Hotel International

Malfunctioning plane was all it took to ground me once more and to award me free stay in hotel, early wake up to catch next flight and feeling awful for whole next day.

I got free ride to hotel (courtesy of Croatia Airlines) and I got free bus pick-up at 05:00. Standard bus ride this early is not something you see too often.

Room was quite fine but real gem was free wireless Internet access through-out hotel. This is something every hotel should have!

Best surprise was dinner. While mighty Sheraton only offered me stale meal, here I could choose what I wish to eat from six three-course menus. To make it even better, you could mix-and-match them to get your favorite combination.

Although I didn’t pay dime for this stay, I felt welcomed and like a proper guest. What more can one ask?

Cover for BeBook Mini

As regular readers are aware, I became owner of BeBook mini. While older device (BeBook one) came with leather cover, this comes without one. This being quite a new device there was hardly any choice. One of rare cases was ($24,99) STYLZ’s Milano cover.

It took a while for it to arrive but it was definitely worth it. Attaching BeBook was as-simple-as-it-gets and no button or lever was blocked by it. Only two things that you cannot do with this enclosure were performing reset and exchanging battery. Since I do not need those on regular basis it is compromise I am willing to take.

Cover itself is of three fold design with BeBook laying on one side and another side serving as padded screen protection. Once that side gets opened you get three slots for credit cards and/or business cards. Above them are two places for SD memory and that is all.

For keeping cover closed one piece of leather is used instead of magnetic latch found on most of covers. It feels weird at first but I found it quite good system after a while. After two months of regular usage leather is still soft to touch. Scratches that it gained do not look too offensive and give nice charm to it. It looks to better and better with each passing day.

Only thing that I found missing is lack of placing for pen and paper. If they added a place for few pieces of paper and hinge for a pen, I would be happiest man alive.

How to Replace Broken Screen on HTC S740

Due to “careful” behavior toward my HTC S740, screen was broken and I needed to replace it. First step was ordering new screen from eBay.

There is quite a few replacement screens available so that should not be a problem. If you do not have tools be sure to get one with free tools included (case opener, T4 and small Phillips-head screwdriver). Although there are quite a few sets with triangle shaped case opener, I personally went for thin and flat opening tool. It makes job much easier.

Take off battery cover, battery, unscrew four T4 screws behind keyboard and then use case opener tool. Jam it on top ridge of keyboard and circle around it gently. This is probably most difficult part since keyboard will keep sliding back inside.

Disconnect two ZIF cables (top-left and bottom-right) and one antenna cable (bottom-left) from board and gently pull up board. It is held by four pieces of plastic and there is another flat cable behind so be very gentle. Pull backside flat cable out of it’s socket and put whole module on side.

There are four Phillips screws holding keyboard and screen part together. Unscrew them and you will be able to put them apart. This will give you access to screen’s part of assembly.

It is held together by five little T4 screws and one Phillips screw (behind keyboard slider mechanism). Once you unscrew them and open case with case opener, you should arrive to same situation as depicted on picture above.

What you see is metal shield behind yet another four Phillips screws. Once you unscrew it, just pull out metal shield (take care of flat cable and button connector above). Camera and volume buttons will fall out itself - just do not lose them. Little bit of stronger tap on the back of screen should be enough to kick it on phone’s front side (notice yet another flat cable). Throughly clean points where screen was held by tape (all of it should be gone).

I could have used double-side adhesive tape to glue new screen in same place, but I opted for cyanoacrylate instead. Put a drop of it at four red-dotted locations and quickly put screen on it. Hold it together for minute or so in order to allow enough time for glue to activate.

After you are sure that everything is as it should be (watch keyboard alignment and tryout all keys), just put everything back in same order.

[2010-03-04: General clean-up of text.]

[2010-03-14: You can now download all pictures I took. Unfortunately they are not step-by-step instructions but they might prove to be useful.]

Best of 2009

New year is always good time to make some statistics. :)

I wrote total of 209 posts bringing over 20,000 page views in last year. While this is not much in Internet context of things, I do not recall having that kind of attention before. Also worth noting is fact that January had about 300 visits and in December number was above 3,000. Trend seems to be quite positive.

More than 70% of traffic was coming from Google and rest was divided among quite a few referrers. Most of content was read by US citizens (30%) with other countries having less than 10% each. For about of 30% of visitors country could not be determined.

As browsers go, most often these pages were viewed with FireFox (43%). Internet Explorer was quite close (39%) and Chrome came in third (10%). It should not be surprise that 95% of those visits were from browser running on Windows (10% from Windows 7).

What follows next is five most read posts from last year:

1. Starcraft color problem

This is biggest surprise to me. My love for both Starcraft and Windows 7 gave offspring that has as much comments as all other posts together.

2. Windows Media Center without IR extender

Decision of Microsoft to add artificial restrictions to their Windows Media Center setup resulted in this post. Although I haven’t written program that solves problem, I do take pleasure at propagating word about it.

3. Logitech V470 bluetooth mouse review

Since I wrote such positive review, I personally had no choice but to buy one more. :)

4. HTC S740 hard reset

It was lack of documentation on HTC S740 that drove quite a few page views to this post. Although HTC added this to documentation, there is quite few visits still.

5. VHD install

This is something I personally think of most useful post I have ever written. It is something that I still use almost on weekly base and (in my personal opinion) single feature that makes Windows 7 most flexible OS to install.

The Weakest Spot on a Human Body Accessible by Bunny Teeth

If I was a rabbit and I wanted to find weakest spot on a humans (accessible to my teeth), I would go for common carotid artery. Only down side seems to be fact that you need human to bent over in order for that to work. However, thinking how cute and cuddly rabbits can be, I do not consider that too big a problem.

P.S. Those wondering what happened to me, please read this. :)

S740 and Operator Does Not Exist in the Database

Every time I power on my HTC S740, I get same greeting: “The operator does not exist in the database. Please contact your operator for the connections settings. Connection Setup will redirect you to the Connection screen”. Once you select Hide as menu option, redirection to Settings\Connections does happen and you have your chance to define connections. Once you define connections, this screen will not appear again. That is how things should look like.

Probably I am problem here.

When I am traveling somewhere I like to delete all data connections. That is sure way to avoid roaming cost. However, when you delete all connections, Connection Setup screen reappears after every power-on. If I am traveling via plane, with few boardings in between, power-off and power-on cycle happens quite a few times and “The operator does not exist in the database.” gets boring pretty quickly.

Solution is quite simple but not obvious one. Turning that setting off is not done in Settings/Connections which, in my personal opinion, should be place for this. On HTC S740 you need to go into Accessories menu and there you will find Connection Setup. Once you run it, under Menu there is option “Enable Auto Configuration”. Uncheck it and you will not be bugged any more.

Hint to HTC - once user selects Hide, do not bother him again unless he changes his SIM card.

Proxy on Chrome

Google Chrome uses proxy defined on system for it’s operations. In my personal opinion that is correct way of doing things. However, sometime I want to leave that server alone and use another one instead.

Fortunately, there is small command line option that will take care of this. All you need to do is to modify shortcut pointing to Google Chrome. In Target text you should just append --proxy-server=192.168.0.1:8080 where 192.168.0.1 is address of proxy server (http and https) you wish to use and 8080 is port where proxy server is listening. Of course your proxy server data may be different. :)

Leaving Ferrari

It is not a secret that I like Michael Schumacher. When it was announced that he will be substitute for Felipe Massa, I was happy as little child. As you all know, that didn’t happen.

Although I still followed Formula 1 and I still was Ferrari fan, something didn’t feel right. First there came Kimi Raikkonen. Guy was quick but I just couldn’t imagine him in Ferrari clothes. Next idiotic move was signing Fernando Alonso. Getting this guy in red suit was just too much for me. Only thing that tentatively connected me to Ferrari was Felipe.

My plan was just to repeat year 2009, be a Ferrari-Massa fan and hope that next year they will find driver worthy enough to drive in red car.

However, it seems that I will be Mercedes fan instead. They successfully (according to Bild) completed negotiations and Michael Schumacher will drive once again.

He doesn’t need any money (and he will not get much anyhow) and nobody expects him to actually win championship. It will just be joy ride mixed with wish to prove himself again. I other words - pure joy to watch.

Thank you Santa for this present.

Summae 1.00

New freeware is ready to go.

It is small utility that attaches it-self to context menu of all files. In that way, calculating sum is always near. Do not worry, that option can be turned off. In such case you can use standard user interface to add files and calculate their sums. In case that you need command-line, again, it is there. Supported algorithms include CRC-16, CRC-32, MD-5, RIPEMD-160, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512.

Summae.exe is main program that is used to select files and configure settings. SummaeExecutor.exe has command-line interface. Sum.exe is command-line interface. It may come in handy in cases where scripting support is needed.

For readers of this blog, I added download of zipped files also. If you prefer to try software without installation, this is way to go.

Download

• Installation
• Zipped files

Google Public DNS

Few days ago Google announced new project. This time, DNS is thing they wish to change.

What they decided to offer is public DNS service for anybody willing to re-configure his IP settings. Since having DNS at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is quite easy to remember, there is no problem to change it at all computers that you use.

What Google gives here is promise of speed and I must say that they deliver. Their DNS is quite speedy and stable. While I cannot say that I would miss it much if they decide to pull a plug, I must say that I had no issues with it. And little bit of speed is not a bad thing.