This gadget was found in a cafe in Guangzhou airport. They seriously used it to light the customers cigarette. Lighters are forbidden at the airport.

Understanding the parts of the software

A) Recovery image – Its a small program which starts when you press home+power while the phone is turned off. From this image you will be able to upgrade to new roms, make important nandroid backup, reach a recovery console, check your sd card etc. Normally you don’t change this software often and its not included when you download new releases from internet for installation. Update: The latest recovery image, cyanogen 1.3, has automatic nandroid restore, making it very easy for complete restore directly from the phone. No need to restore from spl any longer.

B) spl – its the second program loader. Its a small program which starts when you press back+power while the phone is turned off. From this image you will be able to restore your phone completely from a nandroid backup using fastboot. I am not so sure what more it does but the newest version is required to run most roms. Normally you don’t change this software often and its not included when you download new releases from internet for installation. Update: The latest recovery image, cyanogen 1.3, has automatic nandroid restore, making it very easy for complete restore directly from the phone. Nio need to restore from the spl any longer.

C) Radio image – Its the software which handles the phones radio communication (gprs, 3g, wifi etc). This software has so far only been released by google or HTC and its vere recommendable to update to the latest version.

D) The Android ROM – This is the part which holds the android OS and which you probably will change often. New releases are coming all the time.

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Windows 7 beta seems to be very solid without many bugs and what is so impressive is that it runs quite well on very slow computers. For a well written guide how to download and install Windows 7 beta read this guide at Gizmodo.

For my Windows 7 installation on my Eeepc 900, I have found that there are two major things to do which speeds up the OS further.

1) Change main Windows 7 theme to any of the lighter “simple style” themes. There is a “simple style” theme which looks similar to the standard Windows 7 theme.

2) Use a USB memory, SD card or almost any other flash memory to boost your OS using ReadyBoost. To do this, just plug in, ie a USB memory stick, and choose ReadyBoost from the autoplay menu which pops up, the more memory you allocate, the better. Alternatively, if you have autoplay disabled, you can open explorer and right click on the memory stick, click on preferences and check out the ReadyBoost tab.

This is what I found out so far and if you know any other easy and powerful ways, let us know in the comments.

Bonusinfo: Some guidelines about how to install Windiws 7, only related to Eeepc.

I am sick and tired of reading about these never ending releases in the digg tech top news rss feeds!

We already concluded in my previous guide (from April) that we think that Ubuntu might be the greatest OS in the world. But that doesn’t change the fact that the desktop looks very dull out of the box.

But now we are going to change that and I will now let you know how to turn your desktop into this fantastic colourful desktop in no time.

If you like this green desktop, just keep reading, but if you rather like the below dark desktop I have a guide for that as well right here.

Edit: Several steps in this guide will probably work very well also on other Linux distributions as well but due to lack of own experience I won’t guarantee that.

To make the perfect desktop, it is NOT enough just changing into a cool background and apply a nice theme. The secret, which I will guide you through consists in my guide of 9 steps:

1. Change background picture
2. Change GTK2 theme with window border and controls
3. Change icon set
4. Change Fonts
5. Configure the top bar
6. Install a cool mac-like dock (AWN)
7. Install and get conky up and running to get that geeky text information about RAM usage, processes etc
8. Change login theme
9. Change the ugly orange color which is between the login screen and your fully loaded desktop

Note: In order to get that transparent look you need to get compiz up and running. You can activate compiz on Ubuntu 7.10 or higher: right click in the desktop, click “change desktop background”, click the tab “visual effects” and click “normal” or higher. It requires that your computer is equipped with a 3d graphics card with correct drivers.

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Example of major sites that are down

piratebay.org was recently taken down, all other torrent sites I tested works

sourceforge.net, China has amazingly taken down the other of open source

wordpress.com, all blogs hosted on wordpress are blocked including results on dashboard from wordpress stats plugin

livejournal.com doesn’t work

99% of all porn sites are down

Note that

most blogs hosted at blogspot.com works. Any coincidence that blogspot is owned by Google which also has the Google Reader which amazingly works. I guess that Google has the right connections.

wikipedia.org, youtube.com and the dangerous site slashdot.org which were blocked for the longest time, are now up and kicking.

Some workarounds

read sites with rss easily, open the rss feed in Google Reader which works perfectly with text and pictures. You wont be able to read the comments though.

use translation sites hich translates the complete webpage such as this Excite site which translates sites between Japanese and English.

For whatever reason China is now blocking the centre of open source, sourceforge.net .

I wonder why and can find no reason.

Recently I have noticed that the Great Firewall of China seems to be blocking Piratebay. Damn, that is my favourite torrent site. Oh well, all other torrent sites seems to work perfectly still though.

But what is happening?

Before was all blogs on blogspot.com and wikipedia.org down but now they seem to work.

The dangerous site Slashdot.org is still down. :/

Hint, if a site is down and it has rss feed. Start a google account and use Google Reader to read the content. Same as a proxy. It is strange that they let Google Reader pass the firewall.

Today the EEE PC 900 was available for sale in an electric market in Shanghai.

They offered both versions, 20 Gb with Linux or 12 Gb with Windows. The price for both versions were 3999 Yuan (about USD 570). They did not seem to be willing to do anything on that price and that is also the same experience I have from when the 701 was released back in November.

On this (crappy) photo, you can see both the 701 and the 900.

I didn’t have time to stay long but I they quickly let me know that they offered a copy of English XP together with the Lunux version for free

Tomorrow I will go back again. Any request for what I should check?

I have a Sony Ericsson P1i and this is tested on that phone. But most can be applied also to the other phones using Symbian UIQ 3 operating system. Phones which have UIQ 3 includes:

• Sony Ericsson P1, P1i, P1c, M600i, M600c, P990i, P990c, W950i, W950c, W960i, W960c, G700 and G900
• Motorola Z8, Z10

What I will bring up in this guide are

1. Short introduction to UIQ 3 and Symbian
2. Web browser and installing Opera Mini
3. How to manage email with UIQ 3
4. Google maps
5. iSkoot to use Skype
6. Worldmate
7. Swiss Manager
8. Adding new programs as icons on your start page
9. Download and installing new desktop themes
10. Installing GDesk
11. Rss reader
12. Top blogs and websites about UIQ 3
13. Sites for downloading games and applications
14. Bonus: Walkman 3.0 (for SE P1i only)

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