Lee.org

I just got an Android phone, AT&T Samsung Captivate SGH-i897.

What are the essentials for this phone? Here’s what I’ve got so far to change the phone from PITA to awesome

Google Voice – ($free) to avoid the ancient “You have 2 new messages. To listen to your messages, press 1” and replace it with visual voicemail on my phone and computer. Installing it was ridiculously easy after spending an hour hunting on the forums. I went to my (pre-existing) google voice account online and clicked Settings | Voice Settings | Activate Voicemail next to the description of my phone. I typed a few characters into my phone to enable forwarding and Tada!

Touch Calendar Free – ($free) so I can look at my entire calendar at a glance. I can’t navigate around it smoothly but it’s better than the default calendar

RealCalc – ($free) stupid Samsung put the buttons on their calculator in the wrong places! It’s stupid! RealCalc has the buttons in the right places and a lot of bells and whistles that don’t get too in the way

Hi-Q MP3 Recorder – ($3.00) the built in voice recorder sounds like crap and has a mediocre interface. This one is a lot better.

Screen Filter – ($free) The phone is blindingly bright at night. Even at the lowest brightness, it is an excellent flashlight. It is dangerously bright when trying to use the GPS in the car. Screen filter works well to put some kind of “software filter” in front of the screen. Sometimes it turns itself off but it mostly works great.

No fix yet – The AT&T Samsung Captivate (SGH-i897) has 4 buttons at the bottom of the screen. Actually they are “soft” buttons with no tactile feedback. Well, after 3 seconds of inactivity, they turn off, making it impossible to find the buttons in the dark! I don’t have a fix for this yet. I heard of an app called something like “Keep the Lights On” or some such but I lost the reference to it and I have to root my phone to install it. PITA.

I’m still not ready to switch to Gmail as my primary email but it’s working well enough. I’m not switching because: 1- last week the gmail at the office was running slow a while due to Google’s fault. 2- Also last week Google switched our office’s Google Docs interface to something newer and betterer. I wish they had asked/told us before doing that!! I don’t care how new and exciting the new whatchamacallit is, not mentioning that things will be changing freaks me out. It reminds me of the absolute power they have over my email.

NoLed – ($free) when you miss a call, there is no blinking light on the phone telling you that you missed it. Uncool. NoLed fixes that. It might draw too much battery, the jury is still out.

3G Watchdog – ($free) It is difficult… impossible to tell what apps are doing on the phone. They could be downloading porn, burning up your monthly data quota. This should tell me if that happens. The ethos of the platform is pretty much that programs can run in the background whenever they want. That kinda freaks me out.

Battery Graph – ($free) I’m a program to keep track of my battery usage because I haven’t really figured out what drains the battery the most. Some users see 5 hours of battery life, some 30. I really really want to have 30 and not have to think about it.

Installing programs is nerve-wracking because so many apps want access to my data. Does Facebook need access to my Contacts list? If I give that cute new game the power to read and write to the SD card, will it be able to steal data and send it to Russian spammers? The “community” is no help because as of yet, I haven’t come across any group that has recognized malware; there is no procedure for dealing with malware!

The places to look for help appear to be (in decreasing order of usefulness)
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/
http://androidforums.com/
http://www.xda-developers.com/
http://www.appbrain.com/
http://www.androidcentral.com/
http://www.androlib.com/ ??
http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/SGH-I897ZKAATT

So, dear reader, what am I missing? Comments welcome.

The instructions from PendriveLinux.com work almost perfectly for me. There is one bother that makes the instructions from Pendrivelinux not work but I figured out a workaround :-)!

1. Download the  dban-2.2.6_i586.iso
2. Download and run  Universal USB Installer, select DBAN 2.2.6 from the drop down list and follow the onscreen instructions
3. Once the installation to USB is complete, restart your PC and set your  BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from the USB device, save your changes and reboot

If all went well, you should be booting from your  DBAN USB.

Notes: The DBAN autonuke feature may also Nuke the Flash Drive (and as usual, any other drive it detects). I am not sure how to prevent this from happening. So if you use the autonuke feature, you might wipe DBAN from the USB Flash Drive as well.

Here is how to prevent autonuke from wiping the thumbdrive: remove the thumbdrive after the dban has loaded but before it has started wiping drives.

Dban has started. I just typed "autonuke" and the dban.bzi system is being loaded.

The dban image finished loading and it is looking for hard drives to wipe. Now is the time to remove the thumbdrive! You have about 10 full seconds to remove the drive.

Apparently, dban fully loads itself in memory because at the end of the wiping session, it shows a message saying that it has completed it’s job. It doesn’t hang or anything nasty.

When I tried to use  interactive mode on dban (to avoid autonuke destroying the data on my flash drive), dban crashed :-(. I’ve seen many complaints of this online with no fixes.

Here is another way I use to wipe hard drives. It isn’t as high security, but it’s pretty good.

1. Use the System Rescue CD bootable thumbdrive image built by my coworker
2. xinit (xwindows yay)
3. gparted (see what drives we’ve got and unallocate the partitions)
4. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda (and sdb, sdc etc to run other terminal windows) bs=16777216 (a 160 gig drive…) count=10240

I lost a bunch of files off of a web server. But I was able to recover some of them by looking in the cache in my browser. Here are some ways to find those files:

type about:cache in the browser. It will show you all the files in your cache. When you click on the links, it gives you info about each file. To see the actual files, strip down the url a little. For example, change
chrome://view-http-cache/http://lee.org/blog/wp-admin/images/fade-butt.png
to
http://lee.org/blog/wp-admin/images/fade-butt.png

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If you have a lot of files to recover, try using chromecacheview, that’s chrome cache view. As their website says,

ChromeCacheView is a small utility that reads the cache folder of Google Chrome Web browser, and displays the list of all files currently stored in the cache. For each cache file, the following information is displayed: URL, Content type, File size, Last accessed time, Expiration time, Server name, Server response, and more.
You can easily select one or more items from the cache list, and then extract the files to another folder, or copy the URLs list to the clipboard.

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You can try looking in the google chrome cache database on your computer but it’s all a bunch of crazy gobbly-gook.

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You can also try recovering files that have already been deleted from your recycle bin. Recurva does a good job.

I can’t believe Windows 7 hid Quicklaunch. Quicklaunch is a toolbar where you can put all the programs you use most often and launch them easily. It is incredibly useful. I use it 100 times a day. Here’s my Windows XP Quicklaunch.

Well, you can turn it back on in Windows 7. Here’s how (via)

1. Right click on a empty space on the taskbar, then select (hover on) Taskbar and click on New Toolbar. (See screenshot below)

2. In the Folder line, type or copy the location below. (See screenshot below)
%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

3. Click on the Select Folder button. (See screenshot above)

Done!

You can edit the list in Quicklaunch or manipulate the files directly in
C:\Users\(user-name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

There’s more tidbits on the site I found this tip on.

Hugin is a terrific free open source panorama stitching tool. It does not come with automatic control point software pre-installed, I suppose leaving the choice to the user. It takes a long time to set control points by hand and virtually no time to have the computer do it for you. Here is how to set up one of the automatic control point creation tools.

After you have set this up, you will be able to open up Hugin, select your images to stitch and about 3 clicks later have an awesome panorama image like this:

Sunset on a rooftop in Riyadh. Right-click download to view it full size!

1. Download and install  Hugin (I’m using version 2010.2.0 released October 2010 on Windows)
2. Download  Pan-o-matic (local copy of version 0.9.4 just in case) and unzip to some permanent location, let’s say it’s c:\stuff\pan-o-matic
3. In Hugin, go to File | Preferences. Select Control Point Detectors
4. Delete all the existing Control Point Detector Programs in the list
5. Make a new one called (it doesn’t matter exactly) Panomatic

• Description: Panomatic
• Program: c:\stuff\pan-o-matic\Panomatic.exe
• Arguments:  -o %o %i
• Type: Autopano-SIFT

Done setting up!

Now, when you want to stitch images, do the following:

1. Start Hugin
2. From the Assistant tab, click “Load Images…”. Select the images you want to stitch.
3. Click “Align” and wait a while for processing
4. Click “Create Panorama”

Done!

I just came across a piece of software called KFC that removes Flash Cookies AKA Local Shared Objects from your computer. These are new to me but a little googling shows a pretty consistent theme, e.g.:

(webdesign10.com)Web sites use them to track you because they know that most people don’t know about them and that they can track you even after you have cleared your privacy settings.

(wikipedia)Several services even use LSOs as surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, a policy called “re-spawning”

I’m going to add KFC to my  occasional  spring-cleaning of cookies and the like. Find KFC here or a local archive of KFC here.

I own a Toshiba T135 laptop. I’m very happy with it except for one detail. Well 2 if you count that it runs Windows 7, but I digress. The speakers are so quiet that you can’t hear anything. But I found a fix. (via)

You can increase sound DRAMATICALLY if you follow this steps:

Go to Control Panel
Select SMART AUDIO
On the lower part, select SMART EQ/3D SETTINGS
Select CUSTOM
Pull the buttons up (i have them still at number 7, quite enough as you will see)

I pay for the Crashplan backup service and I’m quite happy with it. There is an option where you can backup to your friend’s computer for free. I’d like to trade backup space with a friend (you?) “just in case”. My backup is about 250 gig. I would happily trade about 250 gig on my computer with 250 gig on yours. What do you think?

The app runs with very low overhead. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Don’t worry, without the secret password I can’t view your data and you can’t view mine (assuming you trust the Crashplan software, which I do)

Email me. Lee at Lee dat org.

This is old info but I needed to refer to it after my Windows reinstall so I’ll just put it here for easy reference.

Windows Explorer Command-Line Options

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Explorer [/n] [/e] [(,)/root,<object>] [/select,<object>]

/n                Opens a new single-pane window for the default
selection. This is usually the root of the drive Windows
is installed on. If the window is already open, a
duplicate opens.

/e                Opens Windows Explorer in its default view.

/root,<object>    Opens a window view of the specified object.

/select,<object>  Opens a window view with the specified folder, file or
application selected.

Examples:

Example 1:     Explorer /select,C:\TestDir\TestApp.exe

Opens a window view with TestApp selected.

Example 2:  Explorer /e,/root,C:\TestDir\TestApp.exe

This opens Explorer with C: expanded and TestApp selected.

Example 3:  Explorer /root,\\TestSvr\TestShare

Opens a window view of the specified share.

Example 4:  Explorer /root,\\TestSvr\TestShare,select,TestApp.exe

.

.

.

.

Here it is explained in a slightly different way:

This page was lifted from http://cpcug.org/user/clemenzi/technical/WinExplorer/CommandLineOptions.htm.

Parameters are

separated by commas. Many combinations are allowed, but only a few examples are

given.

Explorer.exe c:\                Open directory as a single pain of icons

Explorer.exe /e,c:\             Explore drive as 2 lists – 
                                  directories on left & files on right
Explorer.exe /e,/root,c:\       Explore drive without showing other drives
Explorer.exe /n,/e,/select      Opens showing only drives
Explorer.exe /e,/idlist,%I,%L   From Folder\..\Explore in the registry
                                  %I – ID number
                                  %L – Long filename
Explorer.exe  /e,DriveOrDirectory
Explorer.exe  /e,/root,directory,sub-directory
Explorer.exe  /e,/root,directory,/select,sub-directory

/e	List (explorer) view, Show large icons if missing (Open view)
/root	Sets the top level folder.
/select	Specifies that the directory should be selected without displaying its contents.
/s	????
/n	Do not open the selected directory, no effect on NT
/idlist,%I	Expects an ID/handle. May help with cacheing. By itself, opens the desktop as icons.
/inproc	Stops display of window (I don’t know why this is useful)

Windows Explorer contains 7 icons. In 95 and NT, the 3rd and 4th are

different. Use

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SHELL32.DLL

I have not found a single reference explaining all the options. Some

parameters were found by searching the registry, some are from the sources

below, and a few are from browsing the executable.

• C:\WINDOWS\TIPS.TXT (95 only)

  provides basic command line help. Search for explorer.

• Additional notes are provided here.

URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / WinExplorer

/ CommandLineOptions.htm

I’m part way through recovering from a hard drive crash. Last week my computer made the dreaded clicking noise. So I decided it was time to transfer my computer life over to a new hard drive.
Old: 180gb main drive, 500gb secondary, 250gb external
New: 1500gb main drive, screw-the-rest eh?

Spinrite told me there were like 3 unrecoverable errors on the old main drive.

My big question is: I have backups; how can I easily tell which files went bad and need recovering? I’ve got something like two hundred and fifty thousand files. (crap, I’ve got two hundred and fifty thousand files!). RAID-5 would automagically do it but Windows doesn’t support software RAID-5 and I don’t want to spend another $600 on drives and controllers. Other solutions?

I’ve got Windows and Outlook reinstalled. Next, the myriad support programs I rely on.