HTC Thunderbolt Root Problems

Yay! I upgraded my Droid X to the Thunderbolt this week and rooted the thing as soon as team AndIRC put out the instructions (found here: http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/03/19/exclusive-how-to-root-the-htc-thunderbolt-and-unlock-its-bootloader/)

I did have a few problems getting it rooted the first time around, so here’s a few notes in case you get stuck as well.

Disable Gmail Spam Filtering

As an administrator of Google Apps accounts, I have found that we needed to stop the Gmail spam filtering because we wanted to use an in house software package instead. Unfortunately, there’s no way to turn spam filtering off. However, there is a workaround:

• In your Gmail account, go to Settings
• Click the ‘Filters‘ menu
• Click ‘Create new filter‘
• In the Has the words: section, type is:spam, and click ‘Next Step’
• Click OK when Gmail prompts you with a warning
• Choose ‘Never Send it to Spam‘ and click ‘Create Filter’

Now Gmail will simply move anything it classifies as spam to the Inbox, thereby disabling the spam filter.

Import iMovie Video Projects to External Drive

I’ve been using iMovie at work to do some video post production and had a problem when I ran out of space and wanted to import footage to an external drive. Thanks to Apple’s lacking documentation (or my inability to find the details), this wasn’t as straightforward as I would have hoped.

In iMovie, File > Import menu gives you a ‘Save To’ drop down menu. To get your drive to show up here, there are two criteria you need to meet:

• The external drive must be fast enough. My 2TB external drive wasn’t available when connected via USB 2.0, but became available when connected via FireWire.
• The external drive has to be formatted as Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended Journaled.

Once the drive was properly formatted and connected via FireWire, iMovie saw it as an option for import.

A Disk Read Error Occurred: Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart

Well this is a step back in time. I was upgrading the hard drive in a friend’s aging laptop to something with more capacity. We were doing a fresh installation so this should be easy.

1. Install hard drive.
2. Power on PC
3. Boot from Windows XP Installation Disc.
4. Ran through the partitioning and file copy process, reboot.
5. ERROR: A Disk Read Error Occurred: Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart

Huh? Search for this error on Google and you’ll a variety of different solutions. Western Digital even has a page dedicated to the error. Unfortunately, none of those solutions worked for me.

The Fix
Honestly, I’m not sure which of these two solutions actually was responsible for the fix. Maybe it was one of the other or maybe the combination of both.

First, I downloaded and burned Hiren’s Boot CD. If you don’t already have this in your repair arsenal, this is a must have. I booted the disc and used the MBR tools to wipe the MBR from the hard drive.

I then booted back to the XP CD and choose to format the 320GB hard drive into two partitions…a 100GB and 220GB partition.

After doing that, the installation went nice and smooth! I’ve learned to just accept that sometimes things just work and I don’t need to know why.

Captcha Prompt on Android Device

After being the happy owner of a Droid X for the past few months, I was prompted with a CAPTCHA screen this morning.

There seem to be plenty of unanswered posts on the subject. One oddity about my situation is that I could never seem to type the right word, even thought I was quite positive I was typing accurately.

After doing a bit of research on my own, I found a fix that worked for me.

• From a computer (not your phone), go to https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha
• Enter your current password as well as the captcha security phrase
• Once you’ve unlocked your account, go back to the Settings on your phone and go into the Accounts section
• Click on your Google account, make sure everything is checked that you want to sync
• Click the menu button, and choose ‘Sync now’

For someone like me who could not unlock the captcha from the phone, this was a nice workaround.

As for why the captcha prompts occur? I haven’t found any official information from Google, but I would imagine that like most companies maintaining accounts, it was likely because someone tried logging into your account with a bad password one too many times. It’s a way of deterring brute force password hacking.

Duplicate Calendar Items on “Desktop” and “Device Default” Blackberry Calendar

Sometimes my Blackberry will end up with two calendars and my calendar items will sometimes be duplicated even though I’m using BES.

To fix this, I went into my Calendar, went into Options, then typed “MOVE”. This moves all appointments to the base system calendar.
After a battery pull (hard reset), the duplicate calendar disappears because it is now empty.

If the calendar items don’t look quite right after the battery pull, resync your calendar items:
– Select Options from the Calendar
– Type rset
– Select YES to reload when prompted

WordPress Upgrade Stopped at Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-.zip

The latest update to WordPress wasn’t working for me. It kept getting stuck at the Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-.zip step.

After some digging around, I found out the solution was simple.

Edit your wp-config.php and add the following line:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

I could immediately upgrade after that fix.

This version of BerryBuzz has not been optimized for your BlackBerry Tour 9630

If you don’t use BerryBuzz,

Alerts, Your Way!
BerryBuzz extends your default Blackberry alert system. BerryBuzz allows you to customze the LED color for many alert types, it keeps the LED flashing for longer than the default 15 minutes and it will repeat alerts until acknowledged so you will never miss an alert again.

This is one of the first apps I bought for my Blackberry. When I went to install it, the download page had two options:

Download BerryBuzz 2.1.35 (OS 4.2.1 and higher)
Download BerryBuzz 2.1.35 (OS 4.7 and higher)

Naturally, I downloaded and installed the version for OS 4.7, and the got the message “This version of BerryBuzz has not been optimized for your BlackBerry Tour 9630″.

If you didn’t browse the forums, you might not have noticed that the version for OS 4.7 is only for the Storm. After installed the version for OS 4.2.1 on my Tour running 5.0.0.419, it worked

How to install a hybrid Blackberry OS

As one who likes to tinker with technology, I got tired of waiting for an official Verizon approved 5.0 release for my Blackberry Tour 9630. Instead, I loaded up a 5.0 release from another carrier. You can find these releases all over the inter webs, but you can go here if you need some help.

As it turns out, I encountered a bug in 5.0.0.419. I loved 5.0 so much I didn’t want to go back, so I decided I’d try a hybrid OS.

A hybrid OS the result of combining the “best” parts of OS leaks into an “ultimate” OS. When an OS for your device gets leaked, sometimes they have problems (like my SMS bug) but other parts of it might be rock solid. Hybrid OS makers might take the radio component of one OS, the SMS part of another, and the browser of yet another, and combine them into what is known as a hybrid OS. The guys over at BBHybrids.net have a ton more information if you’d like to know more.

Here was my experience.

“You don’t have permission to modify files in this network location” error on Windows 7 x64

I noticed a reproducible error on both my work and personal Windows 7 x64 machines.

If you create a new document or file and try to save it to a library location, you are prompted with the error below:

You don't have permission to modify files in this network location

 

The problem appears to be caused by Eset NOD32 AntiVirus software. The fix is simple.