Alan
Published March 19, 2011 | 
I’ve had a few problems getting the foot pedals working correctly with POD Farm 2 and I think I’ve finally solved my problem. I’m using Windows 7 and it seems as though if I launch POD Farm after my computer has been on Sleep/Hibernate, POD Farm will totally refuse to recognise and accept the input from my pedals, which are connected via 1/4 inch jacks to the back of my UX2. The only solution I’ve found so far is to totally reboot my computer which is a bit of a pain, but it does work.
The following video (not created be me) outlines how to go about setting it up inside POD Farm, and a quick Google search will reveal plenty more on YouTube and other sites, so I’m not going to go through how to do that. If you do get stuck though, please leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to help out if I can.
Published February 18, 2011 | Since my last post about the ZTE Blade went down quite well, I thought I would post a little bit on the latest changes for owners of the Blade, in particular the first steps towards running CyanogenMod on the Blade.
If you’re not familiar, CyanogenMod (CM) is a ROM based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which adds additional features, enhancements and overall improvements both to performance and reliability over the stock ROMs. What’s so special about Cyanogen, at least to Blade users, is that unlike the previous ROMs we’ve been used to which have been custom made and designed specifically for the Blade, CyanogenMod has been compiled for and run on numerous devices from HTC, Google, Samsung etc. From the CyanogenMod site:
CyanogenMod (pronounced sigh-AN-oh-jen-mod), is a customized, aftermarket firmware distribution for several Android devices […] Based on the Android Open Source Project, CyanogenMod is designed to increase performance and reliability over Android-based ROMs released by vendors and carriers such as Google, T-Mobile, HTC, etc. CyanogenMod also offers a variety features & enhancements that are not currently found in these versions of Android.
The most recent version of CyanogenMod is 7 (CM7) , which made ‘Release Candidate’ status a few days ago. This version is based off Android 2.3.2 so satisfies the demand for a Gingerbread ROM for the Blade.
Posted in Uncategorized | 
android, CyanogenMod, Gingerbread, Orange San Francisco, zte blade | 
Leave a commentPublished February 1, 2011 | I’ve just finished migrating multiple partitions from a series of old hard drives onto brand new 2TB disks. I created the new partitions on my new HDDs and then used dd, or more specifically ddrescue, to copy the partition data over. When I booted into Windows though, the partitions were still showing as being their old sizes from when they were on the old HDDs. I made the (wrong) assumption that Windows would automatically correct it when it detected there was a discrepancy between the partition table and the indications within the partition.
I tried chkdsk and chkntfs to run and schedule Windows’ disk checker, but this found nothing of any particular interest and didn’t fix my problem. The solution I found was to use a tool like parted (or gparted) and shrink the partitions down by some arbitrary value (1MB in my case) , reboot, and run chkdsk again. This will hopefully change the size of the partition to be correct in Windows. Note that the disk management in Windows doesn’t seem to like to shrink the drives and fired back an error whenever I attempted it; I had to boot into gparted to resize them.
As they were only partitions I had used for archived files and such, I think a better solution in future would be to copy the files over, retaining permissions etc., rather than copy the raw data from the partition directly.
Published January 29, 2011 | I’ve seen a fair few awful translations on the back of Chinese products, but this CD/DVD cleaner from DealExtreme is about the worst yet (click to enlarge image)
… and that’s not even the worst of it. I’ll have to do a video of what the DVD actually contains sometime.
Published January 26, 2011 | I recently had the need to disassemble my Maxtor Basics external 640GB hard drive. I was looking for a way to find out what was on a spare hard drive and not having an external SATA dock handy, I decided to strip this external drive down. A quick Google search found this Australian site with a great guide on how to disassemble the drive although it lacks detail and pictures.
I’ve taken pictures of various points in the diassembly process and hopefully I can give a few tips along the way to those looking to disassemble the drive. Continue reading
Published January 5, 2011 | Update 2011/10/13: Thanks to verg0′s update, I’ve taken another glance at this. Looks like there’s been some progress since I last checked! XP seems to be running pretty well, and apparently Server 2003 runs even better. I’m happy with Ubuntu for the time being, but those adventurous enough will be wanting to check out these jogglerwiki.com threads: release: jogglerxp foshiz edition (image up)plus revised and Windows Server 2003 so far. Please feel free to leave me a comment and let me know how you get on. Good luck!
I love my O2 Joggler. I bought it for £50 about a year ago fully intending to use it as a small bedside internet radio and alarm clock but with thanks to the modding community, it’s now running a fully functional web browser and media streamer as well as having the option to boot into a full desktop environement (Ubuntu Linux at the moment).
There’s one thing that’s always been missing though, and that’s the option to run Microsoft Windows. Sure, Linux is great on the Joggler and with a few tweaks here and there, it could almost serve as a backup PC thanks to it’s 1.3GHz Atom and 512MB RAM, but there’s a time when you find yourself missing Windows. I didn’t expect this endeavour to make any progress as despite having a great community working on bringing the most out of the Joggler and with it having specs similar to a netbook PC, there’s a few fundamental differences that make running Windows more difficult than might be expected.
I am now pleased to say that after quite a few months of inactivity, there has been a great advance in getting Windows to run on the Joggler, and a video of Windows XP successfully running has been seen floating around the Chinese community hi-pda.com (you may need to register to see the post + images). It looks like it’s missing some functionality (mostly driver issues) and from what I understand, instructions on how to get this running on your own Joggler aren’t freely available. But hey! It’s progress!
You can watch a crude video of Windows XP booting on the Joggler here.
I hope that when I next update this, I’ll be able to show Windows XP booting on my Joggler but in the meantime, you can probably get up to date information from the hi-pda thread (see above) or at the joggler.info forums, or more specifically this thread.
Published December 22, 2010 | As an introduction to the world of Android smartphones (and as a replacement for my aging Nokia N95), I treated myself to a San Francisco phone from Orange.
Although I’m not going to give a full review (I want to wait until I’ve had the opportunity to play with the phone a bit more), I’ve got a few thoughts and pointers to give to any new owners or anyone who is planning to get one.
First impressions
Although it’s only £100, the phone should still be pretty snappy when navigating through the interface. Despite only having a 600 MHz processor ( a lot of the higherend – more expensive – Android phones can be expected to have ~ 1GHz processors), you can expect it to perform admirably despite what you throw at it. In short: Angry Birds will work quite well.
The build quality is fine although the back cover and the power button could be a little sturdier. I wouldn’t want to push it by popping the back off too often or pressing the power button too hard. A turbosim / dual-sim adapter may work, but there’s not a lot of room to work with. Continue reading
Published April 23, 2010 | 
My good friend Adam has just written to let me know about a little tutorial he’s put together showing how to install a near enough fully working copy of android running natively on the Apple iPhone 2G. The original source is http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com so credit to them for getting the whole thing working.
This is something I’m actually quite excited about. I’ve got it running myself and to be able to use WiFi and even make calls from Android is a huge deal.
If you want to try installing Android on your iPhone, be sure to check out Adam’s blog post which has the full guide and little tips and tricks to make sure your installation goes smoothly.
Published March 30, 2010 | Just a quick one here.
If you’ve found that the Windows games that come bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7 no longer animate, it’s likely that you’ve tweaked with the options that determine the balance between visual effects and performance in Windows.
To fix this, press the Windows Key + Pause/Break simultaneously to bring up the System window. Select Advanced system settings from the options on the left and choose the top Settings button under Performance. On the visual effects tab, ensure that Animate controls and elements inside windows is checked and click Ok.
This will restore animations in games such as Solitaire, Freecell and Spider Solitaire at the expense of also enabling animated windows controls in other applications.
Published March 29, 2010 | I’ve been a Symbian user for a long time now. My previous 3 phones have all been Symbian powered Nokia phones so I’ve installed countless amounts of applications over the years. Here’s my top 15 FREE S60 applications and how you can download them too.
