Another 15 minutes

An Android phone will scan your entire memory card for music and images and display them as available media in the players and albums, but maybe you don’t want to show all media but only specific folders. There is a solution for this. To hide media in a specific folder from the player apps do this:

1. Windows: Open notepad and save an empty file as filename “.nomedia”. Linux: In a terminal window create a file called “.nomedia” by typing “touch .nomedia”.
2. Connect your Android phone by USB and copy the file into all folders you wish to hide from the media scan.
3. Done.

The media (music, images and movies) contained in this folder will now be ignored and not show up in your MP3 or movie player on the phone. To access and play them you can use a file manager, like Astro File Manager.

Ever since I noticed that TouchFlo 3D (also known as Manila) got updated on newer phones, but not on my HTC Touch HD, I have been thinking of doing it myself with one of the multiple custom ROMs available for this phone, made by enthusiasts of the Windows Mobile community. The newer versions of Manila has alot more nice functions and much better looks that I want, my phone comes with version 1.3 so it’s pretty basic. The procedure seemed a bit complicated though, and I didn’t want to risk my warranty on the phone. But after e-mailing HTC asking whether or not the HTC Touch HD (Blackstone) would ever get an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5 and newest version of Manila and they replied…

- We currently have no knowledge of any planned updates for the HD. It is unlikely to be updated to 6.5 or beyond as Microsoft have made some hardware restrictions on devices that can use 6.5 that the HD does not meet.

… I decided to go ahead with my plans, since I know that many people use Windows Mobile 6.5 and later versions of Manila on their Touch HD’s and it runs just fine. I’m gonna go for Dutty’s “Leo” ROM with Windows Mobile 6.5 and Manila 2.5, since Dutty seems to be the most popular and skilled ROM cook out there, and here’s a step-by-step guide on how I did it.

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Alot of people seem to have problems with auto-updating WordPress to version 2.8.2 with the processes freezing at download, stuck with message the the file is being downloaded but nothing ever happens. This only seem to happen on some blogs, 2 out of my 3 blogs worked just fine, but one needed more help.

The problem seem to be with some plugin. Here is what you do to successfully get the update through. Go to the plugin page, select “Active” plugins and then use bulk action to deactivate all active plugins. Don’t worry if you have many plugins already deactivated and don’t want to manually activate the ones you actually used one by one, you can activate them just as easy. Now proceed with the core upgrade, it should go through right away. Then, go to the plugins page again, select “Recently active” plugins and then bulk action activate them again. All done!

If you run your WordPress blog on some hosting partner you probably have the automatic updates of WordPress core and plugins working, but if you ever setup your own Linux server and trying to run WordPress on it, it is likely that this will not work out of the box, especially if you’re running multiple websites on the same server.

I don’t want to use some 3rd party plugin for this to work or FTP, so I investigated what it is that makes it work in my hosting partners server, but not my own. I figured it was some PHP configuration missing but it was much simpler than that.

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Ever since I got my Asus eee PC 1000HE installed with eeebuntu linux I have had problems with very low volume on the speaker, even tho the speaker volume slider was showing max volume. I didn’t spend much time investigating why this was, just accepting it. But today I found the solution to it, and it was very easy. Just right-click the speaker icon, select preferences. A new windows pops up, if you select the “LineOut” device by clicking it, and then click the speaker icon again to adjust the volume slider you will notice it’s only at 50%. Just set this up to 100% and you will have all the volume you need.

Recently I’ve been playing around with Photoshop, retouching photos and making artistic twists in particular, and have come to like it after finding some very cool blogs with Photoshop tutorials, guides and how-to’s. One of them is “moderskeppet” which is an awarded Swedish Photoshop blog with lots of video tutorials and tips. The other I found was a blog by Dave Cross who is an author of Photoshop books and he also has nice video tutorials of how to make some pretty cool effects in Photoshop. Both of these sites have ideas and tutorials which I’ve been using when training and retouching photos of myself. I hope to get working on some pictures of other objects too and creating and modifying images. Video tutorials really helps alot more than just a written guide and you get instant results.