Enable / Disable EDGE on iPhone without jailbreak and toggles

July 6th, 2010

After a long history of incidents/accidents, I’ve been using my iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) with regular iOS4 for a couple of days. However, I had to do without any mobile internet – even though my contract was fine and it had been working just fine with 3.1.2.

I’ve pretty much tried every instruction that’s out there which has anything to do with enabling mobile internet. Removing SIM-card, resetting APN (even though my provider doesn’t even need any APN settings), completely resetting network settings – along with disabling+enabling mobile data connections and/+ 3G for a thousand times. The “E” or the “3G” was showing up fine (depending which one I enabled), nevertheless, no connection could be made from any app.

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Computer gibberish in movie

June 22nd, 2010

We all know those scenes from movies, where we see a computer screen while the NOC-list is being copied or when someone logs into a mainframe in order to disable the power of half a city (via SSH btw). Some are done well or very well (as the mentioned SSH one) others poorly researched or even plain lazy.
While watching such scenes, we usually immediately recognize whether it’s authentic or just crap. Nowadays modern high resolution+definiton movie formats make it even possible to pause the movie and verify all the text that we see on computer screens in such scenes.

Recently, when I watched the (quite brutal) movie “Unthinkable” I saw a real killer:

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Opera and innerHTML vs. createTextNode()

January 20th, 2010

Recently I came across the situation where I created a webpage on which I wanted to include some raw XML data in a <textarea> so the user could see that XML data including all tags and stuff. What made the setup special was, that in this scenario I didn’t just put a predefined XML formatted data inside the textarea, but the XML data was supposed to be inserted into the webpage (into the textarea) on the client-side via Javascript.
(In order to give you a little bit more information about the whole picture: the source XML data – to be inserted on the fly – might change and should be able to be updated without reloading the whole page)

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Disable compressed folders in Windows Vista and Windows 7

October 19th, 2009

When you’re using an “external” tool for handling ZIP archive file (and the likes), it can be really annoying when you double-click on such a file in Windows Explorer (or other file browsers) and Windows treats the file as a compressed folder and doesn’t start the external application even though file associations are correctly set.

Some tuning tools like XP-Antispy are able to disable the functionality of compressed folders, however it didn’t work for me on Vista the last time I tried.
After a while of research I found the solution how to edit the registry, so that double-clicking associated files will truly be opened with the external application:

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The Big Bang Theory – Intro (frame by frame)

September 21st, 2009

After a few weeks (actually, a few months) of procrastination and research, I finally finished my “project” to split up the intro of the TV-series The Big Bang Theory frame by frame and find out what each snapshot meant.
I organized all 109 snapshots in a list with a short label of what the snapshot shows. Maybe community and fans will help to complete the work and compose nice descriptions.

You can find the list on a separate website here: http://www.haraldkraft.de/thebigbangtheory/

Enjoy :)

UPDATE (09/29/09): As I am in Toronto atm without proper internet access, I will update all your comments and emails within the next two weeks.
UPDATE2 (09/29/09): To avoid further comments on the same issues, I updated the page (spending the last 2 hours in an Apple store ;) ).

WebCalendar is not working with Lightning or Sunbird

September 18th, 2009

After using WebCalendar for quite I while, I finally got to the bottom of the problem, why it wasn’t working as a remote calendar in Mozilla Sunbird or in the Thunderbird extension Lightning.

Following the official description how to subscribe to a remote calendar did add the calendar successfully, but showed a yellow warning sign with the caption

The calendar foobar is momentarily not available

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Use customized shortcut keyboard setup in Opera browser

September 3rd, 2009

Throughout these past weeks, I’ve installed Opera on a few new systems (with various operating systems btw) and had to make (just) a few adjustments. One of them included setting my own keyboard setup. Even though making my custom shortcut settings was easily done each time (via Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> “Keyboard setup” Duplicate + Edit, see Tamil’s blog for a nice description), embarrassingly I had forgotton how to actually “enable” the modified keyboard setup.

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Invalid command ‘Script’ in Apache configuration

August 3rd, 2009

While I was trying to allow some tool’s PHP file to perform the HTTP command PUT, the tool’s manual said to put the following code in the httpd.conf Apache configuration file:
<Directory /foo/bar>
Script PUT /some.php
</Directory>

And so I did. But when I tried to reload Apache’s configuration (/etc/init.d/apache2 reload), Apache complained with the following message:

Invalid command ‘Script’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
failed!

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File association for certain filenames without file extension under Windows

July 24th, 2009

Recently I was facing the issue whether it’s possible to associate files with a certain filename to be opened with a particular program in Windows operating systems. These could be files named TODO, README, INSTALL, LICENSE and the likes, as they are widely common in the unix world.

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BCDboot and BCDedit

July 8th, 2009

After the first complications with the quadruple boot, I was facing new ones when I tried to do everything again on a new hard drive.
The installation order was 1. Windows XP 2. Windows 7 (which recognized the “old” XP and integrated it in the boot loader) 3. Ubuntu 9.04 4. OpenSolaris 2009.06
(for detailed partition info see quadruple-boot blog entry).

The boot process would then be like this:

  • load OpenSolaris GRUB from third primary
    1. boot OpenSolaris from third primary
    2. load Microsoft bootloader from first primary
    3. load Microsoft bootloader from second primary
    1. boot Windows 7 from C: (as first primary)
    2. boot Windows XP from E: (as second primary)
  • boot Ubuntu (several entries for different kernels) from logical

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