(photo credit: Wikipedia)

SMS has been with us from the very beginning of the so-called “mobile revolution”, and yet many of us still don’t use it to its full potential. Maybe we’ve been conditioned to avoid the draconian limits and overage charges from the mobile overlords, but strangely these days carriers are the handing out unlimited messaging plans like it’s going out of style. What else could they do? They’ve been gouging us over for years, charging for a service that costs them next to nothing to deliver (don’t get me started on the international text plan racket) and in response people have shifted their methods of communication to more data-centric options like social media, apps like Kik, or the ever-awesome (and free) Google Voice. They’re losing profits and I say serves them right. Now they’ve changed their tactics to making data their cash cow; tiered data plans, or “unlimited” data for “just a little more”. And while it’s hard for us consumers to quell our ever-increasing data addiction, it’s easy for the frugal masses to find a cheaper route.

With the focus shifted to data consumption, messaging plans are on the clearance isle. I say stock up now that they’re cheap. I myself have downgraded to a $30 monthly prepaid plan, and I now find that the stigma I once associated with prepaid was really rather silly. A 5GB/month data cap is totally livable if you’re not a streamer and/or have occasional access to Wi-Fi. All this marketing propaganda about coverage and throughput to promote these stupid data plans are a load of bull in my opinion, not to mention overpriced. In my quest for Android optimization, I’ve found that most of my data usage comes from checking Facebook and Twitter. This is actually quite shameful, especially in the case if Twitter, whose entire format was birthed from the SMS standard. Upon my discovery of battery saving apps that switch off data while the screen is off, I soon found that I was defeating their whole purpose by letting them wake my phone’s 3G radio after receiving some mundane comment by someone I don’t even know in response to a post I marginally like. Isn’t social media great? Then I remembered something from my BlackBerry days: Text alerts and posting via SMS. I guess they were good for something.

Twitter SMS

Facebook SMS

These are just two examples. You can read the instructions for yourself as I really have no time to hold hands, but once mastered you can perform many of the same functions via text as you can with a dedicated (data sipping) app. Best of all, you can switch off your 3G/4G radio altogether and save yourself some juice while still staying “connected”. Whatever that means.

—Got juice?

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—Found this guide on tonymacx86′s website after a serious crash (when will I learn). I had so much fun playing around with this I had to share. Always remember to back up your backups of your backups, and back up those backups to the cloud

Mod About This Mac 10.8

—Onward

—1st video, constructive critiques welcome

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Just wanted to pop in and post a quick update to my little repurposed laptop LCD screen project. Quite frankly I’ve become disillusioned with this whole “blogging thing” in general, and so I’ve changed the motivation behind it. But enough of that, here’s what’s going on:

With Trinity situated in the TV stand hooked up via HDMI, it really limited her to entertainment duty, and considering the money I spent on these parts it just wasn’t maximizing her potential. I needed to upgrade her to desktop duty, and so clearly I needed to make this work.

In earlier posts I talked about where to get the parts and little about putting it together, but without a proper stand it just wasn’t functional enough to put this screen to use. As a thumb in the eye to one of my old studio professors, I finally had the idea to craft one out of corrugated cardboard. It’s a sturdy, lightweight, and truly beautiful material if you look closely. As a project at another school we actually crafted a chair that could support our own weight out of this stuff with no glue of fasteners, just folds and notches. Anyway, after some measuring and fiddling I think I came up with something that looks quite nice.

The only lingering loose end is finding a way to mount the menu buttons. They have an oddly positioned wire connector which I solved by removing it altogether and soldering the wires directly on the backside of the PCB. Should make it much easier to flush mount it to something. Pretty sure I’ll be making many revisions as I get the fit right. At first I didn’t want anything too fancy but this is looking better than I thought it would. I especially like the soft glow it emits from the back. It helps a bit when typing in the dark.

I’m really impressed with how well this works and I’m almost tempted to scrounge around for some more old laptops to harvest their screens. One more thing to add, I had some trouble getting the DVI port to work, but after some Googling about the MANY DVI standards I discovered I was using the wrong cable. A dual or single link DVI-I cable works best I’ve found.

Until I care enough to post again,

—Rob

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Well it’s finally here. Took longer than I anticipated, but that’s mostly because of budget constraints. I finally got around to ordering it on 7/20/2012, and it arrived in about 2 weeks. Not at all unreasonable, considering it shipped all the way from Shenzhen China. In my original post,

I was interested in the base model which would give you basic VGA input for about $30, but after some consideration I thought it might be safer to go with a model that included DVI as well. I was afraid Apple’s pretentious operating system didn’t support VGA’s “outdated” analogue standard, so for about $9 more I went with this model instead. (Turns out I didn’t need to, as you can use VGA on a Hackintosh provided you have a graphics card)

What we have on the table here is a spare 15″ XGA LCD screen for a gracefully aging Dell Inspiron 1150, with a native resolution of 1,024×768 pixels. Coincidentally, it’s manufactured by Samsung, bringing my household Samsung product count up to 6. Insidious aren’t they? The kit includes the controller board, inverter, menu keypad, and audio cable. When ordering, make sure your LCD model is on their list of supported ones, and shoot them a message with your model number. They do the matching and programming for you. The power adapter is an additional $7.50, but not necessary as 12V adapters are pretty common (just make sure the amperage is 4A). Setup is pretty straightforward, since it comes pre-assembled. Just remove the old inverter and LVDS cable, and swap them for the ones in the kit. Mine works very well in both Windows and OS X. As you can see it’s hooked up via VGA. Thinking of how I can make the presentation a little prettier, but this all I have for now.

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Sometime last year I stumbled upon this great DIY project for the budding tinkerer. The MintyBoost: a portable AA battery-powered phone charger concealed within an unassuming Altoids tin.

Out and about I find myself always looking for some outlets to top up on juice, and most of the time this is a not-so-fun treasure hunt. I picked up a couple of these kits, made one for my girlfriend, and recently sat down to assemble the last  one for myself. It’s a really cool idea, and it’s especially handy now that I’ve made the switch to Android. Battery life is at a premium, no matter how aggressively you dial in power saving measures. It won’t give you a full charge, but at the very least it will give you enough juice for the ride home.

As you can see from the first image, my first attempt was a success. For my second kit, I wanted to do more. Either more batteries or some sort of solar-powered rechargeable set up. I went with the larger, more traditional, Altoids tin. Plenty of room for extras:

(craftsmanship is important to me)

I’ve got it assembled and working, now I just have to figure out how wire in more batteries. Then ultimately I want to add a solar cell to charge the batteries. So far so good.

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Reblogged from EssayBoard:

Sometimes I feel we are too eager to throw away the new to make way for the newer.  The truth is I too have bought into the whole trend, and probably continuing to do so unless one day I wake up to find the world of technology has suddenly got a facelift.  You will know where I'm going with my ramble if you have already owned a smart phone. 

Read more… 715 more words

Okay so we’re back in business. Trinity‘s roaring again. Fiddling with it after a long weekend, it turns out I was using the wrong HDMI port (doh). Once I switched to the HDMI port 1(?), below the VGA port, I was able to boot into Lion. That was a close one. The penalties of trying out the latest updates early on.  It was a serious headache reading through Toleda’s guide especially with so many recent updates and changes, but I learned quite a bit in the process. Here are Toleda’s Guides on the matter (& update). They taught me how high-definition sound is handled in OS X and how to do future edits on my own. This should come in handy when my new graphics card arrives (well first I have to choose one). HDMI audio works as before, as well as line-in (mic), line-out, headphones, and I’m told optical 7.1 surround sound, though I have nothing to test it with (yet).

If you’re using one of Tony’s supported systems, and this seems like too much of a project, you can always use his pre-edited files and save yourself some trouble (but where’s the fun in that?). Simply use the appropriate DSDT for your motherboard with HDMI audio edits, and in MultiBeast select: Drivers & Bootloaders/Kexts & Enablers/Audio/Realtek ALC8xx/Patched AppleHDA/ALC889.

As of writing, Trinity’s running OS X Lion 10.7.4 with no HDCP support being the only lingering problem. The graphics card I decide on should eliminate this, but I want to be sure I make the right choice for the buck. I’m looking for something that’s HDCP compliant (obviously), single slot (only have one PCIe slot), works well with OS X & Windows 7 (Linux shouldn’t be a problem), medium to low power, and is low profile. I recently tried an MSI NVIDIA GeForce 210 N210-MD1G/D3 . Worked fine, but it didn’t beat the onboard Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics performance. In Windows my Experience Index actually went *down* to 4.4 from 5.8. My other 2 candidates are the ATI Radeon HD 5570 and the Nvidia Geforce GT 430. What I choose I’ll let you know.

—”Baby now I got the flow”

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You know the saying… When I upgraded to the latest version of OS X (10.7.4) I brilliantly forgot to rollback Toleda’s audio kexts which made HDMI audio possible. I have copies so I could replace them, but in addition to HDMI audio I also want to enable all the other port & jacks ie: headphones, microphone, line out. You know, make this thing more functional. Pshh, can’t be that hard right? Welp, halfway through the process of editing new kexts, I did a restart (to allow OS X to register the changes) and now I can’t boot into Lion. Some errors having to do with “sound assertions” and that infamous “kernel panic” screen of death hackintosh-ers know and hate. I think this is now a more widespread problem than a few files. It also seems as though I can’t even do a simple Time Machine restore. UniBeast isn’t booting either, so much for sneaking in the back door. I’m not going to wipe the hard drive and start fresh. That just seems silly, there has to be way to get in and make repairs. Windows & Linux are still there so Trinity isn’t totally useless, it just doesn’t feel like much of a hackintosh right now without OS X. Now I’m sad. Why couldn’t I have just left it alone?

(because knowledge is power that’s why…)

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If you’re familiar with RIM’s products, by now you might have heard something about linking your BB to the not-so-stellar 7″ device that is the PlayBook. I’m talking about the BlackBerry Bridge App, I mentioned its features before, but I’m trying to put that all behind me. All the disappointment’s been too much to bear. I wanted to think it was great and useful, but then I realized how cumbersome it is to have a device so inadequate you need a BlackBerry to *add functionality.

Anyway, one of my yearnings for Trinity is a shiny new wireless keyboard, with back-lit keys, and a solar-powered recharging feature. They’re coming to market (not back-lit), but I don’t see them coming down to my price range soon. It occurred to me when fiddling around with Bridge that there’s actually a fully-fledged keyboard and mouse buried in the sub-menus and key combinations. The Windows Start Menu key, Ctrl, Alt, F1 to F12, it’s all in there. It uses a bluetooth connection to link to the PlayBook… and Trinity has bluetooth… See where I’m going with this? What if… I could use Bridge to control Trinity? I mean bluetooth keyboards and mice have existed for some time now. Surely it couldn’t be that simple?Conveniently, Broadcom just issued a driver update for their Windows bluetooth software so decided to try to see if this would help this work. In Win 7 (in bluetooth device properties for my phone) there are actually hooks for remote control present but inactive, so I deleted my phone’s Bluetooth profile, re-paired it and tried to connect with Bridge. Success! It actually worked. I already have a wireless mouse, but I’m still using a corded USB keyboard I got cheap on eBay. It doesn’t quite make it to the couch (so close), hence all the yearning. This ties it all together, and guess what; BlackBerry keyboards are back-lit. Freebie. Downside is, I’m using an older non-touch BlackBerry model, so controlling the mouse pointer with the trackpad on a giant HDTV screen is work for the thumbs. But the keyboard feature is a bit of help when searching ye olde Netflix queue from the couch. And you know what else? It also works in OS X (*Update 5/18/2012 - works easily in Ubuntu 11.04 & 12.04 LTS).

So yea, if you’ve still got a BB and you’re looking for a free, bluetooth, back-lit, keyboard & mouse for your HTPC (or PS3), download the free Bridge app from App World and put it to good use. Also, if you have a “newer” model BB, with a touch screen, and you’re on a Mac/Hackintosh, would you mind letting me know if any of the multi-touch or swipe gestures work? I’m dying to know. (Multi-touch doesn’t work)

—Toodles

*Notes: Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR UHE (Broadcom chipset), BlackBerry Bold 9780 OS v6.0.0.706, Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4/Windows 7 Enterprise/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

*Update 5/25/2012: It seems you need to have a bridged PlayBook profile on your BB before you can get this to work with your computer. I found this thread, hopefully someone will crack it. I guess my success was somewhat of a fluke.

*Update 6/7/2012: I found a workaround in the forums: –How to use Bridge Remote without a PlayBook

*Update 6/14/2013: (Mac) If you keep the Remote Control component of the Bridge app running in the background, you can quickly reconnect, even after a reboot.

P.S. If this post, or any other, have helped you, why not consider a small donation to help us grow?

Video:

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