I want to suggest a trick that worked for me. My work place blocks most of the popular radio stations stream sites in my country.
I can understand why they’re doing that, but hey – if you want to save bandwidth I suggest you block YouTube (not that I complain…)
Well, I thought of a way to listen to my favorite radio station from work, by re-streaming it from my home. And it worked!
It can also work for you, in case your IT does not block by protocol, only by address.
So here’s how to do it:
A very basic feature that I was missing in my Android phone is the ability to save a number while I’m in a call. Sure you can go to the home screen, and open up any app with a textbox, but I decided to create a dedicated application.
So, meet Number Saver!
UPDATE: Number Saver got a new look
Basic usage guide:
When you open the app you will get the main screen:
From here you are able to enter the number, copy to the clipboard, and clear the clipboard if it is full. Also, when you open the app, if there is a text in the clipboard it will already be in the text box. So you can press Dial to instantly dial the number
Also, during an active call you will notice the note and pencil icon. Stretching the notification area will give you the option to launch the application.
This app is available for free through the Android market. Donation is always welcome …
Today I came across a very nice free service called Ring-2-Skype. It lets you register a personal international number from about 40 countries, and whoever calls this number and dials your extension is directed to your Skype account.
The coolest thing is that you can register a number on several countries for the same Skype account. For instance on for USA, one for Peru etc.
And… it’s FREE!
The downside is that the number you get is not direct, but requires you to dial an extension number, so you can’t use it with Google Voice-like services.
UPDATE #1: I discovered a bug with the service – it is incompatible with Skype’s voicemail: meaning the call gets disconnected when the greeting is played. I contacted them and they said it’s a known issue and they are taking care of it. I’ll update the post again once I know this issue is resolved
Last week I finished my first Android application. All through the development stage I had to Google a lot for examples which some were really hard to find (even though you can find reference for everything in the SDK, for me, it’s easier to understand from a code sample).
My mobile company allows you to send 10 free daily SMS through their website, and after that each text message is still half priced, so I decided to take a challenge and create a UI that allows me to send my messages from the phone through the website automatically.
The core of my software was pure java, so even though it wasn’t straight forward to accomplish, I kinda know the material.
The main issues were after – when I got to the android implementation and UI
Here are the issues I needed, and will supply examples for in this post:
(Of course – for you that are more experienced than me with Android development, please forgive if I’m not doing everything ‘by the book’, it’s simply what I could find. So if you have any suggestions or improvement please send them to me or post a comment J )
Here is the code I ended up using. Hope you find it helpful
This is the story of my journey to find a way to run a process (or a program on a remote pc)
This wasn’t an easy thing at all…
Overall, I thought, this should be an easy thing to do.
I found this C# code on a Microsoft forums
object[] theProcessToRun = { "notepad.exe" };
ConnectionOptions theConnection = new ConnectionOptions();
theConnection.Username = "username";
theConnection.Password = "password";
ManagementScope theScope = new ManagementScope("<\\\\" + IP + "\\root\\cimv2", theConnection);
ManagementClass theClass = new ManagementClass(theScope, new ManagementPath("Win32_Process"), new ObjectGetOptions());
theClass.InvokeMethod("Create", theProcessToRun);
I tried this code, not after forgetting to disable the firewall on the remote computer – a big downside but I guess if I had gone with it I’d hunt a way to stable port to unblock in the firewall.
Then I found the big downside (which can be an upside to some of you):
The remote process this way will never have a GUI window opened (In this example, a process of notepad will be opened in the background).
This can be a big advantage to system admins which want to run scripts.
Ok, back to the quest.
Private BitTorrent trackers require that you keep a certain upload/download ratio. This basically means that if you download, and don’t leave your client running for seeding for as much as you downloaded, you will probobly get kicked out of the site sooner or later.
RatioMaster is an open source project that emulates your favourite client and sends the tracker with false info, saying that you are uploading. What a great solution for people with low upload rate.
A guy that calls himself NRPG, created his own version of RatioMaster, which added a lot of features to the original RatioMaster. His version looks out for your opened client, and takes all the random-generated values from it, that way making the tracker very hard to spot the cheat.
So far so good, as this was only the exposition to the situation.
Not too long ago, I wrote a network administration utility with specific needs.
One of the needs was to scan all the LAN pool for MAC addresses.
The code will look at your active network adapters, calculate start and end IP according to your address and netmask,
and query all the IPs within that range for their MAC address.
The code is written in C#, and it’s basically going over the whole range in a nested loop.
If you find this useful, you are welcome to use the code:
Last week, a friend of mine needed a solution that will auto-restart his PC at a specific time and run a specific task.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but his problem was that the PC was inside a domain and required auto-login.
So I dug a bit inside the Windows registry and found a way to do that:
1. I backup all the registry keys in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
2. I remove “legal notice” registry keys, to ensure that it won’t stop the PC from logging in by forcing to press Enter
3. Adding the username, password and domain as default registry keys, setting AdminLogon to True
4. Adding a shortcut in the Startup folder for my Post-Startup script
5. Restarting the PC
after the pc has been restarted, i delete all my added registry keys, and restore the backup. At my post-Restart script I also call the required script he wanted to run (in the attached example it is Windows Calculator)
This solution should only work on Windows 2000/XP Pro
All you need to do is edit postStartup.cmd to run your specific task, and schedule a run for preStartup.cmd with Windows Scheduled tasks (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks)
Download Restart Script