Quick Tip: Remove a screw

Yeah I know, I don’t usually post DIY tips, but this one saved me and I thought I should share. I was trying to remove a hard disk, but one  of the screws was stripped, probably by the guy who installed the disk. There are ways to “convince” a stubborn screw to come off, ways that include a rotary tool and an evil smile, but this one might save you the trouble:

Use a wide rubber band between the screw and the screw-driver. The rubber band will fill in the gaps and hopefully you’ll manage to remove the screw.

Click the image bellow to go to Life Hacker and read the full article.

PS3 Hacked?!

Image via http://hackedgadgets.com

It was bound to happen sooner or later. If there’s one thing I’ve learned all these years I mess with computers, is that nothing is unbreakable. Apparently, George Hotz believes the exact same thing. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Hotz was the one who first managed to unlock the iPhone, so it would work with any carrier.

Hotz now, claims to have unlimited access to PS3 memory, which in short means he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He says that there’s still work to be done, but at this point it’s only a matter of time.

We’ll have to see how Sony will react (if they do) to this. However, it should be very interesting…

May we soon see homebrew apps for the PS3!

[geohot via Kotaku]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

Win7 Bug: Wallpaper better than solid color desktop!

In the old days, when every byte of RAM counted, I would always strip down every machine I built, removing all kinds of eye candy (well back then, it was eye candy) and leaving my self with only the bare minimum. I’ve never used active desktop, never had custom pointers or system sounds (I had tried WindowBlinds once but that was a tragedy) and most of the time I did not have a wallpaper. Yes, not even that. My PC would look something like the image below:

Windows 98 typical desktop

Not much fun right? Well, yes but as I said, every bit of RAM counted. All this did not change much later, with Windows XP. I would still use “Windows Classic” theme only (I still do whenever I set up a WinXP box), but I confess I did have a wallpaper Now, that I have Windows 7, I honestly did not bother with any of this. I did not even turn off Aero. See, when I noticed that it would run faster than XP without tweaking anything, I decided to keep all these little nice touches. So, I am not one of those that found out about a bug, that I personally consider to be more than ironic.

If you happen to chose a solid color for your desktop, you might find yourselves waiting for 30 or so seconds before you can log in and start working…

According to Microsoft, it has something to do with Window Manager Session Manager service, so if you do have a solid color background and do not experience the 30 second delay, this service is stopped or disabled. You can download a hotfix for this problem, or as people from LifeHacker propose, create an image with the color you want and set it as wallpaper.

Manually Install Adobe Flash on Ubuntu

Just a quick one, hoping to save you some trouble, in case you have problems installing Adobe Flash Player for Firefox on Ubuntu.

For the past half hour, I have been trying to install it either from Adobe’s download page or from Synaptic Pachage Manager, with no success whatsoever.

What did work for me was to manually install it, and I would suggest you do the same, in case you experience difficulties too. In order to do that first you need to download the .tar.gz package from Adobe. Click the above link, go to the download page and from the drop down list, select .tar.gz.

Save and extract the file someplace (eg /tmp)

Now, you need to copy the extracted libflashplayer.so to firefox’s plug in directory. You need to be root to do that.

Open a terminal and type:

sudo cp /tmp/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

It will ask you for the root password, just type it and you’re good to go. I didn’t even had to resrtart firefox.

UPDATE (5 Feb 2010): After an eeeBuntu re-install, I had to re-install flash for firefox too. With firefox v. 3.0 (I haven’t updated yet), flash plug in installed directly from Adobe with no problems.

eeebuntu on Asus eeePC 900

You thought it was over, didn’t you? From windows to SuSe, to EasyPeasy, I’ve been trying to find which OS suits me best for my little friend and now, I’m back with one more experiment: eeebuntu!

I liked EasyPeasy. It was fast, neat looking and most of all it did the job, save for one little thing. Network Manager. Now, I have absolutely no idea why it happened, but if it would lose a connection, it faced difficulties reconnecting to a network and some times it would require a reboot. Depending on where I was, this was not necessairily a problem, but anyway it was not a feature I chose to have, right?

I needed to have my eeePc working, so I went back to using Suse. Suse has a very nice design, lots of eye-candy and functionality, but it is not suited for 900MHz and 1 GB of RAM on an SSD. It was terribly slow. Another distro please!

After some digging around, I came across this useful article where Pale Heretic lists 5 linux distros suitable for a netbook. Having already tried two of them, Suse and easy peasy, I had three more alternatives: Mandriva, Fedora and eeeBuntu. The three e’s in eeeBuntu, made my dillema pretty clear. I went for eeeBuntu.

When you visit eeebuntu.org, you are greeted with a set of three options, as to which flavour of eeebuntu you want to install. Normally one would choose NBR, which features a design similar to that of easy peasy. I wanted something that looks more like a “real” desktop so I chose the standard version. There’s also a base version, with little extras, so you can add as many programs you want yourself.

I downloaded the iso and made sure the MD5 was correct. Since we are talking about an OS, you want to make sure you don’t have a corrupted download! There are many programms that calculate MD5 sums, so google away!

You now have two options to install eeebuntu on the eeePc. 1) Burn the ISO on a disk and find an external drive. 2) Transfer the ISO on a USB stick.

Since I do not have an external DVD-ROM drive, I had to choose the second option. Thankfully, there’s UNetbootin, a tiny programm that transfers a Linux Distribution onto a USB drive! Neat!

You want to choose the second option and point to the right letter for your USB. No need to say that all data you might have on the drive will be lost, right? When the procedure is over, you only need to plug the USB drive, reboot your eeePC and boot from the USB. What you have on your screen now, is a Live Version of eeebuntu, which means, nothing was changed on your hard drive. You can play a little bit with it, see if it suits you and if you decide to do so, just double click on the install icon on the desktop.

The installation procedure was easy as abc, I just had to choose the “Use Entire Disk” option and that was all. Everything worked out of the box, I only had to tweek some appearance settings, desktop wallpaper and the like.

I am very satisfied with my new distro. It is fast, It has many programms preinstalled and I like the design. It comes with Gnome desktop, but I am sure one can intall KDE easily enough. I think I might be sticking with this one for a while

Alice is Dead! [Mini adventure game]

A quick adventure game, featuring a dead Alice, and a twisted wonderland. Not much to do, only a couple of riddles and a few rooms to explore, but it has nice aesthetics and gives an interesting view on the classic story. The developers say that there will be more… Oh, did I mention it’s free?

Click on the image to play

 

 

Bump Top Desktop – Bumped

We would all like to use an interface like the one in minority report wouldn’t we? Waving our hands around and opening files, browsing through pictures and doing all sorts of “Tom Cruise stuff”. Maube, just maybe that time isn’t that far…

Some time ago, I came across a youtube video, showing the features of a desktop alternative, called Bump Top Desktop.

Nice isn’t it? Yeah, I know… Most of you will think it’s probably eye-candy and nothing more, but I beg to differ. I downloaded the free version, installed it on two PCs (home and work) and worked with it for several days. What the developers tried to achieve, was a more natural way of working with your computer desktop, just like you are used to working with a real desk. Having piles of papers, sorting out your more important documents on a different pile, sticking post-its all over the place or having picture frames with nice photos to make your work more tolerable.

At first I was excited about this new toy. So excited, I was ready to order the professional version, so I could have all the additional features. I must say this is a very very good program. Carefully designed, with only a few bugs, I expect to be corrected soon and very user-friendly. Today, I decided to uninstall it though. It was not the bugs.

I just felt this was not for me. I mean, its for people who actually work on their desktops. I keep all my files elsewhere, organized (kind of) in folders, and I try to keep my desktop free from large files – we all know that having large files on your primary partition slows down your pc, right?

I recommend a download though. Try it out. See if it makes your work easier and if so, buy it. ^^

Restoring a PC from Windows Home Server

Everybody tells you about the importance of keeping a back up (hey, even Jesus saves!!!) , with a ton of suggestions and practices, ranging from simply using a USB drive for your most important documents and files  to using special software to more complex solutions. The thing is however, that when you own more than one PC you would prefer an easy, almost automated back up solution, right?

This is exactly what a friend thought, a friend who is crazy enough to own and operate six different boxes (without counting his two laptops), and after some internet research, he bought another machine and a copy of Windows Home Server and called me to set it up, some months ago.

Yesterday, he called me to tell me that one of his machines (a two year old Dell) crashed and he was waiting for a replacement HDD and asked me if  I could stop by to help him set it up again. Having only used Norton Ghost (with a 98% success rate mind you) I thought it would take half an hour tops, but that was not the case at all… I don’t want to tire you with boring ranting, so I will describe the procedure that worked. Note here, that the WHS manual says nothing of value (except “Follow on screen instructions” ) – read my verdict at the end of this post.

Before you read any further, I am talking about a complete restore. If you just want to bring back the porn you accidentally deleted, look elsewhere

Step 1: Boot the machine you want to restore with the WHS restore cd. Microsoft claims that in 90% of home networks it will get in touch with Home Server and prompt you to start restoring your PC. What Microsoft forgot to tell us, is the fact that if your machines do not use DHCP, but have fixed IPs instead you belong to the 10%, so you’re not able to communicate with the server. Just go over to the server box and change the IP setting to DHCP. Everything else on your network will lose the server, but the machine you want to restore will find it… I did not try it my self, but someone said that he just connected the two machines with an ethernet cable. Crazy? Yes! Worked? Yes!

Step 2: You will be presented with a list of backups and after you chose which one you want to restore, the procedure will start. In my case the machine had a single HDD with a single partition, so things were rather simple. If you have a different set-up, you might want to be careful what you restore where, since all data in the destination disk will be lost.

Step 3 : I wish you don’t have to read this step, because in theory, everything worked out as supposed and you only have to press “Finish” to reboot into your newly restored machine. Before you reboot, take some time to review boot.ini. There is a button there, that will open a notepad with your OLD boot.ini. Now it is a good time to stop for a while and start thinking about the past. No, don’t laugh, I am dead serious. Think what you are trying to restore. In my case, as I said, it was a Dell box. Dell boxes, usually mean that apart from windows partition there is another, smaller and hidden partition that you use to restore your PC to factory settings. Does that ring a bell? HP does that too, Fujitsu Siemens does that too. If you are trying to restore after an HDD crash, chances are that this little partition will not  exist in your new HDD take a look at the following boot.ini :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Window XP Professional” /noexecute=optout /fastdetect

Do you see the (2)’s? It means that your old windows installation was on partition number 2, which of course no longer exists, so you cannot boot. You have to change those (2)’s into (1)’s and you will be fine. Really, this is the only thing you have to do… This little thing that Microsoft could have told us about, but did not…

There are many ways to do that. If you are lucky enough and have a newer build of WHS, you can edit it in notepad (when you press Review/Check boot.ini at the end of the restore) and save it and be done with it. If not, when you try to save, you will be informed that boot.ini is a read only file and you will have to save your changes under a different file name. So, do exactly that. You can then use something to access your disk, delete the old boot.ini and rename the file you just saved into boot.ini. What you use depends on your personal taste and resources. I only had a windows XP cd, so I booted with that, pressed R to go into recovery console and worked from there. You can also use a Linux live cd, one of those special boot disks (like Hiren’s), anything that will offer you access to your HDD.

I spent many hours trying to figure out those things I wrote above. See, when you restore and fail, the first thing that comes on your mind is the case you did something wrong, missed a step, chose the wrong option, so you try it again. That means time wasted… No matter how convenient I find the possibility to manage all your backups centrally, store files (WHS is more than a backup solution) and do all those neat little things, but for fuck’s sake, how do you expect an average user to come up with all those ideas and manage to do the simplest thing? Why on Earth don’t you provide all this info in the damn manual? You want me to propose your product to my clients? Seriously??

Parents & the internet – What? Who? What?

In my line of work, it is very common for me to have to answer all kinds of computer related questions, from what is the best lcd monitor one can buy to how can one download porn to how can one spy on his wife. I usually spit out something extremely generalized (and somewhat in-comprehensive), hoping to be left alone, not because I don’t want to share whatever knowledge I may have with others, but because I have come to realize that most people (especially colleagues) do not ask you to learn from you, they do so in hope that you will say “sure, I will fix it for you”. To this day, cases that someone really wanted to learn something from me, needed a little push so he/she could take it from there, are rare.

One question that is really often, is how can one “protect” his/her kids from the dangers of the internet. Check the following semi-real dialogue:

- My 10 year old son spends way too much time on the internet. What should I do?
- What do you mean? You’re feeling alone and want him to keep you company instead?
- Don’t be silly, I am worried that he will watch porn* (or start worshiping satan, or meet pedophiles, or buy drugs, or…)
- Well, yeah, there is the possibility.
- So? What do I do?
- Well, you could… [series of suggestions]
- What? All that? It is a LOT of work! Isn’t there a program or something for this kind of thing? A friend of mine says there is!
- There are such programs, but they require you to… [long explanation about how net-filters work]
- Crap! I thought I only had to throw it in and be done!
- Apparently, this is not the first time you thought that all you had to do is throw it in…
- What?
- Never-mind…

Apart from the obvious, the above conversation shows one other thing: Parents do not know what internet is and most importantly how can they take control of it. You could always pull the plug (just like you do with TV) but you still don’t know what goes on in that little box your kid spends so much time with. Thankfully I was browsing Geeks Are Sexy, and came across this:

Problem solved! You only have to follow the instructions in the video and you will be able to spy on your children, control their digital lives, threaten their friends and a bunch of other interesting things!

I have to apologize to all of you who thought that they would read something serious, or even a ranting and were “tricked” into watching a humorous video, but the truth is that I do not have the patience to deal with this matter more seriously than this. See, being a parent, means above all else, being responsible. Yes, internet might seem scary, unknown or simply too much work, but it is your kid we’re talking about. Invest some time…

I am the god of Hellfire…

I am not sure how many of you have heard about the wildfires in Greece, over the last few days, but it’s quite serious. While having a conversation, I was asked whether I am sad about it or not. I answered no…

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t care about the environment or that I would be happy if every inch of land was covered in cement. No, not at all. I just believe that caring about the environment, is actually caring about ourselves. Who are we trying to fool here? This planet does not need us! Even if we burn every forest, pollute every ocean and river, build skyscrapers all over the fucking place, we are going to end up with a planet we cannot live in. After time, nature will find her way back to where she wants and we will be like the dinosaurs, extinct.

Besides, these fires, are clearly the work of man, whether by accident or on purpose, it makes no difference. I refuse to believe that other countries have a magical way of preventing fires, while we are victims to all those who want to claim the forest for themselves. If you watch the news here, they are talking all the time about “them”, about those who want to build luxurious villas once the forest has cleared. The truth is however, a little bit different. I am old enough to remember how the mountain near where I live used to be, full of trees, and how it is now, full of houses. Houses that belong to middle class men and women, not multi-millionaires with huge houses…

We only try to hide the truth under the rag: There’s not enough room in Athens, so we will make room….