Update your Android G1 to Cupcake without the wait

May 23, 2009 – 9:53 am

Problem: I got the T-Mobile G1 (Android) because of the open-source engine behind it.  I wanted a phone that would continue to be updated and include features wanted by lots of users, as opposed to those features only allowed by the manufacturer (e.g. Apple’s iPhone). I have been disappointed with T-Mobiles schedule of updates (lots of posts out there say that Cupcake was scheduled for January 2009) and tired of waiting for the Over the Air (OTA) update, so I decided to take the plunge and root my phone so that I could update it with whatever I wanted, whenever.

Quick Solution: Rooting your phone is actually much, much easier than I thought it would be.  The two excellent guides that I used are Android and Me’s G1 rooting article and xda-developer’s G1 rooting article. Once you have rooted your phone, you can manually update to Cupcake (Android 1.5) without waiting for the OTA update.

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Connect your Xbox to the Internet using your Mac

April 4, 2009 – 3:23 pm

Problem: Many instructions that I have found to connect your Xbox to the Internet using your Mac (with Airport and Ethernet) did not work for me.  I experienced an interesting problem while following these other instructions, and managed to find a solution.

Quick Solution: Follow other instructions on the Internet, but make sure that your Mac’s Ethernet address is manually set to “192.168.2.1″ with a subnet mask of “255.255.255.0″.

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T-Mobile G1 (Android) Battery Life

February 28, 2009 – 1:54 pm

Problem: I recently got the T-Mobile G1 (by HTC) that runs the Android operating system.  For the first few days, I was sorely disappointed in the battery life.

Quick Solution: I found that after a few days/weeks of normal use, the battery indications were more reliable and appeared to last longer.  Possible reasons include power-saving practices and charging.

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Android Features: The Good and the Wanted

February 28, 2009 – 1:08 pm

Problem: The Android operating system for mobile phones has a great deal of potential.  However, a lot of this potential has not yet been tapped.  This post identifies my wantings with regard to Android. I will keep updating this post as I find new items to address.

Android is slow when loading Home screen, SMS, and other Apps

February 28, 2009 – 11:22 am

Problem: after a few days, my Android phone transitions to the Home screen very slowly (sometimes taking >10 seconds). Other apps also seem to be slower.

Quick Answer: Try clearing some of the system memory.

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Moving a Parallels Desktop for Mac Virtual Machine to Boot Camp to be used by Parallels

December 18, 2008 – 12:34 pm

Problem: I need to move my Windows XP Virtual machine to a Boot Camp installation so that I can boot straight into Windows.

Quick Answer: Still working on it…

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Macintosh iWork ‘08 Numbers is a Real Pain

May 23, 2008 – 5:16 pm

Usually I post articles that describe how to get around a problem that I had, but this is just about how frustrated I am with Apple’s Numbers, part of the iWork ‘08 suite.

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An ssh problem when trying to log in

May 22, 2008 – 1:08 pm

Problem:  I have a computer running Ubunutu (Linux) and I needed to ssh into it for some MySQL management.  I set up the ssh server, and was able to enter my username and password, but would be denied because of a wrong username/password combination.

Quick Solution: Even if your username includes a mix of capital and lowercase letters, you should use all lowercase when using terminal.

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Keeping Track of Elapsed Time in Python

May 20, 2008 – 7:20 pm

This article shows how to put a few lines of python code into your python script so you can tell how long the script has been running, or how long a certain part of the task took to run.

The Quick Answer: For the most accurrate time elapsed, use the time module and make 2 time.time() objects.  The difference between these objects is the time elapsed. Do not use time.clock().

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Get rid of WordPress messing with your quotes while writing code

May 1, 2008 – 10:45 pm

Problem: Recently I was writing an article where I posted some python code.  Using WordPress, I was switching between HTML/Code view and “Visual” view.  Every time that I switched, the WordPress editor would change some of my code, namely the quotes.  I ended up with something that looked like this:

Solution: Not exactly sure, but it seems to have stopped.

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