Sunday, October 18, 2009

Twitter Applications for Your Browser and Phone

The Twitter is the most popular micro blogging tool in the world. Because of that there are lot of people who are searching for application for ease of use of twitter. Following are some of Twitter applications for your browser and phone.

For Browser 

Twit Kit
Integrate Twitter with your Firefox browser. This plugin can work on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can also customize the look to fit your tastes.
Twitterfox
Find out the statuses of your friends on Twitter right on your Firefox browser
Shareaholic
Share webpages with your friends on Twitter. Can be integrated with your Firefox Browser
Twitbin
Receive and send tweets at the side of your Firefox browser
Firefox Search Plugin
Find out how you can post to Twitter right from your Firefox search bar
Twitterbar
Post to Twitter via the address bar
Tweetbar
A twitter sidebar for Firefox and Flock
Twippera
Twitter widget for Opera
Power Twitter
Twitter plugin for Firefox that have photo and video sharing capabilities.
Yoono
Firefox add-on that add different social networks to your browser
Twitzer
Firefox plugin that let you post more than 140 characters.
Twitterlights
Firefox addon that lets you Tweet any page you see.
Twitterbook
Post to twitter like Bookmarking
Twitterline
Displays your friend's public timeline on your toolbar
Maxthon
This is a toolbar you can download so you can tweet via your browser

For Mobile Phone 

Twitterfone
Update Twitter using Voice
Twitsay
Record Voice Messages on Twitter
Twitter for iphone
Self explanatory
Itwtr
Another Twitter client for iphones
Pocket Tweets
another twitter client for your iphone
Twittai
mobile phone software with retweeting capabilities
CCtwit
windows mobile twitter client written in c# leveraging the .net compact framework.
Twapper
send updates from your 30boxes calendar to your phone via Twitter.
Twittelator
Integrate your iphone with Twitter
Twitterberry
Integrate Twitter with your blackberry
Vlingo
Another tool to integrate your blackberry with Twitter
Email Twitter
Get your Tweets on any email-enabled mobile phone
iTweet
Twitter Site for your iphone
Qik
A tool that let you share videos via your phone.
Jargong
Twitter client for your phone that has Flickr and other social network integration
MoTwit
Application for Palm OS
Widsets
Get content without sending SMS
Moby Picture
Post to your blog or sites like Twitter on your mobile phone
Twixr
allows you to share pictures on Twitter via your mobile phone
Locify
Send twitter updates on your mobile phone along with GPS location
Fring
Post to Twitter + other sites using your mobile phone
Abiro Jitter
Abiro Jitter (Java Twitter) is an easy-to-use and fully-featured Twitter client for mobile phones
Jtwitter
Java application which you can install on your phone
Twidroid
twitter client for android mobile phones
Twitteresce
Twitteresce allows you to access your twitter feed using your mobile phone.
Twobile
Twitter client for users of Windows Mobile Pocket PCs
Tiny Twitter
Client for any Java enabled device (that's a bunch & includes the CrackBerry) and any Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone
Twitter SpellCheck
Check your spelling while twittering on your mobile phone

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Surf Internet In Your Own Language Through Opera Mini 5

I suppose that everyone of you have already seen my earlier post about Opera Mini 5 Beta version. There I have posted that Opera can be configured to see the blogs or sites, in sinhala language. It will also show any  language since the content is rendered as images. So if you configure it as I did, then you will also see your blog on your mobile in you own language (If it's written in a language other than English. Sites written in English will render as usual)

Before configuration:


How it is done is simply like this:

Open up Opera Mini 5 and type "config:" in the address bar (without quotes) and then press "Go" button.


Now go to the bottom of the screen that you get after "config:". There you will see a parameter named "Use bitmap fonts for complex scripts".


Now click it and from the menu select "Yes" instead of "No"

Now press "Save" buttom at the bottom to confirm your selection.


After configuration:

So, now it's done. Now you can surf your own blog or website through your mobile phone and check whether it works for your language. Belowing is for my blog for the same post which was shown as squares as I showed you in the very first picture of this post.

 
Well, now it's your turn... :) Good Luck!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Opera Mini 5 on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Opera is not a newbie to the browser world. It has been with mobile users for a long time. It has become one of mostly used web browsers in the world of mobile users. There are various factly for this.
  1. Based on Java - So that it can run on many platforms.
  2. User-friendly interface.
But there was a lack during last few months in Opera since they didn't have a good version of their browser to newest symbian system 9.4v5, which is becoming one of the most popular mobile platforms.

However Opera innovative teams has been able to give the users a new version with so many new features including tab browsing. It is one of the expected items that I have been looking from a mobile browser for some time. At last, Opera has done it. There are so many other features too.
  1. Speed Dial.
  2. Power Scrolling.
  3. Password Manager.
  4. Google search box.
So I thought of showing you some of screenshots I took running Opera on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Tab Browsing
 
Speed Dial

Google
 
Onscreen Keyboard 
Google Web Search
Google Image Search

Read Sinhala

Read Sinhala
Main Menu

Get Opera from here

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Windows XP on Linux Mint (Virtualization)

Most of the time the inability to move totally on to Linux is that some softwares aren't working well even in WINE on Linux (yet). But it is really annoying to move on to Windows and back to Linux when we want to run certain softwares on both of the system. But how if it's possible to run windows inside Linux?

That is possible using the process called "Virtualization". This method is not very new but still is developing. There are bunch of virtualization softwares but some use lot of resources while others do a petty job with less resource eating.

VirtualBox is one of the nice low weight softwares used for virtualization. So I though of using it for a while on my Linux Mint machine and see how far windows can go inside Linux. Still doing some configuration stuff. So I'm leaving here showing you the first welcome note from Windows XP running inside Linux.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

How To Change Root Password Of A Linux OS If You Have Forgotton It

Someone can say that "Root is the god of the system", where it bears the literal meaning regarding the root user of a Linux system. Because he has the full access to each and every corner of the system and can change or modify it as he wishes. As a matter of fact, if the root user does something wrong with what he is doing, the system may stop working.

Anyway, if you have forgotten the root password, what can you do? It will make the system less operative since you need the root password to configure and change lot of things in a Linux System.

Assuming that you have access to BIOS, there is a possibility to change the password using a Linux Live CD.

Stuff Needed:
  1. Change the first boot device to the CD Drive or to the DVD drive. You can do this from the "Boot Settings" menu under the "Boot Sequence" sub menu. These entries change according to the BIOS system you have and the above is in general.
  2. A live CD or DVD of Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, etc (For this explanation Linux Mint Live CD has been used)
Method:
  1. After changing the first boot device put the live CD or DVD in the drive and boot up the computer.

  2. Now when it is finished loading the desktop, right click on the desktop and from the menu select "Open in Terminal". In the terminal you get, you have to give all the commands as shown and explained in the following figures. (Every command is without quotes)
  3. "sudo fdisk -l" From this you can identify the disk partition in which you have installed Linux. In this case it is /dev/sda2.

     
      
  4.  Now create a new folder using the command, "sudo mkdir /media/temp". Then you will get a folder named temp in /media.
      
  5. Now what you have to do is to mount the partition at temp folder. Use the command, "sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/temp"
  6. Then you have to tell the system to identify this partition as the root partition. Use the command, "sudo chroot /media/temp"
  7. Now it's the final stage, where you have to change the password to a password you prefer. To do this, as in the figure, type "passwd root". It will ask you two times for the password and put the same password correctly. When it's done you will see the message "passwd: Password updated successfully".

Now restart the machine and when it comes to the login prompt, use the password you put just now. Using this method, one can change not only the root password but also the password of any existing user.

Friday, August 28, 2009

"Still waiting for the root device" problem

This is an annoying message given by the startup process of linux and I got in to the same situation after installing Linux Mint.

Linux mint is a reconfiguration of ubuntu so that it make ease of use for the beginners to Linux. You have everything installed out of the box such as flash plugin for Firefox and MP3 decoding.

After sometime, I got this annoying problem when I was going to do a cold boot (starting up the computer after a shutdown) and later I figured it's not only happening even after a hot boot (reboot). I had been searching a lot about this problem and there were so many posts in forums saying to change the label of the root partition and adjust the grub->menu.lst and etc->fstab. Some had said to use the UUID of the device as the value for the root parameter for the kernel. But all of them didn't work in long term for me.

After all time I though there would be a problem with the bootloader itself. Having that thought I removed the default bootloader for Linux Mint, the grub-gfxboot bootloader and installed the legacy grub bootloader. Here we go, it has fixed the problem for me (so far).

So according to my experience with this I think the grub-gfxboot bootloader sometimes forget how to find the root device no matter how the parameter value is given. So if you also have this "still waiting for the root device" problem and couldn't figure out a solution, it's time to go back to the good old (legacy) grub bootloader.

Cheers

Saturday, August 22, 2009

How to check UUID, Label & Filesystem type in Linux

First there should be a little clarification what these things are.

1. UUID - Universally Unique Identifier
This is a kind of an identifier that you can give to a device. Since it is a universally unique identifier, the identification of the device is easy.

2. Label
Label is another way to identify a device but it's not unique. Like in Microsoft Windows you can have more than one device with the same label.

3. Filesystem
It is the method for storing files in a computer system. Different operating systems use different types of file systems such as,
* EXT3/4 - Linux
* HFS/HFS+ - Mac
* NTFS - Windows

In Linux there is a method how you can find these things with a single command.

* Open up a terminal and issue this command without quotes "sudo blkid"

The output will be like this,