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LexLook! 1.0 for UIQ now released July 28, 2008

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : lexlook, sofware , 1 comment so far

I’ve now made a stable LexLook! 1.0 release for UIQ. It can be downloaded from  here.

lexlook box

LexLook 1.0 for UIQ June 26, 2008

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : uncategorized , 3comments

LexLook! is a little project I’ve been working on my “free” time. It’s a simple, yet effective way of looking words up on your mobile phone. The database of words is quite extensive. Will soon make a proper release. In the mean time, here’s a little preview:

lexlook! screenie 1

lexlook! screenie 2

lexlook! screenie 3

Handy recipes February 6, 2008

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : cooking , 1 comment so far

couple of simple recipes to have handy…

Carbonara

  1. Mix oil, egg yolks, cream, and half the cheese
  2. Cook the bacon on a large pan, set aside
  3. Boil the pasta on a separate pan
  4. Transfer the pasta to bacon pan and add the mix
  5. Add the remaining cheese and pepper to taste

Crepes mix

  1. Put all in the blender. Blend away!

Ceviche! December 12, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : cooking , add a comment

Made some ceviche the other day! A teaser…

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

gtk# on windows November 28, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : tips, gtk+, mono, windows , add a comment

Decided to write a quick app on gtk# that I could easily use at home (linux) and at work (windows). Had been while since I played with  C#. Symbian/C++ development has taken most of my time in the last 2 years.

In any case, I already had mono installed on my machine at home, so I quickly got a gtk# app built and running on linux. Next day I wanted to try it at work, so I installed a few things on window:

  1. Install Visual Studio Express (yuck!)
  2. Install gtk# runtime from Novell’s installer
  3. Update your environment variables:

Should should be good to go now:

csc -r:gtk-sharp.dll -resource:blahblahl.glade blahblah.cs

Great to have a win32 installer for gtk#. Makes life simpler.

Matshita DVD-R UJ-857 firmware upgrade November 26, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : tips, gentoo, mac os x , 2comments

Recently found out there is a firmware update for the infamous UJ-857 dvd drive which gets rid of the awful region lock. This drive comes in some of the early Macbooks. As I bought mine in the US and now live in Europe, I have accumulated dvd’s from different regions. Until now, there was no way of getting around region checks on this drive, limiting what movies I could watch. Kind of a pain, since I had *paid* for these dvds!

To install the updates you need to boot into OS X:

Firstly, you need to ensure that the drive has firmware revision HBEA. This firmware update used to be available from Apple. Not any more :) It can be found here.

Once SuperDrive/firmware update (HBEA) is installed, download the region free firmware from here.

Before unziping/running the firmware update, make sure you have previously set a region (any) on your drive (ie. played dvd’s on it). Otherwise, you can brick your drive. There is a tool floating around called DVDInfoX that shows you the region set on your drive. Google for it. In any case, once the second update is installed and your machine rebooted, your drive should be *free* :)

Quick internet share October 18, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : tips , add a comment

Recently had to share my wireless internet connection with a wired box. The access point itself was too far to just hook up directly. Instead, used the wired interface to route to a secondary machine.

Belkin Wireless PCI Card - F5D6001 (rev 20) October 8, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : uncategorized , add a comment

got an old box at home with no hard drive. wanted so set it up in the kitchen for quick browsing… used an ubuntu livecd. most things worked out of the box, with exception of  X and wireless card. for X, removed incompatible resolution from xorg.conf.

used ndiswrapper for wireless card:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lspci | grep Belkin
00:13.0 Ethernet controller: Belkin Wireless PCI Card - F5D6001 (rev 20)

lspci -n | grep 00:13.0
00:13.0 0200: 1799:6001 (rev 20)

Download winxp driver  from here and unzip

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo su
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu#
root@ubuntu:/media/disk# ndiswrapper -i NET8180.INF
root@ubuntu:/media/disk# ndiswrapper -l
net8180 : driver installed
root@ubuntu:/media/disk# ndiswrapper -a 1799:6001 net8180
root@ubuntu:/media/disk# modprobe ndiswrapper
root@ubuntu:/media/disk# ifconfig wlan0 up

Got a few open networks in my neighborhood ;)
root@ubuntu:/media/disk# iwconfig wlan0 essid SOMESSID
route add default gw 192.168.1.1 wlan0

voila!

Quickoffice for Z8 August 5, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : symbian , 2comments

A few weeks ago, Quickoffice released a Z8 version of our office suite (view-only). It’s been great being able to give ideas while having the privilege of implementing them. Nice to see overlays come to existance. Also, here’s a positive review.

Z8 Quickpoint screenshot

annotate pdf April 8, 2007

Posted by Alvaro Ramirez in : tips , add a comment

Needed to fill out a hideously long pdf form. The only problem was that the pdf itself was not a form :)

To fill it out, I used a combination of tools. In essence:

1. Converted the pdf to ps using pdf2ps
2. Used flpsed to annotate the ps file (fill out all fields of the form)
3. Convert back to pdf using ps2pdf and you are done
4. Optionally, you may convert the pdf to odp (open document format) using pdf2oo and add graphics (ie. your signature) in OpenOffice. In fact, you can probably do all annotating from OpenOffice.
5. Either export back to pdf from OpenOffice or print.