The objective of this test was to see if we could use the same keyboard – in this case a Motorola bluetooth keyboard – with either our iPad2 or our Playbook.

It took some mucking about, but we now have the Motorola bluetooth keyboard working with both. Not at the same time, but that could be a challenge for another day. ( We have a Motorola Xoom tablet going through some other testing at the moment, and assumed for better or worse that would be a slam dunk. We’ll see about that later.)

So why try to use a Motorola keyboard intended for the Xoom for two competing tablets? Because I liked the feel of the keyboard.

Blackberry is talking – yawn – about a bluetooth keyboard this summer. It’s mid August, gents. That’s 8,000 emails and Facebook posts ago. Hello?

Tried the Apple industrial aluminum chicklet keyboard. So clean. So pure. So…alien. Better than using bloody stumps to hunt and peck on the onscreen keyboard, mind you, but only just.

(If the lack of tactile feedback isn’t bad enough…what monster programmed autocorrect? But that’s off topic. For now.)

The keyboard and the tablet need to find and then connect to each other. It’s called ‘pairing’ and the most likely part of the process to cause headaches.

First, a disclaimer: This worked for me. I don’t know if it will work for you, but if you decide to follow these instructions, the responsibility for whatever ever happens is all on you.

OK. So step one?

Turn everything off. Power down the tablet. Take one of the batteries out of the back of the keyboard. Shut down and/or remove any other Bluetooth devices in the immediate vicinity.

And now we’re going to divide the class into two streams: iPad2s first and then Playbooks.

iPad2:

Fire up your iPad. Go to settings. You’ll find Bluetooth under General settings. Make sure it’s turned ON. Click on ‘Bluetooth’ and you’ll be taken to the Bluetooth ‘page’ where you’ll see a list of available Bluetooth devices.

Now put the battery back into the keyboard and turn it on, too.

You should see the Motorola Keyboard appear on the list of devices. If it doesn’t automatically connect, click on it.

You should be good to go. That simple. Really.

Playbook:

This is going to be a little weirder and requires you to put the keyboard into what Motorola calls ‘PC mode’.

Fire up your Playbook. Go to settings. Select Bluetooth. You’ll be taken to the Bluetooth page with a drop-down list of discoverable devices. Click on ‘Discoverable’ – which means that other Bluetooth devices can find and connect to your Playbook.

Now click on the Add New Device button. You can either choose to search for the keyboard or have it find you. Doesn’t really matter. Pick one.

Put the battery back in the keyboard and close the cover.

This is the odd bit: You need to hold – I don’t mean touch but HOLD – three keys down: V – A – R

Keep HOLDING while you press the keyboard’s power button.

The little green LED on the top right of the keyboard  should flash a few times – keep HOLDING – and then, finally, your keyboard should automagically appear on the list of devices.

Now you can relax your fingers.

Xoom? Why not. It’s right here in front of me.

Since I was switching from PC mode (the only way to connect to the Playbook that I could find and which calls for the V – A – R three-finger salute), the keyboard wouldn’t play nicely until the power was cut off. (The ‘power’ button the keyboard only seems to power it ON, not OFF.)

So there you have it: one keyboard, three tablets.

Hope that helps.

Oh, and by the way, we’ve coined this pairing of a keyboard with a tablet as ‘a Lego Laptop’ because we thought all this mobile technology stuff was supposed to give us fewer bits and pieces to carry around, not more.

-g

Fanboy Disclaimer: We are technologically agnostic. Hell, we even gripe about companies or products we’ve invested in. Dumb? Maybe.  But if we think it sucks, we think it sucks. It may not suck for you. It may save your life. Good for you. But it still may suck for us even knowing it saved your life. That’s called ‘having an opinion’.  We’ll probably praise a product, service or company you totally hate. In fact, we sometimes praise a product or service from a company that we totally hate. But if it’s good, it’s good.  If we tell you about stuff we get for free, we’ll tell you. We used to ask – and get all kinds of goodies – but mainly buy retail these days and that gives us the same ugly beauty experience y’all are having. Just the way we like it.

I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox for a long time now, since the days when its version number started with zero & it was still called “Phoenix”. In that time, I have been fairly conservative about installing extensions, but there are still a small handful that I can’t do without; this is a list of my top 6 favourite extensions for Firefox.

Number 6 – FlashBlock / AdBlockPlus

FlashBlock and AdBlockPlus are really two separate extensions, but I’ve lumped them together because they’re both help make the web significantly less-irritating. As the name suggests, FlashBlock blocks Flash content from loading automatically – instead, you see a play button in its place. You can then start the Flash movie by clicking on the play button, or you can whitelist that site file so that Flash content loads automatically next time.

On slower internet connections, running FlashBlock can make webpages load much faster – especially pages that contain Flash-based ads. And on faster internet connections, it’s FlashBlock handy if you want to block advertisements audio and/or videos ads, since those typically use Flash. Until about six months ago, I didn’t bother running any other ad-blocking extensions, because FlashBlock already took care of the truly obnoxious ads.

Which brings us to AdBlock Plus (or ABP), which is easily one of the most popular Firefox extensions. If you really dislike advertisement on the web, ABP can block the vast majority – including ads from the large advertising networks like Google AdSense & the ads displayed by common self-hosted banner applications. Personally, I try to avoid blocking ads unless they’re genuinely obnoxious or distracting, and FlashBlock already takes care of most of those. I finally broke down when video sites started going really overboard with the pre-roll & post-roll video ads, and even started running ads in the middle of videos – for me, final straw was getting a pre-roll ad on Blip.tv that couldn’t even be paused or muted.

AdBlockPlus doesn’t block most in-video ads by default (except on youTube), but it can with about 3 minutes of effort to add the “EasyList” subscription. That’s one of the best features of AdBlock Plus: anyone can create & publish a blocklist that other ABP users can subscribe to. When new ads (or types of ads) are discovered and added to a list that you subscribe to, your copy of AdBlockPlus updates itself and the new ads are blocked automatically – similar in principle to definition updates for anti-virus software.

Recently I ran into some some problems with an HTTPS (SSL) website hosted on a Linux server running CPanel. In a nutshell, HTTPS worked fine initially – but it would stop working every morning when CPanel’s Apache restart/cleanup cron jobs ran.

As a result, I needed a way to automate the process of checking whether a specific HTTPS URL was reachable, and restarting Apache if not. There are numerous scripts online that do almost what I needed, but the majority use the “ping” command and therefore only check if the server itself is up (telling you nothing about the availability of specific URLs or services on that server).

Read more for the details – and the script.

(more…)

If you work in IT, you’ll probably find this scenario very familiar: you have a task to complete, but you’re not sure how long it will take – and you have other things to do in the meantime, but you still want immediate notification when the background task finishes.

My old solution was to simply keep a cheap cooking timer next to my computer, until I realized that the same thing can be accomplished using software that’s already included with Windows. Read on for the details.
(more…)

When it comes to cell/smartphones and business users, the most important innovation of the past decade has unquestionably been push-EMail. Love or hate the BlackBerry, it has – combined with push-EMail – become an indispensable tool for many.

Unfortunately, a variety of technical and economic factors make push-EMail much less attractive for small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers, etc. Both Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry server software – the main “traditional” options for push-EMail – either require you to run your own server, or to purchase the service through your mobile carrier. Most mobile carriers treat push-EMail as a premium service, and charge significantly higher for the service than they do for generic data transfer – and here in Canada, our data transfer rates are sky-high to begin with.

Enter EMail-to-SMS gateways.

(more…)

Question: The Windows Start menu has a “Run” option – what can it be used for?

Answer: More often than not, the “run” option in Windows’ Start Menu is used simply to launch the command prompt (by clicking “Run,” typing “cmd” and pressing Enter). There are many other useful actions that you can perform from the “Run” command, a few are included below. (more…)

Question: How can I make Outlook Express sort incoming Email for me?

Answer: Outlook Express has the ability to automatically sort Email for you based on “Message Rules.”

To create a new rule in Outlook Express, first click on the “Tools” menu, then “Message Rules,” and then the word “Mail” – now click the “New” button to create a new rule. The “New Mail Rule” window is split up into three parts – in the top part, you can choose what part of the message Outlook should search for (E.g., From address), and in the second pane you can choose the action(s) that Outlook will take when it finds messages that meet the criteria. In the bottom pane, you can choose the specific criteria to search for.

There are many different combinations of Messages Rules that you can setup and they can be used to automate repetitive tasks for you.

Question: How can i use multiple instant messenger accounts at the same time?

Answer: There are several different, incompatible instant messaging networks available on the Internet – MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and others. People with friends on more than one service often resort to running multiple chat programs at once. Fortunately, there is a program called GAIM which allows you to connect to multiple chat networks at once.

First, download GAIM from http://gaim.sourceforge.net/win32/ and install it. When you start GAIM, it will bring you to the login screen – click on the “Accounts” button to get started. In the Accounts window click on the “Add” button to create an account, fill in your details (chat system, username, password, etc), and click “Save” when you’re done. From the Accounts window, you can add more accounts or control whether existing accounts are signed on by clicking the checkbox to the right of each account.

Question: How can I store FTP connection information in Windows Explorer?

Answer: If you use Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer as an FTP client, then you can use the My Network Places folder in Windows to store FTP connection profiles.

To add a new profile, click on the “Start” button and then click on “My Network Places.” Now click “Add a Network Place” on the left side and click “Next” in the window that appears. Click on the words “Choose another location” and then click “Next”. In the next screen, type in the address of the FTP server, E.g. “ftp://ftp.server.com”, and click on the “Next”. Un-check the box next to the words “Log on anonymously” and then type in your user ame. In the next screen, give this connection a descriptive name (E.g., “my ftp site”).

Click the “Finish” button and now you can connect to the site right from My Network Places.

Question: Is there a way to save the programs and files I have open when I turn my computer off?

Answer: In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft provides a feature called “Hibernate.” Hibernating your computer is similar to shutting it down, except that Windows saves a record of all the files and programs you had open before it shuts down. When you start your computer back up after hibernating, the files and programs you had open will also be restored. And as an added bonus, starting up after hibernating is faster than a normal startup.

To hibernate your computer, click on your “Start” button and then click “Shut Down.” In the “Shut Down” window, click the drop down list and click “Hibernate” (instead of “Shut down” or “Restart”), then click the “Ok” button. Windows will now save your computer’s current state and shut down when it’s finished.