the boredom of ramfree17

Aero is a default theme in Windows Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium or better but is not enabled by default. Aero adds some nifty features like Peek (showing thumbnail previews when hovering on the open programs), Shake (shaking the window minimizes all other windows), Snap (dragging the window to the edges snaps it, useful for side by side windows organization). Aero however consumes additional CPU and GPU power but in some cases it can introduce some efficiency like repainting only the areas that are affected by window movement.

Enabling Aero requires two services to be started before they can be used: the Desktop Windows Management (uxsms), and the Themes (themes) services. Enabling them from the Control Panel->Services MMC console is fairly easy but this tip jar is about enabling them from the command line to reduce the wait and teach the basics of interacting with the Windows services using command line options.

The command are split into two categories: making sure the services are enabled, and starting them up.

sc config uxsms start= auto
net start uxsms

sc config themes start= auto
net start themes

These are administrative activities so they need to be done from within a command window that has administrative privileges. Refer to previous TipJar entries on how to do this. The “auto” parameter of the sc commands can be changed to “demand” if the services are to be start manually so as not to consume resources ?at every Windows startup. The sc invocations are only required to be done once.

Tags: Non-FLOSS, Tipjar by Erin
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This guide is created to show how to use the SmartBro USB Internet dongle in Ubuntu Linux. The dongle comes with the Windows installer that enables the SmartBro application to be installed in most computers. From within that application the user is able to send and reeive SMS, and connect/disconnect their Internet subscription. It allows more operations like access to the Smart portal but for the duration of this guide only the SMS send/receive and Internet configuration is covered. The instructions should be portable to the plug-it kits of the other telcos.

From my experience, Ubuntu has easily supported the USB dongles and tethering devices as early as Karmic Koala. I no longer have my Sony Ericsson K618i that I just connect via a USB cable to my MSI Wind U100 Netbook so this is what I will use for the guide. My netbook is sporting Natty Narwhal during the time the screenshots are taken.

Lets get cracking. Caveat though that I had to recreate some activities in two different locations so don’t mind the clock too much.

Configuring data connectivity

• Boot into Ubuntu and connect the dongle. Wait for a few second while the system recognizes the device.
• From the system tray, click on the network-manager applet and enable the “Enable Mobile Broadband” option. Select the “Edit Connections…” entry, and add a new entry under the “Mobile Broadband” tab.



• As can be seen below, Ubuntu has already detected the chipset of the USB dongle. Click on the Forward button.



• Select the provider (which in this case is Smart). Click on the Forward button.



• On the billing plan dialog, accept the default selection and click on the Forward button.



• Confirm the summary of the selected settings by clicking the Apply button.



• Visit back the settings of the created connection and ensure that there is no username and password in the Mobile Broadband settings page. Save any changes made and dismiss the wizard to go back to the desktop.



• Click on the network-manager applet and click on the mobile internet entry created above.



• If everything goes well and the signal is strong enough the user should be greeted with an established connection message.



• Click on the network-manager to validate the type of connection.

Configuring SMS capability

The setup above can fail if the SIM card used is of the prepaid type and there is no credit loaded on the account. SMART imposes a Php10/30mins rate but there are promos that can be activated by sending some keywords via the SIM account. This implies that the SMS send and received facility should be accessed. Fortunately the wammu project provides this capability.

• Install the wammu application by invoking the command below:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wammu -y

• Start the wammu application. If the wammu application doesn’t find its configuration files then it will trigger a wizard for first time-configuration.



• Click on the Next button to start the Wizard and select the following options in the succeeding windows:

– Configuration Style: Guided Configuration
– Configuration type: USB Cable (as the unit is plugged in a USB port)
– Phone Type: None of the above (unless future versions provide an option for the chipset)

– Connection Type: AT based
– Driver to use: Generic AT over serial line or it’s emulation
– Phone device: /dev/ttyUSB0


The above part is trial and error. If the test doesn’t succeed select the next option. If it succeeds then information about the model of the dongle will be shown. In my experience it is almost always /dev/ttyUSB0 but then I do have another device that emulates a serial connection via USB.

– Complete the remainder of the next dialog windows using the default option.

• Once the wammu phone configuration is done, start accessing the USB dongle by invoking the Phone->Connect menu item.



• Once the dongle is active, test the connectivity by receiving existing messages.



• After the operation succesfully completes, select the Messages item in the left treebox to view all retrieved messages.



• Next is to try the SMS sending capability under the Create menu. The editor is dated compared to the built-in provider interface but it would suffice. In the screenshot below, the bucket promo of Always On is being triggered.



• Check the Sent folder if the message was successfully sent.



• After a few seconds/minutes, retrieve the messages again to check the result of the promo registration.

And that is basically it. The instruction in this guide, with minor tweaks, should be applicable to any of the USB dongle. Enjoy your USB Internet dongle in Linux.

ciao!

Tags: FLOSS, Gadget, Techology by Erin
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This is a spin-off of the original article found here. For the rationale on the benefits and gotchas for hibernation then refer to the original post. This post is dedicated on how to enable hibernation in Windows 7 as the instruction has changed.

Enabling the hibernation feature requires that the process be done using an administrative account on the machine.

• Open an administrative command window by pressing the Window key, typing cmd, highlighting the cmd entry under the Programs group, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter.



• Execute the command “powercfg -h on” to enable the hibernate feature.



• Open the Power Options group in the Control Panel and click the “Change plan settings” of the current active plan.



• Click on the “Change advanced power settings” link in the resulting window.



• Under the Sleep tree item, disable the hybrid sleep option. The hibernate option will not be available if this option is enabled.



• Click on the Apply button and dismiss all succeeding dialog windows. The hibernate option should now be present on the Shutdown submenu.

ciao!

Tags: Non-FLOSS, Tipjar by Erin
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I have started listening to the GoodTimesWithMo Podcasts for those dead-air moments during my every day travel/commute. The new Android phone provided a good vehicle for listening to the podcasts. Way better than my old (and stolen) Sansa Fuze. The people running the podcasts are pretty much iTunes-specific so here are the steps I did to have the podcasts ready.

• Install a podcast manager in your Android device. I use Google Listen so you can search and install it form the AppMarket or scan the QR code here:
• Go to the www.motwister.com site and copy the link to the Video/Audio podcast. I dont want my phone to get stolen so I use the audio link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/gtwm-audio. You can also get an alternative link via the www.battleaxe.network site but I will leave that exercise to the reader.
• Launch the Listen application and go to the “My Subscriptions” section.
• Tap on the “Add Subscription” button and enter the link to the podcast feed retrieved in an earlier step.
• Tap on the GWTM podcast entry, refreshing as needed, and tap+hold on the episodes that you want to queue.
• Once done, go back to the main screen and tap on the “My listen items”. Tap/play the podcast you want to listen to and it will start downloading.

Some tips and notes:

• Google Listen will link up with your Google Reader account. Well it did on my setup. Use a separate podcast manager if you dont want to do this.
• Listening to a podcast will buffer and save it locally. Each GWTM podcast comes at around 50MB so be prepared to wait.
• My trick is to start a podcast, then pause once it starts playing. Google Listen will keep on downloading the podcast until it completes.
• While downloading, I repeat the steps above for the succeeding episodes on the queue. Only one podcast will be downloaded at a time but the application will start the other “buffering” episodes once the current one is done. A nice activity to do before you sleep.
• Make sure you revisit each finished item and remove the local data to free up some more space for the next wave of episodes. Or buy a larger SD card.
• Google Listen doesn’t have the feature of preventing your phone from sleeping. In my experience this means the player will suspend after 60-90 minutes of inactivity.
• Google Listen also doesn’t yet have the feature of moving the local storage to another directory, or importing an already downloaded podcast.

Have fun. And also try Gabe Mercado’s Geek Chorus podcast from the BattleAxeNetwork.

ciao!

Tags: Techology by Erin
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At work, the Windows 7 workstation we were given came with a Trojan-esque gift: several instances of wscript.exe are running at startup and uses all available CPU processing cycles. Killing them off does not show any adverse effects (yet) but the graphical way is a bit time consuming as the machine is already slow at this point.

Below is the quickest way to snipe these instances using the lowest memory-guzzler tool in every Windows arsenal: the command line processor window. The only catch is that the wscript instances would require the kill command to be executed from an elevated command prompt as the Windows User Access Control (UAC) is active.
1. Press the Window key to bring up the startup menu.
2. In the Start menu search box, type “cmd”. The first entry highlighted is the program entry.

3. Press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” to run the command in elevated mode. If UAC is really running, a confirmation prompt will be displayed for the command line processor.

4. Invoke the command “taskkill /im wscript.exe /f ” to kill all running instances of wscript.exe.

5. To validate if there are still instances running, run the command “tasklist | find “wscript” ” (omit the first and last double quotes). Nothing should be shown.

The exercise above can be adapted to quickly kill some errant processes without going through the task manager or resource monitor GUI clients. Be careful in what you kill for it might bite back.

[UPDATE] A colleague,Ron Emil Castro, has provided this trick on combining both in a script that will load up with administrator privileges upon startup for Vista/Win7 machines.

• Create a batch script with the following code

CHOICE /N /C YN /T 15 /D Y
taskkill /im wscript.exe /f

The first command waits for 15 seconds to give the script enough time to run and the second kills it as specified in the script above.

• Open the startup folder by right-clicking on the Start->All Programs->Startup item then selecting the Open option.
• Create a shortcut to the batch script. Right-click on the shortcut and open the properties window. Select the “Run as Administrator” option under the Advanced section.

[UPDATE] The processes are because of an errant firewall checker script loaded by the domain policies. The alternate solution provided by the support team is to execute the C:\Windows\system32\wscript.exe binary and set the timeout to a low number (5 or 10 seconds). Use the recommendation at your own risk as this basically handicaps the execution of other scripts that would require more time than the set timeout.

Tags: Tipjar, Top of my head by Erin
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