I have had the G1 for about two and a half months now, and it is a great phone. I decided to change my plan though because I only call a few numbers a month. So I went to the website and started to change it to the MyFaves 300. The process seemed simple enough until I got to the part for changing services, I wanted to keep my current data plan. It said to do that to just click the keep current services button, seems simple enough except for the problem that the button doesn’t exist, at least when I tried. After trying the process a few different ways I noticed that the buttons all worked like this javascript:__doPostBack(‘btnKeepCurrentPlan’,”) for keeping my current plan so all I did for keeping my current data plan is put the modified version, javascript:__doPostBack(‘btnKeepCurrentServices’,”) in the address bar and press enter. The server received it as a valid command and listed my plan correctly instead of saying I removed it. Should have worked fine, then I checked the pending plan link on the My T-Mobile page and it did not show anything except for the MyFaves plan. This is where I decided to call T-Mobile so I didn’t end up without a data plan, or worse, charges for using data without a plan. So I used the 611 number and got to the page where I say what I want to do. It did get me where I wanted after a while, but I would have preferred to have an option to go where I wanted by pressing buttons. After someone answered they were easy to understand and looked up my account and it did show the MyFaves 300 and the data plan as ready for next month. So as long as the system works fine I will have my new plan on the 23rd. Now maybe sometime when I feel like it and have the time, I will review the G1 as a phone. It has been out long enough though now that I probably is to late because it will just be another review in the all to crowded blog world. I should have got to it sooner, but I do work 40 hours a week and go to school as well so my days are very busy. I will just give my review here then. It is a great phone, especially with the Android Market and because it runs on Linux.
Author Archive for geektechblog
OS X Wallpaper
I have had my Mac G5 for a while now and am really liking it. I was board yesterday so I decided to make my own wallpaper for it. You can see it below. Click it to get the full wallpaper.
Apple Mac G5
I recently received a lightly use Mac G5 from winning a drawing at my school, ITT Tech. It is a 2004 model with OS X 10.4 and comes with a single 1.8 Ghz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 80 GB hard drive. Although it is not one of the more powerful models it still runs very well. It also came with several expensive programs such as Photoshop CS2 and Final Cut Express HD.
(I realize that OS X 10.4 is out of date, I believe I only address parts of OS X that are in the new version as well, correct me if I am wrong. I am not trying to review an out of date system and call it current)
This is my first time using OS X outside of using it in an Apple Store. So far I like OS X, it is a very stable system, much better than anything from Microsoft. At first I found the interface kind of clunky. The part that seemed the hardest to get used to was having the menu bar detached from the windows. I may have a window open at the bottom of the screen and have to go all the way to the top of the screen to access a control. I still find this kind of a pain for any window that is not full screen although it does streamline the system.
Another thing that I do not like about OS X is how locked down it is to customization and some features that I would just expect it to have. I do not get why there is no way to change the cursor built in. I have found some programs that will allow me to do this, but I would have to pay for them. I would really like to change the cursor so if anyone knows how to do this for free please, leave a comment on how to do it.
As a Linux user I am used to being able to customize just about anything to the way I like it and to also be able to find a good program for free just by searching in the package manager. I do not like having to search all around the web trying to find one simple program. Also the support on forums that I find on average does not seem to be very friendly, even hostile, and a lot of the times not helpful. I find that most of the time when I have a Linux problem I find real help from people that know what they are doing, or at least are trying to help, with the occasional person that just wants to start a fight.
As far as the hardware Mac G5, it is well designed and I can tell it is high quality. However there are some things that do not seem well thought out. One of these is the length of the cable on the keyboard and the mouse. It is not long enough unless you have the tower next to the keyboard. I do not have enough space on my desk for this because I already have one desktop computer and a 19 inch widescreen lcd and a 17 inch lcd. The cable is short on the mouse also, but it can be plugged into the usb ports on the keyboard so it works fine. The mouse also has only one button this requires me to control+click if I need to right click. It also does not have a scroll wheel. I believe however that the later versions do not have the single button and now have a scroll wheel.
So in conclusion the Mac G5 is a good computer except for some of the complaints I have. What Apple needs to do to make a even better computer is to unlock the operating system so that it can be customized more and I think that they should ad a package manager, sort of like the app store for the Iphone, as long as it has free software in addition to paid software.
securing your wireless network
One thing I see all the time is that people do not secure their wireless networks. This is great if you want to share your internet with your neighbors, lose some of your speed, make it easier to be hacked into, or make any online crimes they commit traceable back to you. You get the point, it is better to just secure your wireless than the other alternatives. I don’t know why people don’t secure it, but it is either because they don’t know how or they don’t want to take the time. So, if you don’t know how I will tell you, and if you don’t want to take the time, then you probably won’t read the rest of this. The first thing to do is to turn your security on, this is done by going to the settings page for your router using your browser, my address for this is 192.168.2.1, this can vary a lot so check your manual. After putting that address in the address bar and pressing enter you should get a settings page. You may be prompted for a password before you get to the settings or when you try to change something. If you never see this you should set the password, or you may have to use the default, that you should change, refer to your manual. This is not as important as the wireless encryption because they are already on you network if they can access your router, but still turn it on. Once in the settings look for security settings, this will vary by router, check your manual if you can’t find it. Turn on and set the password for the encryption you choose, don’t choose WEP it is easily hackable by someone that knows what they are doing. Use some form of WPA. Now apply the settings and connect to your wireless using your password, that’s it for the main part. Now if you want it to be really secure I will tell you some things to do, this is getting more complicated and less necessary so I am just going to point you in the right direction. One thing to do is disable you router broadcasting your SSID. This is what you see as the name of the router you are connecting to. When you disable this it make it hard and impossible for the average person to even try to connect to your network because they can’t even see it’s name. They will need to know it’s name first. Also change it from the default, there are already too many linksys networks that they can guess yours or whatever brand you are using. The next thing to do is enable MAC address filtering that makes it so only computers with a MAC address that has been allowed can connect to your network. Every computer has it’s own MAC address. MAC addresses can be spoofed, but they would still need to know yours before they can spoof it. Now your wireless is very well locked down, maybe to well locked down. You most likely will not need it to be this secure because just turning on encryption will stop most people. Now that your security is on the edge of making you look paranoid, go, feel proud of knowing your are in control of your network.
when online advertising goes bad
Yesterday I watched several episodes of Firefly on Hulu, at least five episodes. As you may know Hulu has short commercials during the show, on average 4-5 for each episode, that last for thirty seconds each, so there is two or so minutes of commercials an episode. I really don’t mind them much because they are what make it possible to watch TV shows and movies for free. What I do not like however is the way the advertisements are chosen, there seems to be no real process for this. During all those shows I saw about 25 commercials, around 3 for McDonald’s, 2 for a debt recovery program, the other 20 were all for Target. (Whoever is reading this, I am not saying anything about the companies that make the commercials, because they may not have control over when they are shown.) Showing commercials over and over again does not work to make people want to buy a product. The debt recover one did not apply to me, but I only saw it two times so it was fine, the one for McDonald’s was fine the first couple of times, I wanted to go eat there, I even considered it. After seeing it several more time though it just got old, it did not make me want to go there anymore than I already did. The Target commercial that was shown more than any other one, to be honest, I did not like it to start with, it has this hello goodbye song I find really annoying, the commercial would still have worked despite this if there was something at Target I could have gotten a good deal on. However after I saw it again and again and again. I was completely repelled from even thinking about going to Target I would prefer to shop elsewhere. I kept muting the commercial even though I usually prefer commercials to silence, but it was still annoying even on mute. This is not good for Hulu or the company that puts out the add, or the person watching something on Hulu. It is bad for Hulu because some people may be completely turned off from watching something and then they will not see the adds that pay Hulu’s bills, so the advertisers will not pay for the adds because they do not get customers. This will go all the way down to the person watching a TV show or movie because there will be less and less stuff to watch, and Hulu may disappear completely. Another problem I see with advertising is that these adds are not targeted very well, when the adds look more like they would target children, why are they on Firefly and not on some children’s show where they will make the most profit. Adds should only be shown enough times to get a customer, not turn them off, because even if they don’t become a customer now they may be later, but not if they are annoyed to death first. Adds should be targeted more towards the type of person that typically watches the show so that it is more profitable and customers are more content to watch your adds.
I wanted a second monitor for my desktop, but I don’t have the money. So I took my old Dell Latitude C600 and took the Puppy Linux 2.15 disk that I had laying around and installed it. I then installed the FreeNX client dotpup that I found here. I already had the NX server installed on my Ubuntu Desktop, so it was just a matter of letting my laptop through my firewall and logging in through the client on my laptop. Now I sort of have a second monitor and/or computer. I now have access to all of my programs and files, and also the power of my desktop. This is similar to VNC, but much faster. Another difference is that I am not controlling the desktop on my other computer, but I am logged in as another user or the same user. the only time I can tell that it is not my laptop that I am actually using is if I want to use a program such as games or TVtime, some won’t launch and others have very low frame rates, YouTube videos are also choppy.
Is Linux Ready?
Is Linux ready? Who is it ready for? Why would someone want to switch from another OS to Linux?
I think that Linux is ready. This was not always the case for me. I first tried Linux a few years ago and I liked it. I only liked it, I didn’t use it much though until about a year ago. The reason for this is because I always had several problems that I could never get fixed. The main problems that I had were with sound and video. My sound almost never worked, sometimes I could get it to work in one program and not in another. This was very frustrating to someone who was trying to switch from Windows. Eventually I did get the sound to work and then started to try to get my monitor to display a higher than 800×600 resolution. The resolution that I wanted was not available by default in the graphical settings so with some help from various forums I tried to configure my xorg.conf to get the resolution I wanted. After doing this x would fail to start and would drop me to terminal only which is very intimidating to a new user and is still not where I would consider myself and expert even now. So I had no idea what to do, so instead of fixing the problem I would reinstall another distribution of Linux in hopes that I would find one that would like my computer and just work. I have a CD case of about 24 distributions that I have tried including Knoppix, Fedora, Suse, Slackware, and Vector. All of which I could never get set up correctly, even though I could do it now, I am not saying that these are bad distributions. After a long time of just settling for Windows I heard about Ubuntu 7.10, so I decided to try it in hopes that it would not mess with my dual boot of XP and Vista like other distributions had. So I put the live CD in and booted it up installed it rebooted and now I had a triple boot system. There were still a few problems that I had, getting sound to work in FireFox, and most problematic was my wireless card. More on that here. Now in conclusion Linux is ready for me, but is it ready for you?
Who else is it ready for? I will say that Linux is not ready for everyone, but for a lot of people it is. One group is the less computer savvy and new users that have a very limited need. For example the people that need a compute to check email, browse the Internet, instant message, and work on text documents. You may be wondering why Linux is ready for the new users and less savvy? Wouldn’t they have a hard time with it, especially when there are problems like what I have had? The way that it is ready is if someone installs it and configures it for them, or they buy it preinstalled from someplace like Dell. When a Linux system is installed and ready there is almost nothing that the user needs to do to use it. Almost all the software is already there and if they need more they can easily install from add/or remove programs. Another reason it is very good for new users is because they become completely confused from antivirus program alerts and firewalls asking for permissions. They see these and just ignore them and their antivirus becomes ineffective, sometimes they will even turn it off completely.
One group that I would see as Linux not being ready for are the people that want to get just a little more out of there computer, but not take time to learn how it works or fix it if they mess it up, they like make modifications to make it more to their liking without knowing what they are doing. This brings up another question though, is Windows even ready for them, once you mess something up in Windows it can often bring the whole thing down to the point where it needs to be reinstalled. Linux can be brought down also by making a change to a config, and a new user would still need to reinstall, but there is a large group of people to help Linux users. In my experience it is usually easier to interpret Linux errors than Windows errors, and when you Google the error is has been easier to fix.
Another group that Linux has a hard time getting adopted by are gamers, there just are not as many good games for Linux as there are for Windows, however there are good games for it. My favorite is Tremulous, but I am not much of a gamer so I will not go into too much on this topic of gaming. I know that many games can be ran under wine, but it is not always easy to do.
If you are tired of the instability of Windows, the common crashes, lack of really choosing what you want it to look like, then Linux may be for you. Some Linux gurus will hate me for saying this, but yes some things are harder to do in Linux, and yes they can be harder even if you know what you are doing, but the same can be true for Windows as well. So, is Linux ready? I know that I have said it is not for some people, but I am going to throw all that out, Linux is ready, but the world is not ready for it. What I mean by this is that manufactures have not made support for Linux with their hardware, so Linux is doing great with being able to work with so many things that have no official support. Game companies have not yet started to make games for Linux because they do not see a profit in it just like the hardware manufactures. Times are changing, you used to never be able to buy a computer from a major manufacturer with Linux, now thanks to Dell, Asus, HP, and others you can. It is only a matter of time before the world sees Linux as ready. That time is on its way now.
Firefox 3 Released
The final version of Firefox was released today. I have been using the betas since they came out and have been happy with it mostly. The only real problem I have had other than incompatible add-ons was it would freeze up in Gmail every time, only on my eeepc though not on my Ubuntu Box. With the final version however it has not frozen once. The true zoom ability is great for using on the small screen on the eeepc, this is the feature I was waiting for when I bought my eeepc. I tried to switch to Opera for this reason, but without add-ons I could not stand it. Some of you might be wondering how to get Firefox 3 installed on your eeepc, as was I, try these instructions, http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=22973 when you get to the download Firefox part don’t use the beta link, but go here instead, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/. I hope this is useful.
Ubuntu 8.04 is installed
All seems well except Miro is not working [edit: I fixed Miro, it was a Python problem, probably from when I compiled Miro]. It crashes every time it starts. It took 40 hours to download the update, must have been the large game files, 2.5 gigs altogether for the update.
Ubuntu 8.04
I am working on a dist upgrade for Ubuntu to version 8.04, the servers are really being hammered right now so I have seen a download rate as low as 400b/s and an estimate of 49 days left. If it ever finishes I might write a review. It says 1 day 3 hours and 13 minutes left as I write this.
