Archive for December, 2011
New computer, part 2
New computer
Christmas came early this year, or to be slightly more precise, the Swedish postal service delivered my brand new computer 3 days before Christmas.
Took roughly 2,5 hours to screw it all together. (Yes, yes. I know, I know. I’m really rusty.)
I already knew before hand what probably the weakest link in the new power-chain would be, and I was right. The RAM is way too slow compared to the rest of the computer. I’ll throw the experience index from Win7 up for good measure, not exactly accurate, but before I get all giddy and just have to install three billion different performance test suites, it’ll have to do.
Without further ado, here it is:
I’ll update the true stats a little later as well as all the parts that this little black baby has eaten.
Ubuntu 11.10 – Setting up automatic connection to wlan
More or less some notes to myself again:
(Assuming, of course, that the wlan interface is wlan0.)
The magic command for generating the required PSK for WPA/WPA2 is wpa_passphrase.
janne@pingu:~$ wpa_passphrase ExampleSSID DamnLongPassword
network={
ssid="ExampleSSID"
#psk="DamnLongPassword"
psk=9981ece75e0eb563acbc783b1ce4250e7383d9ce7f71caa0d8406c0d1495f4bb
}
When that’s done add the information to /etc/network/interfaces:
auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-ssid "ExampleSSID" wpa-psk 9981ece75e0eb563acbc783b1ce4250e7383d9ce7f71caa0d8406c0d1495f4bb
…and finally you might want to remove network-manager to avoid conflicts.
Now this combined with automatic login lets me reboot my laptop at home without having to a) login and b) connect to the wireless.
How-to: Resize hard disk in VirtualBox
Just a note to myself again, this time on how to resize a virtual hard disk in VirtualBox. Stupid as I was I never changed from the really small 8GB disk VirtualBox suggested per default and had to pay up quickly after I started fiddling around in my virtual Ubuntu installation.
Here are the steps:
- Run cmd.exe and cd C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
- VBoxManage.exe modifyhd “<full path to the vhd/vdi>” –resize <new size in MB>
(Note: there are two dashes before resize) - Boot up the virtual machine from i.e. a Ubuntu live-cd .iso
- Start gparted (if not installed run sudo apt-get install gparted and when it’s done sudo gparted)
- Delete the swap-partition within the extended partition, move the extended to the end of the unallocated space
- Recreate the swap within the extended partition
- Resize the primary / partition to include all the unallocated space left over
- Shutdown the virtual and remove the iso-image
- Try starting up the virtual and check disk space available with df -ah in the Terminal
10 billion Android app downloads
I was browsing the android market today and saw this big banner at the top saying something about “10 billion downloads”, slightly curious I decided to have a look at what the fuss was about.
They had a bunch of interesting apps for about 1 SEK each, among them SketchBook Mobile, Great Little War Game, SwiftKey X Keyboard, Paper Camera, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD and Minecraft – Pocket Edition. Also SoundHound, Endomondo and a couple others, but they did not seem that interesting. I bought all the ones I linked above.
Sketchbook Mobile – Works nicely on my Samsung Galaxy S2, quite intuitive controls for drawing on the screen. Even small details can be drawn once you pinch-zoom enough.
Great Little War Game – Had this one from earlier, it’s quite a nice game. BUT, it seriously drains the battery. I mean drains in the way a 4 inch pipe drains a gallon of water.
SwiftKey – quite impressive keyboard, also cool that it’s multilingual and supports up to three languages at once. Meaning I can have English, Swedish and Finnish all at the same time and don’t have to switch between which I’m typing it, it will recognize which language I’m writing in and give suggestions based on that.
Paper Camera – This was probably the most “useless” of the apps I bought, but still a bit fun to see in real-time the overlay/effect which will be applied to the final picture.
Asphalt 6 – Fun racing game, but this one also drains the battery quickly. A rough dozen laps around the tracks resulted in almost 10% drain on the battery.
Minecraft – Never understood what the Minecraft fuss is about. I still don’t. Probably nice for those who are hooked to the blocks.
Here’s the link to the promo-page: https://market.android.com/details?id=apps_timed_promotion&feature=banner&pli=1


