancode Map application so you don’t need to manually update registry.]

Asterisk Be Damned

Honestly, I almost lost hope this day will come. However, finally there is a download of Visual Studio Express 2017. Because no sunshine can happen without clouds here in Redmond, only Desktop edition is available. Moreover, Microsoft found it necessary to clarify it further with the following asterisk:

* Visual Studio Express 2017 is available for Windows Desktop developers. This will be the final version of Visual Studio Express, and there will not be a UWP or Web offering of Visual Studio Express 2017. We encourage all users to look at the free development options offered by Microsoft such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Community for future development needs.

Yep, this is the last edition for the fans of Express. It has been a good ride I guess.

PS: And no, answer is not using Community as its licencing restrictions make it wildly unsuitable for the whole host of scenarios where Express was shining. For example, use in a bigger company is not really allowed - even if you are not using it for production software but only for internal tools.

Windows 10 Pro USB Install on Dell's XPS 15

When I got my new Dell XPS 15 with Windows 10 Home; the first thing I wanted to install my own fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro.

Guess what? Dell, as many other PC manufacturers, stores key in BIOS (Home edition in my case) and it will never ask you for it. Try as you may but Windows installation will never even ask your for alternate key. That is, if you don’t adjust it a bit.

First part is preparing installation USB and these same steps are needed even if you don’t need to change install key. Press <Win>+<R> and write diskpart, followed by OK. This will execute partition editor tool. Be very, very careful to select disk you want to clean and make new installation USB:

LIST DISK
 Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
 --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
 Disk 0    Online          476 GB      0 B        *
 Disk 1    Online          931 GB      0 B
 Disk 2    Online         7168 MB      0 B
 Disk ^^3^^    Online         7648 MB      0 B

SELECT DISK ^^3^^
 Disk 3 is now the selected disk.

CLEAN
 DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.``

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
 DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.``

FORMAT FS=FAT32 QUICK
 100 percent completed``
 DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.``

EXIT

Assuming that your, newly created and empty, USB drive is under letter U: and your Windows installation disk is at W:, you can use XCOPY to transfer files. Again, press <Win>+<R> to get a prompt where you can enter following command:

XCOPY ^^W:^^*.* /e /f ^^U:^^\

For getting our key into installation we need to create PID.txt with following content (use your key instead of XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX):

[PID]
Value=^^XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX^^

This file you then copy onto USB to U:\sources or U:\x64\sources folder, depending which one is present.

Now you can plug USB into XPS 15, boot to USB using F12 key and proceed with Windows installation as you usually would. The only difference is that Windows will now use key from USB instead of BIOS and give you the correct edition.

PS: If you want to use USB drive bigger than 64 GB, use CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY SIZE=8000 to make disk appear a bit smaller. Otherwise FAT32 formatting won’t work and that is important for UEFI.

PPS: To avoid entering legacy mode, I like to add custom EFI boot option pointing to \efi\boot\bootx64.efi on USB.

Bimil 2.20

This minor update essentially brings only two significant changes.

First is inclusion of NTP check before time-based two-factor authentication code is generated for the first time. If you are getting code on freshly installed computer with wrong date or your clock simply drifted more than required 30 seconds, Bimil is now going to check time and issue correct code regardless of your system clock.

Second important change is Debian package. While you could run Bimil on Linux before, you had to deal with installation and requirements yourself. Now it is enough just to download package and use your favorite (Debian-based) installer. And yes, it does install in /opt.

To check these changes together with a few minor improvements and bug-fixes, you can download Bimil from these pages or update it through application.