LUX.ET.UMBRA

Unfortunately, this is something that sometimes needs to be done with a phone. Fortunately, outside of your applications, contact information can be synced from your Google account and such, so restoration isn’t as terrible as you may think.

For me, it was the official Twitter application that hosed my phone up. When you have a lot of contacts, my suggestion is that you do not sync your Twitter contact information. Since it doesn’t ask where to store the information, it stores it directly on the phone memory which will fill up and basically leave you with an always syncing phone.

To hard rest your Motorola Droid:

1. Turn the Droid off.

2. Open the keyboard.
3. Hold the X key and hit the power button. Keep holding the X button down until a yellow triangle appears on the screen.
4. Press the camera and volume up buttons at the same time to get to the menu.
5. Use the directional pad to the right of the keyboard to select the Format option.

Once you format the phone, it’ll basically set it up like it was at the store. Fortunately, you don’t have to go through the entire process of letting the system know what your ESN is and what not, since that should already be in the system. The rest is just setting the phone back up to however you had it before.

Tags: Cellular, Tips and Tricks, Wireless by darkmoon
View Comments

First off, I hope that you never have to read this, since if you are, that means that something crazy has happened to your Droid and I feel for you already.

Sometimes, there are applications out there that don’t have checks and balances that really should be done when looking at the Droid. Fortunately, there is a way to boot the device into safe mode:

1. Turn off phone.

2. Open the keyboard.
3. Hold down the Menu and hit the power button. Continue to hold the menu button until splash screen.

If you do these steps, you should see it boot with “Safe Mode” in the lower left hand corner. Good luck!

Tags: Cellular, Tips and Tricks, Wireless by darkmoon
View Comments

I recently loaded my work netbook with Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. What’s interesting is that with the HP Mini 210, the touchpad is an integrated key/touchpad. Which means you can run into some really nastiness when it comes to trying to click or right click since the mouse will move to place where you’re “pressing” for the click.

Annoying.

Fortunately, someone had gone through the trouble of figuring out a patch for the touchpad so that the area where there’s supposed to be clicking buttons deactivates the sensors which makes it infinitely more useful. Just follow the directions there and patch the linux source and create yourself a new patched kernel module to run that actually makes the touchpad function as it should.

Brilliance of open source, eh? Now if only they figured out how to make multi-touch scrolling and such like the Mac… and believe me. Someone is probably already working on it.

Tags: Linux, Open Source, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
View Comments

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, a friend asked me how to automatically load a Powerpoint presentation when you open an email in Outlook. While I have never tried it with any other mail program, apparently in Microsoft Windows in Outlook, if you take your Powerpoint and save it as a pps file (Powerpoint Slideshow) and attach it in the email, then whenever the recipient opens the email, Powerpoint will magically load the file.

Well, okay. It’s not magic. But still. Also, another point of reference. If you do not embed the pictures, or audio files, or even some fonts, then the recipient’s system will not play them. Another reason why I tend to stay away from Powerpoint if at all possible.

Tags: Tips and Tricks, Windows by darkmoon
View Comments

If there’s one thing that I despise, it’s when sites move slowly. Like they drag. And when it comes to blogging software, these usually are hella draggers. But fortunately there are a few ways to speed things up without actually giving up as much. The biggest one that you can ever focus on is caching.

Caching basically means that instead of telling the server to dynamically process something, it has a statically saved copy somewhere that it basically reads off. That shaves ticks off the seconds when you don’t have to ask the CPU to figure out what some variable is saying. And with most database driven applications, there are two methods to do this.

DB Cache: This is less well known but is actually an entirely brilliant design. Basically, it makes the assumption that you’re going to be querying your database a lot, and thus it saves those queries statically and can shave off seconds for you if you have large queries to make. This basically means that it’ll be slow the first time around, but not so much the next if you happen to repeat things a lot. Very useful in that sense.

WP Super Cache: WP-Super Cache is one of the most well-known in the WordPress community. It allows you to cache the pages themselves after the first time they’re built into static calls. This means that instead of reading directly from the database and generating the page, it creates the page the first time and doesn’t change out that copy until there’s a new one to change with. This basically allows the first person to read it to have a bit of slowness, but after that the page is already kept around.

As you can see, there are at least two different caching methods that you can implement to improve the quality and decrease the time latency. And in the web world, time latency is everything.

Tags: Blogging, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
View Comments

Google came out with their social network tool called Google Buzz just a day or so ago.

While it’s actually a fascinating tool and definitely could give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money, it really is a little too noisy for me. Mainly because of the integration with Gmail. When I logged in, I expect to see my emails since I have to respond to many of them and they’re usually something important even though they’re of personal nature. But with Buzz, it’s really just a noise floor to keep up with what’s going on in the world. I usually have another tab open for those types of things so I don’t have to pay attention to them unless I want to pay attention.

In any case, this isn’t a well-known thing so to turn off Google Buzz:

• Scroll to the bottom of the Gmail screen
• Click “turn off buzz” in the footer.

And that’s it. It’s pretty easy and straight forward, although you’d never think to do it in the footer since there’s a Settings tab for your account. In any case, there have been some other friends that have been seeking this information since it got too noisy in their lives too so obviously it’s not just a personal occurrence. Either way, if you’re looking to turn off Buzz, there ya go.

Tags: Google, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
View Comments

If you do a lot of online banking and you happen to use Bank of America, you probably have SafePass activated.

Unfortunately for you, there isn’t a very published method on how to fix your SafePass and gain entry back into your online banking if you have recently switched cellular carriers but have kept the same number. If you’ve changed numbers completely, you’ll have to call customer service to deactivate your old number and sign up your new one. But with an existing number that has been ported from another carrier? Seems like you’re up a creek since the SafePass won’t send to the phone.

What you do is, you take the mobile, and text to: 73981. In the body of the text, just text “help” without the quotes and hit send.

Then you wait about 24 hours because their systems don’t update but once a day I suppose. In any case, if you come back and try your SafePass again, it seems to actually work. Now, there apparently has been this issue on and off with iPhones and the like, but with my Droid, that seemed to do the trick in changing out the carriers.

Tags: Cellular, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
View Comments

As a system administrator, have you ever gone through the annoyance of having to fresh install every single application and have hell trying to download each and every latest versioning? With Ninite, you won’t have to do that anymore.

Free for personal use, this creates a special installer that grabs all of the latest and greatest versions of the applications that you check on their website, and it’ll create a special installer for those. Basically allowing you the freedom of one-stop-shopping for the applications. While this isn’t perfect since there are always things out there that you need that might be special case, this does provide a solution as an in-between to those that install everything from scratch, and those that just start fresh from a cloned image.

This works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, and installs all of the applications on default configurations without toolbars and other extraneous things. Definitely worthwhile to take a look at for your one click install needs.

Tags: Tips and Tricks, Windows by darkmoon
View Comments

If you have set up your SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record but you haven’t tested it, then here’s an easy method of checking if it works. Send off an email to:

spf-test@openspf.org

If you get a response where it says that it has passed, then you’re good to go. Otherwise, you’ll have to do some more testing to see why it’s not working. OpenSPF is a great place to start as far as finding the right tools and how to do setups for SPF records.

Tags: Email, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
View Comments

Annoyingly, email from Google Apps will fail to some recipients if you do not set up the SPF (Send Policy Framework) record for your domain. And while Google Apps tells you how to do it with a TXT record, the way GoDaddy does it is a little bit different:

• Go to Total DNS Control Panel.
  
• Under the TXT section: click Add SPF Record.
  
• Select An ISP or other mail provider: click OK.
  
• Select Outsourced tab: put “aspmx.googlemail.com” (no quotes) in the field and click OK.
  
• Click OK again when GoDaddy sets up a SPF record.

And then you can wait a little bit for that to propagate to all of the DNS servers. Once that’s done? You’ll have your SPF Record set.

Tags: Email, Google, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
View Comments