I tried it, and liked having a “Jump to top” button (that is SOOO useful), and image previews. I use it very often, sometimes way more than others. Doing so, I found a few things that I’d like to see fixed.

Previews work.. but only in Timeline mode, or on someone’s profile page. If I stumble over the same tweet through Mentions or Thread, nothing will preview. Also, application handlers fail in a similar fashion. I use TweetCaster Pro to read TwitLonger links, as well as images from twitpic/yfrog/etc. It really cuts down on the time needed to access the desired content, by avoiding launching the browser and loading the bloat.

Similarly, a YouTube link will properly launch into the Android YouTube app, but not if I click the link through Mentions or Thread.

I’m not reproducing this behavior at the moment; this is all coming from my memory, so I might be slightly off, but the issue is definitely there.

There has been a rising frequency, over the past month or two, of connection errors while loading tweets or threads. I don’t know if this is a TweetCaster problem or Twitter API issue, but it has happened to me on various Wi-Fi, 3G, and 4G networks.

I’m a location whore, so I enjoy adding my current coordinates to my tweet (as long as it’s not exposing private information — generally the location of my home.) However, when I enable it with TweetCaster, it doesn’t tell me if it successfully obtained a position or not, so I have no idea if it got added, and I don’t know how long to wait. An even nicer feature would be to show me a preview of the detected location, to make sure I didn’t end up with something absurd from Wi-Fi geocaching.

I miss being able to open one tweet. Sometimes I want to show a tweet to a friend, but I have to show them a timeline of tweets and say “look at this one” or cover the others with my hand.

Someday there will be an API to see replies to the currently viewed tweet. AFAIK only the web twitter client (including m.twitter.com) supports this.

Overall, I love TweetCaster Pro, it has tons of features, support for a bunch of features that I don’t use, and options to customize things just the way you want it.

Edit: I like how a release came a few days after, which allowed seeing replies to a tweet.

I wanted to connect a HDMI laptop/computer (common output, nowadays) to a monitor without HDMI, but with DVI. I knew that with a standard $1 male-male HDMI cable, I could connect the computer to the adapter. However, the other end of the adapter has pins for DVI-I dual link, but the monitor’s female end shows DVI-D dual link.

I looked at the pins on Wikipedia and deemed the side pins a bit unnecessary (“don’t care”), as they were for analog communication. I pulled the 4 square pins (C1-C5), but the plug still wouldn’t fit. I realized that the flat connector (C5) was a bit longer on the converter than the DVI cable I was using; I saw that it was analog as well, and pulled it out. and then it worked! I was able to hack my $2 HDMI-DVI adapter to work not as intended, given a few minutes of research and understanding. Of course, one could buy the correct converter from Monoprice, but shipping costs tend to be too much for one item, and sometimes you need a hack in the moment, instead of waiting a few days for shipping.

A year ago, I understood DVI-D vs DVI-I on video cards and how the DVI connector on video cards supported extra pins for analog input, and could be used with VGA monitors given a cheap, passive DVI-VGA converter found with every video card nowadays. Now I understand it just a bit more.

I moved to an Android phone 7 months ago after being fed up with the lack of Google Voice integration, and Sprint ironically released their integration with Google Voice a month later. I also recently obtained a TouchPad since it was $100, even though I did not need a tablet whatsoever (I’m a phone + netbook + desktop kinda guy; no tablets or laptops.)

My list was scrambled not too long ago, so it’s probably missing things, but without further ado..

TouchPad severe:

• Maps – Bing…
• No camera app WTF!
• No GPS (TouchPad only), so no navigation

WebOS severe:

• No real input method support
• No widgets
• No polished Twitter app; a few have existed here and there but no outstanding ones
• No application handlers!
• Email – replies are made with a weird font, makes me not want to use it altogether
• The obvious – limited app selection. I’m sick of no Google Voice, no Google Reader, no VNC client, weak terminal/ssh clients, etc.

TouchPad mehs:

• Kinda slow at stock 1.2GHz, fine with 1.5 UberKernel
• YouTube is not native. They want you to just use the YouTube webpage, which isn’t exactly bad, but isn’t good at all. You try to do desktop-style mouseover to fullscreen or change volume, and it doesn’t work well on the TouchPad. Also, videos have trouble playing at higher resolutions.

WebOS mehs:

• No last.fm scrobbler. Must use music player with integrated scrobbling

WebOS awesome:

• Card view
• Best developer community yet worst app selection
• Homebrew FTW (also FTL, we live in an era where everything should just work)

Since it’s 2011, everyone expects their technology to just work, and for some reason they all think that you should never have to wait for anything. While this is a somewhat reasonable expectation, they shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t perform “like a Mac” or “like an iPad”… that is, a device that can’t really do anything, but does it (fairly) well.

After googling for a bit, I found people messing with gfx settings so I decided to try. A few combinations of things didn’t work, and I eventually found something that did work.

So here’s my (non-default) option settings:
layers.prefer-opengl=true
layers.acceleration.disabled=true
gfx.direct2d.disabled=true
I bet one of those isn’t necessary.

It’s fairly snappy again!

FreeBSD makes it simple enough. All you need to do is root to the first subpartition of the FreeBSD partition and call boot kernel /boot/loader.

However, GRUB needs to be able to read UFS2 in order to load /boot/loader from that UFS2 filesystem, otherwise partition type 0xa5 will be “unknown”. I updated GRUB on the FAT32 partition to support UFS2 stage1.5, among some other strange filesystem types.

I then reinstalled the FAT32 copy of GRUB to the MBR with the usual install (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst, and voila, the MBR/booted GRUB could read UFS2.

Here’s a sample of my finished menu.lst:
[root@saratoga16a ~]# cat /mnt/fat32/boot/grub/menu.lst
default 0
timeout 8
title FreeBSD 7.4 i386
    root (hd0,1a)
    kernel /boot/loader
title FreeBSD 7.4 amd64
    root (hd0,2a)
    kernel /boot/loader
title Windows
    root (hd0,0)
    makeactive
    chainloader +1
[root@saratoga16a ~]#

I made the mistake of making an 8GB (default?) fixed image size, and now I made it a 50GB variable image size (the guest OS thinks it has 50GB, but it only uses as much real space as it needs)

1. Create a new disk under the SATA controller
2. Boot into a live Linux, like GParted
3. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb (add bs to improve performance!)
4. Open GParted and extend /dev/sdb to your desired size
5. Mount your new partition, fix any /etc/fstab-related items as necessary
6. poweroff, remove the old disk from the virtual SATA controller, power on

I keep forgetting.

To get these settings, run the following:
# stty 115200 -ignbrk -brkint -icrnl -imaxbel -opost -onlcr -isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echoctl -echoke time 5 min 1 < /dev/ttyUSB0

Replace /dev/ttyUSB0 with the device of choice. I only know that 115200 is the baud rate, and everything else is uncertain to me. They are simple concepts, but I haven’t bothered to figure them out, and I’ll bet that a lot of them are unnecessary.

We prefer DHCP by default for all IPs, and the onboard NIC to use eth[01] while our test/development NIC uses eth[23]. All DHCP transactions provide a gateway address.

However, different operating systems have different behavior when determining which route to set up as default, when there are multiple interfaces. RHEL tends to use the last activated interface. SLES seems to use the first one, BUT on our older set of chassis, the DHCP transaction for our onboard NIC (with the desired default route) doesn’t complete “in a timely manner” (40 seconds), gets backgrounded, and the network configurator uses the next “working interface” for its default gateway.

For RHEL, we simply specify GATEWAYDEV=eth0 in /etc/sysconfig/network and that solved our issues, in a simple manner, while letting us keep DHCP. No DEFROUTE= in each /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* file or anything.

Unfortunately, such a simple solution doesn’t apply to SLES. For SLES 10, I set WAIT_FOR_INTERFACES="60" and added the “slow” NIC to MANDATORY_INTERFACES, both in /etc/sysconfig/network/config. (I also set FIREWALL="no" for good measure, but that is likely irrelevant.) Enabling DEBUG in ./config and ./dhcp didn’t seem to help at all. For SLES 11, I do the same thing, though the style of entry in MANDATORY_INTERFACES is a bit different, and it doesn’t really … seem to work well.

At the end of the day, spanning tree on the switch was causing link negotiation to take like 30 seconds or something, which is why we saw the DHCPDISCOVER coming down the OS stack but not out the wire until 30+ seconds later. It really shouldn’t, and this is a hacked out solution, but meh…

I wanted to get DavMail running on it, so I went to install java packages. I ended up installing default-jre. But I had to update the package lists first — I ended up with some 404s on package names that had been renamed since my last update.

DavMail uses Java.SWT graphical elements by default. By setting davmail.server=true you can run it without an X11 display. All other items in your .davmail.properties can be default.