The first is as my own personal SVN-esque server. I set up a folder in my main Dropbox “root” directory, by default in Windows this is under “My Documents/My Dropbox”. Any code I write, I save in this folder. The code is then synced to all my PCs automatically by Dropbox, allowing me to work on the code from anywhere. As I use Eclipse to write my code, I have set this folder as the default source folder for my workspace in both my Windows and Ubuntu version of Eclipse. Thus, all I need to is open up Eclipse and hit F5 to refresh and get all my updated sources, thanks to Dropbox!

I do the same for the music tracks I am working on under Renoise. By saving all my songs in a folder under the main Dropbox folder, the tracks are synced across all my accounts. As Renoise is cross-platform (to a degree) I can simply open up Renoise on both my Windows and Ubuntu machines and work on the same track. Sweet. This trick works for any cross platform program. You can do it for your Firefox or Google Chrome profiles, or even your Music Library!

First off, there is the choice over the biggest app of all, which version of Android to use. Although I use a HTC Hero, I am not a big fan of the Sense interface, so instead I have chosen to install a vanilla (plain) rooted version of Android. As I am using a custom ROM (the name given to the OS that the phone runs) I can choose to use a more modern version of Android than is currently available on the HTC Hero. Thus, whilst other UK Orange HTC Hero users are still waiting for Orange to get their update out there, I have been rocking Android 2.1 for over two months now. I use RaduG’s VanillaEclair ROM which is pretty damn perfect. For those that don’t know, the advantage of running a rooted version of a ROM means you can install certain apps that have added functionality and you have greater control over your phone, more about this later.

The second most important app (and from now on I am only talking about real apps here) is what Home app to use. The Home app is the one that you see and use almost all the time. It is the first screen you see after you unlock your phone and it is what displays the menu of all your apps . The default Android Home app isn’t bad, but there is certainly room for improvement. There are a number of Home apps out there, both free and paid for with various functions. I have settled on the rather awesome LauncherPro. LauncherPro is based on the stock Android Home app, but it has a myriad of improvements. First off, it has a dock at the bottom, that is fully customisable, allowing you to put shortcuts to apps, contacts and folders right on the bottom of your Home screen. Even better, you can have up to three docks, which you can swype between, so you can have 12 shortcuts. Furthermore, a newly released feature allows you to add a gesture shortcut to each of those shortcuts, so swiping up on a shortcut opens up another shortcut, so you can have in effect 24 shortcuts in all. As you can see on my screenshot, I have a shortcut for the browser, the phone, messaging and gmail. The middle “blocks” button takes me to my menu of apps. You can also see another excellent feature of LauncherPro, the ability to give message indications for certain shortcuts, in this screenshot it is showing I have 2 unread gmails, ooh, how popular I am. LauncherPro also features some of the more popular features from alternative Home apps, like ADW Launcher and HTC’s Sense – a “helicopter” overview of all your home screens and scrollable widgets, more about them in second. There are two versions of LauncherPro, the free version, called LauncherPro and a paid for improved version called LauncherPro Plus. LauncherPro Plus includes additional features (and more are being added all the time), the main ones are three built-in widgets: bookmarks, calendar and people. You can see the calendar widget in the screenshot to the right, it basically shows you your upcoming appointments. The great thing is that it is scrollable, so you can scroll through about a month ahead to see what is coming up. The people widget shows a pre-selected group from your contacts and is also scrollable, clicking on a contact pops up a context sensitive menu with various options to interact with that person. The bookmark widget shows thumbnails of all your bookmarks, though I have not used that widget yet, so can’t say more than that. I’d highly recommend the Plus version, if only to support the excellent developer of LauncherPro, as it is a one-man show.

My next awesome app is Tasker, but I have already mentioned this app in a previous post so I wont go on about it here. Basically, Tasker allows you to set up various profiles that enable or disable various settings. It essentially allows you take full control of your phone. Lifehacker wrote some cool guides on how to take full advantage of Tasker. You can see some examples of the profiles I use in the screenshot to the right. So, for example during the day, I turn on my data connection and auto-sync, but at night these are off, to save battery power. Another profile simply notifies me when the phone is charged, so I don’t leave it plugged in the charger for an age. It is an incredibly powerful tool and helps you take total control over your phone.

Up next is Titanium Backup. This app only works on a phone with a rooted ROM, as I mentioned earlier. It’s one of those awesome apps that you keep installed and only use occasionally, but is very useful when you use it. It allows you to backup all your apps and their associated data. Then, when you come to install a new ROM, you can simply restore that backup and all your apps, with all their settings as you left them. Nice. You can also use it to backup pretty much anything else as well, such as your contacts, text messages, browser bookmarks etc etc.

Next on the list is the rather awesome CoPilot Live v8. Whilst Google’s Navigation app is certainly useful, it only works online and gets into trouble if you veer off course without an internet connection – which in the UK can happen from time to time, especially if you are on Orange. CoPilot is in a whole different league when it comes to SatNav apps. It is just beautiful, works really well and is very easy to use. It has a few additional features, like nearby Points Of Interest indicators, the ability to route missing out toll roads and bridges and live tracking. You can buy maps for most of the major countries in Europe and the United States for a reasonable amount (way cheaper than the cost of maps for v7). I used it on an 8 hour round-trip and it didn’t flake out on me once. Because all the maps are stored on your SD card, it works offline, so you never loose where you are or where you are going. I wouldn’t be surprised if they come out with a new version next year supporting 3D models of buildings in major cities, ala Google Earth, but that will no doubt require the purchase of a new licence and no doubt a new phone to power it all!

Next on the list is the rather cool SystemPanel. This is a great app for keeping an eye on your phone to make sure it is running OK. It shows you which apps are running, how much memory is being used and which apps are thrashing your CPU (and hence killing your battery). It also allows you to monitor CPU and battery usage as well as data usage. Furthermore, it has an app archive facility allowing you to backup non-protected apps. It does have the ability to kill tasks and apps to “free memory”, but this is advised against, as Android is designed to use up as much memory as possible, just like Linux, so you are always going to be “low on memory”. Android kills apps itself if another app needs more memory, so task killers really aren’t useful. I use it if an app is misbehaving and to track down what app is maxing out my CPU and generally to keep tabs on my phone. It has a lovely GUI and is very reliable.

My final app that I would recommend is the BBC News widget by Jim Blackler. It might only be useful to users in the UK, although it does show World news if you want. It is by far the best news widget I have found. I did use AnyRSS Reader for a long time, but I never liked not having an image to view and it took up too much screen space. The BBC News widget takes up only one “slot” on your home screen, yet manages to squeeze a picture and an informative headline into that space. You can set it to regularly update throughout the day, so whenever you turn your phone on, you are always aware of the latest news around the world. You can see it in action in the screen shot a few images above, showing the news headlines (quite why the BBC thinks an article on being single is a news headline is any one’s guess, but that’s modern media for you) and David Cameron’s latest foreign policy gaff.

There is one more app that I use everyday, but it is quite specific to me. IP Cam Viewer is a great app if you need easy and quick access to images from an IP Webcam. I have a baby daughter and have set up a night-vision webcam to monitor her during the night and day when she sleeps. IP Cam Viewer allows me to keep tabs on her late at night and when it gets dark when we are putting her to bed. The developer of the app is very active, updating it constantly and it even supports audio from some webcams.

It worked perfectly with my cheap Fosscam ripoff from eBay (until I punched a hole through the microphone by accident and the plug literally fell apart in my hand!). If you need a way to view webcam images on your phone, I would highly recommend it.

That then is about it for my favourite apps on Android. Here are some other apps that I use occasionally that deserve an honorable mention: Astrid (for managing your daily tasks), Andromote (an awesome UPnP client), APNdroid (for turning off your data connection), Barcode Scanner (you know, for scanning barcodes), ConnectBot (for logging in to PCs via SSH), Dropbox (for sharing files), DroidWiki (for making awesome TiddlyWiki style notes), ES File Explorer (for browsing my files on the phone and on the LAN), Power Strip and Quick Settings (for quick access to various settings no matter what app you have open) and WaveSecure (for tracking my phone if it is lost or stolen and for backing up contacts online).

I hope you like the apps listed here. It is interesting to note that all the apps I have mentioned are paid-for. Whilst the majority of the apps mentioned here come in a “free” version, I find I like to thank the dev for all their hard work so am happy to upgrade to the fully featured versions.

It seems Canonical (the developers of Ubuntu) are keen to push the next release, called Lucid Lynx, or 10.4 LTS (Long Term Support). To help the push, they have published a number of badges for websites.

Here are all of them, since I love Ubuntu so much

<disclosure>I am a PS3, PSP, PC and Wii gamer.</disclosure>

That's a lot of Gaming Companies.

To manually get a minimal install of Ubuntu to auto-mount a USB drive at boot:

First off, you need command line access (also called The Terminal) to your installation and also you need to boot WITHOUT your USB drive connected. So, shutdown your box and then disconnect your USB drive. Now restart the box. Then, when XBMC has loaded, press Alt and F7 together, which should bring up a new Terminal screen with a log in.

Then log in using your username and password that you set up when you installed Ubuntu.

Next you need to type the following:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

This basically prints out the system log as it changes. Once you have typed this, plug in your USB drive. You should see a load of new stuff being printed in your terminal, this is the Ubuntu system recognising and loading your USB drive (though not mounting it). You should see something like this:


Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.616121] usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.750917] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.752477] scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.752815] usb-storage: device found at 5
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.752820] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.753513] usb-storage: device scan complete
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.754606] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WDC WD16 00AABB-56PUA0    7H00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.755793] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.756402] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 312581808 512-byte logical blocks: (160 GB/149 GiB)
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.757163] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.757171] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.757176] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.761108] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.761119]  sdb: sdb1
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.774572] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.774583] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

You want to look out for the reference to “[sd*]“, in my case it is [sdb]. This is the name that Ubuntu has given to your USB drive.

Next stop the tail command, so press:

Ctrl and C

This stops the tail command, then type the following:

sudo blkid

You will have to enter your password. This should give you something like the following:

/dev/sda1: UUID="1024B74F24B73696" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="015273a3-e1a8-4d53-867f-ffec83b3df60" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda6: UUID="50b2512a-4d07-4a83-860e-be608a5b2cb7" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="" UUID="48D3-B1C9" TYPE="vfat"

What you see should be different from this. This basically lists all the drives attached to your system, alongside two important pieces of info, the drives UUID number and what the drive is formatted as. You need to find the reference to the “sd*” that you found out earlier, so in my case it is /dev/sdb1. Then, make a note of the UUID number and the TYPE as well, in my case it is vfat.

So, now we know where our USB drive is and what it is called.

Next, we want to tell Ubuntu to automount it each time it boots.

So, you need to edit the /etc/fstab file that tells Ubuntu what drives to mount at boot. Be careful here, don’t delete or change anything that is already in this file, since it will stop your device from booting. It is ok to add new stuff to this file however. To be safe, we shall make a backup of the /etc/fstab file, just incase we mess up. If we do mess up, simple copy this backup over the /etc/fstab file and reboot and everything will be back as we found it. So, to make a backup simple type:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstabackup

This copies the /etc/fstab file to /etc/fstabackup, which we can use as a backup.

To edit the /etc/fstab file, you need to use the command line Text editor called Vi ([url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi[/url] and [url]http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html[/url]) I would recommend reading about it first, since it is a bit of an arse to use in Terminal mode.

Start Vi to edit your file using:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

Use your arrow keys to move down to the very end of the file. Then press “a” to Append stuff to the end of the file. Press Return to start a new line and then type the following:

UUID=YOURUUIDNUMBERHERE /home/xbmc/usb vfat defaults 0 0

Add your own UUID number after the = and change the TYPE if yours wasn’t vfat. /home/xbmc/usb is where you will be mounting your USB drive, this can be anything you want, but to make your life easy, since XBMC defaults to showing your home directory in the file browser, put it under your home directory, so in my case, the main user on my box is xbmc, so I use /home/xbmc/usb.

Press Enter again after typing that, then press Escape, then press and hold Shift and press Z twice, this saves and exits Vi.

Next, you need to make the folder that the drive will be mounted in, so type:

mkdir /home/xbmc/usb

Replace /home/xbmc/usb with whatever you put in the /etc/fstab file earlier.

Finally, that is it. Hopefully, if all went well, you can now simply reboot, with your USB drive attached, and the drive will be found at /home/xbmc/usb which you can navigate to from XBMC.

Best of luck!!

It comes with a horribly stripped down version of Ubuntu 8.04 from Dell pre-installed. Luckily, however, that can be ripped out and a nice new install of 9.04 can take its place and it all works wonderfully….except the touchpad. To save space, Dell has used a horrible touchpad that integrates the two left and right mouse buttons into the touchpad itself, so when you go to click on something, you actualy end up moving the mouse at the same time. I was amazed that no one mentioned this in any of the reviews about the mini 10v, I guess everyone was embarrassed since they thought it was just them and they had fat fingers! Luckily, the Open Source Ubuntu community being what it is, there is a fix out there.

If you follow this post there is a clear step-by-step guide telling you how to download some specialised drivers for the touchpad that disable the lower portion of the touchpad, so that it works just as a left and right mouse button and not as part of the touchpad. THANK YOU. My Wife was getting ready to throw her netbook out the window until I found that fix. Be warned though, it only works on the 9.04 (and hopefully later) versions of Ubuntu and not on the version of Ubuntu that comes pre-installed, so you will have to install a new normal version of Ubuntu from their website first (though this is a simple process). I hope this helps some one else and allows them to love their Mini 10v, not hate it!

Now, after doing a lot of searching, sadly it seems there isn’t The best solution seems to be to use Windows Standby/Hibernate. But this is kinda impracitcal, since I want to use the computer after I have saved the session. Another option seemed to be TwinsPlay which has a Session Save feature, but this seemed to crash my computer and kill Windows Explorer so that was out. Another option was SmartClose however, this only managed to save the running programs, but not the actual files those programs had open (so it would save and restore OpenOffice, but not the XLS file that OpenOffice actually had open). So once again, this was no real use. My final option was Microsoft Research’s own GroupBar. Sadly though, this also only saved and restored the running program, not the file that that had open.

GroupBar

So, I am kinda stuck My only alternative is to create a batch file to do this, so I would create a new text file, put in the following commands, as an example:

start /d C:\Windows\System32\ calc.exe
start /d "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" firefox.exe https://www.bankofamerica.com
start /d C:\finance\spreadsheets budget.xls

And then save it as start.bat (thanks to watchingthenet). But this is hardly the best solution. I am sure there is a better solution out there and if anyone knows it, hit me up in the comments (I recon Autohotkey can do this, but I don’t know where to start).

fsck.ext3: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks…

fsck.ext3: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdc1

fsck died with exit code 8

After some rooting around, it turns out to be an error on my part. It is all down to my /etc/fstab file (a text file which tells Ubuntu how and where to mount all the hard drives in your system). A while ago, Ubuntu changed the way it records drives details, whereas it use to use /dev/sdX to refer to a drive (with X being a-z) it now uses UUIDs instead. These are unique ID numbers that the system gives to a drive. It changed from /dev/sdX to UUID since occasionally the sdX number would change upon a reboot.

This was exactly what was happening to me. In my fstab file I used /dev/sdc1 to refer to one USB hard drive, and a UUID to refer to another. fstab correctly mounted the UUID drive, but the /dev/sdc1 had changed from the original USB drive it referred to, to the same USB drive that I mounted via the UUID number, thus it failed to mount. When fsck (Ubuntu’s file checking program) runs, it uses fstab to find out info about the hard drives you have. If you have a situation like mine where two entries where referring to the same hard drive, fsck freaks out and dies, thus the error.

To fix this, you need to edit your fstab. Now, if you are lucky, you can simply type EXIT at the prompt you get when this error occurs and the system will boot up. If not, I’d recommend using an Ubuntu LiveCD to boot up the system and then edit your fstab file.

So, open /etc/fstab in a text editor, make sure you use a user with the correct privileges to do this. Then, open a command prompt and type

sudo fdisk -l

This will list all your hard drives, allowing you to identify them. Next, type:

sudo blkid

This will list all your hard drives and their UUID numbers.

Using the info from the first command, fdisk and the UUID number from the second command, blkid, you can work out which device has which UUID number. Then make sure in your /etc/fstab file, you refer to devices using UUID=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX instead of /dev/sdXX.

This way, your disks will always mount correctly and you shouldn’t get anymore fsck errors on boot, well until your hard drive dies lol!

It will be one thing and one thing only, a beautifully quick and simple Web Browsing Platform. It will load in seconds and present you with the Chrome Browser, allowing you to access the web and all the Web Services that are out there in no time at all. Being installed on your own hardware means that you have the added bonus of local storage, allowing you to work offline when you have no internet access.

Google Chrome OS

It will no doubt feature a version of Google Gears, so you will be able to run Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheet and maybe even some variant of Google Maps offline. It will work in the same way that Chrome does, separating all running programs from the underlying Kernel, ensuring that viruses and malware simply can’t infect the base system. It will allow you to install Google Gadget-type applications only, it wont allow you to run many other apps, since that is not what it is designed for (unless those apps are modified to work as a Desktop Gadget) – we will no doubt see a massive fight to develop a Google Desktop Gadget Wrapper allowing you to run Windows, MacOS and Linux apps (these things will be like a Gadget version of Wine on Linux).

It will ofcourse intergrate with Google Search, allowing you to easily visualise all your locally stored content, to find anything quickly (as such you might not even need a file system as we know it with a folder heirachy, since every item will be pre-tagged and easily accessbile via a nice simple tag/timeline/type UI. It will also intergrate with on-line storage, allowing you to remotely store your settings and apps, so you can log into your Chrome OS account from any H/W that has Chrome OS installed on it. On-line storage of all your local content will be available in a professional version for a monthly fee, allowing you to access your locally stored content from any Chrome OS.

A lot of people will be disappointed that they can’t load the apps they are use to and they can’t get certain peripherals to work initially. But then these people are missing the point of Chrome OS. It is an alternative to Windows and the others, for those that live their life on-line, need quick access to Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and more and don’t use normal off-line applications.

Being Open Source, a million and one variants of the Chrome OS will begin in ernest, some trying to merge it with Ubuntu, others trying to add a Windows compatibility layer via Wine. Many of these will die within the first ten months, a few with some clever ideas will keep going.

Just expect there to be lots of moaning and whining from early adopters who don’t understand what it is all about, but expect Google to produce an amazingly stable, fast platform allowing you to browse the web and be very very impressed.

For example, this morning, Vista was moaning at me that it had some updates to install, but as I had some work to do, I clicked on the Postpone button. Ten minutes later up popped the reminder again and I clicked on Postpone again, but this time selected 4 hours. Obviously Vista didn’t like this, because, ten minutes later, up popped a command prompt, all my programs closed (giving me no time to save) and Vista logged off to install updates…….and then it BSOD….nice one Microsoft

After an automatic restart, a few seconds of some weird looking command prompt view, Vista loaded in Safe Mode and it informed me it had suffered an unexpected shutdown and that updates had failed to install. Hmm, you don’t say.