Last night I got to play with ibm-acpi for a little while. It was refreshing to watch the backlight on the R50 go to sleep after being continually on while running on linux, thanks to radeontool and ibm-acpi’s magic to intercept Fn-F3. Priyadi Iman notes that ibm-acpi is included in kernel 2.6.10, but I’m still running the Ol’Thinkpad on 2.6.9, so I will have to play around with a newer kernel and report back my findings.
Category: Tech
Windows Update + Squid Proxy: The WinXP Scenario
If some Windows XP box refuses to download the latest patches through your brand-new Squid proxy (or any other proxy flavor, for that matter), you might be surprised to learn that you must configure the system proxy settings manually:
C:\> proxycfg -u
Voilá. The system will import Internet Explorer’s proxy settings and your system will be patched uneventfully. That is until the next massive system patch.
Update 20050706: Apparently this is also documented in the Squid FAQ.
Cellphone unlocking for dummies
Say you are going to travel to Europe, but are unwilling to pay the insane roaming fees that some functional monopoly imposes in your country. So you buy an overseas GSM chip and drop it into you phone and it just works, right?
Wrong.
Your carrier is probably unwilling to let you use the phone you’re leasing from them -and even the one you outright bought from them with a nice markup- in some competitor network. Any competitor network. Even if it is half a world away.
Well, there’s help out there, and there is hope:
NokiaFREE calculator will provide unlocking codes for the most popular models from a dozen manufacturers, either online or in a standalone version.
However, if you succumbed to temptation and bought a Treo 600 just five months before the Treo 650 was released in your country, you might have to reflash it under your own risk.
Update 20050910: In an article aptly named 20 Things They Don’t Want You to Know, PC World writes about cellphone unlocking, but fails to even notice NokiaFree.
Firefox 1.0
I finally got to install Mozilla Firefox 1.0 (and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 as well, but that’s a whole different story). I must confess that I thought it was going to be kind of painful because a few weeks ago I tried to upgrade 1.0PR but some of my can’t-live-without extensions -mainly easyGestures and switchProxy– just wouldn’t work. I still look forward to get BugMeNot going, but since I have the bookmarklet in my Bookmarks Toolbar I guess it can wait a bit longer.