Category Archives: Computers & Internet

How to repair a bad screen resolution on the IOMEGA Screenplay Pro HD

This is the situation: you have a IOMEGA Screenplay Pro and while you where trying to find a better output resolution for your monitor you accidentally (or not) selected the HD option and now you are not able to visualize anything.

In few words this is the easiest problem you can afford but also one of the worst because you are not able to visualize the menu and so you cannot revert the right monitor resolution.

I visited many websites but unfortunately I didn’t find any forum or post about this topic. In any case I like to focus your attention on this ScreenPlay Pro HD wiki which is a real mine of information and tips about this specific hardware.

So I tried to “play” with the Screen Play Pro HD remote but I was not able to find a solution without visualizing anything on the monitor.

At the end, when I was thinking to reset the Screenplay and loosing all the data contained, I tried to use an old solution I used different times with other stuff: I pressed the power button for more than 10 seconds while I was switching on the device.

Something happened because the monitor showed me the Screenplay boot up window for a couple of seconds. At this point I pressed the NTSC/PAL button and the Screenplay Pro HD menu was visualized on my monitor again.

A quick trick to have the USA google.com always ready

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When we use our computer outside the USA, the browser is automatically redirect to the local google page. This is not a problem when you are just surfing without any specific goal but often the google automatic redirecting is very annoying because also your search will be customized depending where you are and the language spoken in that country.

To easily avoid this problem you can instruct google to ignore your location just typing http://www.google.com/ncr and your searches will always start as a USA customer. In fact NCR stands for NON COUNTRY REDIRECTING and allows you to use the USA google.com.

On the contrary, if you are in USA and you want to customize your search focusing to a particular foreign country you have to just add a suffix to the google search results link.

In other words, if you are looking for operating banks in Ireland, you have to:

– search into google as usual, typing the word “bank”

– go to the end of your search url and add &gl= followed by the country code where you want to focus your research (de or in or ir or it or …) eg: &gl=ir

Last but not least, if you prefer to influence the google research interfering just with the results language, goes to the search settings and choose the languages you prefer.

galigio.org: 2011 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 150,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Video – [HowTo] Upgrade Firefox to the latest version on Ubuntu by bitspired.com

How to update Firefox to the 9.01 version on Ubuntu

How ro repair Ubuntu 10.04 LTS if the Update Manager and Synaptics don’t work

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After I installed some new software I wasn’t able to update Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The Update Manager was not able to check for updates and when I tried to use the Synaptic Package Manager I hadn’t better results. A reboot was not the right solution and I tested different ways to solve my problem saving the Ubuntu installation in my computer.

Searching on internet I discovered that there are few possible solution to avoid this problem and, in case you have the same bug on your computer, I decided to sum-up the most powerful after I successfully tried them.

First of all you can try to force the update process through the Terminal typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

If this doesn’t work you will try with this next step:

sudo rm var/lib/dpkg/lock
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Then launch again the Update Manager to verify if you succeed and if nothing happened solve the matter typing:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

and try again to launch the Update Manager.

In my case this was enough to restore all the Update Manager features and solve the problem. If you have extra problems about this bug or if you want to suggest alternative solutions, please, don’t hesitate to comment this post.

Time to clean-up! Ubuntu – Linux suggestions.

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Christmas time is ending and today we really don’t know how many relatives used out computer for “just few minutes” or “to quickly (sic) check the emails”. In few words, our Linux PC could have been overstuffed with unwanted temporary files and we haven’t had time to update it. So, it’s time to clean-up!!

First of all I suggest to use BleachBit because, for my experience, it’s the most powerful software to clean temporary files, log files and unwanted traces on your computer. BleachBit is easy to use and, as we described in previous post, very effective.

Then we have to check if our system is really updated so we can use the usual ways as Synaptics Package Manager or quickly run a some simple commands through Terminal to update, upgrade and remove old packages or Kernel.

For this purpose I collected three simple commands and chained them in a single line:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
&& sudo apt-get autoremove

In this way you will be sure that you can start again to work on your Ubuntu as before the Christmas time!

How to extend your home wi-fi lan using the Airport Extreme when the Netgear router hasn’t a specific option for that

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This is the situation: I have a Netgear wi-fi router which has not the option to extend the wi-fi lan and two rooms in my house where it was not possible to use computers or external hard disks due to the weak wi-fi signal in there. The other available stuff I have is an Apple Airport Extreme with the right features to extend the existing wi-fi lan.

After many different configuration tests I was not able to configure correctly the wi-fi lan to improve the signal and cover all my house. Then I decided to buy a couple of used powerline ethernet adapter for about 30.00 USD and I put one of them near the area I wanted to cover with my wi-fi lan.

Then I connected the Airport Extreme to the adapter located near the low signal area and I was able to solve my problem configuring the lan in this way:

1- I reserved a fixed IP on the Netgear router for the Airport Extreme and I added that specific IP in the DMZ list:

2- I put the Airport Extreme in the Bridge mode and chose Ethernet as data connection:

3 – I cloned the configuration of the Netgear wi-fi on the Airport Extreme. In particular I assigned to the new wi-fi lan the same broadcasting name to the main one:

4 – I restarted the Netgear router and I had a strong wi-fi signal into all my house.

I know that the solution I found it is not orthodox but it is cheap especially when you do not want to spend money for a new professional router when the “old” one is still brand new.

Multiboot CD /DVD and USB Builder: Sardu

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The last generation of external 3.0 usb disks allows us to create fast multi-boot drive that can be used for different purpose. Commonly we use these “special” drives as recovery tools when something goes wrong in our computers or when we would dig, in a deeper way, a particular desktop.

The best software to create multi-boot disks or ISO have been developed for Windows and the only exception is a French, multi-step solution named LiveUSB Multi-Boot.

Today we focus our attention on Sardu a multi-language Italian project developed for Windows machines. After you have downloaded it you can unzip and save the folder in your favorite location. The sardu.exe file will run the program and you can start to decide if you prefer to create a multi-boot ISO or a multi-boot usb key.

The menus are complex but in a couple of minutes you will be able to properly navigate them and select the software and ISO you’d like to have in your CD or USB key. You can also decide to manually add a specific ISO which is not directly supported.

The CD-DVD burner is included in Sardu consequently you can create your bootable CD-DVD in just few clicks.

In the everyday world, Sardu is also useful to test computers when you want to quickly install a Linux distribution and you are not sure about the best one to choice.

Moreover, Sardu is plenty of extra freeware which can help you to recover the GRUB, partitions, lost files and passwords.

Unfortunately Wine is not able to run Sardu in a correct way and when we tested it on Ubuntu we were able to use just few basic features.

Sendoid: share your file through torrents

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The first time I read about sendoid.com I was really interested about the services offered by this site. In fact, the possibility to share files with my friends regardless dimensions through a torrent protocol appeared to be very useful.

Unfortunately, in my personal experience the results are not so positive as promised by Sendoid.com. When you decide to try it, you can choose between the online version and the desktop widget built on the Adobe AIR technology. The widget installation is easy, graphically nice and simple to use. Furthermore, the online interface is very well structured in few clicks you are able to “build” the torrent url to share your file directly from you PC to other people through torrent protocols. For this reason, if you decide to use the online version, you are not allowed to close the webpage with the url because it is the “door” to keep the torrent working.

The first problem is that the data are not protected by https and you can only decide to add a password to your file. On the other hand, with just one click you can decide to share the file with more than a person.

The second, big, problem you have with Sendoid is the transfer speed because, in my tests, the service was not so competitive in terms of timing. A light 160MB ISO needed more than 20 minutes to complete its transfer from my computer to another located in a near city. Unfortunately I was not able to understand if this specific problem was related to the ISPs or to the sendoid service but I obtained the same results in different extra tests I decided to try with similar files.

To conclude I decided not to use sendoid and now I am looking for another program or website which could offer similar features. Please, if you have something to suggest, do not hesitate to add a comment!