Techno

Bluetooth is a really good technology. I was not a great fan of it till some years back,i came across an interesting feature of Bluetooth technology – Wireless Audio. A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile is a technology supported by Bluetooth. This technology is what makes possible to have wireless headsets.Recently I had an itch to make my PC speakers wireless as the real estate they were occupying at my desk was at a premium. I therefore decided to move them to some other area of my room so that they become general purpose audio receivers.There were 2 goals for this mission -:

1. Make PC speakers wireless, so that the PC could play music to the speakers situated at the opposite end of my room.

2. Anybody @ home should be able to play audio from their smart phones, thus removing the need to keep the PC on just for playing music.

I looked for few available Bluetooth audio receivers in the market and zeroed on the cheapest one which fit my needs – LeoxSys Bluetooth audio receiver.

This device connects to your speakers with a 3.5mm audio jack input and takes in a power of 5V through USB. I powered the device with a spare 5V phone chargers. The device needs no configuration. As soon as it powers up, any device/PC/phone can connect to it with the standard Bluetooth pairing. I was able to play audio from all the smartphones available at home. This accomplished goal#2.

To accomplish goal#1, i had ordered a device which would make my PC Bluetooth capable so that it can speak to the Bluetooth audio receiver. The device was again from LeoxSys- A bluetooth dongle. This added Bluetooth support to my PC. The Bluetooth speakers can then be searched and added as an audio device easily both on Windows and Linux. Once added it starts appearing in the audio output list from which you can play music or any other audio  as you would normally play. The goal#1 was marked as finished .

Bluetooth , you can count me as a loyal fan now 😉

 

Just downloaded and installed Andriod-x86 – the Android version which is capable of running on PC’s . All the hard work has been done by the folks at http://www.android-x86.org/ . The installation is almost same as a standard Linux distribution since its based on Linux.

Three basic rules for newbie developers trying to find and fix bugs

1. Computers are right most of the times.

2. There is a 150% chance that your code is wrong.

3. Rule# 1 and Rule# 2 holds true always.

Yes, its possible to run a perfectly non live cd system without a hard disk. All you need to have is a substitute for the hard disk . A usb pen drive is a  good replacement. Anything greater than 4GB should work fine. The Fedora installation process detects the pen drive and offers to install the OS on it. There is no special configuration that needs to be done. All you need to do is change the order of boot devices in your BIOS so that it boots from the USB HDD. Your Linux Desktop should now run completely fine even without an hard disk.

Just installed Fedora 18 . Here are the 2 snapshots. Will post some more if i find anything interesting.

Not clear how the brand/advertising department in Microsoft allowed Windows RT to be marketed as a separate brand. I know engineers must have put real hard work for this happen ( i have no idea in what goes in porting OS’s to different CPU architectures) but that does not mean the end consumer has any interest of the CPU architecture his device is running on. If you don’t agree you should probably go to your local computer shop and observe the customers and their questions. When such customers buy a tablet or phone or a music player they are more interested in the usability factor and the price of the device. They want good battery life. If you can provide the same battery life with a x86 based CPU i am all for you.

The problem is not that WindowsRT is a new product and still has the name Windows attached to it. The real problem is WindowsRT actually behaves differently than the regular Windows8. Customers who go in for a Microsoft Surface RT which launched recently thinking that they would be able to use it as a replacement of their Windows laptop would be disappointed/shocked/surprised as WindowsRT  is indeed a different creature which i feel should have been managed internally without the poor end user having to decide all the math.

I guess somebody out there at Microsoft forgot the KISS principle.

You can read more on this in an excellent post by Danny Sullivan .

If you are tired with your PC getting virus infected too often here are 2 approaches that have worked for me for a long time.

Things to do before the computer can be marked as “usable” after a clean format

1. Install antivirus and firewall software. Avg and Zone alarm are pretty good options.

2. Create an user with standard permissions.

3. Start using the computer using the standard permission user. You will get popup screens asking for administrator permission for some task which require admin privileges(This may seem irritating at start, but its worth the deal)

4. Install all standard applications that you would like to be used in the PC.

5. Take a snapshot of your machine using some hard disk imaging software. Macruim reflect works fine for me.

Things to do once you start using your computer

1.Always use the PC with the user with standard permission (created in Step 2 above). This is the most important step.

2. DO NOT download any executable if you don’t trust the source. Actually the best approach would be download all executables from reputed websites like Download.com, since there are less chances of those executables being virus ridden.

3. Always update your antivirus definition updates.

Every time I install windows I find a new way to screw up things. In this process i also manage to learn something new. This time it was a kool issue which resulted in a deadlock.

1. Installed Win 7. The “Administrator” user is disabled during installation.
2. Created a user which had administrative privileges.
3. Changed the default ProfileListPath (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList) registry key so that User data is stored on some other drive. (In this process did a typo in the ProfileListPath.
4. Created another user with Administrative privileges.
5. Changed the privileges of the user created in Step 2 to that of a Standard User.
6. Restarted the machine.

And then the fun begin. Windows wont allow the new administrative user to login into the system giving the “User profile could not be loaded” error due to the type in Step 3. As a result the machine had no user with administrative privileges. There was no way the registry key typo could be corrected within Windows.

OS Re installation was looking the only good option.  Some questions to Google god and it pointed me to the right direction – Offline Registry editing.

Offline registry editing means to edit the registry outside the Windows environment. Windows 7 has a super kool feature where you can go into repair mode  using your Installation DVD and execute the registry editor and actually edit the installed registry using the “Load Hive” option. This was a blessing for me.

Listed below are the steps which i performed

1. Loaded the hive where the key was present and corrected the typo.
2. Restarted the machine.
3. Logged into new user. (Voila! it worked)

Learned a bit about Windows 7 repair mode system tools as a result of this whole process and looking forward for more 😉

In my earlier post about the decision to buy a tablet, i wanted to answer the question which came to me repeatedly by many of my friends. If you have decided to buy one and now are confused about various options available in the market then check out this excellent post at Gigaom. It will surely help you decide.

Link: http://gigaom.com/mobile/best-tablet-for-you/

Found these lying deep inside of my electronic trash…