Awesome Techs

PDFs are the most common ebook format. So most of you will be having the pdf formatted ebooks collection. Now kindle is the most common ebook reader. Most of you may also have the Kindle. But if you are a user of kindle, you know how nice is the kindle books with the controls they are giving us with their kindle formats. And PDF files will not simply work along with all those controls and options. So now you need the pdf to kindle format converter! You can read on how to do this conversion. Its pretty easy.

First of all you can do this in several ways.

1. You can use Auto Kindle to convert a PDF to a Mobi file. (Windows)

This project was originally a quick for me to convert my ebook collection in various formats to a kindle compatible format without worrying about the ebook source type. It takes PDF, Lit, and HTML files and converts them to .mobi.

2. Or you can use Calibre. It will convert from most ebook formats to most others. (Windows/Linux)

But its a ebook library management system and it has lots of options which can confuse you if you haven’t been familiar with its functionalities. I cannot say its a converter. Its a management system with all the options. But it is available for Linux also.

Now this is what we all need when we have to transfer huge files and yet we dont have any means to use the sd card or transfer using the USB cable. Using bluetooth to transfer is pretty hectic. Wifi is much faster.

Here I use one ssh server from the android market and one client in my system. since I use ubuntu, the client is not an issue. But if you use windows machine, you can use a simple tool called scp.exe, a google search will take it to that download page.

0. connect both your computer and the android device to the same network.
1. Now as the first step, you need to install the ssh server in you android device.
2. Now specify a password. (Choose wisely as, if someone guesses this, they could get all the files from your device.)
2b. Better choose non default port as its is more secure. People will have to guess the port number also incase if they got your password.
3. Then start the ssh server.
4. Now goto your computer and open the terminal (linux) or open the scp file browser or whatever ssh client you downloaded.
5. Now if you have a GUI then you know what you have to do, just copy the files you need to the android device. (Usually copy from the left side panel to the right side panel.)
Or if you use terminal client you will have to type in some commands.
In My case the following command will copy all the mp3 files from the folder (/home/xpl0iter/.miro/Movies) to the sdcard. sdcard is the actual sdcard in the android device. You can use whatever path you need to, but for all the other path which is not sd card or the place we are not intended to copy the files, you will need root access. That means you will have to root your phone first.

scp -P 1387 /home/xpl0iter/.miro/Movies/*.mp3  192.168.2.187:/sdcard/

scp – command for copying the file using ssh. (Secure Copy)

-P 1387 – Specifying the port on which the ssh server runs in the android device.

/home/xpl0iter/.miro/Movies/*.mp3 – The files I wish to copy from the computer.

192.168.2.187 – Ip address of the android device. This will be shown on the ssh server.

/sdcard/ – the path to where I am copying the files.

Now iPhone Dev team has confirmed that they will not be releasing any jailbreaks for iPhone OS v4.0.2. Now this is a bad news for all the people who have accidentally upgraded their OS version to 4.0.2.

But there is way by which we can downgrade our OS version to the previous version. ie., 4.0.1 for which jailbreak is still available.

This step by step guide will show you how to downgrade your iPhone

iOS 4.0.2 to iOS 4.0.1. These steps are pretty simple but there is one major requirement: you must have your SHSH files saved on Saurik’s server. There is absolutely no way around it. If you don’t have your SHSH, you won’t be able to downgrade your iPhone.

In this tutorial, we will see how to downgrade the iPhone from 4.0.2 to 4.0.1 but the steps are the same if you want to downgrade to iOS 4 or even 3.1.3.

There are several methods used to downgrade the iPhone. We will learn the method that uses TinyUmbrella. No file editing will be necessary.

How to Downgrade from iOS 4.0.2 to 4.0.1

Step 1: Let’s download your SHSH blobs from Saurik’s server to your computer. To do so, download TinyUmbrella and plug your iPhone in. Select the “Advanced Options” box. Also select the firmware version to which you wish to downgrade. Finally, select “Cydia” under “Request From”. Then hit “Save My SHSH”. This will grab your SHSH files from Saurik’s servers and save them on your computer.

Step 2: Download the firmware to which you wish to downgrade to from our iPhone downloads section. Save it to your desktop.

Step 3: Put your iPhone in DFU Mode. To do so, launch iTunes and plug your iPhone in. Press and hold the Home and Power button together for 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, release the Power button while still holding the Home button until iTunes pops up and says it has found an iPhone in recovery Mode.

Step 4: Run TinyUmbrellaand click the “Display SHSHs” button to make sure your SHSH blobs were downloaded to your computer. Once done, click “Start TSS Server”.

Step 5: Now we’re going to restore to the firmware you want. To do so, launch iTunes and plug your iPhone in. Hold to SHIFT key (Windows only) or ALT/Option key (Mac only) while clicking on Restore. Make sure you hold the key while clicking Restore. A window will open. Simply select the firmware you downloaded in step 2.

Step 6: Your iPhone will start the restore process. You will most likely get several errors (error 1011, 1013, and 1015) but that’s ok, don’t worry about those.

Step 7: Finally, we need to get your iPhone out of recovery mode. To do so, simply click “Kick Device Out of Recovery” in TinyUmbrella.

Done!

You should now be back on a previous iOS, giving you the ability to jailbreak and unlock.

Well first let me make it clear that, I am not using wine or any other syncing tools for Linux. I am actually using Virtual Box.

So First install the non GPL version of Virtual Boz in you linux. Then just install Windows Xp in this Virtual Box. You can read the article for setting up Virtual Box Here.

After setting up windows XP properly install itunes 8.2. You can download Itunes 8.2 from here.

Then Plugin your Ipod or Iphone to your system. Then for your guest to recognize the ipod/iphone you will have to make a change in the Virtual Box. In the virtual box guest window frame, You can see a USB icon. See the Pic below.

Right Click that icon and select the ipod/iphone Now If you open the itunes in The guest OS you will see the Ipod/Iphone is connected status.

Now if you need all the Music /  Video / Picture files to be accessed by from Windows XP, you need to create the shared folder in Virtual Box settings. For this select the Devices and Shared Folders from the top menu in the Guest Window. Then add the Muic/Video/Picture folder there.

Now for the ease of use, you can map these as network drives. For this Just right click on the “My Computer” in Windows XP and select Map Network Drive, and then browse to the shared “vboxsvr” folders. Also select a suitable Drive name. Now you can see you favorite media folders as Drives in your My Computer.

If you have done till this, you can just use the iTunes as you were using it in the Windows Machine.

Editing the boot menu in Grub version 2 is a little bit different compared to Grub version 1. The problem is Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 comes with Grub 2. That means a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 changes your old grub to version 2. And version 2 of Grub dont have menu.lst. Menu.lst is the file we have to edit if we want to change something permanently in the bootmenu.

Instead of menu.lst Grub V2 uses grub.cfg. The path normally is

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

NOTE: you can use the grub-mkconfig utility to generate a grub.cfg file for you. Other operating systems can be detected and will be added to the configuration only if os-prober is also installed. os-prober is currently only avaible in Debian and Ubuntu.

GRUB 2 uses new bashish scripting language that is used to build menus. At startup file grub.cfg will be read and executed.

Please note that partition numbering has been changed to start from 1 (in grub legacy it started from 0).

Example menu entrys can be found in docs/grub.cfg in the source or in the Debian/Ubuntu package in /usr/share/doc/grub-pc/examples/grub.cfg.

Here is an simple example:

# Timeout for menu
set timeout=10

# Set default boot entry as Entry 0
set default=0

# Entry 0 - Load Linux kernel
menuentry "My Linux Kernel on (hd0,1)" {
    set root=(hd0,1)
    linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
    initrd /initrd
}

# Entry 1 - Chainload another bootloader
menuentry "Chainload my OS" {
    set root=(hd0,3)
    chainloader +1
}

PS: The improper editing of the file grub.cfg can leave you with an unbootable system.