I just got a Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ last week. It’s a great device that can play a lot of different media formats at 1080p. The latest firmware also lets you stream Netflix movies. One problem I have is that it does not have a wireless network card. The FreeAgent Theater+ is placed by the TV in the living room, and it’s far away from the router. Before I get a WIFI USB dongle for it, I want to test the network functionality first. I have used my Macbook to act as a wireless bridge for my PS2 to connect to my wireless network at home. This time, I want to use my Windows 7 based laptop and see if it’s possible to do so. To my surprise, Windows 7 has made it easy to bridge the Ethernet connection with a wireless network.

Before we begin, you need to have a Windows 7 laptop with a working wireless connection. Here are the steps:

1. On the Windows 7 laptop, click on the Windows icon. Type view network connections and press Enter.
2. Identify your Ethernet connection and your wireless connection. In this example, the Ethernet connection is called Local Area Connection and the wireless connection is called Wireless Network Connection.
3. Click on Local Area Connection to select it. Press and hold the Ctrl key and click on Wireless Network Connection to select it. Now you should have both connections selected.
4. Right click on the selection and select Bridge Connections.
   
5. Now use an Ethernet cable to connect the Ethernet port on the FreeAgent Theater+ and the Ethernet port on the Windows 7 laptop.

That’s it. The FreeAgent Theater+ is now connected to the network using the Ethernet connection. This technique applies to other appliances with just Ethernet connection like Xbox 360, Blu-Ray player and Network enabled TV.

Note that when your laptop is acting as a wireless bridge, you might not be able to use it to browse the Internet at the same time. When you are done, follow the step 1 and step 2 to network connections in control panel. Right click on the bridged connections and select Remove from Bridge.

Ever since we switched from Leopard to Snow Leopard, the old Cisco VPN client has not worked. The new Cisco AnyConnect VPN client is required. One user had troubles installing the client. I tried it myself and found that the installation was not straightforward. A bit of tinkering is required. Here are the steps:

1. When you visit the AnyConnect VPN Client site, the automatic installation does not work. Follow the link on the page to download the installer: vpnsetup.sh .
2. Invoke Terminal application.
3. Change the directory to where you save the script. It’s usually ~/Downloads . Type the command in the Terminal window.

   cd ~/Downloads

4. The permission for the vpnsetup.sh is wrong; fix it by typing the following command.

   chmod +x vpnsetup.sh

5. Run the script. You will need to supply your password for this command.

   sudo ./vpnsetup.sh

The client should be installed now. Point your browser back to your company’s Cisco AnyConnect VPN web site again and it should connect.

For those who are unfamiliar with bokeh, it is the blur in the out-of-focus areas of an image. This effect is easily achieved by using a DSLR camera. On a compact camera, it is difficult to have bokeh because of the small lens and sensor.

You could however “simulate” bokeh effect using an image editor. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to do it using the open source GIMP.

1. Invoke GIMP and open the image you want to edit.
2. Click on the Free Select Tool.
3. Trace your subject with the Free Select Tool.
   
4. Once your subject is selected, click on Select -> Invert to invert the selection. The background is now selected.
5. Click on Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur… to bring up the Gaussian Blur dialog.
   
6. Enter the size of Blur Radius. You have to experiment a bit to figure out the size. In this example, it is a 10MP image, and I used 20.0 px for the Blur Radius. Click on OK to close the dialog.
7. Save the image under a different name so that the original is unaltered.

Here are the sample photos.

BEFORE

AFTER

The thumbnails are a bit small for you to notice the difference. Click on the thumbnails to see the full size images.

Inkjet printers are so inexpensive nowadays, sometimes it is cheaper to buy a new one rather than getting it fixed. However, it is not good for the environment.  One common problem for inkjet printers is when the print heads get clogged up. On some printers, you can just replace the ink cartridge; for others, you have to clean the print heads. The printer usually has a utility to clean print heads. The clean utility can help you when the print heads are lightly clogged. It doesn’t always work. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to clean the clogged print heads when the utility fails to work.

What you need are a syringe (injector) with a long needle and some ammonia. You can buy the syringe from Ebay and ammonia from any supermarket.When you buy ammonia, make sure that it is the clear kind, without added color or other ingredients.

Let’s get started.

1. Mix one part of ammonia with one part of hot water.
2. Fill the syringe with the ammonia solution.
   
3. Remove the ink cartridge according to your printer’s instructions.
4. Put some napkins or towels under the cartridge to prevent the ammonia solution from dripping . Use the ammonia solution to flush the connector(s). There may be multiple connectors for your printer, so make sure you flush them all. In this example, there are two connectors.
   
5. Wait for a moment and let the ammonia solution work its magic.
6. Insert the print cartridge back. (Optional) If you have an empty cartridge, you can fill it with the ammonia solution. Insert this cartridge instead of the original cartridge.
   
7. Repeat steps 3~6 for all the colors you want to clean.
8. Use the printer’s print head clean utility to clean the print heads.
   
9. If you used an ammonia cartridge in step 6, now replace it with the original cartridge. Print a test page and see if the print heads are clean. If not, repeat the steps 3~8.

Here is a test page I printed before cleaning.

The print heads for light magenta and magenta were clogged and could not print at all. Here is a test page after cleaning. The light magenta and magenta were printing again.

A feature of Firefox is that it calls your Anti Virus program to scan the downloaded files automatically upon completion of the download process. This feature is nice that it adds an additional layer of protection. However, there are times when you want to disable it. I was downloading a huge file from a trusted source. After the downloading was done, Firefox froze while the file was scanned. It took me a while to kill the crashed Firefox process.

There is no option to disable this feature in the Options dialog. You have to use the configuration editor. Here are the steps:

1. Enter about:config in the address bar and press Enter key. You might see a warning dialog. Click on I’ll be careful, I promise! to continue.
   
2. Enter scanWhenDone in the Filter box. Notice the the preference name browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is set to the default value true.
   
3. Double click on the preference and it changes to false.
   
4. Close Firefox. The next time you use Firefox to download files, it won’t scan the files.

Once you have downloaded those files that have problems with scanning, you might want to enable this feature again.

When I purchased my Brother Laser Printer HL-2170W, I was aware of the notorious premature “toner life end” problem. The printer has a sensor for the toner, it would stop printing when the toner is low. The problem is often times the printer stops working even when the toner is perfectly fine.

My printer stopped working when the page count is only about 650 pages. To get around this problem, there is a trick that you can do it by yourself. Here are the steps.

1. Follow the printer’s instructions to take out the toner.
2. There is a round hole to the right side of the toner. Use a strip of non-transparent tape to cover this hole. If you do not have non-transparent tape, you can tape a small piece of paper there instead.
   
3. Insert the toner back to the printer.

When you run a Java application on Snow Leopard, the 64-bit Java is used by default. This might be problematic when you run some older applications. We ran to this problem earlier when a user tried to activate his Matlab license. The message he got is

There was an unexpected exception: Can’t load library: / Applications/ MATLAB_R2009aSV.app/ / bin/ maci64/ libactivation.jnilib See the log file (/ var/ folders/ Mp/ Mp0PQFo9GbKznsjhgBiZf++++TI/ -Tmp-/ TMW_svact_christophergiuliano.log) for more details.

The solution is to set the 32-bit Java as default. Here are the steps:

1. Invoke Java Preferences in Applications -> Utilities.
   
2. Click on the entry of Java SE 6  32-bit and drag it before Java SE 6  64-bit in the Java Applications section.
   
3. Close Java Preferences. The 32-bit Java will be used next time you run a Java application.

If you want to try Fedora 11 without buying a new machine or partitioning your hard drive, VirtualBox is a good choice. This guide assumes you have downloaded the Fedora 11 KDE iso and you also have installed VirtualBox 2.2 or above. You also need enough disk space to hold the virtual disk on your hard drive.

1. Run VirtualBox and Click on New to create a new virtual machine.
   
2. Click on Next to continue.
   
   
3. Name your virtual machine and select the proper OS Type. Click on Next to continue.
   
4. Set the memory size for the virtual machine. I used 512MB. Click on Next to continue.
   
5. Click on Next to create a new virtual disk.
   
   
6. Create New Virtual Disk Wizard starts, click on Next to continue.
   
   
7. Select Dynamically expanding storage and click on Next to continue.
   
   
8. Specify a location for the disk image and size. If your system drive is low on space, you might want to use a different drive. Click on Next to continue.
   
9. Click on Finish to finish creating a new virtual disk.
   
10. Click on Finish to finish creating of the new virtual machine.
    
11. Now back to the main windows of VirtualBox with the newly created virtual machine for Fedora. Double click on CD/DVD-ROM. Note that a lot of features are turned off by default. If you want to change the settings, click on Settings to modify them.
    
12. Check Mount CD/DVD Drive and select ISO Image File. Click on the folder icon.
    
13. Click on the Add icon to locate the iso image you downloaded. Click on Select and you will be brought back to the dialog in previous step. Click on OK.
    
14. Click on Start icon in the upper left corner to start installation.
    
15. Click anywhere inside the virtual machine window, so that you can use your keyboard and mouse inside the virtual machine. If you ever want to release the mouse and keyboard from the virtual machine, press right Ctrl key. Double click on Install to Hard Drive.
    
16. The installer runs. Click on Next.
    
    
17. Select the language and click on Next.
    
18. A warning dialog shows. Click on Re-intialize drive to continue.
    
19. Set a hostname and click on Next.
    
    
20. Select a time zone and click on Next.
    
21. Create a user and click on Forward.
    
22. Enter root’s password and click on Next.
    
23. Use the default scheme for partitioning. Click on Next.
    
    
24. A confirmation dialog shows. Click on Write changes to disk.
    
25. The installer copies the live image to the virtual disk. When the installation is done. Click on Close.
    
    
26. Click on the Fedora icon -> Leave -> Shutdown.
    
27. When the virtual machine is in the shutdown state. We want to un-mount the Live CD, so the virtual machine won’t boot to it again. Double click on CD/DVD-ROM and uncheck Mount CD/DVD Drive. Please see the screenshots for step 11 and 12.
    
    
28. Start the virtual machine.
29. When the VM boots up the first time, a setup wizard runs. Click on Forward.
    
30. Click on Forward.
    
31. Create a user and click on Forward.
    
32. Click on Network Time Protocol and check Enable Network Time Protocol. Click on Forward.
    
33. Click on Finish.
    
34. The basic installation is done!
    

In my next post, I’ll show you how to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. Stay tuned. Ok, here is the link to the guide on Guest Additons.

My original package was designed for Navigon 2100 US model. A lot of people have adapted the package to be used on other Navigon models. There are some reports about my release 4.2 causing some GPSs other than Navigon 2100 to reboot continuously.

The cause for this problem is that my script reboots (resets) the GPS after successfully unlocking. The problem is some GPSs’ registry got wiped out clean after each reboot. Therefore, the next time system boots up, the script thinks the unit is not unlocked and does the unlocking again and reboot.

To fix the problem, I have changed the script so it won’t reboot again. I also made some modification for the taskbar to show up correctly. Two packages have been made for this release. The first one is the whole package which is for people who have not downloaded my release 4.2 before. The instructions are the same as the release 4.2. Here is the link to the zip file.

The second package is for people who have download the release 4.2. The second package has only two script files: autorunce.mscr and StartBtn.mscr. Please replace these two files in your old downloaded package. By default, autorunce.mscr goes to the root of the SD card and StartBtn.mscr goes to the Script folder on the SD card. Here is the link to the zip file.

Please consider making a small donation to my site if you find my package useful. Thank you!

Playstation 3 supports a lot of media types, but it’s not clear about what are the media types that support subtitles. I tried several different formats and found that DivX format supports subtitles on PS3. I wrote a post about how to convert .mkv file to .avi (DivX) earlier. Even though I can finally watch the video with soft subtitles, the process is long and the video gets degraded because the encoding process. The conversion is also sometimes buggy.

Later, I found AVCHD on PS3 can also show subtitles. There is an excellent program multiAVCHD which can convert .mkv file coded with H.264/AC3 to AVCHD without re-encoding the video.

1. Download multiAVCHD from the author’s site.
2. (Optional) If your .mkv file uses AAC as the audio codec, follow this post to convert it.
3. Run multiAVCHD.
   
4. Click on MKV/*TS/MPEG/MOV files to select the .mkv file you want to convert.
   
5. Click on Menu tab and select the correct TV System. Use NTSC in North America.
   
6. Click on the Audio/Subtitles tab and check Use embeded ASS subtitles if your .mkv file uses ASS subtitles.
   
7. Click on create multiAVCHD to start the process. By default, a subfolder called AVCHD will be created under the multiAVCHD folder.
8. When it’s done processing, copy the AVCHD folder to the root of your USB flash drive.
9. Safely remove the USB flash drive from your computer, insert it to PS3 and enjoy!

Note that AVCHD is kinda picky about the resolutions  and the H.264 level of the video source. If the generated AVCHD folder is not viewable on PS3, you might still need to convert .mkv file to a different format.