Finally, a nice and clean setup to get Mountain Lion’s Mail app and Gmail to play nice together. Thanks for the write-up, David Chartier (@Chartier)!
Have you always wondered if there was a BETTER way to make a new folder in Windows 7 (and 8)? I loathe having to right-click in my current folder and choosing New > Folder. The New submenu is usually WAY at the bottom of the context menu.
I did a little digging today and found this simple post at Infrequent Geek with the shortcut. CTRL + Shift + N makes a new window!!
I’ve been having these thoughts as of late… ever since I got the Google Nexus 7 around Christmas time, I’ve more and more fallen in love with how Google does things with their OS. Even having gone as far as jailbreaking my iPhone 5, adding in some of the customizations that I’ve wanted: Fonts (Bytafont), more than 12 icons in a folder (Infinifolders), vertically scrolling pages (Infiniboard), tethering (MyWi), color temperature changes for time (f.lux), and a few other randoms, I’m still very intrigued by the Android OS.
A few of the things holding me back are:
- Pixels per inch (but it seems there are many new phones out or coming out with higher than 326ppi)
- Overall size of iPhone (nice and sleek) compared to some of the better Droid phones
- Generally speaking, iOS is still pretty tight the way things work
The new HTC One that is coming out looks pretty damn slick, if I do say so myself.
FINALLY, after a half dozen calls to Comcast tech support/customer service, their escalation department was able to help me out. Mohammed wasn’t able to quite get it tonight, but Tim, a local Michigan guy, was able to get my cable modem’s boot file all squared away. Thanks Tim!
So, in preparation for moving, I bought a new router since I needed to have both households up and online while we had a 10 day transition period, or so.
One of the features I was looking for in buying a router for this was being able to turn my Brother multifunction printer into one that was AirPrint compatible, something my household lacked. The Netgear R4500 that was for sale (may still be) at Costco seemed to fit the bill. It was both cheap, $130-$140, and available (in the store).
When I hooked it up and followed the directions to get the printer set up to be AirPrint compatible, it failed. It didn’t show up when trying to find it on my iPhone 5. Bummer, I thought. After doing some research, I found that the Costco model of this router had a different boardid that didn’t allow it to get firmware updates from Netgear nor could it load firmware updates that were manually downloaded. I had a suspicion that this was the cause of this ReadyShare printer funny-business. I let it slide, as I had a lot of other things to deal with in this new house.
Fast forward about a month, and I re-investigated the notion of hacking the router to set its boardid so that it was, indeed, a retail version of this Netgear router, the WNDR4500. I followed the YouTube video instructions on how to do this.
To do this, you’ll need the MAC address of your router. You can find this MAC address by looking at your router in the web interface, or by typing “arp -a” in a command prompt. These routers seem to start with 84.
You’ll also need the telnetenable.exe file which can be found at myopenrouter.net. The directions you see in the Word document that comes with that download and in the YouTube video threw me off for a second. It has you use the login Gearguy and the password Geardog when using the telnetenable command prompt utility. At first, I was using my own web interface router login and password and it wasn’t working. I re-read some info online and found that the username and password were set up by folks at Netgear to give developers access to be able to telnet into their routers for various reasons.
After you do the boardid change for your router, you’ll need to download and install the firmware from Netgear for it to reflect it’s now the WNDR4500 and not the R4500.
Crazy thing is, after I did this, I went back into my router’s setting via the web interface and navigated to the ReadyShare Printer setup, selected my printer in the list of printers, and voila, my printer was now seen by my iPhone. All is well in Computer Ninja’s house now!
NOTE: Netgear’s documentation states you need to have the printer hooked up to your router with a USB cable. This isn’t true. As long as the printer is part of your network, the ReadyShare printer functionality within the firmware will work!
To recap:
1. Find your router’s MAC address with “arp -a” from a command prompt or the web interface. Should start with 84.
2. Download the telnetenable.exe program and extract it so you can run it from a command prompt.
3. From where you have it, you’ll need to run it like this: telnetenable 192.1681.1 (unless yours is different) 84xxxxxxxxxx Gearguy Geardog
4. Telnet into your router: telnet 192.168.1.1 (if you don’t have Telnet, you’ll need to go into Control Panel > Programs > Turn on Windows Features > Click Telnet
5. Once you successfully telnet, you’ll get a prompt that has a #. From this, you’ll need to enter this: burnboardid U12H189T00_NETGEAR
6. Reboot your router
7. Download and install the firmware you want from Netgear’s website
8. Reboot your router. It’ll now be listed as a WNDR4500 and you’ll be able to use the web interface to do firmware updates!!
This doesn’t happen often (every millennium technically and I just wanted everyone to know that here at the Filias house, we care about this stuff…especially my boys!
Alex, Shekhar, and I were at a TechCrunch MeetUp last night in Detroit. Nice event… venue could’ve been laid out a little bit bigger, but nonetheless, we enjoyed it.
Or photo at Flickr:
I tasted a new iPad at lunch. Holy smokes, that display. Imagine, 60 ppi aside, surfing on a tablet that looks like the iPhone 4/4S. Stunning. Didn’t even see a game that was native to 2048×1536. That’ll be amazing as well. Have fun new iPad getters today!
I’ve been using the free version of Sparrow on the Mac for a few months now. Why? Well, I was turned on to Postbox, a pay-for-a-free-email-client-based-on-Thunderbird by a friend of mine at Wayne State University a few years back. I liked it quite a bit because it offered features that weren’t part of Thunderbird and didn’t seem to be part of their roadmap. Since then, Thunderbird added the whole unified inbox, as the queues were taken from smartphones with their unified inboxes. Thank you RIM. Yes, RIM, not Apple nor Google)!
Well, Sparrow takes the whole e-mail client that should be free (those that come with your OS or Thunderbird) and makes it a bit like Twitter. Quick and to-the-point. No frills. It’s very slick.
Now, Sparrow is on the verge (no pun intended) on releasing (if approved) an iOS app to make e-mail much simpler. Dom Leca of Sparrow talks about it here, in this article. He mentions some of his ideas and also talks about what Google did wrong with their GMail app. Me, I find the GMail app pretty weak. It’s nothing more than a wrapper to a browser-based GMail client. I never thought it was very sophisticated nor did it gave me any reason to use it over the native mail client on my iPhone 4S. Also, if the search in the mail client is adequate, I never use the GMail app. I simply go to GMail in Safari or Atomic.