IT Legends - Tech in Connecticut

I’ve used a few mobile phone platforms over the years. My first was a hearty Motorola StarTac - remember those things? haha. Most recently I’ve used an HTC phone made for Verizon - the XV6800 with Windows Mobile 6. I was pretty excited, let myself buy into the hype. My Treo 650 (which for the most part I was enjoying) was broken with a shattered screen so I went out and bought the HTC. (more…)

So I bought this phone, I kinda like it. I decided what the hey, maybe I’ll check out using it as a USB modem. So far, not bad. Its got the nice wireless EVDO broadband and the modem link works pretty well. I can’t receive calls when I’m linked up, but I can deal with that. I’m using it now to post here. There seems to be an issue with using SSL VPN (via my Astaro Security Gateway), but maybe I have to use a different type of VPN to get that to work with this connection. It does connect, but (more…)

OK, so I thought all of my Wireless Hell days were over with the installation of my Intel Wireless Adapter. Then I decided to see what it would be like to use my Verizon HTC XV6800 as a USB modem for my laptop. I give VZW a call, they offer to let me use the feature for free for a month, charging at $15 per month after that. How generous of them :) So I download the latest drivers for the phone to work as a modem, download the latest VZAccess Manager software and was able to follow the instructions on their website just fine for my model phone. Everything appeared to be working properly. I even got a display from the VZAccess Manager screen that showed me how strong of a signal I could get from the phone. I was pretty happy… then I clicked Connect.

Yeah, and Connect and connect and connect again. ARR! I kept getting errors that the computer could not establish a connection. So yesterday while I had some downtime at my Red Cross Golf Fundraiser (more…)

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GParted did the job! I was able to resize my partition. At first I was a bit nervous booting into GParted (I used the automatic boot, worked fine) because I saw a lot of command-line text as it was booting. And then I saw a Linux bash prompt. I cringed, thinking “Oy, I’m going to have to learn some esoteric command line stuff in order to resize this partition…” and just a couple seconds after that I saw a GUI interface come up. Hmm, quite nice. I clicked on my drive, found my partition and was able to actually just use the mouse to resize my partition with a click on the edge of the partition and then dragged it larger. Very nice! I was able to use some finer controls below the graphic interface with some numbers in it (representing the size of the partition) to leave myself 8 GB of space at the end of the drive (that’s 8192 MB). I decided I would put the virtual memory here in a 4GB virtual memory file, leaving 4 GB of space left on that partition as well. Following the prompts on the screen I was able to do what I needed to resize the partition! I was very happy as I’ve been searching for a free partition manager for years. I’m glad the folks at Clonezilla led me to GParted. (more…)

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Well, my nifty 120 GB drive arrived! I was very happy with it. Now, how to get my operating system from the old 30GB onto the new 160GB? Clonezilla! I tried the Clonezilla Live CD, and this did a good job of a device-to-device partition transfer. It’s not quite as polished of an imaging product (but its free!) as something like, say, Acronis or Ghost, but if you know just a little Linux then you can get your way through it. The one thing I didn’t like was that Clonezilla did not auto-resize the destination partition. So I have my new 120 GB drive running in my system with a nice, small 30 GB partition and 90GB of unpartitioned space! Now I have to decide if I’m going to partition that space into a new volume or try to resize the partition. (more…)