Here are the steps to quickly connect your phone to the internet.

Connect your phone via USB cable. On a Sony Ericsson, the phone will prompt you how you want to use your phone. Choose “Phone Mode”.

Click on the Network Manager icon in the system tray and select “New Mobile Broadband connection…”

Choose the country where your provider is in.

Choose your service provider. This will be the name of your cellphone carrier. In my case, I chose Smart.

Next is to select your plan. This option varies depending on your carrier. For Smart though, you just choose Default.

Last step is to just verify if your details are correct and click on Apply.

That’s it! In a few moments, your phone should connect your computer to the Internet and a notification will display showing that you are connected.

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Concept art by Andree Wallin

The third open movie, Sintel, is coming out really soon and is in its last few weeks of development. Like the first two open movies, it is being produced by the Blender Foundation, inviting the best talents to work on it for six months in Amsterdam and introduces several more improvements to the Blender software. As an open movie, the guys creating it are not restricted as with commercial movies and have all the creative freedom they could have to create it. This time around, the third open movie will be an epic, action-adventure short movie set in a fictional fantasy setting.

Video of their intro video at the Blender Conference after the jump

Blender Conference Intro Video from Project Durian on Vimeo.

Big Buck Bunny

How Much Is That Bunny in the Window?

Meanwhile, as I was looking for the SM/Nokia dropbox where I could dispose my old batteries, I was surprised to see Big Buck Bunny looping on some monitors of a computer store window. Not that I don’t want them to show it there, it’s great that they are. It’s just that Big Buck Bunny has been out for almost a year and a half now…

For those of you who also have no idea about Big Buck Bunny, it’s the second open movie project by the Blender Foundation after Elephants Dream (see To the (Open) Movies).

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For Recycling

I have this jar at home. It was an old jar that used to contain choco flakes from Baguio, which I repurposed as a container for old, spent batteries, and I labeled it with black cloth tape and marked with correction fluid.

After a couple of months of collecting AA and AAA alkaline batteries, I was quite surprised to see how many batteries our house actually consumed! All the old batteries from clocks, remote controls, flashlights, you name it, goes straight into the jar.

Yesterday, with the jar being about 4/5 full, I decided to bring the jar with me to the mall. In SM Megamall, and most other SM malls as far as I know, they have a Nokia-sponsored box where you can drop your old cellphones, chargers, and batteries in. After that, the contents are sent to the proper disposal channels.

Nokia: We Recycle

On the downside, my research has led me to fact that, while alkaline batteries still contain small amounts of mercury despite the ban of its use in household batteries, it is uncertain whether certain “recycling centers” actually segregate alkaline batteries for recovery of its precious metals, or if they just throw it out in landfills anyway, which sort of defeats the purpose of my dropping off of batteries. Dropping old lithium-ion batteries in would be better, since they have higher recyclable content. But since the lifespan of laptop batteries usually last at least 1 year, there may not be much of those lying around your house.

With any luck, Nokia would be true their tagline, “Drop your old phone, battery or charger here for recycling and we’ll take care of the rest.” If you need to find the dropbox, head on over to the ground floor of Podium or beside the information counter in CyberZone SM Megamall.

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Don’t have World of Warcraft yet?
Buy World of Warcraft (PC CD-ROM) at Play-Asia.com

Buy World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack (PC CD-ROM) at Play-Asia.com

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Learn more about Max and the Magic Marker from their official web site.
If you’d like to subscribe to GameTrailers Wii, click on the following button:

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Pre-Order your copy of Muramasa: Demon Blade from PlayAsia to get it as soon as it comes out!

Click on the following links for the other games in the lineup:

• New Super Mario Brothers Wii
• Wii Sports Resort
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
• Sin and Punishment 2

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P.S. Yes I know I said I’ll be posting about iPod and Ubuntu. Don’t worry, we’re getting there.

Add/Remove Programs…

Click on Applications then on Add/Remove Programs…

The Add/Remove window will appear and you’ll be presented with a lot of applications that you can install, organized by category. You can quickly find an application by typing in the first few letters of its name (while the application list is focused), clicking on one of the categories to trim down the list, or by entering a few keywords in the search bar on top.

Tick the checkboxes of the applications you want to install and click Apply. After the applet downloads the package files and installs them, no questions asked (no pesky options which you’ll ignore and clcik Next anyway).

Synatic Package Manager

Installing GNOME Raw Thumbnailer via Synaptic

Synaptic functions much the same way as the Add Remove Programs, except it displays the packages themselves instead of the application. Most applications are composed of multiple packages, though you don’t have to worry about that because when you choose to install a package (ex. miro), it automatically prompts to install all the dependencies (packages which miro needs to run). Go ahead, try it for yourself. Oh, and as with the Add/Remove Programs method, there are still no pesky questions aside from the “Apply The Following Changes?” confirmation. Whereas the Add/Remove Programs… applet offers you a user-friendly interface to pimp out your Ubuntu box, Synaptic offers you a way of choosing specific packages to install (more often than not, instructions on the net will tell you specific packages to install), while still remaining relatively user-friendly.

Debian Packages (.deb files)

Installing the Skype .deb

This method is perhaps the most familiar to Windows users:

1. Download the deb file (Win users might be more familiar with the term installer)
2. Run the deb file
3. Agree to the End User License Agreement (EULA)
4. Select destination folder and click Next
5. Select Full or Custom Install. If Custom, select the appropriate options.
6. Click Install

My bad, there are no steps 3, 4, and 5.

Aptitude

Aptitude is the command-line utility used for installing packages. Now before you go dissing off Aptitude because it’s a terminal command, consider that when you’re installing a lot of programs at once (or following instructions off the net), it’s quite faster and easier to type (or paste) in the command-line sudo aptitude install blender miro mirthkit scummvm filelight deluge frozen-bubble than it is to find and select those 7 applications.

Source Code

When worse comes to worst, you can install most open source applications by performing the following steps:

1. Downloading the source code (usually distributed as a .tar.gz file)
2. Extracting it (Right-click > Extract here… or tar -xzf file.tar.gz)
3. Entering the extracted folder via the terminal
4. sudo aptitude install build-essential if you haven’t done so already
5. Typing in ./configure
6. Typing in make
7. Typing in sudo make install
8. If you want your program to be removable via Synaptic/Aptitude, use sudo checkinstall -D. This will create a package first before installing it.

A more thorough explanation of the compile process can be found eleswhere on the Internet. Just Google it.

A Word About Dependencies

One of the fundamental differences between programs in Unix/Mac/Linux and Windows is the way a program is packaged. As you install more and more applications, you’ll notice that fully-functional programs only use up a few kilobytes, sometimes only a few megabytes, and you might begin to wonder how Linux programs get to be so small when compared to their Windows counterparts.

This is because of one of the unwritten rules in writing programs for Linux, writing many small applications with a single purpose rather than 1 massive application that does many, allows many programs to use and share libraries or even other programs. These libraries or programs that an application uses are called dependencies. In Windows, save for a few Windows DLLs, each application needs to include everything in its installers (haven’t you ever wondered why you’d hardly find any CD installers for Linux?).

There is a term called dependency hell. I personally experienced this back when I was using Red Hat. It describes what happens when you have an application with several dependencies, where each dependency has a few more dependencies themselves or is dependent on a specific version of an application. Thankfully, the package manager for Ubuntu (and Debian for that matter) is very robust in automatically handling these dependencies for you.

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So for now, I’ll just leave you with an excerpt from late breaking news that Apple is getting sued for iTunes

Internet rights champions have accused Apple of stifling free speech by bullying OdioWorks into ending online sharing of ways to get iPods to work with music websites other than iTunes…

…At the heart of the issue is the BluWiki website that details ways to get Apple’s popular iPhones and iPod MP3 players to synchronize music and video files with media at services such as Songbird, Banshee, Rockbox, and Winamp…

…Apple zealously guards iTunes’ status as an exclusive content delivery and management tool for iPod and iPhone hardware.

“Apple’s legal threats against BluWiki are about censorship, not about protecting their legitimate copyright interests,” said EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann.

Full article at Yahoo!News

All I can say is I’m not surprised and actually expecting it. These days, consumers can no longer be bullied into a monopoly the likes of how Microsoft dominated the 90’s. Personally, I’ve never used iTunes software with my 3rd-gen iPod Nano. As an Ubuntu user, I’ve initialized it in Linux and use Rhythmbox and GTKPod for managing my music and videos. I’ll teach you guys how to do that next time. Till then!

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…Local retailer Puregold is deploying a Linux-based point-of-sale or POS system, as it looks to cutting down costs on security while expanding its network of stores…Puregold has ordered more than 2,000 licenses of TPLinux software, according to Paderborn, Germany-based Wincor Nixdorf, which sells niche solutions for banks and retail firms…

…“We wanted to cut the cost of buying anti-virus licenses and save on the cost of the license of (Microsoft) Windows per POS,” said Ruel Magat, Puregold’s IT Manager…

Read the rest of the article: http://technology.inquirer.net/infotech/infotech/view/20090416-199780/RP-retailer-goes-for-Linux-based-system

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Add the countdown for your site

Last night, I upgraded my laptop to Intrepid Ibex, just about a week before the newest version of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackelope, comes out. Go figure. But before I could perform the upgrade, I was warned that my 7gig root partition on my small 40gig hard drive needed a few more free space. So I was wondering where that free space went; it couldn’t be because I installed the XFCE window manager (which I removed anyway). From Tombuntu, I learned that I could free up more space by removing old unused kernels.

How much free space? I freed 757megs by removing 6 old unused kernels!

Why do you get unused kernels anyway? It’s like a service pack or firmware upgrade, only instead of getting it thrice in…oh…a decade, you get them every few months or so. When a new Linux kernel is released, it contains several bug fixes, new drivers (so you won’t ever need your driver discs again), and improvements to OSes in all of Linux land, regardless of race, religion, or distribution. For safety, your old kernel is kept safe, just in case the new kernel won’t boot up. My Hardy Heron laptop had gathered 7 kernels (including the present) since April of LAST YEAR (In contrast, WinXP SP1 came out 2002, SP2 on 2004, and SP3 just 2008)!

Removing Old Kernels In Synaptic Package Manager

First up, check which kernel  you have by running the following command in a terminal:

uname -r

You’ll get something like “2.6.27-11-generic” which is your current running kernel. Now go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.

Search for “linux-images” or click on the “Status” button and choose “Installed” to list only installed packages and scroll down for the linux-image-2.6.2X-XX-generic” packages. DO NOT mark your currently running kernel!

Click on their green boxes and select “Mark for Removal”.

After you’ve marked all old kernels for removal, click on apply.

References

• Remove Ubuntu Kernels You Don’t Need
• Wikipedia – Windows XP Service Packs

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