Technology

Recently I attempted to get my Logitech Presenter R800 working with Keynote on my Mac. I swiftly discovered that although it works with PowerPoint for Mac out-of-the-box, in Keynote the ‘start/stop presentation’ and ‘blank presentation screen’ keys didn’t work.

After a bit of investigation, I found the solution, which was to use KeyRemap4MacBook. The presenter tool behaves like a USB keyboard, and uses  for blank screen, and F5 for show/hide presentation. I installed KeyRemap4MacBook, and installed a private.xml based on the one on this page for a slightly different presentation tool. I’ve uploaded the one I used to github. Tip: Don’t forget to read the KeyRemap4MacBook manual. You need to explicitly reload the private.xml once it’s in place (you’ll also need to rename it to that name when you download from github), as well as tick the ‘R800 for Keynote’ checkbox on the Change Key tab in the KeyRemap4MacBook settings.

I installed CyanogenMod on my HTC Desire about a week ago in an attempt to get rid of some of the crapware that Orange UK are notorious for installing, and get a snappier, cleaner phone. I won’t repeat the excellent CyanogenMod install instructions, which you can find here. However, here are some points that might help you if you’re doing something similar:

• The OS (Android) firmware and the radio firmware are two separate things. The phone was at the latest Orange-approved firmware level before the upgrade (Android 2.2, which comes with the radio at version 5.10.05.30). I had read elsewhere that Orange network-lock the phone and that this sometimes causes problems when installing CyanogenMod; so I deliberately removed the SIM card during the upgrade process as suggested. Whether this circumvented the problem or whether it simply wasn’t an issue I can’t say, but certainly I haven’t seen any network-lock problems. I didn’t upgrade the radio at all, as this seemed risky; I simply left it at the 5.10 level and skipped over that section in the install instructions.

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I recently started using Orange’s new roaming service that allows you to roam on T-Mobile’s network, in the same way as you might roam around networks when you are abroad. So far experiences are very positive. The phone remains on Orange most of the time, which is fortunate as 3G/HSxPA signals are only available via the Orange network. However, when a signal isn’t available, it seems to roam fairly quickly and efficiently onto T-Mobile’s network. The phone sees this as a roam: the same “R” symbol appears on my Desire’s screen. Charges are allegedly exactly the same as via Orange, so in theory it shouldn’t cost anything extra (although I’ve yet to see a bill since I’ve had it turned on).

I just acquired a new Vodafone Mobile Broadband modem to replace an aging ExpressCard version I had that wasn’t working too well. It came in the form of a Vodafone-branded Huawei K4505 USB stick. It didn’t work completely out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 10.04, at first appearing unrecognisable. After some hunting, I discovered that these sticks initially present themselves as USB Mass Storage to allow you to install the Windows drivers. You have to give a few magic incantations on Linux to make them switch into modem mode:

I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my Thinkpad T61 and set about disabling the touchpad, which I always find irritating. There seemed to be lots of guides to this, including this one, but none of them seemed to work for me. Eventually I figured some fairly simple steps which did work:

• Install two packages if they aren’t already installed (gpointing-device-settings is the more modern version of gsynaptics and will uninstall it if it’s installed):

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I recently bought a veryPC AT20 as a more powerful replacement for an aging Debian-hacked NSLU2 that I had serving up files, doing backups, and other such tasks. I thought I’d do a quick review in case it’s of value to anyone considering a machine from veryPC (at the time of writing, it seems to be no longer for sale, although the veryPC AT10 looks similar).

I particularly wanted something more meaty than my NSLU2 so I could do full-disk encryption, fully-encrypted offsite backups, so it seemed ideal. The variation I ordered has:

I suddenly realised that I expect Amazon (and indeed many other websites) to correct my misspellings in the same way as Google:

Did you mean: lost in translation ?

But it doesn’t.

They should fix this.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using Dopplr and TripIt a lot recently as I’ve been travelling more. Although TripIt is far more featureful, I know more people on Dopplr and so keeping it up-to-date is useful as it increases the chance of serendipitous coincidences. They are competitors, but I like them both.

So far it’s been a pain to enter information into Dopplr manually, but they announced today that it can now watch iCal calendars and create trips accordingly. I’ve added my iCal feed from TripIt and it seems to work well so far. They are minor niggles. For example, it gets confused if you have multiple destinations in your trip as TripIt doesn’t really allow for this concept. Also, not all trips involve advance booking, so I don’t bother adding them to TripIt - they’ll need to be entered into Dopplr manually. Nevertheless, it should cut down on the amount of data entry.

I went to the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC at the weekend. The show itself was a little disappointing, obviously oriented more around trade sales than the end-consumer, and was marred a little by poor organisation from the NEC resulting in large queues, a car-park merry-go-round, and so on. But nevertheless, there were some interesting stalls - Canon and Nikon having the largest and most impressive, with some substantial Canon L-series lenses on display.

As I’ve starting travelling a lot recently, I’ve been making reasonably heavy use of both Dopplr and the less well-known TripIt. The idea behind Dopplr is simple: tell it which cities you’re travelling to and it will share that information with your other Dopplr contacts, notifying you when you’re in the same place. You can also syndicate your travel plans - I have mine published on Facebook and available as a feed via Google Calendar.