Blackberry 8220 and Google apps without data plan works!

I have BB8220 and I do not have any sort of data plan thru TMO. All I have is wifi UMA for data usage. I just love the convenience of checking my mail right after I wake up without going thru the loop of starting up Vista PC, login, Outlook. And my Blackberry Flip works just fine for this purpose. However there are tons of contradicting report about what works and what's not without a data plan.
Here is a breakdown of steps that you need to follow to get Gmail app going.
1) Subscribe to $25 data plan at Tmobile website. This will download the necessary service book entries to your BB device.
2) Call Customer service (speak blackberry in voice prompt and it will take you to the right department). Ask CSR to enable "Blackberry feature enabler" in your phone.
3) Restart phone.
4) Check if Gmail is working fine (it should as you still have data plan on).
5) Cancel data plan (daily charge is about 80 cents).
6) check your Gmail app again.

My BB browser is set to use Hotspot Browser, so it works without any problem. So does Opera mini and GMaps/Gsync. It works fine for me. hope it will do the same for you too. Yahoo apps used to work fine, but for the last few days it is not.

Sending and receiving free fax

FAX is one of the arcane tools that we still have to use at times like a old floppy drive. Unsurprisingly it costs quite a bit to send and receive a fax. For sometime, I used to use faxzero.net for my outgoing fax; but recently switched over to Callcentric.com for my VOIP needs and they handle outgoing fax very well through an ATA adaptor. However receiving fax is not very easy in Callcentric with only one dedicated number (yes, you can purchase another number for fax receiving only for about $3.50). So I use nifty eFax for my incoming fax needs. Unfortunately, free account with eFax does not offer a local number, but that is not a big deal. Efax however loves to install junkware in order to view your fax (they email you a file with .efx extension which must be opened with eFax messenger, and I hate that program). But I found a very old copy of efax messenger that does not happen to install crapware and you can view your .efx files just fine; you can also export your fax to a more common tiff or jpeg format with this program. best of all, this one works absolutely well in 32 bit versions of Vista and Windows XP.

TVpack installation in Vista X86 PC

1. Prepare a machine with clean install of Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
1. The machine will need to meet or exceed the minimum hardware requirements for Windows Vista -http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919183
2. The Windows Vista Service Pack 1 operating system must be Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate (x86 or x64)
3. Following operating system install, do not launch Windows Media Center or go through Windows Media Center Setup
2. Install Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008
1. Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 (x86)
2. Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 (x64)
3. Install the PlayReady PC Runtime
1. PlayReady PC Runtime (x86) - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dadc6bf4-a615-4f23-a7cc-b7569c05d305&DisplayLang=en
2.
PlayReady PC Runtime (x64) - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec9ac8f4-6209-4aea-a302-d9f33a7d4f64&DisplayLang=en
4. Install the following patches from the Download Center
1. KB951685 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/951685) - The video playback application stops responding when you watch video or Live TV on a Windows Vista-based computer
2. KB950754 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950754) - Noticeable problems occur in the video when you use the DirectSound renderer on Windows Vista
5. Install any required or recommended Windows Updates
6. Launch Windows Media Center and go through Windows Media Center Setup

Save the green

Hereby, I am making a pledge that I will go GREEN! I already use double sided printing and use e-statement wherever possible. And I will continue to use my savings for the future.
Linky

T-mobile rocks

After staying with At&T for the last 4 year, I moved to T-mobile this month and I can not be happier in my last 4 days worth of experience. The customer support folks are superb- they way they handle the calls and they way they know what they are doing are very much superlative compared to any other business I have dealt with in last few years. I hope to get a similar level of service once I am out of the 30 days return trial period.
Oh, I forgot to add- a human voice can be reachable in 2 minutes only- no more long term torture of jazzy music for me.

Xming rocks with XFce4

I run a tiny ubuntu server in my home network which basically does it all for me- Squid/Apache/Asterisk/FTP and offcourse as my NAS device through SAMBA. I restored two 10 year old Dell to make a single usable machine with 400MHz P3 processor and 128X3 SDRAM. The machine is slow by any means unless you want to comaper to a 486, but it does the work and it does the work really well for me. That P3 chip sips very little power being a 24W rated processor. I don't think the whole machine does not sip more than 50W daily, but I may be wrong.

Anyway, the point is, while I do most of admin stuff thru ssh, once in a while I really like to get into my servers X-server. From Windows machines, the only free option that really worked for me is Xming. However, Gnome works really slowly even under really stripped down form. What I found that Xfce4 works like a charm. All I have to do is invoke xfce4-session from Xming starting dialogue.

When people will learn to build a decent house?

The fire at this Conshocken Apartment makes me believe that the roofing material used is actually far from fireproof. It amazes me how Mr. Joe Blow spends thousands of dollars on his home without worrying about a bit about firesafe. A safety alarm sure saves life- but at the same time it almost warrants charred home. If average Joe spends more $ initially to build/buy a better home upfront, he can save a ton for future in terms of regular maintenance cost as well as insurance costs.
Its time average Americans realise that cheap wood is no substitute to cement and concrete as building material. Though expensive they are not only long lasting and maintenance free but also least fire friendly. So its time to make the right choice, choose cement and kiln baked bricks for all construction purposes and be assured that you stay in a fire proof home/office and not sitting over a pile of matchsticks waiting to be ignited.

A tiny little hotel guide for Vizag

It all happen on late October, 2006, that Rupa and I have to agree on a place where we will be spending a few very special days of our life. After way too many discussions and net crawling, it was quite clear that we will not be able to visit any of the so called exciting places, keeping in mind of time constraints. Rupa, since beginning, wanted to visit Vizag, but I wanted to go Bharatpur near Delhi. Scarce accommodation made it a no-no for a honeymoon trip. Henceforth, we settled on Vizag. I was lucky that Rupa made all the reservations, all I did was just to be there with her in right time. We booked a room at Punnami Hotel which is owned by APTDC (Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation Ltd.). Through out AP, APTDC maintains quite few hotels in nice locations and if price and quality needs to be balanced, APTDC hotels are by far the best. Rooms are nice, so are the locations. The hotel we stayed at was along the coast of Bay of Bengal and the beach was hardly 5 minutes walk.
The real bummer is, APTDC for some reason chose to be obscure over the web, the only way to get in touch with them is an old fashioned telephone or just be there in person at any of their branch offices. I am posting the details of the phone numbers and rates of Punnami Hotels and package tours from a brochure I got from my hotel. Hope this will help.

Semiful reset of HP PSC1315 series printers

Vuck HP, that's my impression when my PSC printer started giving problem, actually it started denying it's own cartridges. Low and behold, I started online chat with a support tech. Unusally good tech support give this little info, which can be included in manual in the first place.

.......................................
A semi-full reset will do the following:
The user settings to the factory defaults, Language and country settings on some models Reset the All-in-One to the factory default settings by using these instructions:
1. Disconnect and then reconnect the power cord.
2. When the lights begin to flash, press and hold On/Resume and Number of Copies. When only the On/Resume light is flashing, release the buttons. When the On/Resume light is steady, the reset is complete.

Performance of Lexar 2GB 80X Platinum II compact flash card

I am quite impressed as I received the card from Frys today.

The linear read speed is marginally better (500KB/s higher than 1GB Sandisk Ultra II) but the random read speed is almost triple the speed of Sandisk Ultra II card. Whiel the theoratical speed bump is good to brag about, it has marginal or no increase in real life shooting situation with my 20D, most likely becasue 20D is not as fast as the card can offer. In any case, for nine bucks, I consider it a good deal.

Export X to remote machine in Ubuntu

copied from Ubuntu community forum

Displaying Remote X-Windows Applications
== Computing ==
Displaying Remote X-Windows Applications
Thursday, 23 June 2005; Word count: 472
http://www.vyvy.org/blogs/index.php
Suppose that you are working on machine local_client and would like to use an X Windows application which resides on another machine remote_server. There are several ways you can achieve this, and here are the popular ones.

Native Method
This method is native because it uses only 'pure' X windows system to accomplish the task. No security has been taken care. Nonetheless, the method is still useful in many circumstances and it serves as the basis of some other more sophisticated techniques.

First, on the remote machine, set the environment variable DISPLAY to point to the display of the local machine. If you use bash:

[remote_server] $ export DISPLAY=local_client:0.0
Or, if you use C shell:

[remote_server] $ setenv DISPLAY local_client:0.0
The trailing 0.0 is in the form of D.S, which means that the application is to be displayed on screen S of display D. Generally you need 0.0, unless you've set up multiple screens or multiple displays.

Second, allow the remote application to access the local display:

[local_client] $ xhost remote_server
That's all! Start the X applications as usual and they should work properly. E.g.,

[remote_server] $ xclock &
The most common error you'll encounter here is that the application complains some connection problem. For this method to work, the remote machine needs to talk with the TCP port 6000 of the local machine. (In general, TCP port 6000+D for display D.) So, make sure that the firewall of the local machine does not block this traffic. If you use gdm, make sure that you have the following in the configuration file on your local machine, usually at /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf:

[security]
DisallowTCP=false
(/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc comment -nolisten tcp ??)
This lets the X server to listen to TCP connection.


Secure X11 Forwarding
You can do X forwarding over ssh. Simply connect to the remote machine with -X switch:

[local_client] $ ssh -X remote_server
Start the X applications as usual and they should work properly. E.g.,

[remote_server] $ xclock &
You can enable X11 forwarding by default by modifying the local ssh configuration file, usually at /etc/ssh/ssh_config. Specify the following:

ForwardX11 yes
ForwardX11Trusted yes
If it does not work, then probably the remote server has not enabled X11 forwarding. To enable it, modify the remote sshd configuration file, usually at /etc/ssh/sshd_config. (Note that we have (a) ssh_config for the ssh client, and (b) sshd_config for the sshd daemon.) Specify the following:

X11Forwarding yes
Remarks
There are always security impacts when you open more ports or enable more communication channels. So be careful if you use these techniques in a 'risky' environment. For more information, refer to the manual pages of ssh_config and sshd_config. For more techniques on displaying remote X applications, refer to Remote X Apps mini-HOWTO.

Mp3 Encoder support (or the lack of it) from Creative

If you are a user of Creative mp3 players/sounds card, I bet you are also familier with MediaSource suite that Creative ships with their product. Suddenly, after purchasing a that teh newly installed MediaSource player is not allowing me to encode an audio file in mp3 format. What teh heck...I thought I must have done something wrong during installation. A reinstallation did not help much either. Upon digging thru Creative's website it was revealed that Creative stopped supporting mp3 encoder for free and now they want a freaking 10 bucks for a mp3 pack to re-enable this feature.
So here is the quick solution. Install a version of Mediasource player which is pretty old, for example I chose Muvo2. It used to come with an old version of MediaSurce suit. I found this part of audio converter portion of Mediasource version 3.30.21 works flawlessly in XP and also in 64bit version of Vista Ultimate. The hitch is you have to attach some kind of Creative hardware to the system, else it will not install at all.

New hope for cancer patients, Provenge

Cancer- the most dreaded combination of alphabets to civilized human is going to get some fight back. Even though there are few drugs available in the market that fights back to cancer, the path to heeling is very painful, thanks to all sort chemotherapy. Almost all these chemical based drugs have one thing in common- devastating side effects. Patients endure the side effects since life is more important than anything else.
Dendreon Corp's Provenge ( Sipuleucel-T ) is rather unique (see how Provenge works)from the perspective of a cancer drug. Unlike chemotherapy Sipuleucel-T teachs the body to fight against cancer causing antigens. So far Provenge has been successfully tested in prostate cancer cases with a noticeable increase in lifespan of a patient. A FDA review committee reviewed the data presented by Dendreon Corp and the agreed to make a favorable recommendation to FDA towards approval of Provenge, the first immunotherapy to treat cancer.
Dendreon Corp is listed at NASDAQ under ticker symbol DNDN. Stock price is expected to jump 50% on Friday.