Android Apps
This post has a good list of Android applications. I think that ecosystem of Android application is really doing well.
Here is a list of the third party Android applicaitons that I have installed:
- Amazon
- Backgrounds
- Bank of America
- Barcode Scanner
- CNET Scan & Shop
- Evernote
- Jewels
- Last.fm
- LastPass
- Listen
- Movies
- OneTouch Timer Free
- Pandora
- PhoneFlicks
- Remember The Milk
- Seesmic
- Shazam
- SqueezeControl
- SqueezeDroid
- TripIt
- TuneWiki
- Ultimate Stopwatch
- WordPress
- Yelp
Setting up D-Link DAP-2553
Our Airport base stations were starting to die. Every once in a while, the basestations would still broadcast the SSID, and wireless devices could still connect to them but wouldn’t transmit any data to our wired network. Since this was happening to both our Airport Express and Airport Extreme base stations, I assume that there was something, either on the wired network, or some RF interference that was causing them to lock up.
I took this opportunity to upgrade to a 802.11n base station, so I bought the D-Link DAP-2553
Avast! antivirus and HP Time Machine support
A while ago HP added Time Machine support to their MediaSmart servers. I have mentioned previous problems getting Time Machine to back up to the server. Since I had to restore the server, I had to re-setup the Time Machine drive.
This time I was having a hard time creating a volume large enough to back up all of my data. The disc image creation would fail and state that there wasn’t enough space on the server, even though that there was plenty.
In this post I mentioned that I was trying to uninstall Avast! antivirus and see what would happen. It looks like Avast! was preventing me from creating a disc image large enough. I believe that the scan was causing the reads to time out on the Mac, so the process just stopped.
Removing Avast! Antivirus from Window Home Server
I was having a problem creating some large disk images on my Windows Home Server from my Mac. I thought that the Avast! antivirus could be causing some problems with this. So I decided to try uninstalling it, and seeing if I could create the files. Unfortunately, attempting to uninstall it from the Add-in screen of the Windows Home Server or from the Add/Remove Programs from the Control panel failed.
This post has a some steps that worked for me to uninstall Avast! antivirus. It looks like the disk image creation is also working better without Avast!, so I probably will not reinstall it.
Sending links via Gmail using Chrome
This page has a javascript that makes it easy to send the url for the current page in Chrome as an email using Gmail.
I did have to modify it to make it work for my Google Apps for Your Domain account. I just had to modify
mail.google.com/mail/
with
mail.google.com/a/{your domain}/
[via Lifehacker]
Music format support on Nintendo DSi
Today I bought a new microSD card for my phone. My son also wanted a SD card for his Nintendo DSi. He wanted to use it to put music on for playback. So I figured that I would give him the 2GB card that was I was using in my phone.
When I copied some mp3 files to an SD card, and they were not playable. It looks like the Nintendo DSi only plays AAC files. On their web page they link to the Nero software where they sell it for $6. You can do the same thing for free with iTunes.
Windows Home Server recovery
For a while there has been an update to MyMovies that I have been meaning to install. On Saturday, I decided to do the upgrade. The first thing that I did was uninstall the old Windows Home Server add-on. The uninstallation appeared to go OK, and I was prompted to reboot the server. Once I did, the server would not fully boot back up. Since this is a HP MediaSmart ex475, and there is no video out, the only option is to recover the server. Since server recovery consists of reinstalling the server software, I decided to to take this opportunity to upgrade the system drive to a 1TB drive that I had, but hadn’t used.
Reinstalling the software went fine, but I was never able to get it to automatically recover the data from the other drives. Supposedly, when you do a server recovery, the data will be automatically reconstructed from the drives.
Instead, the server partition is created, and all of the other drives are just mounted, but not added to the storage pool. No data is lost here, but you just need to copy the data back to the storage pool. This page describes the steps required to recover data. I am using GoodSync to do the copy, as it pretty much functions like rsync, but doesn’t require cygwin. The copying of the data will take a few more days.
Windows Home Server user account tips
Over the Thanksgiving break, I helped my grandmother with some things with her computer. One of the problem is that on one of her new computers, her account name was spelled differently than it was on the Windows Home Server. This causes her to be prompted for her username and password when she tries to mount the server.
Unfortunately, in Windows, you can change the display name for an account, but you cannot change the username. In order to fix this, you need to create a new account with the right username, and then copy all of the files to the new home directory.
Since when you create a new account on windows, the control panel doesn’t offer the ability to specify the username and display name. I would recommend that when you create a new account, you create an account and specify the username. Then after the account is created, change the name to the name you want displayed (This only changes the display name)
Smart AC
A while ago, I received a letter from PG&E mentioning their Smart AC program. This program lets customers voluntarily let their air conditioning get throttled when there is a significant energy demand.
The box that is installed on the compressor, has a pager network radio receiver, and when it receives a signal from PG&E, it will throttle the AC back. It looks like it does it’s throttling by cycling the compressor on in 15 minute intervals, when the thermostat tries to turn the AC on. During this time, since the thermostat thinks that the compressor is on, the fan will still be running to help with the cooling of the house. Users also have the ability to opt out of the throttling in 24 hour periods.
In our case, I don’t think that we will be affected, as we hardly have the AC on. But, I figure that we can do our part, and if turning off our AC in 15 minute intervals, can prevent a black out, we can join the program.
Upgrade ext3 to ext4
I was interested in upgrading my laptop’s hard drive to ext4 from ext3. Ext4 offers some features over ext3, and I figured that since I upraded to Kubuntu 9.10, I might as well upgrade the file system.
This blog post describes the steps needed to upgrade from ext3, without formatting the hard drive.
Unfortunately, I didn’t unmount it before running through the steps, and I didn’t pay attention to the fsck warning. My partition did get corrupt, and I decided to reformat and do a clean install. (At least I am able to create an ext4 partition, and it is nice to do a clean install every once in a while.)
Luckily, I was able to restore all of my data, since I have been backing up my files on Linux with JungleDisk. Also, I am able to restore my Windows VMWare image, since it is backed up to my Windows Home Server.
