John's Blog

My preupgrade system was a dual boot (linux/win7) x86_64 system with a couple of hardware RAID arrays running FC14 with grub as the bootloader.  Graphics hardware is fairly modern and should not by itself pose a problem for Gnome3. There are separate partitions for /home, /boot as well as a couple of others. I mostly relied on the Fedora Project preupgrade Wiki . Used Software Update to update to latest FC14. Backed up /home , /etc , and some of /var to an external drive. sudo yum install preupgrade su; preupgrade (choose FC16 Verne as the upgrade dest) ---At this point everything seemed to go well as many new packages were downloaded etc. but significantly there was no /boot/upgrade directory created and /boot/grub/menu.lst did not have an entry for the upgrade kernel.  Ran preupgrade again --- now things are good. Reboot and boot into the upgrade kernel -- this takes a while as more stuff gets downloaded and the system is modified to support the new distro. P...

Update 1/28/2012: They (WSJ) have provided a software update - latest is now 1.3.1.6 - before was 1.2.5.0. You can check your current version from settings | More | applications | WSJ. You can update by starting from home screen, going to "Apps", then "Store", then Bottom Menu, then "My Apps", then "Update Available" then on WSJ hit "Update".  Before this update the app would often freeze. Now it is working as it should, with articles loading crisply, and no problems with downloading the whole paper each morning. I recently got one of the first Kindle Fires. At $200 I figured the price was right, and while I can read Kindle books and my Wall Street Journal from my Android phone, the (phone) screen is small, not to mention battery life is a problem. Furthermore, I figured I could make the Kindle Fire pay for itself, as the difference between the WSJ print edition and the online only edition over the course of one year is --- $200 (...

I recently changed my  blogger.com blog to their new Dynamic views. These Dynamic Views have an Ajax-like way of changing between pages that don't require a page refresh. Unfortunately, this change broke Google Analytics , which had previously been working. With the old, static, blogger views, Google Analytics required that you manually paste some "tracking code" in your HTML. With "Dynamic Views" this is no longer possible and the old "tracking code" (if it's still there at all) no longer has the intended effect. Fortunately there is a simple solution. Access your Google Analytics account, click on the "Gear" icon, go to profiles and copy your "Web Property ID" which is of the form AB-12345678-1. Go to your blogger.com account, then go to Account | Settings | Other and paste in your recently copied "Web Property ID" into the field that asks for the Google Analytics Web Property ID.  I found this tip on ...

Running the Update Software utility from Fedora 14 was giving me some conflicts and error messages related to Sane Backends which has to do with scanning, digital cameras etc. This looks to be Red Hat Bugzilla - 749083 . The error messages look like "Transaction error: could not add package update for sane-backends-libs-1.0.22-5.fc14(i686)updates: sane-backends-libs-1.0.22-5.fc14.i686".   The fix is easy   sudo yum update --obsoletes   The explanation (from Bugzilla) is that "The problem was that sane-backends-libs-gphoto2 has been obsoleted by the new package sane-backends-drivers-cameras, but it looks like Software Update didn't deal with this."

When I first got my Android and synced to my Google account, there were hundreds of unwanted contacts showing up on the phone. Most of these contacts were auto-generated by Google based on any emails I had been sent or had sent out. All they did was clutter up my contact list. The fix for this is simple. The idea is to use Groups in Google contacts. I happen to use the group "My Contacts" and I think this is what Google wants you to use. The same approach may or may not be possible with other, arbitrary groups. In Gmail on your PC go to "Contacts" then select "My Contacts". If there are contacts under this group that you don't want on your phone simply select them and under Groups uncheck "My Contacts". Then on your phone go to the Contacts application, hit the menu button, hit "More" and then go to "Display Options". Go to Google and here make sure "My Contacts" is checked but "All Other Contacts...

Apparently this is easier with Windows - something is done automatically there. What I found worked for Linux was On phone - Settings | Applications | Development | Enable USB Debugging. Connect Phone to Linux using USB. This will create a notification on phone - tap the notification - phone will ask if you wish to access files from PC and answer "Yes".  As a side note I couldn't add ringtones from the Sound Menu. Need to create folders on the phone which are all one word and all lower case named ringtones notifications alarms And put the proper sound files in the proper folders. Some folks say you have to restart your phone for this to take effect but I did not have to do this - it just worked.

First off let me say I've never had a smart phone before. No iPhone, no Crackberry, no Windoze phone, no Droid - zilch, zero, zip, nada. I knew that one day I would eventually take the plunge being pretty much of a techie and that day turned out to be yesterday. Having been playing with the Samsung Galaxy S2 (ATT version) for almost exactly 24 hours it's time to take stock and jot down some random observations in no particular order. Some of these impressions or opinions may change obviously and some may be purely a function of me being a total smartphone n00b. But with that being said, here goes. Battery life seems pretty lacking as a first impression. I can see myself charging the thing more than once a day. The Wall Street Journal app is a huge disappointment. You might think that as a print and  an online subscriber that I would be able to read the content that I've already paid for - twice - without any additional fee. But if you thought that you'd be wrong. T...