Scattered Mind

Vodacom announced last year that it is giving away free “GBs” for night owls.

Now as all of you know it is quite easy to schedule downloads with torrent clients, download managers etc in the evening, but for applications like iTunes it gets quite tricky to stop and start downloads at certain times of the day.

So with Vodacom they offer you a whole 1 GB free from 00h00-05h00 if you buy their Broadband Advanced product.

So what do we do when we schedule a bunch of iTunes downloads in the evening and want it to use this extra free bandwith.

Well, I was introduced to Broadband Scheduler by Stephen Groenewald as an alternative to having schedulers built into the application.  This application actually switches off your broadband on OS level, thus effectively keeping you in control of when downloads must occur and it might just save you a couple of bucks.

Wow, how frustrating is it to have a Microsoft Mobile Phone !

I now understand truely why Microsoft lost so much ground on the mobile front.

For the last couple of months I’ve been using some really cool applications for my Windows Mobile(running 6.5) phone.  I’ve been browsing through the Marketplace apps and have downloaded soem nifty applications and the tool just makes the installation so much easier.  Then I found an application that I had to pay for and I had to add a credit card to the profile.

I tried desperately to add my credit card to my profile, to the dismay, that every avenue I try it just does not work, because I’m from South Africa, it restricts me from buying the apps or adding my credit card.

We in South Africa have been running TechEd‘s for the last couple of years and have a Microsoft office here, now why would they ever restrict us from being able to try out the technology etc , that is plainly just rediculous.

Am I missing something somewhere or is Microsoft just cutting their own throat.

This is slowly starting to make me think to go towards another platform and with Windows Mobile 7 coming, they surely need to pull up their pants and make it easier for people to use their platforms.

On a side note, at TechEd they made us soooo excited about SQL Azure and the Azure platform, but to be told we cannot use the trial versions.  Of course we managed to get accounts to use it, although we had to “move” to Australia.

As most of you’ve noticed, I am crazy about parody videos and just love what is coming off the online video platform these days.

My latest awesome team is the guys from The Key of Awesome. You can find their channel on http://www.youtube.com/show/keyofawesome. Thanks for @pyrosa introducing me to their collection of videos.

I was introduced to their videos by their Twilight “Emo Vampire” video and of course the best ever Kesha look alike video TIK TOK.

EMO VAMPIRE

TIK TOK – AWESOME KESHA PARODY

HuskyStarcraft ,KurtHugoSchneider (producer) and Layne Pavoggi on YouTube produced this awesome Parody of Justin Biebers Baby Baby song.

Had over 1.4 million views in 2 days !

Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzMhh8zhTiY

On one beautiful morning as I woke up, for some strange reason my “Entertainment” share on our Freenas home server was …. missing !!

After plugging in a monitor onto the machine and rebooting I found that the BIOS was not picking up the hard drive anymore.  Well, I thought this was the end of the drive, but it was peculiar that the drive was still spinning.

So, I contacted Piotr Kula, who is living in the UK now(was in South Africa for some time), and an old friend when he was here.

He told me that it might be that the firmware might have gone corrupted on the drive, and that it is actually still salvageable. He said that I will need to get a device to convert serial to ttl.

Great news for me, as our photos from the last 10 years was on the drive, and for some strange reason I have not done the “backup” thing.

I set off to find more information about this issue, and immediate came upon hundreds of articles with the same diagnostics I have found. Most of the drives could not be detected by the BIOS although the drive was still spinning, and most of all, it was certain models of Seagate.

Found this very cool video which actually explains the process very cool – (not embeddable 🙁  ) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29FztWJVxbM

One thing that was a problem was getting the serial to ttl, or a direct usb-to-serial-to-ttl device.

After looking at various places, I found the ideal device at RS-Component in Kyalami, Gauteng.  The deivce is a USB->TTL converter, and very neatly done, with output pins for the Tx and Rx of the serial interface for a measly R106 (cheapest quote I got for data recovery was R4500!!!).

After reading a couple of guides and the YouTube videos, I managed to get my 500 GB drive and data back, what a relieve.  I still have to upgrade the firmware to the latest version still.

I found this “Wild West of IT” quite amusing and would like to do some other hard core tricks in the future, and have asked friends to bring me drives they thought were broken to see if I can learn myself even more about this unknown area of computer hardware.

Guide:

• The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDD on msfn.org

I’ve been generating some additional funds from the internet lately with some very lucrative Affiliate sales that I’ve been making, having the money paid to me into my Paypal account, seeing that it is now possible to receive money via Paypal in South Africa through FNB.

Obviously this is 100% spending money for nice-to-haves and for time around I decided to buy myself a new Media Player, as my MVix is starting to behave more and more strangely lately, network broken, processor freezing.

After some research, Roland Lipman which knows his hardware, suggested the small but powerful WD Live Media Player.

What I wanted ?

My MVix 780HD lacked one thing, and that was that it was not truely HD, as the chipset used on the 780HD did not support H.264 encoding, which is used in quite a lot of HD movies, and converting everything everytime just to view was getting quite frustrating.

I was looking for a device that can firstly played the above mentioned HD movies.this includes MKVs, and secondly something striking but also not in the way.

Thats where this little device was perfect for our home setup, small, neat and has network connectivity to connect to my media server at home or an external hard drive.

Again, keeping it simple, this device has Ethernet, HDMI, Composite A/V, Composite video and USB 2.0.

Another nifty thing is that you can browse Flickr and YouTube with this device. This makes for evenings of fun sitting in the TV room searching and browsing funny YouTube videos.

Where to Buy

As I receive most of my affiliate money via Paypal, I searched for a South African online shop that supports Paypal, and eventually found PC-Direct.co.za which got me this device in 2 days and I paid via Paypal.

Otherwise you can also try Kalahari.net for their offering here .

It retails for about R1300 online, which does exclude any hard drive as this device does not have an internal drive.

Top 10 finalist at 2009’s Core77’s Greener Gadgets Contest, Brendon Macacluso and his Recompute project astouned audiencing with their sleek design of their cardboard computer case.

Another great achievement of this innovative gadget, is that the Museum of Industrial Archaelogy and Textile in Belgium has added it to their display and the section it has been added to focuses on the evolution of the industrial age and a “glance into the future”.

The main focus of this computer case, is sustainability .

They are starting producting in this year of this computer case, and have a couple of options available for buying your own machine:

• PREcompute
  • DIY kit, you get the cardboard and a power supply
  • around $72
• Recompute LNX
  • The Linux community have approached the Recompute guys to bring out a machine, with Ubuntu 9.10 pre installed.  Hardware would be able to support Fedora 12 and Linux Mint as well.
  • around $480
• Recompute Standard and Deluxe
  • Turnkey machine running Windows 7 64-bit (Home(Standard) / Professional(Deluxe))
  • around $800 – $1200

The price of $72 is not too bad for the case and a 400W power supply, taking some guys spend thousands of rands pimping their boxes – this one will definitely stand out in the crowd.

Be sure to check out Recompute’s website.

I was trying to unsubscribe from a mailing list on PHP.net today, and had to see what email I used to subscribe to the mailing list.

To do this, you have to look in the email headers and look for the Return-Path directive.

For the hell of me I just couldn’t find the Message Details section with the new 2007 ribbon system.  At last I found it!!

On the Options section on the Message ribbon.

The Challenge
The past week I was given a CD with images on that was scanned in for one of our mining clients. Roughly it comes to just over the hundred images.
I was then tasked to put these images into one single file that can easily be navigated.
I started looking and found a few tools, but some made the output file over 200MB, others had watermarks on, and I was looking for a free solution for the challenge.

The Solution
After trying a few solutions, I ran into i2pdf, written by Web Newsguy.
The application he built was for his own use where he was also frustrated with the other products out there, and built this very neat and light-weight application to get the job done.