Netflow Developments » laptop

Static discharge through earbuds into laptop = No sound

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:48:41 +0000

Well this was a fun little problem that happened to me today.. Wearing track pants on shag carpenting means a lot of static apparently and at one point I felt a sudden jolt of electricity in my ear and then my sound card died.. Everything else was working fine, my system was playing sound according to the level meters but nothing was coming out of the earbuds or my speakers when I unplugged them.

Of course my first thoughts were that this was a linux issue as sound cards and linux don’t play so nice to say the least so I rebooted into windows and lo and behold the problem persisted. I could see the volume levels going u pand down with the music I played but the laptop was dead silent.

It took me a while of working ins ilence and just assuming that my sound card was fried to think about unplugging the whole machine, taking out the battery and then turning it back on again.. After doing so I’m happy to report that I have sound again and the laptop is back up to being it’s spiffy self! Huzzah!

How to turn off / Disable your touchpad while typing in linux

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:24:03 +0000

So after having the edge of my hand touch my touchpad and mess up an email for the upteenth time today I went around and did some research to see if there was a quick shortcut key or something I could press to turn the bloody thing off and then on again when I was done typing. Well let me tell you I found something so much better! There’s a command in shell that will automatically disable the touchpad if you’ve been typing for a set amount of time and then turn it back on automatically when you’re done.. Genius! Genius I say!! But what is this command you ask? How do you enable it to save yourself endless frustration? Well I’m glad you asked because I was just about to explain it:

The program is syndaemon and it can be enabled in shell by typing: syndaemon -i 3 -d

Where

-i parameter defines number of seconds to wait after keyboard is used – ( 3 seconds suites me. )
-d parameter is used for running syndaemon in background mode ( as a daemon ).

If above command throws some error then you are using other than 9.04 release. To get it working type in terminal,

wget http://people.ubuntuwire.com/~fujitsu/syndaemon
chmod +x syndaemon
sudo mv syndaemon /usr/bin/
syndaemon -i 3 -d

Again type the syndaemon command in terminal, it shouldn`t give any error messages.

Above command has to be executed each time machine is rebooted. To execute above command automatically we can create a tiny bash script and add it to startup items.

1. Create a new file somewhere ( My BSD habits puts files like this in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ but that’s just me ) and copy paste following into it.

#!/bin/bash
syndaemon -i 2.5 -d

2. To add above script to startup items, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applicaitons > Add. In new pop-up box name it something meaningful and type in the path and command.. After that click “Add”.

There you go, done like dinner Enjoy not having the hell of your cursor selecting 2 paragraphs of text and typing over it before you know what’s going on!

Cool Rolltop Laptop Concept

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:16:09 +0000

Found a concept design for tomorrow’s laptop today and thought it was cool enough to share. What I like about this is that it doens’t just look cool and look pretty in a futuristic way but it incorporates common sense technology that not only makes sense but will be feasible very very shortly if not already. The design was created by Orkin Design, a german design firm. Either way very cool

Orkin Design has unveiled the rolltop concept with the support of Schlagheck-Design and the device comes with a flexible display which can be rolled and carried wherever you want.

Thanks to its OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen, it can be used a laptop while it weighs as much as mini notebook. It comes with a 13 inch screen while being used a laptop and when being used as a monitor, you could get a cool 17 inches screen. Power supply, multi media integrated pen and even a holding belt are integrated in the ROLL TOP and it certainly is an all-in-one gadget.

Click here to view the embedded video.