Best Resizer

Feb

Questions about PayPal

A large portion of my income from Miha’s utilities software is paid by Paypal. The service is easy to use, easy to understand and safe. I understand that many people use PayPal rather than giving my other service provider SWreg their credit card. That’s their choice, really, as long as that doesn’t stop them from purchasing a program or donation for the free programs and my work.

I am getting a lot of question about PayPal here in Slovenia. Our country is not for long on the supported list of countries and people aren’t used to use PayPal. Well, if I count the questions I get, there’s more people involving. And they should. As said before, paying is easy, and so’s the other side of that: getting paid. Getting paid by PayPal is a very interesting option: the same advantages go here. The (international) users are familiar with Paypal, are not afraid to use it and… it’s simple to use. All in favor of businesses who want to sell more.

But in Slovenia getting the money out of PayPal can still be hard. Here you can get the money only by paying it out on your card and only two card types are supported: one is Visa and the other is MasterCard debit card (or a ‘debit card with a MasterCard logo’). Visa is pretty common here, but MasterCard comes only as credit card as far as I know. So the only option to get the money out of PayPal is to get a Visa card from one of the banks and link it to your PayPal account. The money withdrawn from PayPal (minus 2 EUR fee, of course) gets to the account in three days. It can be withdrawn from the bank and the process is finished. One funny thing though: on the monthly statement from Visa all purchases have a positive number (and are subtracted from the account total), and the PayPal transaction has a negative number (because it is added to the account total).

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Feb

Google stops supporting IE6

In a mail to all Google Apps users (that are the users who use Google’s infrastructure and services like Google Docs on their own domain) today Google announced that with March 1st 2010 they will stop to support Internet Explorer 6 by Microsoft. They will however srill support IE7 and up as well as other modern browsers.

This change will start in March but will continue gradually throuh the year, when more and more services won’t support the old IE6.

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Feb

Samsung Galaxy i7500 battery issue – solved!

Recently I wrote about the problems with my Samsung Galaxy i7500 and the problems with Ram2 service center. Over the New Year holidays I’ve had time so I decided to finally find out what seems to be the problem on my brand new Android phone and why the battery drians out so quickly. By reading a lot of forums with posts of users with similar problems I downloaded and instaleld the application Spare Parts. It’s a useful tool with lots of features, one of them beeing battery info (Run Spare Parts, go to Battery History, select Other usage and Since last unplugged, select Running). The software shows the total time without sleeping after disconnected from the charger. This was crucial information in debugging what was happening.

I decided to measure battery use and sleeping with different scenarios when locking the phone:

I left the browser open or closed
I locked the phone while on middle home screen or left home screen
I locked the phone while folder on left home screen was opened
I turned wi-fi on and off

I always left the phone running like that for an hour and then compared the total sleeping time. If the phone was sleeping, I knew there was no problem. If the phone was not sleeping, something has caused the problem.

In the meantime I also read a lot of forums and found out about another measurable option: whether the phone was in the pouch that came with the phone or out. I measured this as well and the results were surprising! I found out that when in the pouch the phone doesn’t sleep and when it’s outside (for example, on the table), it sleeps just perfectly. This seemed very uncomfortable – the pouch was designed and shipped by samsung, how is this possible? But even if it was uncomfortable, it was reassuring. I saw a bright light at the end of the tunnel – maybe the phone isn’t broken, maybe the battery isn’t bad, maybe I will be able to use the phone like I should in the first place.

I digged more into the forums and have found out, that when in pouch, one of the keys gets pressed (shutter release for the camera). The phone has a weird habbit of checking for pressed keys even when sleeping (the unlock button for unlocking it, the volume button for changing volume). This of, course, when a key is pressed (all the time), makes the phone check the key all the time. Hence no sleep mode!

I’m glad that I found that out. Now I leave my pouch at home every morning and have stopped using it completely. Now my phone works for almost 4 days without charging. Wow, compared to less than a day before, this is a major breakthrough!

I see no reason why the software would not disable key checking for the camera key when the screen is off. I see no functionality in it, so maybe it should be excluded from checking in a new version of phone firmware.

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Jan

My dual monitor desktop

Today I bought a new (old) 17″ LCD monitor and decided that I too will have a dual display on my desktop. At first I wanted to buy another graphic card, but I figured out that my on-board GeForce Nvidia 7050 PV works like two independent graphic cards and has two outputs, one VGA and one DVI. So all I needed was a DVI cable for my new (old) monitor and some free space on my desk.

I plugged in the monitor and tried to play with the settings. I knew that I wanted one monitor as it was (landscape) and the new one in horizontal position (also called pivot or rotated). At first this didn’t work – the graphic card driver insisted that the desktop should be twice as wide and both monitors would display the same desktop, just split between the both screens. All other options were useless – clone, which displays the same desktop on both screens or single view which made turn one screen off. I also tried rotating one desktop, but all I could do was rotate both or none, which was useless for me.

I decided to see if someone had the same problems and read a half of hour of forums. I even installed some software (Ultramon and Pivot Pro), but I didn’t believe they could solve the problem – they both work on top of Windows, so the graphic card should tell Windows there’s two screens and not just one. I was right, they didn’t help at all.

On one of the forums I read about the problem and a ‘miraculous’ solution: there was a problem and some time later it was gone, but the user didn’t know what solved it. I thought of the most typical of the solutions: restart my machine! After restart, the Nvidia driver offered a new option, Dualview (independent monitors). I selected it, rotated the desktop (only one) and it works like a charm now.

I can proudly tell you that I am officially in the dual monitor club now Above all, the free space on my desk was the hardest thing to get.