Making the smartphone smart, only €19.99

My HTC Touch HD (a.k.a. Blackstone to you guys across the pond) is my first "Smartphone", and was reputedly an iPhone killer.

It hasn't lived up to that. Not that I've owned an iPhone.. yet.. but it feels a bit clanky to use. And no games has worked well yet. Bah!

But, since it's got 0.5 GHz, ~300 mb ram and 8 gb flash, it ought to be good at something. And I just found out that with WMWifiRouter it becomes an excellent 3g modem + wireless router (that can also play youtube videos in 800x480 :).

This is an excellent piece of software. It installs smoothly, asks for some options, then gives me 6 buttons to start mapping between wifi, 3g, bluetooth and usb whichever way makes sense.

It also monitors the battery's temp in case it overheats... Oookay. I suppose it's a good thing that it does, but it's like having a warning light + engine shutdown in your car in case the rear wheel nut is coming loose.

Can't blame the program for that, though.

I ended up with this because Vista fails to reco'nize my HTC as a PAN supporting bluetooth device. Pfft! My old GSM-only Nokia worked amazingly well (connect to network - bluetooth pan - presto), although it was hideously slow. Well, since it worked for the Nokia, I'll blame HTC this time around.

Anyway, I'm glad that I can now access the net from my laptop _anywhere_. Very nice when on some trains that don't yet offer WiFi. (Most budget trains don't, and the only ones running to my parent's part of the country don't either... although they do have power outlets.)

Ls for windows

See link in title. Good tool, and the latest version supports Vista sym/hardlinks. Yay!

Why do alt,ctrl and space get stuck in Windows?

This has been buggin me since I ran WinXP (Or was it 2000?).

I discovered yesterday it's because of the Sticky keys Lock-modifier-keys-when-pressed-twice-in -a-row misfeature (under control panel - easy access centre).

Disabling that lowers your daily stresslevel. Enjoy. :)

patch.exe on vista - part 2

I've updated my previous post on getting patch.exe to work on Vista with UAC.

Short version: msysgit has a patch.exe that convinces Vista it doens't need to be omnipotent.

Updated 2010-11-26: There is also a comment on my SourceForge bug regarding unxutils's patch.exe.  The suggested fix works well.

patch.exe on vista - the workaround

Vista apparently thinks that any exe with 'patch' in it's name needs to be run with admin priviliges, probably to make a slew of pre-UAC install wizard patches work properly.

But this applies to good old unix:y 'patch' (which I have in windows-form) too!

Argh!

Update 2008-12-13: The patch.exe in the git-for-windows distribution (msysgit) seems to have the correct magic bits set to allow it to run without UAC getting in the way. So, try replacing your gnuwin32-patch (or whatever you're using) with that.

If that's not an option, here's how to do a workaround:

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The trick is to rename patch.exe to pootch.exe (or whatever fancies you) and create a batch file call patch.cmd, with this content:

@"%~dp0\pootch" %*

That makes it work.

(I learn this when running the unit tests of buildbot, a pretty nice tool for distributing automated tests across compilers, computers & os:es!)