MSN/Yahoo Messenger behind corporate firewall

If you company's strategy for blocking the MSN and Yahoo messengers' traffic is to redirect DNS queries to the local network/host (i.e. pinging messenger.hotmail.com goes to 127.0.0.1) all you need to do to get around this is add entries with real IPs to your /etc/hosts file. The same applies if you are on windows, I believe this file is called lmhosts and it's under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

207.46.104.20 messenger.hotmail.com
207.46.110.18 gateway.messenger.hotmail.com
66.163.181.175 scs.msg.yahoo.com
209.191.110.214 filetransfer.msg.yahoo.com

How to become root on N800/N810

1. install gainroot


2. open X Terminal and type:

   sudo gainroot

3. as root now type:

   echo sudo gainroot > /usr/bin/r

4. and then:

   chmod a+x /usr/bin/r

5. exit the root by typing

   exit

To gain root from this point on just type 'r' in the xterm.

Blackberry sync with Google calendar

One thing I was missing on my BB, synchronization with Google Calendar. Now it’s here, and it’s awesome. It works in parallel with any existing BES synchronization. In other words events entered in Lotus Notes (in my case) synchronize with BB and then synchronize with Google. Likewise, events in Google go back to BB and then to Notes. Calendar nirvana!

Run remote Windows applications from Linux with rdesktop

This little trick allows me to run remote Windows applications from Linux in their own window. For example line beloow will run MS Office in it's own window bypassing Windows login screen.

rdesktop -A -u -d -p -s "c:\srdp\shell.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\MSOFFICE.EXE"

For this to work Windows Terminal Server needs to be set up to accept parametrized passwords. Also make sure you have correct path to shell.exe.

Enabling sound recording on Dell Latitude D620 under Ubuntu

Dell Latitude D620 comes with Sigmatel 9200 audio which uses Intel's HDA driver. Sound playing works out of the box but recording using the built-in microphone doesn't.

Enabling microphone is easy. I just edited /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and added model=ref option for the driver:

echo "options snd-hda-intel model=ref" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

I then restarted alsa /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart and tested the recording using Gnome's Sound Recorder application.

After this I tested Skype beta 2 (version 2.0.0.27) and it worked flawlessly.