Andy Bird
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Posts by Andy Bird
Possible fix for download & installation unsuccessful Android Market issues
Nov 13th
There are a number of suggestions out there. I have successfully used the following two to allow the download and installation of apps from the Android market place after receiving the error “download unsuccessful”
1) Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > Market >
Then try the following : clear cache and / or Unistall Updates.
2) As above but for the Market Updater app
Try clear data and / or clear cache
3) If the above do not work try the same for Google Apps.
4) I have not tried it but I have seen people report success clearing data for the Download manager.
How to fix Contact sync deletes new contacts and edits on my Xperia X10 / Mini Pro
Nov 13th
As you can see from other posts the X10 is giving me more grief than it rightly should. Still stuck at Android 1.6 the updates to 2.1 are starting to trickle in as most other phones are moving on 2.2
The symptoms:
Synching your phone to your google app account deletes all contects from you address book. A great feature is it not!
While some people are reporting that the followng has not worked I have tested it to death and it seems to be very reliable. One thing that is good about the X10 is the number of back up options. Far better than those offered by my Samsung Galaxy S. So before you attempt to do anything back up your contacts to your sim or SD card. (menu > more > backup)
The fix:
Enter settings > data synchronisation > Google synch> Group Synchronisation
Tick both options here. No, I have no idea what they do or why they work.
Activate Contact synch and watch those contacts flow.
Pull up your google contacts and make sure you test contacts both ways. eg create a new contact on the phone and synch again. make sure it appears in Google. Delete it in Google and make sure it goes off your phone.
Fingers crossed this helps.
How to download recursive folders in linux with command line ftp
Nov 10th
Ok so all you want to is to ssh into your server and pull a stack of files over from another PC via ftp. Sounds simple does it now. This is linux we are talking about.. nothing is simple.
The short answer.. sod ftp use wget like
[bash]wget -r ftp://user: pass@domain/folder/*[/bash]
Long answer
And being linux all the help is just as cryptic as the manual.
So you probably tried to ftp in to the remote PC and use get to get the files… ha you hapless fool. Then you googled a bit and found that mget command gets more then 1 file so you tried
mget *
you then get sick of answering YES to every prompt.
the someone points out that if you enter
ftp> prompt
it will toggle out of prompt mode
then you realise that this is only downloading files anyway.
argghhh
eventually you google for “lunux ftp recursive” and finally you have cracked it.
Increase the size of tmpfs and leave files intact
Oct 27th
very cool trick
Increase the size of a ramdisk:
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp -o size=2000M,mode=1777,remount
This increases the ramdisk’s size to 2000M. No file is destroyed.
Read more: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Tmpfs#ixzz13amAsYk1
Fix “SIM card unavailable” in Sony errikson X10 xperia
Sep 28th
The problem here is simple… The phone is look ing for a number on the sim. This is a special field which the phone expects to find. When it is not there it throws up an error. It appears that only sony phones use this field for any purpose and for reasons only known only to Sony you cannot edit this field with a 400 pound smart phone. The quick fix is to put the sim in an older phone and try to update the field. You are look ing for some reference to “your number” or “special number”. However it appears that only some phones will do the trick. People have reported success with other Sony phones and I can confirm that a Blackberry will do it. Goto settings>sim>advanced and you will see the blank number field. Fill this with your own number and save it. Put sim back into xperia and you should have got rid of the error. Sorted.
How to fix a range of sounds problems in Linux / Ubuntu and enable Dolby / DTS over SPDIF
Sep 17th
For the record I am trying to persuade Ubuntu 10.04 to spit out Dolby ac3 compressed digital signal via the SPDIF at the back of my Asus R1F tablet laptop. The spdif works out of the box!! An amazing achievement! However, I cant for the life of my persuade any content to be sent to my receiver as Dolby Digital. I have not quite given up yet but the answer still eludes me. The SPDIF will only send a sterio signal and will only reproduce a 5.1 setup when the compressed stream to sent to an external receiver. As far as I am aware there is no way to encode information on the fly and then send as 5.1.. which is a shame. I have the alc6660vd chip in the R1F.
More >
Zip files corrupted on download in internet explorer no FF or Chrome
Jul 20th
Aghh the joys of working with websites..
One step forward another step back.
Scenario
You have zipped files available for download from your site, blog, CMS etc. When you test the download process our in IE you get an error:
The Compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid or corrupted.
Publish wordpress to twitter
Jul 18th
Having just spent all morning getting grief from she-who-must-be-obeyed I am having a bad PC day. Her command was simple enough
MAKE MY BLOG POST TO TWITTER
hmm. 1st it was “who the hell would want to use twitter” then it was like “make my facebook page talk to twitter” now its “make my wordpress blog talk to twitter”. The facebook talking to twitter was a bit of a pain but I figured wordpress would be a doddle. I used the built in plugin search / install tool to try about 5 different twitter integrators and none of them would work. Alex King who produces the most popular plug in Twitter Tools was starting to lose his cool so it is clearly a problem with some esoteric combination of servers and twitter.
Eventually at the bottom of the plugin search page is WP to Twitter by Joe Dolson. Finally!! This worked a treat 1st time around, supports bit.ly and a few other shortening services and is very easy to use. Is these words are true there should be a link flying its way over to twitter right now pointing back to this page 
How to extract *.tgz or *.tar.gz
Jul 18th
To extract .tar.gz or .tgz files from terminal or via ssh
tar -zxvf file.tar.gz
or
tar -zxvf filename.tgz
I don’t know about anyone else but 99% of the time when faced with a compressed tar file I want to extract it to its own folder and view the progress of the decompression. So why it is that every time you seek the answer to this question do most linux support sites feel the need to explain over 1500 words every single possible switch and variant of the tar command coupled with the historical development and legacy options of the command. WE DON’T CARE.
SSH as a different user on remote linux box
Jul 18th
Scenario:
You are sat at a linux box (ubuntu, fedora, suse etc) and want to ssh into another linux box (probably your webserver). By default typing ssh remote-domain.com will attempt to log you in as the user you are currently logged in as. However, you may want to log into the remote machine as someone else.
Short answer:
in a linux terminal enter
ssh user@remote.com
Long answer:
More >
