Dell power supply

We own a Dell Latitude laptop. This week it suddenly stopped chargeing the battery and when we inserted the power supply there was an error message stating that there was something wrong with the power supply and that we needed to contact Dell support.

Bummer, I was sure this ment a trip back to the dealer and that both the laptop and the power supply needed to be sent away for months on end. But I called Dell customer support and a was greeted with nothing but understanding and great customer care. No problem they’d send a new power supply in mail straight away. It would not cost me anything (not even postage or handling fee). Two days later DHL  called and wanted to know what time was best for them to deliver the package straight to my door at home.

Wow. That’s what I call good customer support. I’m sure I’ll buy something from Dell the next time I get a chance too. Dell gets 10 out of 10 points for good service.

The new iPad

Unless you have been away in space you probably have heard about the biggest bit of technology news this week. On Wednesday Apple released their tablet PC called…..iPad…., wow that was innovative naming. It’s basically like some Apple designer stumbled on the zoom button on their Xerox copier when copying some iPod Touch/iPhone photos.

Anyway with this latest Apple toy you can use read books, surf the web, read your email and more (sounds familiar?). As with the iPhone this new 1GHz device cannot multitask. That feature is probably reserved for the the iPad Maxi which will come after the iPad Plus that has a camera. It’s important not to give a customer all the features at once. How else are you going to lure your blind followers to pay for upgrades?

Also don’t forget the other big news from Apple. The new Macbook Wheel

update: All gone.

The new blog domain is blog.codewrench.net.

Among them there are some jewles that I’d like to recommend.

Locale
With Locale, you create situations specifying conditions under which your phone’s settings should change. You can have situations griggered by you physical location (cell tower, wifi network or gps), battery level, calendar events, contacts calling or just plain time of day.

Locate situations

Creating a situation

Things I use it for:
- Automatically turn on WiFi when I’m at home
- Automatically turn off ring tone and turn on vibration when I’m at work
- Automatically turn off WiFi when battery level comes below 30%

Great application that delivers exactly what it’s promising.

Url: http://www.twofortyfouram.com/

ES File Explorer
Sooner or later you need a file manager that you can use to copy files or navigate your SD card. There are many good candidates to choose from, but this one habe an extra feature that makes the deal for me: built-in support for browsing windows network shares.

ES File Explorer by EStrongs Inc.

Key features:
- Manage/(un)install applications
- Manage files on phone, LAN and FTP
- Search and open files

Files on phone

Files on network share

Url: https://slideme.org/application/es-file-explorer

Disk Usage

Now where did all that space do? This is a great small utility that graphically shows you where all the real estate on your sd-card went. You can even tap a folder to zoom in and explore even further.

Disk usage

Url: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-google-android-diskusage-jxE.aspx

Spotify

You have probably already heard about Spotify. This great application lets you listen to all of Spotifys large music calalogue on your Android phone. Requires a premium subscription.

Key features:
- Listen to any of Spotifys tracks on your mobile
- Create play lists (syncs with Desktop Client)
- Offline mode (store your favourite play lists on the SD card for easy playback
when you are not connected to WiFi)

Spotify

Url: http://www.spotify.com/en/mobile/android/

Bubble

A virtual bubble level. Now this is a cool small app. It detects your phones orientation and shows a bubble level on the appropriate side of the screen. If you put your phone flat it displays a two dimentional bubble.

Great for those “does that picture line up” moments

Linear bubble

2D bubble

Url: http://www.ktk.bz/2009/02/bubble.html

Barcode scanner

This application uses the camera to scan a bar code. When the code is recognized you can click a button to do a product search online. If it’s a movie or a book or a well known product you will most probably find a match. You can check out reviews, compare prices and even purchase the item online if you prefer.

Key features:
- Scan barcodes on CDs, books, and other products, then look up prices and reviews.
- You can also scan QR Codes containing URLs, contact info, calendar events, and more.

Scanned bar code

Online book search

Url: Android market, search for Barcode scanner

All the files you need to perform this is located in this zip file (10 MB): Tools for rooting HTC Hero.

Download and uncompress to a folder on your PC.

Prerequisits:
- Install ADB drives if neccecary (usb_drivers folder)
- Verify installation by connecting phone to PC (USB)
- Enter tools folder
- Type adb-windows shell
- You should get shell access from the phone (i.e. a $ prompt)
- Type exit to quit shell

1. Copy recovery.img to SD card

2. Flash new recovery image
- Install flashrec-1.1.2-20090909.apk
- Copy to SD card and start with a packet installer
- Run application
- First make backup of current recovery image (click backup button)
- Change path in textbox to /sdcard/recovery.img
- Click "flash recovery image" button to flash new recovery image
- If you get "Flash complete" message, reboot phone.

3. Backup current ROM
- Shutdown phone
- Power up phone by holding Home button while clicking Power. Keep
  holding down Home for a few seconds.
- Use the NANDROID BACKUP menu option to backup current rom

4. Root phone (optional)
- Boot recovery image as above (Home + Power)
- While phone is in recovery mode open cmd.exe on PC and enter tools\ folder
- Type the following commands:
    adb-windows shell
    mkdir systmp
    mount -o rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /systmp
    cat /systmp/bin/sh > /systmp/bin/su
    chmod 4755 /systmp/bin/su
    reboot

- Enjoy rooted phone

You can test if you have succeded by starting adb-windows shell again
when the phone has booted. At the $ prompt, type su followed by enter.
The prompt should now change to # indicating you are root.

5. Install Market Enabler (optional)
- You can now install MarketEnabler_3.0.4.apk to gain access to full Android Market

DISCLAIMER: I take absolutely no responsibility if you somehow manage to turn your Hero into a unusable paper weight. Messing with root access and changing phone images is somewhat risky and you can totally mess up your phone.

Facebook I don’t use so this was not tested. Twitter I can’t really see the value of, not even on a PC and far less on the xbox. But I started the app and tweeted (is it called that) a small message.

The interesting stuff however is the Zune video market place. Movies are offered in standard resultion and HD resolution at a bit higher price.

On the dashboard itself on the Zune menu I am offered the most popular movies. This menu was in english and the prices was lower than the Norwegian menu offers then I enter the actual Zune market place (which is an application). Probably has something to do with the value of the dollar vs. norwegian krone, and I’m sure they will remove the lower prices items in the finished product.

The english menu offers the Matrix at 210 points at standard definition and 290 points for high definition.

When entering the actual store the Norwegian menu offers standard definition at 350 points and high definition at 470 points. This is just yet another sample of how companies screw us over here in Norway.

At present 1000 points costs NOK 82. That translats into about NOK 30 for renting a standard definition movie and NOK 40 for high definition. Since I don’t have a HD TV (in fact I have an old 32″ CRT) I have not tested HD video. But on my setup standard definition videos are looking good and start playing after just a couple of seconds (I have a 10 MBit internet connection).

You can pause and rewind just as a normal video. The movies available in the store as of now does not come with different sound tracks or sub titles, but the menus suggest that this is something that will come. There are not that many movies in the store as of now, but I can only imagine it will grow quicky.

In my limited testing I give the service a thumbs up. This is looking promising. As with the games on demand I feel the prices are a bit high. 30 NOK for renting Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban for 24 hours is a bit high when I can buy the DVD at cdon.com for NOK 59,-

If you are to compete with “free” movies from pirate bay etc. there are two criterias you need to fulfil:

1. It has to be easier to buy than to pirate (I think Zune market place has this one covered).

2. It has to be resonably priced so that the extra work of pirating is not worth the effort.

I’m not sure that the prices are low enough to cover pt. 2. Also I feel that users that already pay to subscribe to xbox live gold should get lower prices.

Pimp my Home Server

Just before Christmas 2008 I bought the HP EX475 MediaSmart windows home server. After reading about it before I purchased it I already knew that the puny 512 MB ram that it came with was too little so I already had 2GB ready for installation when the server arrived.

Now a little over six months later the 1TB disks was already over 75% full and I was tired of the underpowered CPU chopping up performance whenever the server tried to do more than one thing at the same time. The server uses AMD AM2 slot CPU’s and I bought a new 2.6 GHz Athlon processor for just over 300 NOK which is a really nice price for a CPU. Following the excellent guide from Home Server Hacks the procedure was quick and painless. Installing a new 1TB disk was also done in a few seconds.

Now my EX475 has 4 times the RAM, 2 times the storage and a CPU that is clocked at 45% higher frequency (but also quadruples the L2 cache) compared to the original. In other words my EX 475 is now more like a EX 485 than the EX475 that it once were.

And to be honest it was needed. If you want to do anything other than sharing documents and backing up PC’s you need to upgrade the RAM and CPU.

Main screen

v1.1.0.0
- Fixed shortcut keys (F5, F6, F8 etc)
- Pattern matching for select and deselect of files
- New dialog for storage information and server uptime
- Revamped user interface to match the Home Server Console style

I’ve implemented the two top features you the users had voted for. Click to read more and download.

left right left right left

One of my favourite bands Coldplay is once again giving away free music to their fans. This time it’s the live album “Left Right Left Right Left” which you can download in DRM free mp3 (192 kbps) format. So surf over to http://lrlrl.coldplay.com/ and download your copy today.

Thank you coldplay…