Ejecting a disc on a Wii with a broken eject button

 I've been letting the kids play with my (relatively) old Nintendo Wii for a while, and for Christmas, I got a couple extra controllers and some multiplayer games so we could play some games as a family sometime. Unfortunately, the eject button somehow stopped working — it's either stuck or jammed or in some other way not "clicking" the way it should, so we were stuck with Twilight Princess and absolutely no other options for something as simple as ejecting a disc (not even one involving a paperclip).

So off to Google I go to find a solution. Naturally, it was ridiculously difficult. There were plenty of web forms with answers like "use a sledgehammer" or "push the button harder." One guy on YouTube suggested a "five minute solution" of taking the Wii apart by uncovering multiple hidden screws and unscrewing them with a specialty screwdriver so you can mess with whatever button-pushing mechanism was going awry (this involved adding a piece of tape).

The solution that wound up working for ME was even more ridiculously complicated, but I didn't have to buy a novelty screwdriver or start taking apart my hardware. Instead, I installed an app specifically to tell the Wii to eject the damn disc. This is the sort of feature any competent developer would have put in the UI to begin with, but Nintendo has a way of not bothering that sort of thing.

1. The first step was installing a "Homebrew Channel" on the Wii, something Nintendi does NOT want you to do (because it's helpful and usful). To trick the Wii into doign this, I used the "LetterBomb" crack to do this, which meant finding my Wii's MAC address and then plugging it into a sketchy website to download a ZIP with the files I needed. I loaded this on a 1GB SD card I'd been keeping in a drawer and found the "bomb" message in the Wii message-board (after a couple tries, as it didn't take the first time).
2. After a few command prompts (and some scary-looking Linux crawling across teh screen), the installation was done and I had a new Homebrew software on the Wii menu. I launched this and got to see get to see a blank screen with bubbles and nothing else. This is because Homebrew Channel needs you to put apps, but there's nothing in the documentation that makes this obvious or explains how to install the apps.
3. So to install apps, you take the same SD card you used to install the LetterBomb and add a director that says "apps." Then you can download an "Eject DVD" app and put its unzipped contents in there. And this worked. I opened the Homebrew Channel, then ran the Eject DVD app, and the disc came out. Now we can play a different game at least. Hooray!
4. The "Eject DVD" app was actually my second choice. I'd wanted to install an actual channel to eject the disc on the main Wii menu. There's a Wiki page for something called "Power-Off Channel" that allegedly does this but doesn't actually contain a working link to the app. I had to hunt around for Google to find that. Then, of course, I had to make sure I downloaded the second app instead of the first, as the first just powers off the Wii while the second (allegedly) gives an option to eject the disc.
5. So what THAT does is give you a "wad" file, which is a Wii channel (I guess). How do you install it? Well, you need yet ANOTHER Homebrew app for that, WiiModLite, which will let you install "wad" files that you download on the Internet. Put that app in the apps director and then put the "wad" you downloaded form step 4 into a new directory called "wad." Load the app on the Homebrew Channel and follow a few prompts to install the new channel.

So there. Those are all the steps you need to follow to eject a disc. Because Nintendo couldn't be bothered to add an "eject disc" button to their UI. Thanks, Nintendo. Now I know how to hack a Wii.

Where to find Adobe CC fonts

I've been using Adobe CS6 for the past several years rather than switching to Creative Cloud. I'm one of those crazy people who doesn't want to pay $600 every year for the same software. This hasn't been a problem up until now, when a client needed a file put together using some specific fonts and had no way of sending them to me.

Seriously. The file was created with InDesign CC, and Adobe will not let you include the fonts when packaging it up. They do this to force more people to sign up for Creative Cloud, of course, but nobody's going to pay $600 just to access a few fonts for one project. Certainly not me.

So here's how I got the files. It was tricky, because Adobe does not want you to know where they are. But they're here:

Mac: /Users/<your user name>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/.r

Windows: C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype\r

Now, when you open this folder (on Windows anyway), you won't see fonts per se. You'll see some files with no file extensions and given numbers instead of names. But those are your fonts. Just copy them out and add a ".ttf" file extension, and viola! You've got your fonts.