Tag Archives: SOLVED

Why Switch to Linux #1 – Linux is Eco Friendly

Posted on by
Reply

Use Linux and help save the environment

Discussing using Linux instead of Windows PCs or MAC computers tends to quickly dissolve into holy wars and name calling. But one real advantage of using Linux on your PC is that it is eco-friendly.

The simple truth is that the computer industry contributes large quantities of material to landfill. Recycling efforts are being made. But computers and peripherals contain a number of highly toxic elements including lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, and brominated flame retardants. Even in Australia recycling or disposal of e-waste involves significant risk to workers and communities.  Charities and schools may use older computers, but most computers don’t die, they just fade away.

Linux can help save the world by keeping older computers running long past what is normally considered there life expectancy.

Windows and built in obsolescence

Linux for your PC

Windows needs to be updated regularly because of security issues. Years ago I paid almost $4000 for a Toshiba laptop with 64Mb of RAM and a 200Mhz processor. It did what I needed it to do. It is still running, but I cannot connect it to the Internet because Windows ’98 is far from secure. It is a white elephant. Each Windows PC needs to be upgraded to the next version of Windows, and is rarely able to cope with the minimum requirements of the next version. More RAM can rarely be found, drivers are non-existent. trying to upgrade becomes and expensive nightmare.

Enter the Penguin – Linux
I am writing this article on an old laptop a Toshiba Tecra A4. It was built for Windows XP and will not run Windows 7. It is, to the Windows world, EOL (End of Life) or Obsolete. It runs Mint Linux 9 perfectly. It is secure, reliable and surprisingly fast.

It is talking to a server based on FreeNAS 8.0 running on a 1.2Ghz AMD PC given to me by an old customer who had purchased a new PC. It is fast and reliable. I just added some RAM I bought on eBay for $16 and a decent disk drive. Some of that RAM has also refurbished another old PC purchased from the Mission Shop for $40 that now runs Suse Linux 11.04.

My constant companion is a Asus EeePC 702, the first real net-book. It has a 600Mhz CPU, a 4Gb SSD and a 4Gb SD card. It works perfectly with Ubuntu 10.04 Net-book Remix. I use it constantly for note taking, web browsing, reading e-Books and watching videos. Windows XP will almost run on it, but if you add all the security patches it runs out of disk space before any software is added. Another win for Linux.

And Finally – The Cost of Windows Upgrades
Windows Graphic Microsoft lost my vote forever with the WGA fiasco when they slipped anti-piracy software onto users computers as a “security update” and then shut tens of thousands of innocent users down because they had fixed their broken PC with a disk other than the one they got when they bought it. Many well meaning sons and grandsons fixed Mom or Grandma’s Windows XP PCs with their own disks (because you could) and then the computer died in a burst of piracy notifications that forced honest people to pay again for something they could not PROVE TO MICROSOFT that they already owned.

As a result upgrading a Windows PC is an expensive option – cheaper to just buy a new one, and dump the old one at the tip. Moving to Linux costs NOTHING more than the possible cost of a few computer bits like some RAM that can probably be purchased for $5-20. The computer then goes on to a new, long life.

Linux does not become obsolete
A working Windows computer requires constant patches and security updates to keep it safe. Linux also has issues, but at the present, the average desktop user can stay with the current version of Linux for years with little risk. If you install Linux and it does what you want it to do, just keep using it until the hardware finally dies.

The Linux “Geeks” are constantly trying the latest versions, and that is their passion. If you just want a computer that works. get someone to help you install Linux, and then just enjoy the computer. It will run reliably for years with little more that the need for a backup process to save your important files when the PC finally dies.

Long live the green Linux operating system!

Outlook 2007 – Rules and Alerts Greyed Out

Posted on by
Reply

I have recently purchased a Sony Vaio laptop, and decided to try Microsoft Office again.

The only compelling application is Outlook. The is still nothing quite like Outlook for managing contacts, Notes, Calendar and Tasks in one place. It is bloated and slow, but it has many features still not available in the competition.

I used my licence for Office 2003 to re-generate an Outlook PST file, Importing E-mail, appointments and calendar from Google mail, calendar  and Thunderbird. All went well until I tried to move the Outlook.pst file into Outlook 2007 on Windows 7.

Rules moving e-mail to different folders failed, and the option to edit “Rules and Alerts” was grayed out. I found out that rules imported from previous versions of Outlook have a problem. The cannot be removed, edited or used. The need to be re-created.

If you have done this, the existing rules can be removed by going to the “Start” bar and typing “outlook.exe /cleanrules”. This will remove the existing but unusable rules rules from Outlook. See the MSOutlook.info site for the original information.

What will happen when (or if) I decide not to purchase Office 2007 and go back to Office 2003 remains to be seen…

Making Blogger Templates adjust to Page Width

Posted on by
3

It will come as no surprise to readers that this Blog is created by Blogger. It is, after all, shown on the links and in the bar across the top of the screen. I edit in Blogger, and then the pages are loaded onto the serentycomputing.com web servers automatically.

My one big issue with the Blogger system has been that it caters to the lowest common denominator. the 640 x 480 screen that was the original IBM VGA screen resolution. 640×480 went the way of the Dodo years ago. But then it came back with netbooks like the Asus Eee PC. I own the Eee 702, with a screen resolution of 800×480.

This makes a web site difficult to design. You do not want to make it impossible to browse with a netbook, but using as much screen space as possible is a goal. Blogger uses a format (for almost all templates) the uses a narrow format suited to 640×480 but is a narrow “neck tie” down the middle of the screen on better monitors.

I was inspired by a Youtube video about customising your blogger template. It gave me clues, and I went fishing in my template file. If you use blogger, when you edit a post or manage your dashboard you have a tab for “Template”. This site is based on the “Rounders 3″ template. It narrows the page to fit 640×480 browsers. The “Neck Tie” I spoke about above.

First be sure to copy the content of the template to a safe place. save a copy to your local machine using a text editor.

I went through the template and deleted all references to “url(http://www.blogblog.com/rounders3/corners_cap_xxx.gif)” these are the grapics that round the corners of each box on the screen. If you want a fixed format, you can fix these, rather than deleting, but I simply removed them.

Then I found @media all { and changed it from a number of pixels to 95%.
I found #sidebar { and changed it from 220px to 25%
I changed #main { from 485px to 72%

The result is a “Rounders 3″ template that re-sizes to fit the client screen size. It is not perfect, but I am very please with the result.

I just HATE wasting pixels!

Enjoy!

How to Eliminate SPAM Forever!

Posted on by
Reply

I am sure that heading caught your attention. It is possible to eliminate spam from your in-box quite easily. A nice side effect is that you also get a permanent, searchable archive of all incoming and outgoing e-mail. You don’t need to change your e-mail address and this works with almost any e-mail server. It also gives you the ability to access your e-mail from any computer, anywhere.

And it is quite free.

Use Google Mail (Gmail) as your filter. Gmail has best filter I have ever seen. Gmail uses computer software, of course, but the real secret is the 80 million pairs of eyes that use Gmail. The users. If you have spam filtering software on your email client, It has to be trained by you. Each time you mark email as spam, the system looks for similar messages. With Gmail, when you mark a message as spam, Google flags that e-mail across the whole system. I assume they wait for a few hundred or thousand people to identify that message as really spam, but then it gets moved into everyone’s spam folder. There is a video by Google here.

The result is that I probably see a piece of spam in my in-box about once every two weeks. I am happy to mark it as spam and contribute to keeping the system clean. There are also no false positives. I have never found a message I want in my spam folder.


So how do you do it?

You must create a new Google Mail account. Just go to Google Mail and open a new account (or use an existing one, of course). Just follow the prompts.

Then either have your e-mail forwarded to your new Gmail address, or have it collected.

Forward your e-mail to Google mail.

If you have control over your mail server, re-directing is easy. My mail server has a Smartermail web interface. I simply set it to re-direct my mail and then delete them.



Or, have Google mail collect it for you.

If you cannot access your mail settings, Gmail can collect you mail using POP, the same protocol that your mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) uses to download mail. Go into the settings tab of gmail, then Accounts, and click on “Add a mail account you own” in the “Get mail from other accounts” section. Step trhough the form, supplying the email address, the user name, password, POP server details. This information is the same as you use to download mail to your e-mail client. Just look in your account settings.


If you have more than one e-mail account, you can have g-mail label each incoming message with the name of your e-mail account.

Now your e-mail is being sent to Gmail. Send some mail to yourself to test that it is working. Gmail has a brilliant interface, and many people just stop at this point and use the gmail interface for all their mail needs.

Make outgoing (sent) mail look like it is coming from your e-mail address.

The next step is to tell Gmail to send mail showing your real e-mail address. This is done from the settings page again.

In settings > Accounts click on “Add another e-mail address you own” Enter your name, and your e-mail address.

To activate this option, Google will sent an e-mail and you must reply to it, to prove you actually own that email address. You can then set that address as your default, and all mail sent will show your actual e-mail address.

But what if I want to use Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc?

Go to the Gmail accounts setting again. Click on the “Forwarding & POP/IMAP” tab. In POP download, click on the “Enable Pop for mail that arrives from now on” button, and save.

Then Go to your e-mail client, and set it to point at Gmail.

This is the last step.

Item 3 on the page described above has links to specific instructions for most e-mail clients.

Go into the account settings in your e-mail client, and change the settings to download your e-mail from Google mail following the instructions provided .

That’s all folks!

The benefits include having a Gmail interface accessible from any computer. You keep your official or professional e-mail address and you now have a backup of your e-mail.

An added benefit is that if you use Google desktop, it can search and index all your mail on the Gmail server. This gives very fast search and indexing of all your mail.

Log into Gmail occasionally and have a look in the spam folder. Eventually you will give up, and Google will delete all spam more than a month old automatically.

Enjoy! – Phil Stephens

Using the iRiver T30 Media Player with Linux

Posted on by
2

I recently bought two iRiver T30 medial players. I was attracted by the spec. which includes the ability to record from a line-in jack.

I have used an older Creative MuVo to record from the FM signal in a number of lecture halls, but have been unable to use an induction pickup to record from the induction loop provided for hard of hearing or directly from the magnetic flux of a speaker or speaker cable in some lecture venues, or from a line input. I have been forced to use a cassette recorder and the to dub from tape to MP3.

The T30 also has a microphone, and I have used it to record lectures by placing the recorder close to a ceiling speaker in a quiet area,. The signal strength is quite good, and noise is low. As a result I can use software such as Audacity to boost the signal, and get a clean audio file. Compared to either tape recorder (motor noise) or the MuVo (extremely low signal, and hiss when amplified) the quality is exceptional.

I bought the player from an eBay vendor here in Australia, and expected FM recording capability, and the ability to connect to both Windows and Linux PCs. Unfortunately the supplier sent me a US version. This version uses Windows medial Player ONLY to move files on and off the player. This means it would not work on Linux, and requires WMP with is DRM (Digital Restrictions Rights Management) to handle music. I would call this a deal breaker, but the goods where paid for, and getting refunds from eBay sellers is a painful exercise. So I looked for a solution.

The US iRiver use MTP, Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol to ensure you do not move copy protected music onto the player. The European and Australian players are UMS (USB Mass Storage) devices that can be written to and from like any USB storage device. It is possible to upgrade the firmware to allow the US UMS devices to be accessed by Linux and Windows without WMP. Unfortunately this requires running a Windows application.

Simply go to http://www.iriver.eu.com/mtp.html?&L=0 or http://www.iriveramerica.com/support/mtpupdate/ and download the firmware updater to a Windows based PC and install the latest firmware. Then install it AGAIN and click on the MTP <–> UMS button on the bottom of the screen (this button only appears on the second installation) and the player will be converted to UMS. This makes it possible to copy files the the T30 from Windows or Linux. I Use Amarok to download and then install all my favorite podcasts quickly and simply. I record lectures and edit them using Audacity with no problems.

There is an excellent blog entry with a lot of information and user feedback at: http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/iriver-t30-wma-ogg-mp3-player-with-voice-recording-and-linein/ and a list of ALL iRiver firmware updates at: http://nyaochi.sakura.ne.jp/iriverupdate/.

My only complaint is that the upgrade does not activate the FM radio option.

Regards to all, Phil Stephens