Palm Pre Plus - best way to open the battery door

I know this is not rocket science but I love my gadgets and treat them like babies. So there is always a best way of handling them.

Palm Pre plus's battery door is slightly flimsy and opening it is kinda tricky. The following three steps however make it very simple.

1. push bottom button/release to open up the battery door slightly
2. slide a fingernail (or card) up one side (longer side) of the phone under the door opening; at about halfway you'll hear a "click" of the latch releasing.
3. do the same on the other side.

I wish I am able to start using my Palm Pre Plus soon....

I picked up the above from...
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre-pre-plus/182667-how-do-you-remove-battery-cover.html

My Blackbeauty is getting NATTYer and giving me a hard time

As soon as I heard that Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu's latest distro was to be launched on April 28th, 2011, I was keenly waiting for the same. I jokingly asked an expert (@shekharg) if he could guess why I was waiting for April 28th. I thought it would be a piece of cake for him but he could not guess it. I was not sad but happier because he also added that he likes to work with OSs/ tools/ gadgets that have bugs. He is not interested in Linux anymore because everything works. I wonder what OS is he working with these days ;)

But my journey from 10.10 to 11.04 was not as smooth as I had expected (or experienced with past upgrades).

1. I first tried upgrading via the 'update manager'. It took over 3 hours but failed with some error message.
2. Then I started searching for an 'alternate CD image'. In past, alternate CD is what I used for upgrading via CD media. Surprisingly I could not find the latest release (I am sure it must be there somewhere.... but the point is that I could  not find it)
3. With no other option I used the standard desktop CD image (for 64 bit machines) for installation.
4. Thanks to past expert advice from (@kbhargava) I have always kept the /home directory on a separate partition. So, it was easy for me to do a fresh install without losing my data (or even fear of loosing my data)
5. Unity desktop environment is a big difference in 11.04. As a result, my old user profile was not working smoothly enough. In past, every upgrade was so smooth that I was back to a fully functional machine with all settings/ preferences preserved within 2 hours.
6. I finally had to create a new user profile and shift the data manually. This meant that I would not be able to preserve settings/ preferences/ passwords etc.

Overall, the upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04 (for me) has not been as smooth as past upgrades. I am also not sure if unity desktop environment is far better but it is certainly fresh. I did notice one mac-like feature (Menu for every app window is on the top bar as on macs). But I am happy using this latest version of Ubuntu :))

Iphone 3gs: transferring contacts from old phone without iTunes or Windows

After using a Nokia E61i for a very long time, I have moved on to an Iphone 3gs.

Since I picked up the phone from USA, it was locked to a US carrier.

FIRST CHALLENGE: unlock it to use it on Vodafone in India.
My phone had Base Band 5.14.x and therefore it was not unlockable....till Apple realease iOS 4.2.1 and till @sherif_hashim & @MuscleNerd released Redsn0w 0.9.6b5. see this http://bit.ly/eVAaVa

NEXT CHALLENGE : I had to transfer all my contacts from Nokia E61i to iPhone.

While this may sound very easy to most, I wanted to do this without having to boot into windows.  I use Ubuntu so I donot have iTunes or Outlook that I can sync my iPhone directly to.

Surprisingly, this was far easier than I had thought.

1. I copied all contacts on E61i onto a microsUSB card inside the phone. In Addressbook, Mark All contacts and then copy them to the card. All options are there in the addressbook menu.
2. Connected the phone to the computer using a connector cable (that came along with the Nokia phone). On connection, phone asked to choose one of the two modes - sync or data transfer. I chose Data Tansfer mode on the phone. Now the microusb card was be accessible on the computer.
3. Searched for contacts folder on the card. It had a large number of vcfs (one for every contact. Copied the same to my laptop. Remeber, I am on Ubuntu, so collated all the vcfs together using the command
   

   cat *.vcf > all_in_one.vcf

   Now I had one vcf file that had all my contacts
   
4. Now I logged into my gmail account on the web >> contacts >> Chose Import from file and pointed it to the all_in_one.vcf file. It copied all contacts to my gmail account
5. I setup my gmail account on iPhone via Exchange option. Followed the steps here. http://bit.ly/gDM2Xw 
6. When I synced my mail account on iPhone, all contacts were transferred to my iPhone.

Going forward this will also ensure that all contacts on my phone are regularly backed up on my google account.

Pimping down Firefox : Getting more real estate

I have been using Firefox for a long time. When I tried Google Chrome for the first time, what I found most impressive was the overall real estate that I got. Not only did it offer more space, its also made it look simple because its clutter free. Therefore I decided that I will used Google Chrome going forward. But habbits are difficult to change. Somehow I found myself using Firefox most of the time.

Therefore I decided to 'Pimp down' my Firefox.

Here is what I found effective for myself:

a. Reduce the size of Icons: Right-click on the buttons in navigation toolbar, choose ‘customize’ and check ‘Use Small Icons’ at the bottom.

b. Hide title bar: This is really not required. I used the add on Hide Caption Titlebar Plus (Smart) by DarthMadara. Get it here

c. Hide menu bar: Replace the standard menu bar with a tiny menu popup using Tiny Menu 2.0.2 by Anthony Lieuallen.

Now I have a lot more real estate to play with on my Firefox window.

Sources that I found useful for this:
a. http://bit.ly/9hoM7t
b. http://bit.ly/ctt5sO
c. http://bit.ly/9eADgo

How to view/ convert Windows Meta File (.wmf) in Linux

.wmf image files do not open on Linux. However, installing the following allows conversion of the same to other viewable formats.

libwmf-bin

Steps:

1. On ubuntu, apt-get will install this.
sudo apt-get install libwmf-bin

2. After this, following will convert the file to other formats

convert file.wmf file.png
OR
convert file.wmf file.jpg

Now the file.jpg or file.png file can be easily opened in Gimp or any other tool.

Power of FOSS. This is fantastic....

Stani Michiels designed a coin in Holland using OSS. His design was selected amongst many others (which were made using proprietary, professional and expensive softwares)



Here is what he writes about the technology that he used. Entire post is here.

The whole design was done for 100% with free software. The biggest part consists of custom software in Python, of course within the SPE editor. For the visual power I used PIL and pyCairo. From time to time also Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch helped quite a bit. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines which were running Ubuntu/Debian.In the end I had to collaborate closely on location together with thetechnicians of the Royal Dutch Mint (coin factory). So all the lastbits were done on my Asus Eee PC.(I am still wondering why Asus doesn't offer Ubuntu on its netbooks.)The Eee laptop took a bit longer (30 seconds instead of 3 seconds togenerate a whole coin), but did the job just fine. For looking up thenumber of hits on the internet, I rediscovered Yahoo, which provides a much better apifor automatic querying than its competitors. Of course the jury judgedonly the design and not the software used as others used Maya,Illustrator, ...

CrossOver Linux is free now

I got a mail from CodeWeavers today with a registration code to download CrossOver Linux Pro for free. CodeWeavers programs enable you to run many popular Windows programs, such as Quicken, Microsoft Office, and Photoshop CS2 etc. on your favorite operating system (in my case Ubuntu).

To get a copy of a CrossOver Mac Pro, Crossover Linux Pro, CrossOver Mac Games or CrossOver Linux Games, visit the company's Web site and download the software. You will, eventually, get a deal code that fully enables the software and gets you six-months of support as well.

I would like to use this for:
a. Google chrome (though I am not sure if this with work)
b. some games (specially Spore by Electronic Arts)

You can read more about it here.
ComputerWorld story