December 24, 2008 by dragon_788.

Access this wunderkind here.

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November 13, 2008 by dragon_788.

Below you will find the seven secrets of Google Apps that
can save your business scads of time, money, and effort. If
you’re ready to try Google Apps follow this link.

Link

1. Eliminate email hassles instantly - 99.9% uptime
guarantees that you will always have access to e-mail and
no lost messages. Say goodbye to spam, viruses and
phishing attacks. Find out how to send and receive e-mail
from other e-mail addresses, all from your single Google
Apps account.

Create your one stop e-mail account.

Link

2. Reduce costs - Get enterprise class, worldwide access
infrastructure all for only $50 per user per year. No more
costly server hardware and systems administrators — it’s
all handled for you. Google Apps scales as your business
grows.

Get started in just three minutes.

Link

3. Instant collaboration - Have your whole team working on
the same document at the same time. Do you need to bring an
external consultant? Just add him or her to the list of
collaborators, and they can make changes as necessary.

Start collaborating now.

Link

4. A working history - In each Google document,
spreadsheet, or presentation all of your changes are
tracked so that it is easy to revisit a previous version.
Not only that, changes show which author made the change.
No more tracking of different versions with messy e-mail
attachments.

Sign up for Google Apps

Link

5. Instant backups - Google automatically backs up your
e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as
you’re working on them. No need to worry about hitting the
save button to avoid losing all your work.

You’re ready to create more in less time.

Link

6. Hassle free software upgrades - You always receive the
latest version of Google Apps software. It’s as simple as
opening up a browser window. No more worrying about
operating system compatibility, hardware compatibility, or
paying for those pesky upgrades.

Get the latest Google Apps

Link

7. Work remotely - have your e-mail, documents,
spreadsheets, and presentations on your local computer for
those times when you’re traveling or away from the
Internet. Once you reconnect to the Internet your documents
will sync with Google and be backed up automatically.

Try Google Apps now.

Link

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November 9, 2008 by dragon_788.

Change your email address instead of unsubscribing.

http://blog.otherinbox.com/2008/11/its-better-to-c.html

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November 9, 2008 by dragon_788.

Get Google’s extreme reliability (despite a few complaints to the contrary) and their excellent and always improving spam filter along with 7gb+ (at the time of this writing) of storage space FREE. You don’t even need to register the domain through Google, you can simply point a subdomain where they suggest and any email for your domain will get delivered to your Google Apps accounts. Additionally Google Apps provides collaboration tools, website hosting (intranet maybe?), instant messaging (corporate IM anyone?) and much more. I’ve already gotten Google Apps for a couple of my domains, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend you do the same. Link here.

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October 10, 2008 by dragon_788.

Posting this from MaemoWordPy on my Nokia N800 typed on an iGo/Thinksmart Stowaway bluetooth keyboard using my Nokia E51’s GPRS/EDGE via bluetooth as a test of an option to update my blog more often.

The nice thing about the N800 is that for an ADHD person like me, the fact that the screen/window manager is optimized for one application up at a time means I have less distractions when working on something. On my tablet I tend to have a dozen windows with sometimes literally hundreds of tabs open and I often find myself opening a new window, sometimes in a new browser to follow another train of thought.

Hopefully if you are new to the blog you’ll find something useful, otherwise leave some comments and let me know if there is anything technology related you’d like to see some comments on, I play with anything and everything so there’s not much I don’t have an opinion about (or some information on).

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October 9, 2007 by dragon_788.

http://www.reviewingit.com/index.php/content/view/32/

According to this guy, its a simple command: in the Run dialog as administrator type “powercfg /hibernate on” and hit Enter. BAM!!! It’s back on the start menu.

Hallelujah, I fixed my black screen on resume from sleep by setting the ATI External Event monitor to manual in Services, but then I lost hibernate, this guy is my hero.

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May 28, 2007 by dragon_788.

Anyone who has experienced the joy of streaming a movie in XBMC from a Windows or Linux Samba/SMB share knows just how awesome it is to have a movie that’s spread across 40-odd rar files play seamlessly and allow seeking within the file so you never really lose your place and are never forced to rewatch the first half 3 times because your router hiccuped or the machine you were streaming from rebooted. The solution for VLC doesn’t allow the seeking yet, but it has the seamless play down to a “t”. I’ve always wondered about whether this was possible and the developer who implemented it for XBMC said it could be done, but he had spent so much time doing it he wasn’t going to attempt a PC port anytime soon.

That said, we all need to give major props to Sparks, of the Videolan Forums. He has managed to throw together some code that allows seamless streaming of multipart RARs, even from a network share. I had found this information a few weeks back but didn’t have a chance to test it, last night I finally took the time to try it out and I have to say, I was VERY impressed. You can find his program in the forum thread here and be sure to copy the info on the 2nd page for creating a .reg file so you can play a folder containing multipart movies straight from the right click menu.

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May 27, 2007 by dragon_788.

I just reinstalled my “server” machine with Ubuntu and after having a few issues with too many disks in the system I have a stable system and most of my favorite apps. I’ve grown used to having Beryl and all its pretty effects that can also enhance productivity at my fingertips. Thinking it was as simple as installing a few packages I forgot that I’d probably hafta change my driver and the settings on it slightly. After that first abortive attempt I searched Google for “beryl ubuntu feisty” and wham-O the first two results were exactly what I was looking for. Since I have an nVidia card I chose the 2nd one linked here. It allowed me to copy and paste a few lines and run them and after the X server restart I was golden and using Beryl. Now to tweak it the way I like it….

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May 26, 2007 by dragon_788.

A while back a friend of mine showed me a really sweet Linux command line interface called Yakuake, he found it in a screenshot on the kde-look.org site and we both thought it was a really great idea. The gist of it is instead of having the console (Linux term for CLI [command line interface]) take up an entire window you can have it “docked” to the top of the screen and only have it drop down when you need it, very similar to the effect if you hit ~ (tilde) in most fps/RPG games for the PC. This is nice so you can keep a root console available but not immediately visible for those times you are working on stuff that requires the privileges but not the window open the whole time. Its slightly more secure than using kdesu and having it save the password and I’ve read of one instance where a person scripted closing a root session after 15 minutes of inactivity for even more security.

My main goal with this post is to let those who like the idea of a easily accessible console but also want to be able to see what’s behind it for command references or whatever. I tried Yakuake under Ubuntu and Sabayon and I noticed Ubuntu has some nice themes included with the package and a couple are “transparent” but its only a meta-transparency, it simply takes a capture of your wallpaper and puts it behind the console to make it appear transparent, Sabayon doesn’t have these themes included by default. I searched for a while on the net for a solution but it appears that KDE won’t fully support transparency in Konsole (the base KDE package that Yakuake is built on) until KDE4 is out (its still in alpha currently). I was somewhat disappointed as KDE3.5.7 came out just a few days ago and with KDE4 being in alpha it may be months before its officially out. That’s why I was excited when I found this post, it tells how to enable a “real” transparency for Yakuake using Beryl (the lovely XGL effects window manager). You just open up the Beryl Manager, go to Window Management, then Set Window Attribs by various criteria, expand the Window Opacity option and click the plus sign to add a new criteria, in the option window select Window Title from the dropdown, and type Yakuake in the text box or if you have Yakuake open click the Grab button and click on the Yakuake window title bar. Move the slider to about 75(%) and click OK and you are ready to make your Yakuake truly transparent. Check the checkbox in front of the Set Window Attribs by various criteria option in the left pane and you should now have a transparent drop down console.

I didn’t attempt the 2nd fix which involved patching the source code, the reason being that I installed Yakuake through portage and/or apt-get so I didn’t really have a chance to apply the patch before the fact. Hopefully KDE4 comes soon with support for full tranparencies so we can have an ultra sexy Linux desktop beyond the amazing effects of Beryl/Compiz and XGL, which if you haven’t seen yet you should definitely search YouTube for some clips.

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May 26, 2007 by dragon_788.

To start off this series I’ll give you some background. I’m a geek, a major nerd, a massive egghead, a social introvert and any other descriptive term you can give to someone of a technologically skilled background. You wouldn’t know it to look at me though, other than the laptop/tablet PC that’s almost like an extension of my arm, when primped and polished I almost look like a normal person. Because I’m such a huge geek most of my friends and family like to razz on me for the various dorky things I do (and no I don’t mean acting like a ‘whale’ penis [Wikipedia informed me that the reference to whales make be a folk myth, so let’s stop the misinformation here]).

One day while I was hanging out at a local computer shop (the haven of geeks everywhere) one of my good friends started hassling me about finding a girlfriend (I wasn’t in a relationship at the time) and so I spent a lot of my time on/near or working with computers. As a result he began spouting off my “perfect woman” as a combination of high end parts of the time. The original configuration has escaped as a fleeting memory but the gist of it was “a chick with two huge blazing fast/hot PROCESSORS requiring some massive HEATSINKS for cover, a couple huge HARD DRIVES so she’d never forget a thing, a GIG or two of RAM so she could crunch the shopping list while making dinner, a screaming GRAPHICS CARD so she could always show her best side, a large LCD SCREEN so I could enjoy the view, a GIGABIT ETHERNET port for me to interface, and various other accouterments as her “bling”. His wife was almost rolling on the floor and the owner of the shop and his wife couldn’t stop laughing, I just shot them a sheepish grin and suggested something along the lines of she’d need a beefy POWER SUPPLY if she was going to keep up with all the things she’d be tasked with. We all had a good laugh and they still give me crap from time to time about it, even though we can’t remember half the hardware my dream “babe” had in her.

The point of the story is that we often personify the equipment we use from day to day, boats are often female as are cars, trucks I’d assume to be male but I’ve never looked under their bed to see what secrets they are hiding, and bits of technology are invariably infested with gremlins, whatever sex they might be. People often laugh or give me a strange look when I tell them a computer of mine (which often has a name) is acting up or being grouchy, yet at the same time it gives them a new way to look at their computer, even if it doesn’t have feelings sometimes our possessions reflect the owner. This series is going to be my take on various services, I’m going to try and keep from limiting myself so I’ll start off with common services run from ports/sockets on a PC, but I’ll try to expand into other areas as well. Stay tuned for the next edition of Services Personified and feel free to give me suggestions for services I should cover.

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