I wanted to flash a custom firmware on an HTC Desire S because I didn’t like the Sense interface HTC installed on the device. It felt sluggish and I think it was ugly.

I have unlocked the bootloader on htcdev.com, rooted the device, and installed ClockworkMod (cwm). I chose a rom that seemed usefull (in this case CyanogenMod), and copied the cwm image (.zip file) to my sd-card, and booted into recovery. Here I made a backup of the current rom, did a full wipe, and flashed the image. After this I rebooted the device, expecting to see my new rom boot.
Instead of booting, all I saw was a white screen with the letters HTC in green on an white background. This state is named bootloop.
After flashing back the original rom, the device booted without problems.

I have tried several roms, all with exacly the same problem. After a lot of online research i have finally a booting custom rom. The solution was to flash the correct boot.img file for your rom to the device with the fastboot utility. The file boot.img is in the .zip file of the rom you chose. Flashing the boot.img can be done this way:

1. Boot the HTC in fastboot mode by powering on the device while holding the Volume – button, and choosing fastboot
2. Connect the phone to your computer with an micro-USB cable
3. Flash the boot.img you extracted from the custom firmware:

   fastboot flash boot <path to boot.img>

4. Reboot the phone

After these steps your HTC Desire S should boot the custom rom as expected!

I noticed a while ago that my Echofon toolbar button had dispapeared in Firefox. I couln’t find any information how to fix this, except that i should enable the add-on toolbar. But Echofon had Firefox toolbar support, so I souldn’t need the add-on bar.

I’ve found out how te re-enable the toolbar button, and decided to share it here.

1. Navigate in Firefox to about:config
2. Accept the warning notification:
   
3. Type or paste the following string in the filterfield: extensions.twitternotifier.toolbarButtonAdded
4. Doubleclick on the item which shows up, and make sure it is set to “false”.
   
5. Restart Firefox

Now the toolbar button should have reappeared.

Please leave a comment if this solution has worked for you!

Ever been in the situation that you had to copy a bunch of files, and later on wanted to copy only the added files by skipping the existing files?
You can do that with xcopy. Only not with the default paramaters.
For example:

echo n|xcopy f:\source_folder y:\destination_folder /E

The /E makes sure subfolders are also copied. The echo n| prevents overwriting of existing files.

For my (simple) file server I’ve done a minimal installation of CentOS 5.4, and added some repositories. I’ve decided to use ZFS as filesystem for my storage.

The installation of zfs-fuse went smooth, and I’ve created a pool in no-time. There were many tutorials available online on how to do this stuff.

The only problem I ran into, was running out out of memory. The server has only 512Mb Ram, and zfs-fuse was using over 400Mb RAM.

After some research, it seamed the problem was the caching mechanism of ZFS. After a while I figured out how to disable this caching mechanism. You can use the following commands:

zfs set secondarycache=none data

zfs set primarycache=none data

Where data is the name of the pool. This affects the performance of this filesystem, but at least my server doesn’t run out of memory anymore.

Another tip for ZFS: after an update, upgrade your pool to a new version with the following command:

zpool upgrade data

I’ve managed to compile stkeys for my N900 (running Maemo).

Stkeys is an utility to recover the default WPA key from certain Thomson routers using the default SSID, for example the Speedtouch 780.
A few simple benchmarks show that the recovery takes about 130 seconds.

You can download the .deb file here. You can download this file, and install (as root) with dpkg -i stkeys_0.1_armel.deb.

Example usage:
For example we use as SSID of “SpeedTouch188DBB”
You should run stkeys 188dbb from a terminal, and you will see the following:

In this particular case the WPA-key is: 763FF260D1 which is the first possible key for 2006.

Please leave a comment and share your experiences.

Update: (27-10-2010) stkeys is now in the extras-testing repository. You can install it on your N900 by clicking this link.

I recently bought a PlayStation 3 80Gb. When I tried to install Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) on the PlayStation, I came across a message saying something like:

The partition table on device PS3DA was unreadable.

It also warned me that it would destroy all the data on the drive.

I didn’t like the idea of installing and updating all those games again, so I googled for this warning. I found out that YDL doesn’t have access to the entire disk, but only to the part it is allowed to by the PlayStation Firmware. So the only data it could destroy, was the data on the partition which I had created in the PlayStation 3 menu. This means it doesn’t destroy all data on the disk, but only on the empty partition, where no data is stored.

After the installation and booting into the GameOS, it seemed all my savegames and gamedata was still available. So no worries when you come across the warning I described above, your data will not be lost.

You still might want to backup your savegames before installing YDL, you never know what could happen…

To get Gentoo Linux to boot faster, you can disable unnessicary services (with rc-update).

But Gentoo also provides some exceptional rc scripts. These scripts allow parrallel loading of services. The result is a system which boots much faster. To enable the parallel startup of services, add or change the following line in the file /etc/conf.d/rc:

RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="YES"

Now, when you boot your Gentoo distro, it will be ready at a glance!

To scan the current folder, with it’s underlaying folders,  use the following command (only when clamav is installed):

clamscan --log=$HOME/clamscan.log --quiet --recursive

In your home directory, the file ‘clamscan.log’ will appear. You may execute the following command to view the (filtered) results:

grep -v "Empty\|Scanning\|WARNING:\|Excluded" $HOME/clamscan.log

If the memory is very full (on Linux), you may execute the following command:

sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

All the caches are cleared now. Your system may respond a bit slower now, while the caches are being refilled.

To start a ‘fsck’ (for Windows users: a ‘checkdisk’ for Linux), you may execute the following command in your shell:

touch /forcefsck

fsck will run at next boot.

This command creates a file called ‘forcefsck’ in the root folder (‘/’). At boot time, fsck checks whether this file exists. When it does, fsck checks the harddisk.