Hacking Bluetooth- pairing polygamy

It was a very quick service at the registry office. The pairing of my bluetooth mouse and my Windows laptop was a happy relationship that lasted for years. However, things started to break down when my mouse started seeing Linux on the side.

I had started dual booting Ubuntu as a second OS, but every time I switched operating systems, I had to pair up my mouse again which was becoming a pain.

It turns out that when pairing occurs, the couple take a vow in the form of a hexadecimal code that Windows keeps in it's registry and Linux keeps in it's file system, the mouse also keeps a copy, overwriting any codes that it already has stored. The trick is to pair the mouse with Windows, extract the hex code from the registry and manually place that code in the relative place in the Linux file system.

Now my mouse plays nice with both OSs, without any further configuring having to be done. A small victory for computing polygamy.

Step by step instruction are here on the Ubuntu forums. I imagine that the process is similar for other distros as well.

How to make your logo transparent in Google apps

This is one for the admins out there who are trying to make their Google Apps suite look good.

I and many others it seems have had trouble using a logo with a transparent background on their google apps domain. Some suggest hacking into the code of the page itself, but far easier is the solution I found here (as long as you have the appropriate software).

When I was saving the picture using Adobe Fireworks, the picture always seemed to lose its transparancy once I uploaded it. Instead, open the file in Photoshop and save it using "save for web". I have no idea what it does differently, but it worked for me!

Via: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=5299fcb20c585b03&hl=en

Freemake is way more super than Super

I don't know how on earth I recommended SUPER in the first place. I must have been on some mindbending drugs at the time.

Anyway Freemake is loads better. Simpler interface, better presets, and a browser plugin that makes it easy to get web videos.

Freefilesync syncs files free!

Freefilesync is my current favourite file syncing software. I use it to sync the work on my laptop with my user space on the network.

You can setup batch files to sync multiple folders at once, and it even features a real-time auto sync feature. Currently in active development too!

AutoIT gets it done

Have you ever been asked to do something boring over and over and over again? Surely that's what computers are for? Microsoft's Office suite allows you to program it with Macros, and fortunately so does your OS.

AutoIT is a (relatively) easy to learn scripting language that is free and comes with its own development environment. I have recently used it to move files for users on my network so that their web bookmarks work properly.

Shortcut tool

In my organisation I make videos accessable to staff members via shortcuts to VLC on their start menus.

Yesterday I upgraded to the latest version of VLC and all of a sudden, none of the shortcuts worked anymore! Long story short, I found out I had to change the paths on all of the shortcuts to point to the right place. There were >100 shortcuts affected and no way was I going to start doing all of them individually.

That's where the imaginatively named Shortcuts Search and Replace comes in. With this tool its possible to search for a partial match in any number of shortcuts and change them accordingly. What's more- it's free!

Programming Languages for Kids

I've been talking about the increasing importance of learning how to program at schools for a while now and recently the UK government has finally seen sense and changed the national curriculum to include computer science.

I've been looking at different programming languages to teach at our school and I have two that I'd like to show you today:

Scratch is a language developed at MIT to make programming work in a GUI, it's great because it has a friendly interface and allows kids to see what their programs do straight away. It's quite limited, but even within these bounds it's amazing what's possible! I've been very impressed with some of the games my lot have come up with!

For a more "serious" programming course, I've been using Microsoft's Small Basic. It too is a simple IDE that holds your hand a bit, but everything is text based, making it much more akin to "real" programming with C++ etc. It's based on the much maligned visual basic language but it's still good for teaching loops, variables and objects.

For the lazier of the IT teachers out there, Codecademy runs an online course that awards progress with badges and rewards. It reminds me a lot of the w3 schools online HTML training.