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hardware

action / hardware / interesting — 9 Comments
6
Nov 07

How Apple “Chinesed” My iPod

chinese ipod 

    I have never bought a single thing from Apple before, but, everything has its first "iTouch" :), and I decided to get an iPod for my friend’s birthday.

    So here I am on the Apple website filling out all the right forms, giving my extra-sensitive information, and all nine yards.

    Since I know that my friend’s b-day is four days from now, I am very concerned this iPod to be delivered as fast as possible and I see my choice of shipping methods Apple offers me which are:

apple shipping method for ipod

     Great, I think, and choose "2Day shipping" – "I am willing to pay $10 for 2 days, time matters more, my friend will be so happy" – I am thinking. 2-3 minutes of clicking and typing go by and here it is "You order was successfully processed!" – splendid!

    Coming in to work next morning, opening my gmail, seeing "Apple Store Shipment Notification", having my "internal smiling" moment, and clicking a FedEx link to track this order. Wanna see what I saw? Be my guest:

apple ships ipod from shanhgai, china

    Did you notice anything interesting? Probably not, cause I did not tell you that I am ordering stuff from United States. Well now, as I told you, take a second look – see anything? My iPod is picked up at 6:16, which is nice – I paid my $10 for it, but wait.. The location does not seem to be familiar -> CN is definitely not US (well at least not yet :) ).

    I got so negatively puzzled to see that my iPod was shipped from China! Don’t get me wrong, China is a beautiful country, and I have been there less than a year ago, but common, Apple, can you keep your own warehouse with your own products in you own country!? What did I pay my $10 for?

    random thoughts:   Thought of trying "Mac OS X Leopard" some time this week, got so upset, will stick to my lovely Ubuntu

November 8th 2007 UPDATE: I received my iPod in exactly two business days – thank you Apple!
cool places / hardware / howto / linux / software / tutorials — 13 Comments
10
Sep 07

Avant Window Navigator – Dual Monitor Hack

avant window navigator  Ok, so you have successfully configured dual monitor for you (Gnome/KDE) desktop, and now you have decided to take it even further and install and configure Avant Window Navigator – way to go!

    Although most of your installation/configuration will succeed by following one of the tutorials, in case if you have dual monitors, and/or you use Option  "MergedFB"  in "xorg.conf" to merge two monitors into a one screen, standard tutorials will not work. This will require additional hacking to get AWN to work right, and here is where this article comes in :)

    PROBLEM:    One of the problems that AWN has with multiple screens/monitors is to identify the position of where it needs to put its task bar. In case of two monitors merged into one big screen, it does not adjust to this new slightly larger "coordinate system", and fails to place its task bar to the right place on a screen (usually at the bottom of the bottom screen). This can be solved, of course ;)

    SOLUTION:   AWN stores monitor resolution info in a file called "%gconf.xml" which is located here:

          user@host:~/.gconf/apps/avant-window-navigator$ ll
          total 32
          drwx------ 2 user user 4096 2007-07-18 11:41 app
          drwx------ 4 user user 4096 2007-06-26 23:47 applets
          drwx------ 2 user user 4096 2007-08-06 21:52 bar
          -rw------- 1 user user 776 2007-09-10 09:52 %gconf.xml
          -rw------- 1 user user 776 2007-06-27 22:57 %gconf.xml.dual
          -rw------- 1 user user 776 2007-06-27 10:41 %gconf.xml.single
          drwx------ 2 user user 4096 2007-06-27 17:59 title
          drwx------ 2 user user 4096 2007-06-30 14:16 window_manager
          user@host:~/.gconf/apps/avant-window-navigator$

    "%gconf.xml" is an XML file that has several elements called "entry". The ones we are interested in would be:

 
        <entry name="monitor_height" mtime="1179886419" type="int" value="1024">
        </entry>
        <entry name="monitor_width" mtime="1179886419" type="int" value="1280">
        </entry>

    These values would work fine if we had a single 1280×1024 monitor, but if we have our (e.g.) bottom monitor as 1280×800, in order for AWN to display its task bar in a correct spot (the bottom of the bottom monitor), values have to change to:

 
        <entry name="monitor_height" mtime="1179886419" type="int" value="1824">
        </entry>
        <entry name="monitor_width" mtime="1179886419" type="int" value="1280">
        </entry>

    So what we did, we summed up Y-Positions of both monitors together: 1024 + 800 = 1824. Now when AWN is calculating its task bar’s Y-Pos offset, it will take 1824, as the Y-Pos max range, and will do the right thing!

hardware / interesting / software — 7 Comments
30
Jun 07

iPhone: 20 Things It Does Not Have

 

 

Thinking on jumping on a new and "cool" iPhone? Think twice, it might be better to hold the thought for a month or too. And here is why…

  

  • Bluetooth is ONLY good for connecting a headset. That’s it.

  • There is no file browser on the device at all. Data must be organized (if at all) in the appropriate application.

  • The camera is a simple application that has ONE button: the shutter. Pictures come out okay on the device, but nothing too fancy on a monitor, especially if it was an attempt at a macro shot.

  • SIM card is damn near impossible to open, if at all. I didn’t look into it extensively.

  • Web browser is slow, even over WLAN. Even the simple OneList web app that was created takes around 20 seconds to load over WLAN. You can not highlight, cut, copy, or paste and text from a website, and you can not save any images you find from a website either. The only nice thing about it is the tabbed browsing, which crashed on me when I went to Engadget and YouTube on two tabs. This is the only application that allows you to use the keyboard in landscape mode.

  • The keyboard sucks. It gets slightly better after the iPhone "learns" you, as the employees said, but even then, it’s not a device you can use with one hand comfortably, much less without looking.

  • You can only send one picture at a time in an email.

  • No custom ringtones (yet, as we were being told) and the alert tones can not be changed whatsoever.

  • The default ringtones are incredibly lame.

  • The only form of customization outside of a lame default ringtone is the wallpaper, which you’ll only see when you need to unlock the device or when you get a phone call.

  • "Picture pinching" or using two fingers to zoom on any content is certainly fun to play with, but not practical whatsoever. This operation depends solely on using the device with two hands.

  • No document editor or native viewer. You can not store documents on the device to be viewed, they can only be viewed as attachments when they’re sent to your in an email.

  • Visual voicemail is laggy and reacts about the same way as pushing the fast forward and rewind buttons on traditional voicemail systems. The only advantage is for those that get that many voicemail messages a day that they need to sort them according to priority.

  • NO games. None.

  • No voice dialing.

  • No speed dialing (which can be made up by the "quick list", but getting to that quick list isn’t as fast as holding a single key on a real keypad).

  • No video.

  • No MMS.

  • It’s still <4GB for $500 and <8GB for $600

  • It only takes around 2 hours to explore every menu without any options for expandability except to scrounge around for new web apps that will load slowly and nowhere near as smoothly as the native apps.

    This device looks like it was aimed at the general consumer who has the money to spend on such a flashy device, but it leaves so many basic features behind that it’s almost impossible to consider it a success as a mainstream device. It encourages the advanced user to move away from MMS and into email to send images, but leaves out any advanced features advanced users would be accustomed to, and still retains a huge price tag on top of it.

    It’s certainly pretty and Americans will buy it because of that simple UI, but anyone who’s familiar with other operating systems would be appalled. This phone needs to be unlocked and cracked WIDE open to make much better use of the multi-touch system. That, or it needs an immediate update in iTunes to rework every feature.

source
   

hardware / howto / linux / me / software / tutorials — 17 Comments
2
Jun 07

Switch Between Dual/Single Monitor on (Ubuntu) Linux

xorg logo ubuntuRecently I wrote a howto on dual monitor configuration, which works great for my setup. However one thing that is not that great is switching between two modes: dual and single monitor. At work I have an external monitor that I use (which means I use two monitors – my laptop’s and external one), but whenever I am not at work I only need to use my laptop’s. Since all the xorg configuration resides in xorg.conf file, and this file is a regular static text file that is used by X (window system – gdm, kdm, etc.) when it starts, it is nontrivial to change this configuration while running X without some X tools. Unfortunately, Ubuntu is not that fancy (yet) and does not provide these tools by default, so here is a way to do it (sort of) manually.

What we can do is to create two xorg.conf files – "xorg.conf.single" and "xorg.conf.dual". In "xorg.conf.single" just comment out the following line from ServerLayout section:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
.....
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          0 "0 Screen"
        #Screen         1 "1 Screen" Above "0 Screen"   <-- comment out this line
        Option          "Xinerama" "on"
        Option          "Clone" "off"
.....
EndSection

Here is the listing of "xorg" files that I have:

user@host:/etc/X11$ ll xorg.conf*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4457 2007-06-02 15:05 xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4456 2007-05-22 22:03 xorg.conf.dual
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4457 2007-05-22 22:04 xorg.conf.single

Now the idea is simple - before X (I use Gnome Desktop, but it can be any desktop environment) starts, we need to copy xorg file that we need (dual or single) to "xorg.conf", which will be picked and loaded by X.

In /home/user/ directory we have a .bashrc file that is loaded whenever the user logs in (if we use bash shell, which is a most popular shell anyway). Therefore we can leverage this file to define aliases that we would like to use once we login. Since alias can be anything we'd like, why not make a dual/single commands as aliases? Here is an example:

user@host:/etc/X11$ tail -5 /home/user/.bashrc
# restart gdm with dual monitor support
alias xdual='sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.dual /etc/X11/xorg.conf; sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'

# restart gdm with single monitor support
alias xsingle='sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.single /etc/X11/xorg.conf; sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'

Now when we need to switch between dual/single monitor, we can fire up shell (by pressing Ctrl+Alt+1, or gnome-terminal, or kterm, etc.) and type xsingle or xdual whichever we need.

action / hardware / linux / software — 2 Comments
28
May 07

Ubuntu Dell – Three Real Models

Welcome to DELL Open Source

You asked, we listened. For advanced users and tech enthusiasts, we’re happy to offer a new open-source operating system, so you can dive in and truly enjoy a PC experience just the way you want it. In addition to the FreeDOS systems we already offer, we are proud to announce PCs with Ubuntu.

dell pcs featuring ubuntu

 
    So far only these three models are for sale with Ubuntu on them:

Dimension E520 N
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4300 (1.8GHz, 800 FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Inspiron E1505 N
Intel® Pentium® dual-core proc T2080(1MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB
Ubuntu Edition version 7.04
512MB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 DIMM
80GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
XPS 410 N
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4300 (2MB L2 Cache,1.8GHz,800FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz – 2 DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™

 

 

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