Hacking Nokia Nuron + Battery Issues

The title says it all.

I’m fully aware that I probably voided any warranty that I had on it when I hacked my Nokia 5230 Nuron.  It was kind of getting slow and gummed up with stuff, so I figured I’d do a backup, a reset, and then hack away.

I think I’m going to un-hack it.  Here are my reasons, in order of least importance.

I can’t afford an internet plan, so any unsigned apps that use the internet (which are a lot) can’t fully function.  Lame.  I hoped I could find an app that could bypass that, but I haven’t.

It’s slow.  It’s slower than it was before I reset it.  It boggles my mind how slow it is.  I hate it.  I send a text message, and I get to watch a loading screen for five seconds before it even sends it to the outbox.  It’s like having Windows Vista on my phone.  I want to throw it and myself out a window.

Finally, the battery life stinks.  The battery used to have a two or three day half-life.  Now it’s down to just over a day.  I don’t run a VPN server on my phone.  I don’t browse the web all day or play games.  (Remember my troubles with internet?)  Texting and calling people, which, by the way, are the primary functions of any phone, zap the battery like crazy.  It didn’t do that before hacking.

So, the bottom line is this:  Unless there is an unsigned application that you just cannot live without, I don’t recommend hacking your Nokia Nuron.  Believe me, I’m a geek, so I completely understand if you must.  But if there are no musts, I don’t think it’s worth it.

Now, if I had tons of time and money to spare, I’d do some testing to see if the hacking application itself is the battery drainer, or if other applications I am using are the culprit, but I don’t, and I’m lazy, and un-hacking it is going to be enough of a pain.

Hmph.  Have a good day, and if you hadn’t noticed, the archives are back.  Still, a lot of work remains, but it’s getting there, slowly.

Updates

Soon I am going to restore the archives and redesign the site.  I’m back in business too, so check back frequently.

And I graduated from college.  That’s crazy!

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Troubles with VMware nics and Ubuntu

I’ve set myself up with a VMware Server box on a small laptop. This box is going to go onto the DMZ segment soon. I’ve had a major problem setting up things though. The main use for it at the moment is to house a Linux Apache MySQL Php server with Ubuntu Server 8.04.1 as the client OS. I am using Ubuntu Server 8.04.1 as the host OS as well, because VMware ESXi Server didn’t like the hardware. I would have rather used that, but I don’t have the money to buy a server that has supported hardware. Hence, the laptop server.
Originally I built the LAMP VM on my desktop, because I hadn’t figured out what to do with the laptop situation, with regard to ESXi being unable to install. Everything worked peachy-keen. Minus the time to install Ubuntu, it took me about 2 minutes to set up the whole thing right up to serving out a quick webpage on my LAN. I was impressed. The simple yet powerful architecture of Ubuntu never fails to amaze me.

Quick Updates

I’ve been working a great deal the last few weeks with VMware ESXi Server. There’s more to come, including a guide to installing and configuring ESXi for a production environment.

Troubleshooting Dual Monitors with DualView on NVidia graphics cards

Quick post. I got another monitor, plugged it into the DVI output on my new NVidia 9800 GT graphics card, and tried to set up the use of both. Interesting results: I could clone the images, use a single display, or use horizontal or vertical spans. Spanning is stretching the desktop over both monitors in the form of one single big display.
I didn’t want this. Spanning causes windows to maximize across both displays. It causes games to do this as well. I think it’d be very cool to use 3 monitors spanned to play a game like Counter-Strike Source, but the window problem I mentioned earlier is sort of a problem for me.
Anyhow, searching was fruitless for a while and I was getting irritated to be honest. How could DualView just not exist? It wasn’t even an option in the NVidia control panel.

Long story short, all I needed to do was reboot the machine.  Who knows why it can’t do it without that, but for some reason, it’s just not possible unless the monitor was plugged in during boot-up.  Actually, now that I think about it, that makes sense.  Oh well.

New Years Surprises

It’s the new year and I’ve been terribly scarce around here.
Things have moved along in life. I’m back in school after taking a much needed break from a very busy school schedule.
I’ve gotten a chance to work on some other projects, some of which I would like to share with you now.

gTalk + Voice Calling in Ubuntu 8

Finally got around to putting trying out Ubuntu 8.10 and I’ve been having less trouble than some others have been having.  Now I’m getting things up and running including gTalk using Empathy Instant Messenger. I’ve copied the post from the Ubuntu forums only because I’m tired of clicking links to forum posts, only to find that the thread has been deleted.  By the way, this works in my install of 8.10 even though it’s written for 8.04.  So, here’s how to get gTalk working, courtesy of vigyani@ubuntuforums.com:

Living In A Linux World

It’s been ages and ages since I last posted.  School has taken priority over a lot of things with TECHgap.

Been learning a lot about Linux (Ubuntu and SUSE to be exact).  Just finished a second esession with another student talking with them about BASH scripting.  Anyone who’s inclined, check out Elluminate.  My UNIX Administration class is partly online and lectures take place using that.  It’s also great for the instruction I’ve been doing myself with other students.  I am perplexed at my seemingly having a knack for Linux and programming in particular.

Anyway, I’ve wanted to post for a while now and things seem to be calming down enough for me to find time to do so.  I’ll try not to let such a lapse happen again.

I’ve Been Busy Building Things

Posts seem few and far between, and I’ve got some things to show for it.

At school I’ve put together a separate box to just to run VMs in.  I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the setup though, as the host OS is Windows XP.  I’m thinking of putting VMware ESXi hypervisor on it and run separate native OS’s, rather than using VMware Server, even though I really like Server’s remote management features.  I’d be able to take full advantage of the 2GB of RAM, instead of having to delegate some to the host OS.  More to come on that tomorrow.  I’m going to give you a full walkthrough on the setup then.

In other news, I’ve also built a better computer for my home desktop.  It’s not in a case right now, and so I took a few pictures. I think it looks pretty cool.