Category: Techspeak

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MercRX 2010.1

This year’s first Mercury Retrograde is turning out to be a doozy. Some roadblocks are finally giving way (getting things underway with the coffee shop), other delays are springing up (from the construction taking place just before my favorite bike paths to the digging in the street outside my office), to a long lost friend, with whom I haven’t corresponded in well over a year returning, to all sorts of computer and communications breakdowns, as is typical of this time of year.
At least it’s predictable.

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Book Review: The Facebook Era by Clara Shih

Last month, I read The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. It is somewhat larger and more up to date than “I’m on Facebook Now What???” Although I liked it, like the previous Facebook book, I found that it failed to adequately address the issue of social networking security and, like just about any “guides” to “success,” unless you have your killer product, app, service, etc., already, this book won’t do you any good until you do. Also, due to the recent Facebook redesign, certain aspects of? this book no longer apply or need to be updated.

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Quickly Determine What Version of Ubuntu You Have

If you have several machines running Ubuntu, or several versions installed on the same machine, you may, like me, sometimes forget what version you have are running presently. A quick and easy way to do this is with the following command:
lsb_release -a
An example of the output on my system is as follows:
peter@peeeter-karmic:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:?? ?Ubuntu 9.10
Release:?? ???? 9.10
Codename:?? ??? karmic

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It's Time To Be Lucid

Yesterday, while fiddling with my eeePC and attempting to install Crunchbang on an SD card, I accidentally nuked my GRUB config. Note to self: GRUB and GRUB2 = Oil and water. I started to look at the process of repairing the dreaded GRUB error 21, and then decided that this was a good opportunity to just try Lucid Lynx alpha 1. After all, I have a separate /home partition and my machine was already not booting, so what did I have to lose? Continue reading “It's Time To Be Lucid”

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Nokia e71 – Phone Startup Failed. Contact Retailer.

That’s what my Nokia said to me today. “Phone startup failed. Contact Retailer.” Swell. I tried several suggestions that I found on the Internet, mostly “reset the phone,” (which I could not do, since I couldn’t even boot it) and “press 3, #, and the green button while powering it on” (no effect) or “press 3, *, and the green button (SEND/ANSWER) while powering it on (also no effect). I also tried booting it with and without the SIM card (no change).
Finally, I removed not only the SIM card but also the memory card, and powered it back on normally. It gave me the brand new startup configuration screen, and the phone’s alive again. Reinserting the memory card makes the phone not start up, and removing it allows it to start normally. So… bad memory card? I guess so. I’ll try formatting it again and seeing if that helps. For now, I need to remove the memory card in order for my phone to start up. Annoying, but I can work around it.

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Cell Hell

On Saturday night I lost my iPhone. Fortunately it was found (yay!). Unfortunately, it doesn’t work anymore. After months of terrible battery life, now it won’t power up at all, despite my best efforts and those of Apple tech support. To add insult to injury, my Nokia e71, which was working fine, now won’t start up either, and tells me to “Contact retailer.” Wonderful.
Fortunately Apple is sending an advance exchange replacement iPhone, thanks to my buying AppleCare.
In short, don’t try calling me on my cell any time in the next few days.