Canon Printer Error U150

The printer says it can't recognize some print cartridges and asks you to replace them. You replace them, but nothing happends. After fiddling around with it for a while, eventually it works, but another cartridge shows the error. Possible Solutions:

1. Pull the plug. Take the energy away from the printer to reset the memory. Leave it without power for a few minutes. Try not turning it off first.
2. Reset the chips. This often happens with replacement ink or canon chips on replacement ink tanks. Go to the ink store, they usually have chip resetters.
3. Clean the contacts on the printer and the ink chips with ISOPROPYL Alcohol.

AT YOUR OWN RISK! If nothing works, try Canon original ink. If that doesn't work, contact Canon. Good luck!

Eduroam with Linux (incl. Android!)

The guide my university supplied did not work after all with Linux. So I used an alternative guide, which also turned out to be working for Android:

Security: WPA2 Enterprise

Authentification Tunneled TLS (TTLS)

Anonymous Identity: none

CA-Certifikate: (none)

Inner Authentification: MSCHAP2

User: user@your-uni.com (as in the Windows settings guide of your home university)
password: your password, as in windows.

Fixing - at least some - Skypephone S2 Battery Issues

My 3 Skypephone S2 at some point started to run out of battery after being on for about 20 hours or less. And this is not because a Java program crashed, which can be a reason, too. It was after a full charge over night and switching it off and on. Eventually it turned out the problem was that I had still activated the USB Modem setting in Connections. Once I turned it back to blue tooth mode and turned off bluetooth after that the problem was gone and the battery lasted a *lot* longer again. Anyways, the battery delivered with the phone seems to be not very good in any case, so you might want to get a new one. The big question is just: where?

Update: It works! The only problem is you need to leave out the battery at least over night afterwards.

If you like this, why not order a Three UK Sim with my agent link (or send the link to friends). You get an extra 5 quid or so AFAIK.

Immediate Fix for Slow Open and Save Dialogs in Ubuntu OpenOffice

I'm using KDE and I think it's somehow related to that. Anyway, you need to execute the following command to fix it:

echo -e 127.0.0.1 \\t $HOSTNAME localhost $HOSTNAME.'(none)' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Hope this helps. Found in the Ubuntu Forums here.

Linus System Monitoring Tools

Why should I write much about them if someone else already has.

Enjoy.

Fix: OpenCards 1.5 Crashes in Openoffice 3.1 3.0 Linux or Mac

If you don't know it yet, go and check out OpenCards - the best flash card learning software I know. You can edit the cards with OpenOffice Impress like a presentation and then Opencards helps to to learn the slides with a smart algorithm.

If your system crashes when you want to run OpenCards, try starting it from xterm like this:

env SAL_NO_XINITTHREADS=true ooffice -impress

.
This certainly fixed my problems. Now I can switch to Linux on my Netbook. Turns out Openoffice runs much faster in Linux than in Windows.

By the way:If you can't install the OpenCards Extension and see a large java error message, you probably haven't installed all necessary openoffice packages and activated Java. Try installing the meta-package "openoffice.org" and the package "sun-java6-bin".

Simpler workaround to Print Google Waves

All you really need to do it press the fullscreen button on the right top corner. Then you have the same view a in iPhone mode and you can print it. But going back now is just the press of a button. Still, Google Wave is IMHO not much more than a forum thread (on exstacy) which you can export to certain people.

Printing from Google Wave

The work around is to use the iPhone as User Agent:
google-chrome --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16' wave.google.com

This works even if you just open a new tab - no need to quit the entire browser first.

More Security in Windows with EMET

If you are an unfortunate Windows user, at least some times - like most of us are - the Microsoft toolEMET may help you to more security against exploits. Maybe finally something of value after the useless and annoying toolkit I constantly need to block in Windows Update?

XBMC with VAAPI on GMA500

It's not possible directly right now due to limitations of the existing GMA 500 drivers (IEGD, PSB, ...). But if you have mplayer-vaapi running, it's really easy - Because you can set up xbmc to use external players.

Media Center Software for German TV

If you have read this blog from the very beginning you probably already noticed I speak German. If you do, too, here is a great one stop software for AFAIK all German state media accessable online.

Fix for device key_bitmask has changed - Device has changed - disabling

The bug was reported here for Ubuntu and the fixing patch can be found here. The patch applies cleanly to older versions of evdev in my test. I've also packaged a fixed .deb for Ubuntu Karmic here. Your keyboard should no longer stop working after a few suspends. Enjoy\!

Medion ebook reader (not) on the IFA 2010 Berlin

I went there and made a point of checking for it after reading about the upcoming release of their ebook reader on the H. Medion is known for producing pretty good value products (at least every once in a while) and so I was curious. But the representatives could neither show it to me (only to VIPs), nor would they tell me anything about it - not the price, estimated release date, etc. Hence I doubt there will be any sort of release from Medion anytime soon. And with everyone else showing off their devices it was not very convincing. Some of the ones I liked best were the iriver with a nice touch screen but no web browser and vague battery times (11000 pages) and some of the Sony ebook readers (there was one of them with a very bad resolution unfomfortable to read, though). It was actually the first time I saw an ebook reader, though and I really thought - hey is that just an empty sample with something printed on a plastic foil? No it wasn't I found out as it reacted to my finger touching it.

All in all the IFA is quite interesting and it's wonderful to see all the upcoming 3D TVs and their technologies. By far my favorite was a head tracking 3D display at the Heise (the H) stand 124 in hall 17 - no glasses needed but amazingly great results. Most other 3D TVs either needed glasses or had pretty disappointing results. Also impressive were the LG HDTVs - brilliant, crisp colors.

Nice Speed Test Site

The German router producer AVM - IMHO making the world best routers - has a nice speed test site. It does not only include the usual upload and download tests and ping, but also jitter and packet loss. For those who don't live in Germany, it can still help to check how good e.g. your overseas connection is. If you're interested in those routers, google for AVM Fritz Box.

Advanced SSH

Pretty much everything you should know about advanced SSH usage - at least pretty much everything I know - is in this post on the kplice blog.

LG Flatron 1970H and how it really isn't VESA mount compatible

The monitor needs a special metal plate fixed to the stand in order to be VESA compatible. After calls to LG hotline, the replacement parts hotline, the distribution hotline and the replacement parts distribution hotline it turns out this part is not available anywhere and nobody even knows of it. The nicest part though was when I told the man that the device is several years old. He immediately lost interest and hung up. Nice. Thanks, LG.

Update:
Whooops. I had that weird plate in my package all along. This wrapped. Sorry, LG. All I can blame you for is no longer having replacement parts after... roughly 5 years.