I was pleased at how easily Ubuntu 11.4 installed on my old Dell Latitude D600, but the wireless didn’t work immediately.
Thankfully, I just had to search for “firmware-b43-installer” in the Ubuntu Software Center, and that did it! By the way, I had to reinstall it after letting the software upgrade tool upgrade me to 11.10. The upgrade generated a bunch of errors, but it appears that they were all related to the wireless.
Upgrading our Vostro 2510 to Windows 7 was surprisingly painless. It seemed to have good video, networking, and audio drivers from the start.
However, I couldn’t adjust the screen brightness with the special keys. I tried looking for Dell Quickset for this hardware and OS combo, but no luck.
It turns out that installing the Vista video driver from Dell did the trick. Now the screen brightness keys work!
I’m testing a Polycom IP 321 with OnSip.com, and the calls kept dropping. It was probably a consistent call duration, somewhere around a minute or 90 seconds. We’re behind a Cisco 871 router.
I was about to start timing the calls and packet sniffing when I found this thread that suggests the command
no ip nat service sip udp port 5060
which apparently turns off some of the special NAT treatment for SIP traffic. No more dropped calls!
A week ago, my power, network, and volume icons disappeared from the tray area of Windows 7. When I chose “Customize notification icons” and then “Turn system icons on or off”, the choices were grayed out like the image to the left.
I tried the Group Policy and registry solutions that I found online, but with no success.
Here’s how I finally fixed it:
I discovered that 6 .dll files from C:\Windows\system32 were messed up. I found a nice explanation here as to how to extract the files from the Windows 7 installation DVD using 7-Zip, which I already like for other zipping and unzipping tasks.
Unfortunately, you can’t just copy the files into C:\Windows\system32. Here’s what I had to do to replace the .dll files:
That did it! I don’t know how the files were corrupted, but replacing them got the system icons back.
Browse the library — this looks amazing! And check out the intro video from TED: it challenged me to think about how video learning could be used to make classroom learning more personalized.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk[/youtube]
Thought I’d be choosing between Apple TV and Roku, but here were my primary requirements:
The only device that seems to do both right out of the box is the WD TV Live Plus. I picked one up for under $100 with an HDMI cable. I also like the small footprint — here it is next to a DVD:
I was excited to see the Boxee Windows Media Center Integration, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any other way to get Pandora on a Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, my Harmony Remote, emulating an MCE remote through streamzap, can’t navigate Boxee very well. You need to be able to send a backspace, which doesn’t seem to be available on the remote.
Long a fan of AutoHotkey, I found that it comes with a compiler that can take any AutoHotkey script and turn it into an exe! It was easy to create a script to send a backspace character (“Send {BS}”) and then compile that into this executable.
Then I used the streamzap application to assign one of the remote’s colored buttons to the backspace.exe program, and I can navigate Boxee!
I learned about the blekko search engine at SXSW last week. Check out this introductory video — they’ve added an interesting way to prioritize your search results according to “slashtags”.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14593120[/vimeo]
facebook error
I was creating a facebook app and trying to host the canvas URL on my 1and1 hosting account. Even though I could browse directly to the index.html and it would render fine, I would get an error when trying to browse to it via apps.facebook.com.
“Method Not Allowed. The requested method POST is not allowed for the URL …”
Although I have not encountered this problem on other web hosts, it appears that 1and1’s web server is set up a little differently. When you browse to the canvas page via apps.facebook.com, facebook sends some POST variables to your site. 1and1 doesn’t allow an html file to render when POST variables are sent.
A simple workaround is to rename your index.html to index.php. That makes 1and1 think that the POST variables are expected.
Or, “When Zap2It Disappoints”.
I’ve been frustrated by Windows 7 Media Center not finding listings for the broadcast stations in my zip code. I have an antenna and Comcast cable, and would like to be able to record from both. When I program Media Center with my zip code, the broadcast listings show 3 channels (out of approximately 40).
A friend told me that he switched over to Indianapolis’ zip code and was able to get broadcast listings. I tried that, but then my cable company wasn’t offered. And it takes at least 10 minutes to switch zip codes and see what happens.
I finally realized that I could go to zap2it.com (the provider of TV listings to Microsoft), try different zip codes, and try to find one that has broadcast and Comcast listings. I found the zip code map at maps.huge.info/zip.htm and tried 46060 first. It works! I finally have listings for all of the channels that I care about.