Blog Update #unknown

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I just upgraded to the new version of WordPress (which I am loving), removed the annoying  social essentials plugin and replaced it with the brand new Facebook plugin that allows you to “Like”, “Share” and “Subscribe” to me at here. I didn’t activate Facebook comments because not everyone got Facebook (ok, just a little few do not). Soon I will replace the Twitter “retweet” button that I removed which something else. By the way, some people may notice that the title of the blog has changed.

Plus, Cloudflare was configured to make the site faster than before and way more safe. Thanks to DennisTT (who is, by the way, our new hoster since a month ago) for the suggestion!

Thanks for visiting the site, I’m getting up a Debian box for experimenting soon so new guides will come, although suggestions are allowed. Greetings!

Enabling Apache and PHP on Mac OS X (Lion)

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1. Enabling Apache
By first, you will open the  menu, then open System Preferences -> Sharing and enable Web Sharing, customize the settings if you want to, after this you should get the default Apache index on http://localhost with “It’s working!”. Done, you got Apache working, but still no PHP.

2. Creating phpinfo
Open the terminal and write

cd Sites ; echo "<?php phpinfo() ?>" >> phpinfo.php

Save it and close the document, then try to open http://localhost/~yourusername/phpinfo.php and see what you just wrote on the document since Apache still doesn’t have PHP plugin enabled.

3. Enabling PHP
For the sake of simpleness, Apple shipped OS X with PHP (as with Apache), now you just have to enable it. Open the terminal and write

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Then look for this line:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and remove the hash symbol and save the document, then restart Apache with

sudo /usr/bin/apachectl restart

Refresh http://localhost/~yourusername/phpinfo.php and enjoy! :)

How to activate Windows XP

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This one is very easy, just we need to play around with the registry editor.

1. Click on Run and type regedit, click enter
2. Look for “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion”
3. Click on “WPAEvents” and search for OOBETimer, right click on it, and modify the value to ”FF D5 71 D6 8B 6A 8D 6F D5 33 93 FD”, without the quotation marks, click on Ok.
4. Now select the wpaevents folder, and deny all the permissions.

Enjoy your genuine Windows XP again. Btw, I don’t support piracy, is just for people that like me, got an old laptop and the serial got scratched.

My essential applications on Android

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I’m not the kind of person with lots apps at the phone, so I’ll write a list of the essential applications for me and some others with their description :)

 Gmail is my first must have, I still depend on reading my email for notifications from other sites, colleagues, coworkers. The application is the best I ever used for email, is fast, got lots of options for organizing the incoming messages. Before this one I used Blackberry BIS Mail Service which is quite faster but not this nice. Gmail is the best email-inbox provider available for free with a lot of storage space and hopefully this application comes by default on most of Android phones.

Google Talk is another must have, it is linked with your Google account and Gmail contacts. It comes installed by default on most of Android phones. My primary communication application on mobile phone and at desktop.

Whatsapp is a must have for every smartphone user, from Blackberries to Windows Phone. The application I used before this was the powerful Blackberry Messenger (BBM) offered by RIM at their BBs but since it just works there when I migrated I started to use Whatsapp, still lots of people doesn’t install it and prefer BBM which is quicker, robust and awesome but not multiplatform, sadly.

Not many time has passed since Google Currents came up and is already an application that I love, you can get in an awesome user interface, recommended!

 

Twitter is a service that we all know, you can follow friends, artists, company profiles, etc. Get promotions, read the news, stalk your crush, follow the worldwide trends, etc.

 

 

Well, that are my essential apps and the most I use, just followed by Google Maps, Latitude, Foursquare and Instagram. As you can see I don’t have lots of stuff, but this is more than I need and have time for. Sometimes for school I get some extra apps like Cole’s Calculous Review, Electrodroid, etc or one-purpose apps like Kayak but them get deleted when I stop using them.

Installing NVidia proprietary drivers under Debian based distros

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By first, you need to download the following packages with the following command

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc-4.4

Then download and give execution permissions to the NVIDIA binary driver — XServer must be down.

wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/275.28/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.28.run
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.28.run
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.28.run

Now just start the X server, enjoy!

Installing ROM’s at Droid X

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This guide may apply for many other Android devices, but with different bootloaders. In this guide I will explain how to install the ROMs (without buying ROM Manager). First of all, you need to know if you are running Froyo or Gingerbread with Froyo Kernel or pure Gingerbread.

First of all, download ROM Manager (free version) and flash the recovery, selecting Droid X if you are running pure Froyo, if you are using Gingerbread use Droid2 Bootstrap, if you are running Cyanogenmod or MIUI (why are you reading this in first place?) select Droid X (2nd-init).

Then download the desired ROM to the sd-card of your phone.

MIUI 1.9.9 | Direct Download | Forum (for newer versions)
CyanogenMod7 Nightlies | Nightlies List
Liquid Gingerbread 08.06.11 | Direct Download | Forum (for newer versions)
ApeX 2.0.0 RC3 | Direct Download | Forum (for newer versions)
There are many more, check rootzwiki.com to know about them!

The problem of installing the ROMs in this way is that you need to manually update them (and check the forums often if there are updates). Open ROM Manager, and click on Install ROM from SD Card, select the zip of the ROM you are going to install – select data/cache wipe if is your first time moving to Gingerbread, if is just an update rom ROM v1.1 to V1.2 probably doesn’t need that (but it may! check the forums).

I personally use MIUI because it goes fast, totally renewed UI, and great battery life! :)

Configure LIRC to work with Windows Media Remotes

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Configuring LIRC with a Windows Media Center Remote to work at Linux is easy and if you like seeing movies while you are at bed is just awesome, here an easy setup (ripped from mine old blog :) )

sudo apt-get install lirc lirc-modules-source module-assistant

Now on configuration

Windows Media Center Transceivers/Remotes (all) -> None -> DONE!

To test out the controller, is

irw

while doing this, click the keys in your controller and they will appear if it was detected correctly. Here, all were detected.

If you want to make it work with KDE and KDE apps,

apt-get install kdelirc

And configure the keys in System Settings.

Configuring a NTFS partition to be mounted at boot

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Note: This might work on other distributions just installing the packages on their package managers or from source, however you want. Root password and access is required.

I been helping a friend to move into Debian Squeeze although this guide work on any I think, first of all, installing the packages, hopefully way less than any tutorial that I wrote at here.

apt-get install libfuse2 ntfs-3g

The second step is know where the NTFS partition is located, for that we will use

fdisk -l | grep NTFS

And it will output something similar to this

/dev/hdc1 * 1 9728 78140128+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Now we know that the partition is located at /dev/hdc1, we will need to choose the path where we want it mounted, so we will create a nice folder on root ( /disk ) or on the home of an user ( /home/yourusernameathere/disk ), when we created the folder we will just add a line in /etc/fstab that will be like:

/dev/hdc1 /home/yourusernameathere ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

Was easy heh? :) Then just restart or do mount -a as root

Application alternatives

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Often people just creates lists for replacing software from Windows to Linux or OS X, in this list I will write about Windows alternatives too! Enjoy!

Office suites
The most used is always Microsoft Office, why? Because it works actually very good! (and most of people use it, so we need to open it though the official suite to look it correctly). Although the licence costs are high and the pseudo-standards change way too much between versions, making impossible to look it correctly while not using the same version where it was made (or newer).

There are lot of alternatives, freeware, open source suites and other proprietary alternatives and the correct one for you depends on what you need, if you want a word processor, all of them will make the job correctly, if you want presentations probably you will like iWork and for spreadsheets Microsoft office is the only way.

Personally, I like Microsoft Office and KOffice (now Calligra both done by KDE.org guys). The freeware alternative is IBM Lotus Symphony, for open source is LibreOffice (based on the other open source OpenOffice.org) plus, this last is supported by the OpenDocument Foundation. If you want propietary software, Microsoft Office and iWorks (macfags will love) are the way, both are pretty nice BUT only works on OS X and Microsoft Windows. On Linux the way is LibreOffice if you need compatibility with Microsoft Office and you want a powerful office suite, and if you like Qt and KDE — i’m sure you want all your applications running under it, so KOffice (Calligra) is the way. If you want it to be multi-platform, plus cloud computing, Google Docs will do the job!

Music players
This part is the most conflicting to me. I love music, I need an equalizer but also I need that it works pretty fast with a very big music collection. The operating system that got lots of GREAT software for this is Linux. The selection of this will MOSTLY depends on that if you got an iPod or an iPhone. If you got one of this gadgets on Windows or OS X, the way is iTunes, if not, probably Foobar2000 (Windows) or Songbird (although both got iPod plugins, is not the same and we know that). If you’re running Linux, there are lot of options, but the better ones are Amarok, Banshee, Clementine (based on Amarok 1.6, works on OS X and Windows too) and Rhythmbox, all got iPod support.

Burning suites
Most of people uses Nero or Roxio software because always comes with the computer, the problem with this suites is that is pricey plus, bloated and slow. There are lot of superior alternatives, alike ImgBurn for Windows (which is very cheap), for OS X you don’t really need one if you know how to use Disk Utility, but there is SimplyBurns with is good and a BIG suite (alike Nero) that will do any kind of works with CDs, Toast. For Linux k3b is the only and best way!

Compressing software
Since lots of years ago (I think from Windows XP) Windows haves this feature already build-in, the same way on Mac OS X and unzip at Linux, but theres a lot of people that uses WinRAR to compress their stuff, for Windows theres a opensource alternative, 7z which (un)compresses RAR, Zip, plus 7z at Windows. For Linux and OS X you can install WinRAR command to the job, and for other kind of compressions there is tar!

Browser
This mostly is a personal election, just DO NOT USE INTERNET EXPLORER IF YOU ARE NOT USING IT TO DOWNLOAD ANOTHER BROWSER. Personally I like Opera and Chromium (Google Chrome). But there are other good alternatives like reKonq and Firefox. The final option will depend on the extensions you want.

Messaging and Videocalling
Sadly we need to use the protocol that other people use, and the most used ones nowadays are Windows Live Messenger and (worst thing ever) Facebook. But we can make our experience way more comfortable if you got the right applications. For Linux there are a lot of alternatives that got a plus, connecting with multiple accounts on different services at the very same time as Pidgin, Kopete and Emphaty and for the people that likes WLM-a-like GUI, there is KMess and Emesene. For Mac the best thing, and the one I use is Adium.

For videocalling there are not a lot of alternatives, the best one for me is Google Video Call which is way better than WLM. But if you want hi-res an application that lots of people uses, there is Skype. For conferences the best is Google+ Hangouts!

Mobile messaging and calling
I’m tired of Blackberry Messenger users! They thing that everyone needs an outdated phone with an outdated operating system (this is a personal opinion) but there are ways to communicate with other smartphones via messaging alike BBM. The one I use its Whatsapp which is multi-platform, but there is Google+ Huddle (Android and iOS), Pingchat (multi-platform).

Plus, for calling. There is Google Voice, Google Talk, Tango, Skype, Viber, this last one is the one I like. But just Tango, Google Talk and Skype got videocalling.

I think its all, if you want more just poke me at the commentaries and I’m writing other alternatives for different uses.

Setting up an Android environment at OS X

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Hello, in this post I will explain how to setup an Android environment for developing-fun-curiosity-whateveryouwant at Mac OS X, with is quite VERY simple. This guide should work on the same in Windows and Linux but I am not sure.

By first you need to download the Android SDK for your platform: Mac OS X - Linux – Windows. (September 10, for newest click here)

After that you need to open the ‘tools’ executable (from the console) — this is only for OS X or Linux (not sure how at Windows). Then you get a window titled ‘Android SDK and AVD Manager‘.

Go to ‘Available packages’ to select the Android environment you will be using at Android Repository  (Froyo 2.2, Gingerbread 2.3.3, Honeycomb 3.2, w/e). At this very same tab you can also install (at Third party Add-Ons) the Google APIs alike Maps and Admob.

Now that you downloaded the environment that you desire, go to ‘Virtual Devices‘ tab, click on “New” button and proceed to assign a name to the device, which OS you will use, CPU/ABI, etc… then “Create AVD“. Now you are done! Just click Start while you have the desired device selected with blue :) .

Enjoy! — Today is the SuperHappyDevHouse at Xalapa, Mexico. We will be here about 12 hours of programming/learning/geek stuff – I am doing guides for this site, this is the first one. More to come!.