I have been running a stock iPhone for probably a year now. I didn’t really have much of a reason to jailbreak, but as soon as I heard the Grooveshark app was out I downloaded Pwnage Tool and freed my iPhone.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone I highly suggest you download the app and give it a try. Why you ask? Well how about access to any song in Grooveshark streaming to your iPhone over 3G whenever you want? How about access to your Grooveshark favorites and playlists (for users with accounts)?

Currently missing from the iPhone app are the Library and People features. However, something not available on the desktop app but available on the iPhone is the ability to make songs available offline. In fact, you select entire playlists and make them available offline. Grooveshark will download the song to your iPhone’s memory and allow you to play them even when your radio is off. This is especially good for an iPod Touch that might not have access to WiFi all of the time.

Combine Grooveshark with the Backgrounder app for allowing 3rd party apps to run in the background and you have a full iPod app replacement.

Good work Grooveshark, very impressive app. Has anyone else tried the Grooveshark? What are your impressions?

My wife and I decided to rent the movie Orphan in HD. After purchasing the movie, it took about 30 seconds to a minute to buffer enough before we could begin watching. Our internet connection is the standard 7.5Mbps from Shaw in Calgary. We watched the entire 2 hour movie without any glitches. At no point did it need to pause to buffer.

Video and sound quality was quite good. To me the HD video clearly wasn’t Blu-Ray quality, but I would say that it was better than the HD movies I have watched on Shaw HD. I can’t make a comparison to an SD iTunes movie though because I have not rented one.

The next day I purchased a few episodes of The Office. I purchased both HD and SD episodes. I was very pleased with the SD quality but I didn’t feel that the HD episode I purchased brought enough increase in quality to justify the extra dollar.

Overall I am really pleased with how the Apple TV performed for renting and purchasing. I am going to need to start budgeting for monthly iTunes gift cards though.

Do you use an Apple TV for renting Movies? Do you like it? Hate it?

Has anyone bought one of these? Thoughts?

This results in about 440,000 results. Now in the first page I see a bunch of results that are relating to the iPhone, but are not necessarily meant to be viewed on an iPhone. However, there are a handful that do work. Here are a few things I came across:

Wi-Fi Finder
Yahoo Pipes
Travelocity Mobile
Food Network Recipe Search
GelaSkins

And then I found this iPhone Toolbox list from Mashable.

Well I just found this plug-in for Firefox called Foxmarks. It syncs your bookmarks to a server so that you always have the same set of bookmarks no matter which computer you are on. The plug-in will merge your computer’s bookmarks with the version you stored online. Another great thing about it is your bookmarks are always sorted in the same order across every computer. This is a great convenience.

But what if I’m visiting a friend and I want to show them a site I bookmarked on my computer? You dont want to be installing software on your friends computer, so just go to my.foxmarks.com and login with your Foxmarks account. You’ll be presented with an AJAX web page of your last synced bookmarks. Pretty sweet.

If you are concerned with privacy, fear not, you can choose to backup your bookmarks to your own server instead of the Foxmarks servers. I see they also have a version for IE in beta, but if you are still using IE you have bigger problems than out of sync bookmarks. Yeah. I went there.

This method works for me in Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon 7.10 and is probably the most secure. I have only tested this on a wired connection, so I don’t know exactly what will happen if you use this method when using a wireless connection.

First you have to install smbfs:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Then create a folder inside of the /media directory to mount the share on:

sudo mkdir /media/Storage

You can call it whatever you want, I call it Storage. If you change the name remember to change it below when we edit the fstab file.

Create a credentials file in /root so that you can save your password and have it protected by the root account:

sudo gedit /root/.cifscredentials

Add the following information to the file, but change Guest to your SMB username and add your SMB password.

username=Guest
password=

Note: If your fileserver allows Guest access you can just leave the file as above. If it is password protected you have to put in your username and password.

Save and close the .cifscredentials file.

Now open up your fstab file so that you can add mounting instructions:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add the following line to the bottom of the file:

//192.168.0.10/SHARENAME /media/Storage cifs auto,iocharset=utf8,uid=USER,gid=users,credentials=/root/.cifscredentials,file_mode=0775,dir_mode=0775 0 0

You have to change the following information:
Change 192.168.0.10 to the IP address or DNS name of your server
Change SHARENAME to the share you want to mount
Change USER to your Ubuntu username

The file_mode=0775,dir_mode=0775 part sets the mounted directory as read/write for all users so long as the SMB username you set in .cifscredentials has read/write access.

Now save the file and run the following command to test to see if you mount now works:

sudo mount -a

If that worked you should see a new drive icon on your desktop that lets you access your share. Now try rebooting and see if your shares mount automatically. If everything went as planned you will have a nice little drive mounted on your desktop every time you start up.

SMB Shares with Spaces in the Names

If you have a share with a space in the path you can replace the space with \040. For example:

//192.168.0.10/Storage\040130 /media/Storage\040130 cifs auto,iocharset=utf8,uid=matt,gid=users,credentials=/root/.cifscredentials,file_mode=0775,dir_mode=0775 0 0

This mounts my 130GB drive on my fileserver to a local directory called Storage 130.

• The Screens and Graphics utility: If Xorg can not start because of a misconfigured display adapter instead of failing to an error report like in previous versions, this GUI utility is automatically launched so you can select appropriate settings. It’s not foolproof, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of what you used to get.
• Automatic installation of plugins: I went to a website with flash, Firefox told me it wasn’t installed and asked me if I wanted to install the plugin. Just like on Windows and OS X it worked flawlessly. I tried to open a video file in Totem and there was not codec installed for it. Totem prompted me to install the gstreamer packages, installed them, and then continued to play the video – better than windows. I opened Amarok and tried to play an MP3 file. It notified me that MP3 support was not installed and asked if I would like to install it. I went to the Apple Trailers website and they all worked. This is probably a result of me opening that video file in Totem earlier. All this was done without me having to pull up a terminal window once.
• Compiz Fusion: It has all the eye candy of Compiz Fusion installed by default, you just have to enable it. If you want access to all the advanced effects just install the compizconfig-settings-manager package.
• Speed: I dont know why, but it runs faster. Firefox launches faster and the whole system is more responsive. The boot process seems quicker as well.

The next version of Ubuntu is going to be a Long Term Support version, which means over the next 6 months they are mainly going to be working on bug fixes and stability. I really think Ubuntu is going to take off in the next year. Soon enough all that will be holding them back will be that ugly yellow colour scheme.

First switch to root:

sudo su

Then run the tar command:

tar cvpzf /backup.tgz /home

Running the above command will create an archive file in the root folder of all of the files in your home directory including all the settings stored in the hidden folders. Be careful though, if you have a lot of large files in your home directory this archive is going to be quite large. I usually manually backup any ISOs or video files before creating the archive. Also remember to empty your trash or the files in there will be backed up too. I usually just use this command to back up any documents and pictures I have. The great thing is this will backup your Firefox bookmarks and everything.

Now, I also want to save a few configuration files in my backup so I don’t have to recreate them on the new system. I’m talking about my xorg.conf, fstab, and sources.list files. It is easy enough to add these files to the archive, just tack the path and filename onto the end of the command and they will be included.

tar cvpzf /backup-oct-2007.tgz /home /etc/fstab /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/apt/sources.list

Now just copy this backup file onto a thumb drive or file server and you are good to reformat your drive and install your fresh copy of the latest Ubuntu. Once installed I just open the archive and extract any files I want to keep then turf the archive.

This is a three step process. First figure out what display levels are supported by your frame buffer, then edit your grub configuration to use one of the 16 bit resolutions supported, then edit your usplash.conf file to use a similar resolution. I had used this method before with no luck, then I came across a bug report that said you have to run sudo dpkg-reconfigure usplash because when Usplash is started during boot your root folder has not been mounted yet (meaning /etc/usplash.conf can not be read). This worked like a charm.

First we install hwinfo so we can use it to find out what resolutions we support.

sudo apt-get install hwinfo

Then I ran hwinfo and redirected the output to a text file. This way we can try a few different resolutions and we only have to reference the file, not run the command every time.

hwinfo --framebuffer > framebuffer.txt

Here is what my framebuffer.txt file looks like:

02: None 00.0: 11001 VESA Framebuffer
  [Created at bios.447]
  Unique ID: rdCR.z77_s6lubfB
  Hardware Class: framebuffer
  Model: "NVIDIA G70 Board - p317h2  "
  Vendor: "NVIDIA Corporation"
  Device: "G70 Board - p317h2  "
  SubVendor: "NVIDIA"
  SubDevice:
  Revision: "Chip Rev"
  Memory Size: 256 MB
  Memory Range: 0xe0000000-0xefffffff (rw)
  Mode 0x0300: 640x400 (+640), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0301: 640x480 (+640), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0303: 800x600 (+800), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0305: 1024x768 (+1024), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0307: 1280x1024 (+1280), 8 bits
  Mode 0x030e: 320x200 (+640), 16 bits
  Mode 0x030f: 320x200 (+1280), 24 bits
  Mode 0x0311: 640x480 (+1280), 16 bits
  Mode 0x0312: 640x480 (+2560), 24 bits
  Mode 0x0314: 800x600 (+1600), 16 bits
  Mode 0x0315: 800x600 (+3200), 24 bits
  Mode 0x0317: 1024x768 (+2048), 16 bits
  Mode 0x0318: 1024x768 (+4096), 24 bits
  Mode 0x031a: 1280x1024 (+2560), 16 bits
  Mode 0x031b: 1280x1024 (+5120), 24 bits
  Mode 0x0330: 320x200 (+320), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0331: 320x400 (+320), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0332: 320x400 (+640), 16 bits
  Mode 0x0333: 320x400 (+1280), 24 bits
  Mode 0x0334: 320x240 (+320), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0335: 320x240 (+640), 16 bits
  Mode 0x0336: 320x240 (+1280), 24 bits
  Mode 0x033d: 640x400 (+1280), 16 bits
  Mode 0x033e: 640x400 (+2560), 24 bits
  Mode 0x0345: 1600x1200 (+1600), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0346: 1600x1200 (+3200), 16 bits
  Mode 0x0347: 1400x1050 (+1400), 8 bits
  Mode 0x0348: 1400x1050 (+2800), 16 bits
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

The information you are interested in is the Mode. If you want to set your boot resolution to 1024×768 at 16 bits you want to use mode 0×0317. As you can see my frame buffer doesnt support any widescreen resolutions. I picked the 1280×1024@16bit, which was 0x031a on my computer. I tried some of the higher resolutions as well as some of the lower ones. They all resulted in different issues from only displaying as black and white, to not displaying anything at all. both 1024 and 1280 seemed to work ok though, so I went with the higher one. Just pick one and go with it. I should note that these resolutions will not effect the resolution once Ubuntu is completely started up. They are unrelated.

Open up the grub menu configuration to edit the resolution:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

find the following line:

# defoptions=quiet splash vga=

and modify it so that it has your mode after the vga=. Here is what mine looks like:

# defoptions=quiet splash vga=0x031a

Do not uncomment the above line or it will not work. It has to be commented.

Save and close the file and then update grub:

sudo update-grub

Now you want to update usplash to use the same resolution that you set for boot. Open the Usplash configuration file:

sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf

I changed mine to look like this:

# Usplash configuration file
xres=1280
yres=800

Now you will notice I set my boot resolution to 1280×1024 but my Usplash resolution is set to 1280×800. This is because I have a widescreen monitor and when I set Usplash to 1280×1024 the boot logo was stretched. I changed it to 800 to counteract the stretch. If you have a standard 4:3 monitor you should set them both to 1280×1024. Otherwise, try what I did and see if it works for you.

This is the most important part. You have to update Usplash or the configuration change you just made will have no effect. So run the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure usplash

Now reboot and cross your fingers. You might have a working boot splash. If you dont, try changing the mode in grub and the resolution in Usplash to something lower and reboot again. Trial and error is the only way you will find what works best on your system. Good luck!

I really like the expo plugin. That is the one that shows you all 4 sides of the cube and you can move windows between all of them. To be honest I have never really been able to utilize more than one desktop, so thats something I want to work on.

I must say though, I am dissapointed with the performance. The video makes it look soo smooth. It’s not quite as nice on mine. A lot of the animations are jerky and creating windows is a little slow. I do run a 7800 GT 256MB video card, so I dont see why this is so bad. I tried a few tweaks on the Compiz forums but I didnt see too much improvement. Although, I didnt spend much time on it.

One thing I was impressed with was how easy it was to get up and running. The first time I installed Compiz over a year ago it took me several hours to get working and I believe it was probably more than one session worth of research before I finally got it working. This time it was less than 20 minutes and I had it installed and working. That just goes to show the type of advancements that are being made in Linux.