I’ve recently completed two sites, first of all Gender Agenda, a site for discussion and creative writing for feminists at Cambridge University. Secondly a ticket sales site for the forthcoming Secret Porter’s Ball at the Cambridge Union.

Although the icon isn't on as I'm connected over wifi, 3G works

I got my Nexus One from Google yesterday, and it’s great! It took 3 days to ship from Illinois, and I didn’t need to pay any extra taxes on import after I’d bought it. Everything worked fine out of the box, except for internet over the mobile network, which required setting up the access point manually. This requires going to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names, then tapping  and then New APN. The following settings need to be entered:



Proxy: 192.168.071.035
Port: 9201
Username: [your mobile number]
Password: [your orange.co.uk account password]
Server: orangeinternet
MMSC: http://mms.orange.co.uk
MMS Proxy: 192.168.224.10
MMS Port: 8080
Any other settings can be ignored.

Homemade bokeh filter

I made a homemade bokeh filter for my camera. As it’s just using the kit lens, the size of the design is very small, and this limits you to taking photos at full zoom, and you can’t get all the nice effects you get with a proper filter and a lens with a really large aperture, but it’s still pretty good fun! See all the photos on my Picasa page.

The river Cam, seen from Queens' grove.

Having a lot of fun playing around with it, you can see a few of my first attempts on Picasa Web Albums.

Update: Upgraded wavr to v 0.25 and it broke…

Virtual PC running on my VAIO

Sony disables virtualization on all it’s laptops. It does not provide a method to turn it back on, however, there is a workaround. After a bit of googling, I came across this excellent article. Mostly, I used the steps from this guide, though I did a few things differently. As I have Windows 7 x64, the virtual floppy method does not work, so I found my own copy of the 98SE boot floppy files. Also, the AR41M is not listed, but I checked my BIOS version, and the register to change is 027F, from 0000 to 0001. It worked great! Here’s a rundown of what I did:

Download Windows 98SE boot floppy files (and extract somewhere)
Download the HP USB Disk Formatting Tool
Download the extra utilities required
Install and Start the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool ( Run as Admin )

Install as FAT32
Select Quick Format
Select DOS Startup disk
Use the files from the 98SE boot floppy
Click Start

Copy over SYMCMOS.EXE and the contents of pedit.zip.
Restart and press F2 while the VAIO screen is showing to enter the BIOS.
Make sure Boot From External Drives is enabled.
Save and Exit
Press Esc while the VAIO screen is showing to enter the boot menu
Boot from your flash drive (may show up as an external hard drive)
Enter the following commands:

symcmos -v2 -lcmos.sav
pedit.exe cmos.sav
modify the value at 027F from 0000 to 0001. THIS MAY BE DIFFERENT ON YOUR LAPTOP IF IT IS NOT A VAIO VGN-AR41M. REFER HERE FOR OTHER KNOWN VALUES.
Press Alt-F to access the File menu. Save and Exit.
You may need to restart, I couldn’t type anything further at this stage.
If you restart, enter pedit.exe cmos.sav again to check that the new value is saved to the file.
Having checked that it is, type symcmos -v2 -ucmos.sav
Restart, and Virtualization should be turned on!

Once this is done, you can use the free Windows Virtual PC 2007 to run XP Mode in Windows 7, or load up an ubuntu image etc.

CUAI Site

A quick site made in a couple of days, with a few extra tweaks later on. I had to make a site before the start of term for Cambridge University Amnesty International (CUAI), i.e. in about a week. I put this site together using wordpress, with extra plugins for the calendar, which I customized quite heavily, and advanced user control, to allow college reps to access specific pages on the site to keep them updated. Within a week the site is fully functional, and nearly all the content needed for the start of term is there!

New Home Screen

I just flashed the ROM on my HTC Touch HD to Duttys HD WM6.5 Leo R4, and it’s a huge improvement. Previously I had been running Duttys HD WM6.5 R14 Turbo, which was still a huge improvement over Orange’s bundled ROM, which was WM 6.1, which didn’t help.

The Leo ROM’s main improvement is the further reach of Manila (TouchFlo 3D). Nearly everything can be accessed via Manila’s own menu system, including nearly all settings. Even on my old phone, it runs smoothly, and at startup uses less than half of the available RAM.

There are a few major updates to the familiar Manila panes, most notably the Home screen and the Contacts screen. Bother feature large customizable buttons. On the Home screen these can be pointed to apps, contacts, widgets or links, for instant access. The old contacts rolodex has gone, and now there is a large customizable button pane instead.

Flashing was a breeze, this is the third time I’ve done it now, so the whole process takes less than an hour. I have my contacts and calendar synced with my Google, via the fantastic Nuevasync, and all my apps were installed automatically during flashing, so it was just a case of re-logging in to a few things and I was good to go again!

If you want to flash your HTC WM phone, check out xda developers’ fantastic guide, it really is quite simple.

QEnts

Just done a simple site for this term’s QEnts. Artwork by Travis.