Awesome Techs

Apple has confirmed that there are chances that hard drives may fail which were used in MacBook systems, sold between approximately May 2006 and December 2007. So if you bought your MacBooks between 2006 and 2007 could be eligible for a free hard drive replacement.

Apple says,

If your MacBook was purchased in the date range listed above and shows a flashing question mark on the screen, please take it to Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider and they will examine the hard drive to confirm if it is eligible for a replacement, free of charge, under this program.

The offer is open until August the 15th of this year, or three years after the MacBook was purchased.

via: [LifeHacker]

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.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Google demonstrated a new prototype of the technology , which can translate the text from any given photo. Well Google Goggles is Google’s experimental Android visual search application.

Google’s Blog Post about this said,

You may wonder what’s happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it’s not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we’re hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.

The first reason for any normal computer user to use Windows 7 is its cooler look and faster performance. Extended support for themes, desktop gadgets, sidebar etc are helping windows 7 to look nice. The people who uses linux for every day use is increasing day by day, but still its not even close to the numbers of windows users. The main reason is being the ugly user interface, which is not the truth but what most people think.

Now in a KDE desktop, for example Kubuntu, all these effects which windows 7 boasts to have, are there. But what about the Gnome Lovers, so thats why I am writing this blog post today. Gnome can be made lot more cooler than even windows 7 with the use of some tools. Cairo-Dock/Glx-Dock is on of this kind application.

With Cairo Dock we can make the Gnome desktop look like anything we want. The best feature of this cairo-dock is, it is customizable to very high extend. Cairo-Dock is a bar to launch applications hosted (or dock, to the way Mac OS X) incorporating in its latest versions, management of plugins as desklets (or widgets) directly displayed on the desktop of user icons such “interactive”. Incorporated by Fabrice Rey (aka Fabounet) and developed on Ubuntu (also works on other distributions and desktop environments Linux in 32 or 64 bit) it allows quick launching favorite applications directly from the user’s desktop.  A manager of transparency as Compiz Fusion, Beryl, Compiz or Metacity associated with xcompmgr is necessary.  The dock also works under XFCE (with the composite manager xfwm4 or Compiz), and normally with KDE since Kwin manages the composition display.

You can find the installation instruction HERE. Information for Ubuntu Users are available HERE.

PS: If you are experiencing any issues after the install, just right click and quit the application and then launch it by using the -c switch. like cairo-dock -c.

Also if you are using Radeon cards, you may want to add the boot parameter radeon.modeset=1.

If you got any doubts ask me, through he comments. Here are some desktops which uses Cairo-Dock.

Google real time search results, which already have twitter, yahoo answers, etc now included Myspace. That means that publicly available status updates, blog posts, and other MySpace data will now be included in the “latest results” area that now often pops up in Google search results when looking for information about a current event.

Now that google’s Buzz is really making a Buzz in the internet world, everyone with a blog or website might be trying to figure out how to integrate it with their website. Now here I am going to explain how to integrate it to your wordpress blog.

The easiest way for doing it is Use Plugins. I will list a few plugin which will do the integration for you.

Google Buzz Button

This Google Buzz Button plugin that allows you to add a “Buzz This” button to each of your WordPress posts. this may also look familiar because lots of famous techie websites use this.

How to:

1. Download Google Buzz Button Wordpress Plugin
2. Upload in wp-content/plugins folder on your server
3. Activate the plugin from Plugin Dashboard
4. Done! A new Google Buzz Button will start appearing after the post content on each single page. You can customize the location of Buzz Button.

WP Google-buzz

Another button plugin option is WP Google-buzz. This plugin has some more options compared to the previous one.

Features:

1. Show Google-buzz button before/after post content.
2. Manual insertion of code: Use this: <?php if(function_exists(‘add_wp_google_buzz’)) { add_wp_google_buzz(); } ?>
3. 10 different beautiful image options

WPBuzzer

This plugin also has got lots of options by which we can customize the look and feel.  Download WPBuzzer v0.5 from here.

Light Social

The Light Social plugin takes a slightly different approach to the Google Buzz button. Light Social is a plugin that inserts a set of social share links at the bottom of each of your WordPress posts.

Buzz In Your Sidebar

Google Buzz ER Plugin allows you to use the google Buzz features to display your public Buzz content. Just enter in your username and define how many Buzz entries you want to display and drag the widget to your designated choice in your blog.