Requirements:

• A USB drive of any size.  (I used 1 gig)
• A computer with a BIOS that allows booting from a USB port.
• A Bootable floppy disk or CD. (you can use an old Windows 98 bootable CD or floppy disk for this.
• Any Utility that allows you to create partitions, set active partitions, create a master boot record, and transfer the boot files to the active partition. (I used FORMAT and DOS FDISK that are on the Window 98 CD)

Directions:

Part I:

In your systems BIOS, make the USB drive the first in the drive sequence.

Why?  In this case, fdisk does not allow for a partition to be set as ACTIVE (bootable) unless it is the first drive.  In order for your computer to boot to your OS, your harddrive is set to be the first drive.  This needs to be temporarily changed.

How?  There are three ways to do this.  You only need to do one of the three ways, whichever one works for you.  All of them require that the USB drive be plugged into the PC before you turn the PC on. Also take note of the options you are going to be changing, so when you are done, you can set the system back to the way it was originally.

1. Bios** drive sequence: Depending on your BIOS, there may be a way to change which device the computer looks at first.  If there is, select the USB flash drive as the first in the list.
2. Disable the other drives: In the BIOS, turn your harddrive, to the off or none setting.  Your harddrive might be labeled “Primary Drive 0″  “Auto” or “On” Change it to “off” or “none”
3. Unplugg the hard drive(s): Use this option if your BIOS doesn’t have an option to change the drive sequence or to turn off the hard drive.  Please make sure you know what you are doing here.  If you are not sure exactly how to do this, look it up in google.  Be Aware: Opening your computer case may result in voiding your computer warranty or damaging your hardware.

**  Please note that many BIOSes are different and the wording will vary from one to another.

Part II:

1. Boot the PC from the boot floppy/CD (Windows 98 floppy/CD) into the command prompt with the USB drive plugged in.
2. Once in the command prompt, run fdisk
3. If a primary partition  already exists on the USB Drive, Goto step 4 below.  If it doesn’t or you don’t know, use fdisk to create one.  If for some reason you aren’t able to, make sure that the USB drive is set to be the first in the drive sequence in the BIOS.
4. Use fdisk’s “Set Active Partition” (option 2) to set the primary partition on the USB Drive to Active.
5. Exit fdisk
6. Reboot the PC from the boot floppy/CD (Windows 98 floppy/CD) into the command prompt with the USB flash drive plugged in.
7. At the command prompt enter the following command: dir c: This step is to verify that the C: drive is actually the primary partition on the USB Drive.  Regardless of the result that the command generates, the important thing to note is to make sure that the size of the primary partition on the USB drive is roughly equal to the sum of the empty space and the used space.  Refer to Part I
8. Format and copy the boot files to the primary partition.  At the command prompt, from the directory (on the Windows 98 CD/floppy) where FORMAT.COM is located, enter: format /s c:
9. Run fdisk /mbr This writes the master boot record to the USB drive without altering the partition table information.
10. Restart the PC and choose booting from the USB drive.  If all goes well, you should see a C:> command prompt.
11. Now your flash drive is bootable, however please remember to reset your PC settings back to their original settings.

Last night the folks at Boxee announced the release of a new Boxee alpha.  The top additions to this new alpha are the support for Pandora music streaming, PBS streams, RadioTime, a new API and the video playback is built on the XUL framework.  The XUL framework is the same that Firefox is built on.  Yes, HULU does work.  Good Luck blocking it now.  I just downloaded the alpha release from Boxee.tv and must say it delivers.  Go get it.

http://boxee.tv

Here is a short how to in order to use the new plugins:

Start Boxee and in the left navigation pane scroll down to “Apps Box”.  Along the top of your screen there are four selections, choose the repositories tab and add a new repository.  Type the following in the text field minus the quotes ” dir.boxeehq.com” and select done.  You will now be able to back out and select “New Applications”.  This is where you can add all sorts of new feeds to your Media Player.  Have Fun!

Update: The original text for this tutorial was apparently submitted to me as an exact copy of an article by ah2 at ah2’s universe. Please check out the original article there.

The following are instructions for installing the HP Mini’s Mie interface on Ubuntu. The process is fairly easy but be aware that not everything works as expected yet. You can get most of the functionality of the new interface working but in my experience things like the special book marking shortcut added to Firefox don’t work. All in all the HP Mini’s interface is pretty good for small screens.

Warning some features may not work and I ran into an issue where the harbour-launcher used over 50% of the processor.

This instructions were original posted in the Ubuntu forums by wildcard and rafaelcapanema

Download the GTK+ theme, the Firefox theme, and the Thunderbird theme if you want.

The GTK+ theme can be activated through System > Preferences > Appearance (mind you, you don’t need to change the wallpaper, so leave it at the really out-of-place brown), while Firefox should load the theme choosing screen on next load. If it doesn’t, go to Tools > Addons.

Now that that’s over, you’ll need to do some work for getting the launcher.

Firstly, download this, and save it to your home folder. Or anywhere really, but if you’re not that good with Linux you obviously don’t want to.

Now, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal, and put this in:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture --force-depends harbour-launcher_0.78.3_lpia.deb

If the file you just downloaded isn’t in your home folder, then change the last part.

To launch it, press Alt-F2 and type in harbour-launcher. If the launcher didn’t show up, press the Show Desktop button or Ctrl+Alt+D.

But wait! Not everything’s working yet.

For music/pictures, you will need to install elisa. Elisa can be found in your repositories, but don’t install it from there.

You will need to install a number of packages, one after the other.

So here’s a bunch of links. Install them in the order provided.

libpigment0.3-8_0.3.11-1~ppa2-intrepid1-1_i386.deb
python-pgm_0.3.8-1~ppa1-intrepid1-1_i386.deb
python-elisa_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa-plugins-good_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa-plugins-bad_0.5.15.5-0dennis9_all.deb
elisa-plugins-ugly_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb

Whew. Now that that’s over, restart, and press Alt-F2 and type in harbour-launcher. Enjoying it?

Alright, so now, do you want to actually make it auto-start?

Then go to System > Preferences > Sessions, and add a new startup entry, with anything you want as the name, and harbour-launcher as the command.

First off, the Kindle is Amazon’s entry into the ebook reader market.  It joins the Sony PRS-505 Reader which has been around for awhile but, it adds a lot of interesting features such as a free built-in wireless connection that allows you to tap into Amazon’s online bookstore from just about anywhere you can access Sprint’s EVDO cellular data network.

The Kindle is similar to the Sony Reader. The Kindle is 7.5 inches high by 5.3 inches wide by 0.7 inch deep and only weighs 10.3 ounces. That is about the same as your average paper back. Both devices have 4.9-by-3.6-inch (6-inch diagonal), 600 x 800-pixel screens. The screen on both readers uses a technology call E ink. E Ink is an electrophoretic display.

From Wikipedia:

 An electrophoretic display is an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field.

E Ink is a type of Electronic paper display. From Wikipedia:

Electronic paper, also called e-paper, is a display technology designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike a conventional flat panel display, which uses a backlight to illuminate its pixels, electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity, while allowing the image to be changed later.

There are several different technologies to build e-paper, some of which can use plastic substrate and electronics, so that the display is flexible. It is considered more comfortable to read than conventional displays. This is due to the stable image which does not need to be constantly refreshed, the large viewing angle, and the fact that it uses reflected ambient light. It has a similar contrast ratio to that of a newspaper and is lightweight and durable, however it still lacks good color reproduction.

One annoyances of E Ink technology is that the screen takes a second to refresh. The result is it tends to blink when you change the page. Amazon has done a good job of minimizing this so it isn’t that distracting but, for those that have not used an E Ink display before, it might cause unnecessary concern. Considering you can read the screen in direct sunlight, the trade-off seems worth it.

Amazon opted not to use a backlight which might strain the eyes during long sessions. The result is that you’ll need a well lit reading environment just like you would with a real book. The Kindle has a 185 MB of user-accessible internal memory and is expandable with the use of SD cards. Memory cards up to 4GB are supported. That is a lot of books. The Kindle also supports playing MP3s and Audible audio books. The MP3 player is a little restricted in that you can’t select which MP3 to play. It will only play them randomly. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future firmware update but, for now, that feature is pretty useless.

Navigating the Kindle interface is pretty easy. There is a home button that takes you to the main list page of your content.  There is a scroll wheel that you can use to select lines of text and menu items along with next page buttons on both sides of the device. There is a pervious page button on the left side and back button on the right. Altogether, navigating is pretty intuitive. When you are viewing the home page, a click of the scroll wheel allows you to sort the list of your content by author, date, or title and to show just books or periodicals. You can bookmark key passages of what you’re reading, and (using the keyboard), make, edit, and export notes. The Kindle also saves your place when reading anything, so you can always pick up where you left off. One of better features is the built in dictionary. You can use the scroll wheel to select a line of text on the page. By default the dictionary will look up all the words on a selected line so you don’t have to worry about selecting a specific word or using the keyboard.

One of the Kindle’s main advantages over the Sony reader is the built in EVDO cell connection. This is included mainly to allow you to download purchased content from Amazon without the need for a computer or too be in range of a Wi-Fi network. Luckily, there is no charge for this connection and Amazon was nice enough to include a basic web browser. The browser is fairly slow and doesn’t handle link and image rich web pages very well but, if all your are looking for is a quick answer, it does the job. One of the main features of the built in browser is the direct access to Wikipedia. Basically you have an entire encyclopedia with you at all times. Another cool feature is by pressing Alt + 1 you are taken to google maps which, in conjunction with cell triangulation, using the built it radio, can roughly show you where you are. Sort of a poor man’s GPS.

Downloading books wirelessly to the Kindle is generally a very pleasant experience. You can search for titles or authors in the Kindle Store or scroll through the national and Kindle bestsellers lists (Amazon is currently offering more than 90,000 titles, including 90 percent of the current New York Times bestsellers).

Kindle is compatible with a few file types. Most files have to be converted. Amazon provides you two ways to convert your files: you can either send attachments wirelessly to the device’s personal e-mail address, which will cost you $.10 per attachment or you can send them to a “free” Kindle e-mail address that you access via your Windows or Mac OS computer and then transfer the converted files to your Kindle manually via USB.

By default the Amazon Kindle supports the following formats:

The user interface appears to work just fine but, there are some issues with video and audio coding.  Check out the thread on Internettablettalk.

Read The Thread

Here’s the simple nuts and bolts to make this work with your system.  The Software is simply an application for your N800 or 810 and a server application to be installed on your mythfrontend. 

Mythetomer N800/810 app: 

To install the Internet tablet program, navigate to this page from your Tablet and click the download link below.  Follow the prompts.  Easy.

Download Mythetomer app

Server App:

On your frontend machine open a terminal window and type in

sudo wget http://netti.nic.fi/~icewood/mythetomer/file.php?file=mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

After the file downloads to your machine type in a terminal window

sudo dpkg -i mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

Done!

You will now need to shutdown your frontend if you haven’t already and start the mythetomer server.  To do this simply open a terminal window and type “mythetomer” and press enter.  Add a & sign at the end to run it in the background otherwise don’t close the terminal window or the server will stop.

I set mine up last night using the WLAN in my home and it works great.  The software gives you a remote control surface on you IT with number pad, direction arrows, menu and esc buttons, volume and channel up/down, and player controls such as play, pause, skip forward and back.  I have not tried the bluetooth connection as of yet cause I really have no need too but I might play with it a little later to see what happens.  The performance of the software is top notch, easy interface , no lag on button push and pretty steady connection.  I did have an issue once where the server croaked and the N800 lost its connection.  This required me to shutdown the frontend and restart the mythetomer server which to say the least very frustrating.  I am currently working on a Cron job to monitor the status of the mythetomer server. 

Overall its a good piece of tech gadgetry available for download.  I like it and it works much better than my Lirc based machine remote.  Give it a whirl.

Mythetomer Website

PDFCrack is a GNU/Linux application (or any other POSIX-compatible system) tool for recovering passwords and content from PDF-files. It is small, command line driven, and without external dependencies. PDFCrack is released under GPL.

Install pdfcrack on Ubuntu by typing:
sudo aptitude install pdfcrack

Run a quick benchmark by entering the following at the command line:
pdfcrack -b

Results:

Benchmark: Average Speed (calls / second):
MD5: 2616026.7
MD5_50 (fast): 146928.3
MD5_50 (slow): 107780.3

RC4 (40, static): 863985.7
RC4 (40, no check): 864661.2
RC4 (128, no check): 802203.0

Benchmark: Average Speed (passwords / second):
PDF (40, user): 653588.2
PDF (40, owner): 322317.1
PDF (40, owner, fast): 714278.6

PDF (128, user): 30861.1
PDF (128, owner): 14687.8
PDF (128, owner, fast): 30861.1

Use pdfcrack to crack an encrypted pdf-file by typing:

pdfcrack test.pdf

CUPERTINO, California—March 6, 2008—Apple® today previewed its iPhone™ 2.0 software, scheduled for release this June, and announced the immediate availability of a beta release of the software to selected developers and enterprise customers. The iPhone 2.0 beta release includes both the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) as well as new enterprise features such as support for Microsoft Exchange Activesync to provide secure, over-the-air push email, contacts and calendars as well as remote wipe, and the addition of Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to private corporate networks.

Find out more from Apple about firmware 2.0 here

The pwnage tool is very easy to use. First you need to back up all your iphone data using itunes.

After backing up your data, connect the iphone, select the firmware from your hard drive and pwnage will upload the new firmware to the iPhone. The tool takes care of the rest. Now you can wet yourself, turn up the volume on your favorite Sesame Street album or do whatever it is you do when you get excited.

Get your pwnage tool here.

If you are having trouble or want more info on installing the pwnage tool, check out Engadgets video.

Option One The Shuttle KPC

Since CES this year I have been keeping an eye on the Shuttle KPC. The KPC is powered by a 1.8GHz Celeron 430 which, according to the reviews, can hold it’s own and often beat a 3.2 GHz P4. Sounds like a good rig.

The KPC comes with 512MB of memory included but, this can be upgraded to a maximum of 2GB. It also includes an integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 which is more then enough for a windows manager on a server, and an 80GB hard drive. Seeing there is no optical drive you should at least be able to add a second drive if not a third, although I haven’t been able to confirm this. At the very least it has four USB ports for external drive connections which, should be enough for most people.

A copy of Forsight Linux comes pre-loaded but, I imagine that your are going to want to replace it with a more mainstream distribution. Got Ubuntu?

According to Shuttle, the KPC runs full-tilt at just 55 watts and idles at 33 watts, saving 30 watts more than typical computers. And quiet? You won’t hear the KPC running.

The KPC is suppose to start at $209 but, you’ll have to add a monitor, keyboard, and mouse yourself. I personally hope that the monitor, keyboard, and mouse will only be needed during setup just like the Mac Mini I’m running now. The stability of Linux means that 99.9% of the time you can run a headless server and just remote administrate it.

So I was all set to go this route until I saw a review for the HP 2100 Media Vault on Gizmodo this weekend.

Option Two The HP 2100 Media Vault

The HP 2100 Media Vault (pictured below) could be called the baby brother of the HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server. Both come with 500 GB of storage except the the 2100 uses a Linux based OS and is $300 less. The other difference is the 2100 is a two bay device while the MediaSmart Windows Home Server is a four bay device

I couldn’t find much more information on this device but, my hunch is that as soon this is released, it won’t be long before it is modified into a full blown server by the community. Here is hoping.

Option Three The Apple TV

I bought an Apple TV three weeks after it was released last year. This was the same time that the community figured out how to install OSX on it and turn it into a full blown Mac. Shortly, there after, someone else figured out how to load Linux on the ATV. My ATV has never been connected to my T.V. Instead I have loaded OSX on it, the Indigo home automation suite, mounted it in a media distribution box in the wall in the basement stairwell, and use it to control my entire insteon home automation system. This setup, coupled with a touch screen mounted in my foyer, allows me to control every system in my house from one location or remotely across the web.

During a year of operation this setup has only caused me one problem and that was related to a power outage. The system is now on a UPS. So if you are looking for a low power, 40 watts total, embedded Linux/OSX system then you might want to look into this option. The Apple TV does have only one USB port but, with the addition of a USB hub you can add as many ports as you need. The only real advantage to the Apple T.V. over the first two options is the ability to run OSX which, was a requirement for Indigo.

Each of these three options cost about the same. If you are looking for something that runs out of the box, then the clear choice is the KPC. On the other hand, the HP Media Vault has a lot of potential but, that will depend on the community support and adoption. Finally the Apple TV is hardest option to setup but, if power consumption and the ability to use OSX over Linux is important, you might want to go that route. If anyone has any more options in the $300 and below category, please leave a comment.

Read The Story