October 2010 archive

Reverse Engineering the Coles Fuel Voucher Barcodes

Expired Special Offer Voucher

Sometimes when you are dealing with technology you come across things with little documentation and the source code is not commented. In such cases it can take a significant investment of time and effort to work out how something works before modifications and improvements can be designed and implemented. The ability to reverse engineer and …

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Build Your Own Android Smartphone

I came across a website yesterday that allows you to customise your own Android smartphone in a very similar way to how you can customise a Dell laptop to your personal requirements. This is interesting as traditionally the only thing that you might be able to differentiate in a mobile device is the included amount …

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Tips to Further Extend Your Mobile Device Battery Life

The last couple of blog updates have covered ways to prolong your battery life using your existing battery and either supplementary chargers or altering your usage habits. Whilst those approaches may go some way to help you get through those longer periods sometimes you can’t beat a bigger battery. Not all devices allow you to …

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Save Battery Life on Android – Turn Off Unused Radios

Leading on from yesterday’s article, sometimes you need to be a real power miser if you are nowhere near a power socket or you have forgotten your charger. I’m sure many of us have undergone the humiliating scrounge  around the office begging for a charger. Worse still, there are people that will simply help themselves …

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Save Battery Life on Android – Check Background Services

Android Battery Statistics

Whilst Android had the one up on iOS for a while with its multitasking ability with user applications it did come with a few drawbacks one of which was an impact to battery life. This can occur when you leave applications running without quitting them or when an application has a background service component that …

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Regain the Traditional Start Menu with Classic Shell

Settings Screen (Courtesy of Classic Shell)

Here’s a quick tip for those that may have made the move to Windows 7 before realising the changes to the start menu and the taskbar or otherwise had change thrust upon them without much choice (like your old computer having gone to heaven thus requiring the purchase of a new computer). One of the …

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A Backup Battery for Your Mac and Portable Devices

A while back, I wanted to get my wife an external battery to take overseas just in case she was away from a power point longer than her devices could retain their juice. I also was interested in something that could also recharge her MacBook Pro if it were in dire need of power. The …

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Free Your Android Device of the USB Cable with SwiFTP

Here’s a quick tip for those who are prone to losing, misplacing or hate using cables. There’s a great app called SwiFTP (a contracted form of “Swift FTP”) which basically install a compact FTP server on your phone.  Then you can connect to it using your favourite FTP client (such as FileZilla) and drag and …

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How to Flash Unofficial Firmware on a Samsung Galaxy S

At least in Australia, Samsung Galaxy S owners have been let down by ongoing delays with regard to the release of the Android 2.2 update (AKA Froyo). This has been of particular frustration for users with Android 3.0 (AKA Gingerbread) due to be released by Google before the end of the year. However, there is …

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WINAMP for Android Released!

From what I have gathered reading numerous forums and blogs, finding a good media player has been somewhat a quest for the holy grail for Android users. DoubleTwist has been popular as it can be paired up with client software on a regular computer for content management however it has not been without its problems …

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