Strotos Communications Blog

Apple Wireless Keyboard – Why are my batteries dead???

I’m an Apple fan, wouldn’t say a massive fan, but a fan nonetheless. The hardware they have for most of their products is top notch and the software puts simplicity at its heart for its users. I don’t mean to dis Windows, I use that as well and Linux too.

I wrote this because of a pretty serious problem I have (serious in that it is costing me money or rather batteries).

I got the Apple Wireless Keyboard last October and I really like it. Took awhile to break in the keys but its pretty good, nice sleek form factor and was at the time very good on battery usage in fact I didn’t have to change the batteries till I ran into my problem.

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Ubuntu 9.10 on a USB Stick

Since Ubuntu 9.10 came out I have been playing with the Desktop and Server releases quite a bit. In the Server instance they now include Ubuntu’s Enterprise Cloud, which is really a fantastic piece of kit. More information can be found here. The part I like the most is being able to move your machines between a public environment (EC2) to a private one (your Enterprise Cloud). That’s all contained in the Server release and I’ll have a post on that later.

But what I want to inform you all of today is that with the live version of Ubuntu Desktop you can install it on a USB stick and boot from it. Whats different in this release compared to others is that there is a GUI tool for you to do it. None of this messing about with text files trying to get a bootloader and bios to work together.

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CheatSheets that I use

So when I’m programming or doing anything of that sort, I tend to have a cheat sheet for the tool or piece of software that I’m using at any given time, be it for an IDE like Netbeans or Textmate, or just a command-line tool like Git or SVN. It really can make life much simpler when you just have the commands or shortcuts at hand.

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Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 & Snow Leopard

After installing Snow Leopard on my MacBook, I failed to connect my Microsoft Wireless Mouse via Bluetooth like I had done with Leopard. The mouse I use the most is the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000. I have three of them and I use them for the various computers I use on a day to day basis on Mac, Windows and Linux and they work very well.

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Weird fonts in Finder on Snow Leopard 10.6

Hey, so after getting Snow Leopard installed I changed a lot of things around, one of which is the fonts that the OS uses located in System Preferences -> Language & Text.

The default is “English” along with a whole list of supported languages that the system can use. So I removed them all and added “British English” as the only language to use.

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Recursivly delete .svn from your directories

A pretty simple tip that can save you a lot of time if you use revision control systems.This command can be used to remove the .svn folder that is used and placed within every folder to control your versioned files.

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Simply run this command on the command line in the top level of the directory you want to remove the folders from. This will go down through all the folders in the directory and delete all the .svn folders.

Note: This will only work on Unix based systems or with Cygwin

IE8 and a broken Terminal Server Client Plugin

So those of you on Windows may be very familiar with IE 8, the latest version of the Microsoft Web Browser. I’m not really going to talk about it in general (or diss it rather ) but what I am going to talk about is a small issue that you may have when you update it from IE7. If you have the Terminal Server Client plugin enabled when you do the update, the plugin might not work. This can be the case if you a trying to log into you computer, say at work using Remote Web Workplace. I have noticed that although the plugin is enabled it will not work for some reason. To fix this so that you can log into your remote machine using RWW. First

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Installing 4 Gigs of 800Mhz DDR2 RAM into a Macbook that won’t take it…

Ok I have this black Macbook that I got last August, my first ever Mac and I love it,  Macs  just make life so easy, especially since most of my servers are Linux based. Whenever I need to use Windows I just use a VM, VirtualBox namely.

Anyway, I found that overtime the 2 gigs of RAM that I had in this mac would fill up from all the applications I had open. The logical choice was to get more RAM. I bought 4 gigs in total, in a 2 x 2gig config. The RAM was from Crosair because that’s my preferred brand.

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Removing hard to remove programs from vista and xp

So there are programs installed in your XP or Vista system that will not remove themselves from your computer when you use the uninstall provided by the application or they will not uninstall anyway by and easy means.

There are a number of ways to manually remove the application by removing the applications registry keys from you computer, there can be any number of entries from 4 – 10 and manually doing this can be a pain.

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Reinstalling “Help and Support” Service after upgrade of Small Business Server 2003 to Service Pack 2

Came across this recently where after an upgrade of SBS 2003 to Service Pack 2, the Help and Support service magically disappears. I have upgraded SBS servers before but this has never happened to me. It’s a bit strange really, still trying to figure out why this happened. Anyone have any idea’s?

Anyway to reinstall the service requires 3 simple tasks.

1. Navigate to “%windir%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries” in the command-line.
2. Run the command: “start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install”
3. When the command completes (it should take a minute or two), the “Help and Support” service should appear in the Services list, so start it,

There you go, problem solved. If anyone knows why this happened do let me know..