SheepTech » Tips & Tutorial

iPhone TV Out: Fix “This Accessory Is Not Supported by iPhone”

Vincent — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:51:48 +0000

Bought a cheap tv-out composite AV cable for your iPhone off eBay, but learnt that it’s unsupported later? Well, all is not lost. Like most prudent consumers, I refused to purchase an Apple-branded composite AV cable that will set me back RM139 ($45). Instead, I tried my luck with an aftermarket tv-out cable on eBay, costing just RM25 ($8), which is the cheapest in my region. The seller advised me that the cable would only work on older iDevices like the original iPhone and iPhone 3G.

I figured that the iPhone 3GS is really not all that different from the 3G, so I placed my order anyway.

Fast-forward a week after ordering (snailmail international delivery), the cable finally arrived. You guessed it, it didn’t work. Every time I plug the cable into my iPhone’s connector dock, the phone shows the following message: “This accessory is not supported by iPhone.”

I tried playing some videos anyway after dismissing the message, and it turns out that the audio would play on my television just fine, but the video won’t show up.

What gives? It turns out that this isn’t a hardware limitation. It’s an Apple-imposed limitation that render any tv-out cables that are not blessed by Cupertino useless. The aim is to make you buy their expensive cables that have special authentication chips on them — but you really don’t have to, provided your iPhone is jailbroken.

If your situation is similar to the one I described above, follow the following steps, and chances are your cheap cable will work like a charm:

Open Cydia on your iPhone
Search for “Resupported 4″ (works on iOS 4 and 5), install it
Search for “TVOut2 Mirror TVOut” and install it
Reboot your iPhone

That’s about it. It worked perfectly in my case, but your mileage may vary. Do note that “Resupported” will only work for 10 days before you have to pay for it. But considering the amount of money you could save by NOT buying Apple’s expensive cable, the $3.99 the developer asked for is reasonable.

Share Internet Connection on Windows 7 Without Software

Vincent — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:22:48 +0000

With freewares like Connectify and Virtual Router, sharing internet connection from Windows 7 via Wi-Fi is just a few clicks away. That is, provided they’re working fine. Somehow after some time, both of the mentioned freewares decided to stop working on my Windows 7.

These are the common error messages: Connectify service down, Virtual router could not be started, and Can not manage Virtual Router. The service is not running.

If you too couldn’t get Connectify or Virtual Router to work, try the following steps to share internet connection on Windows 7 via Wi-Fi without any software. We will be setting up an ad hoc network and bridging it with the internet connection source.

Set up an ad hoc connection:

Go to Network and Sharing Center
Select Set up a new connection or network
Select Set up a wireless ad hoc (computer-to-computer) network
Enter a network name, select Open or WEP for security type (some devices couldn’t join WPA protected networks) and enter your desired security key.
Join the ad hoc network using the device you wanted to share your internet connection with

Bridging Internet Connection to Ad Hoc network

Back to Network and Sharing Center
Select Change adapter settings on the left
Right-click on the Wi-Fi adapter > Properties. On the Sharing tab, uncheck the two checkboxes
Right-click on Local Area Connection adapter (the source of internet connection) > Properties. On the Sharing tab, uncheck the two checkboxes
Now select both the Wi-Fi and LAN adapters (Ctrl + click on both the icons)
Once both of them are highlighted, right-click > Bridge connections

Any device that is connected to the ad hoc network should now be able to leech the internet connection off your Windows 7 PC. It works great on mine, tethering the 3G connection from my iPhone to my Windows 7 laptop, then sharing the connection via Wi-Fi with a Nokia E7.

Thanks to Dumbuser on superuser.com.

Recovering Mistakenly Closed Window in Chrome

Vincent — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 03:48:45 +0000

Chrome doesn’t behave the same way as other browsers (like Firefox) in many sense. For instance, the tabs will continue shrinking infinitely as you open more tabs on a single window, to the extend that will render them unusable.

Another dissimilarity is that, you will not be warned when closing multiple tabs. We all know how it feels when we mistakenly closed a window full of tabs containing our research information. Getting frustrated of our own carelessness while blaming Google for stripping the warning in the browser.

Amit of Digital Inspiration wrote about bringing back the warning to Chrome using the Chrome Toolbox extension.

Chrome Toolbox is a Chrome extension released by Google itself, returning many features users are used too switching over from other browsers, including the “Confirm before closing multiple tabs” option.

Why would Google left out the option, then include it back with an extension?

The developers believe that the browser should not get into your way when you are trying to get things done. It makes sense because the chances of a user intentionally closing a window with multiple tabs are higher comparing to those who did it inadvertently.

Instead of interrupting you every time you close a window, you are given the option to re-open all the tabs of your recently closed window (whether intentionally or not) in the New Tab Page.

How to recover closed window with multiple tabs in Chrome

Shouldn’t have made my own video, Google’s is way better: Baaam.

1. Close a window with multiple tabs opened.

2. Open a new tab in an existing window (open a new window if you’ve closed all the windows)

3. Under the Recently Closed section (at the bottom), click on “X Tabs” to re-open all the tabs in your last closed window.

Unless you’re a very clumsy person in nature, you probably won’t need a warning when closing multiple tabs. It’s a whole new story if you’re using a 56k dial-up that recovering multiple tabs at the same instance will take forever.

Chrome Tabs Shrink Too Small? Try These Extensions.

Vincent — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:39:41 +0000

In Chrome, it’s not possible to set a minimum width for tabs and create a scrollable tab strip whenever your screen can’t fit all of them. Instead, the tabs will shrink smaller and smaller as you open more tabs, to a point where you can no longer see both the page title and favicon, like the screenshot below.

At this point, the tabs are basically unusable. The beauty of today’s modern browsers is that nothing is fixed. You can extend or modify the way your browser works using extensions, add-on or plugins, whatever they call it.

The following is a list of Chrome extensions that will partly solve the highlighted problem by listing opened tabs in a readable manner.

Tree Style Tabs

When your tabs becomes too small, just click on the extension icon and you will see all your opened tabs across all windows in a vertical list.

The extension will list all your opened tabs in tree style. Links opened from the page on tab A will be listed as a child tab, creating a neat structure, especially helpful when you’re researching on multiple topics.

You can close tabs from the list itself, but there is no way to rearrange them.

[Tree Style Tabs →]

Tab Switch Plus

Unlike its fancy name, there is no bell and whistle in this extension. Click on the extension icon to view the vertical list of opened tabs of a particular window (Tree Style Tabs list opened tabs across all windows).

From there, you can either switch to another tab or close tabs that you no longer needs. No other features beyond that.

[Tab Switch Plus →]

VerticalTabs

Similar to Tab Switch Plus, but with two extra feature—rearrange tabs and filter tabs.

[VerticalTabs →]

Tab Glutton

Number of opened tabs across all windows will be displayed on the green pig icon. Clicking on it will list all tabs opened, which you can easily switch to. You can also filter or close tabs within the list, but rearranging is not supported.

[Tab Glutton →]

Tabs Plus

Instead of displaying opened tabs in a vertical list, they’re displayed as thumbnails. It’s more feature-rich, with the ability to filter, group tabs (arranging them side by side), bookmark all tabs, move them to a new window etc.

Like Tab Glutton, it will also display the number of tabs you have opened on the extension icon. Beware though as there are quite a number of reviews complaining about its massive memory usage.

[Tabs Plus →]

Tab Menu

Tab Menu works just like VerticalTabs. You can filter, close or rearrange tabs with it.

[Tab Menu →]

Visual Tabs

Instead of displaying opened tabs in a vertical list like most other extensions, Visual Tabs display them in cover-flow style. Not very practical if you ask me, but if you place eye candy above usability, this might be for you.

[Visual Tabs →]

Tab Split

If you don’t like the idea of using an extension to navigate your tabs, your only option left is to use a new window for the extra tabs. You can either do it manually by drag and drop or use Tab Split.

This extension helps you to split tabs when you decide that the existing window cannot accommodate more tabs.

Say you have 10 tabs opened, you can split the tabs into two windows by clicking on the 5th tab and then the extension button. Tab 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 will now be moved to a new window, leaving the original window with only 4 tabs.

[Tab Split →]

How crowded is your tab bar when you’re at work? Are you using any of these extension to when the number of tabs go out of hand?

Setting Global Hotkey on iTunes

Vincent — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:32:35 +0000

Before I got my iPhone, foobar2000 was my primary music player. Which feature do I miss most after making the switch to iTunes? Not the lightweight-ness, not the components (add-ons), but the ability to control the player using hotkeys no matter what you are doing on your PC.

Say I want to watch a YouTube video. I would have to summon the iTunes window just to pause the song, then switch back to my web browser to play the video. If I were using foobar2000, I would just need to hit the hotkey to pause the song while I’m still on my web browser, making things faster and less tedious.

You can however compensate the missing feature by using one of these third party utility.

HKTunes

You can do nothing extra with this small utility other than assigning global hotkeys for iTunes. The user interface is definitely not the best, but considering this is a one time job, it doesn’t really matter much.

Instead of typing your desired hotkey, you were to select it from a list of keys.

I’m using HKTunes on my PC, for I wouldn’t want to install other heavier alternatives just to add such simple functionality. It uses just slightly under 4MB of memory.

You have to keep HKTunes opened the whole time you want your hotkeys to work. Pressing your hotkeys will do nothing if the program is closed.

[HKTunes]

iTunes Global Hotkeys Plugin (ighp)

Unlike HKTunes, there is no need to start another program just for the hotkeys to work. ighp is an iTunes plugin, meaning it’ll be part of iTunes and will work outright whenever iTunes is on.

Download the files, place them in iTunes plugin folder (C:\Program Files\iTunes\Plug-ins), launch iTunes, press Ctrl+Shift+P, configure the keys and off you go.

I would have use ighp if it works. Too bad, iTunes will not launch with the plugin installed on my PC. Your milestone might vary though, I’d suggest giving this a try before concluding.

[ighp]

iTunesControl

You can do much more with iTunesControl than just assigning the usual playback global hotkeys—like searching songs from playlist (another feature I miss from foobar2000), song name display and sleep timer.

iTunesControl is still actively supported and developed. In fact, the latest version was released less than a month ago, so you won’t have to worry that it will stop working when you update to a newer version of iTunes.

[iTunesControl]

iTuner

iTuner is another utility that adds several extra functionality to improve your iTunes experience. You can view all its features here, which of course includes global hotkey customization.

[iTuner]

How-To: Set Desktop Wallpaper on Chrome

Vincent — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 09:51:47 +0000

Unlike other browsers, the option to save an image as desktop background is missing from Chrome’s right-click context menu. There are two ways to overcome this:

1. Install “Set image as wallpaper” Chrome extension

This Chrome extension returns the “Set image as wallpaper” option to your right-click context menu. In the settings, you can decide whether you want a preview to be displayed whenever you set a wallpaper.

If you’re opt for no preview, you can select the default position (stretch, center, tile, fill, fit) of your wallpaper, so that the next time you set a wallpaper, it will come into effect automatically without any prompt.

With a preview however, you can see for yourself how the wallpaper would look like before selecting the position.

Install “Set image as wallpaper” extension for Chrome (Windows only)

2. Setting wallpaper manually without extension

If you are not changing your desktop wallpaper frequent enough to justify yet another new extension installation, you can choose do it in a less convenient way.

Right-click on the image you want to set as your wallpaper
Select “Save image as…” and save the image
Locate the image you’ve just saved
Right-click, select “Set as desktop background“

Not very elegant, but still get the job done. It obviously would be painfully tedious if you are setting many different wallpapers to see how they look like before deciding in this way.

Just use another browser for wallpaper browsing

The above two methods don’t sound like a plan to you? Just use another browser whenever you are looking for wallpapers. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox has the option by default to save an image as wallpaper in the right-click context menu.

IE9 Beta is looking quite good comparing to any of its older versions, you might want to give it a try.

Spammer Exploiting Facebook Outgoing Link Redirection

Vincent — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:35:28 +0000

How do you identify spam links received on instant messengers? One of the easiest way is to identify the domain. If your friend is sharing random links with unknown domain, the fancy ones especially, you should be very wary (pun).

Some phishing sites might also use domain similar to popular social networking sites, faceb0ok.com for example. So does that mean if the domain is exactly the same as popular sites like facebook.com or youtube.com, you are safe?

If you ask that a day or two before, I would say yes. But not after I received the following spam link on Windows Live Messenger:

Facebook.com, that should be safe. But wait a second, examine the URL more carefully before you let your guards off. The spammer is exploiting Facebook’s outgoing link redirection to gain user’s trust.

What happens when you visit the link? You’ll be greeted by Facebook’s “Please be careful” message, which probably no one reads or care.

Seeing Facebook’s logo and ignoring the little words Facebook put up to warn users, the victim would have a false sense of security and proceed with the charming blue “Continue” button.

You will then be redirected to just any URL that follows behind http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=. (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=www.sheeptech.com for SheepTech)

The rest were history.

Do notify your friends and family, especially the not so tech-savvy ones, to beware of this new tactic.

How-To: Backup Photos from Flickr to PC

Vincent — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:32 +0000

(Windows Only) The cloud is probably the best place to store your data. You can gain access to them easily on just any device with an internet connection even if your primary computer is stolen or damaged. But should you rely 100% on the cloud for your important files?

Probably not. The cloud is only reliable to a point where the company decides to sunset it. The fact that Flickr is owned by Yahoo! doesn’t help. They would probably not sunset one of their most valuable asset, but no one can say for sure.

You can never go wrong keeping a copy of all your Flickr photos offline, especially with the generous storage PCs come with these days.

Downloadr

We will be using Downloadr for this purpose. It’s a Windows-only photo downloader, completely free, and capable of downloading both public and private photos (after you have authorize it to do so).

Download Downloadr

How to backup

1. The first step is to authenticate Downloadr on your Flickr account. That would give permission to Downloadr to backup your private photos.

To do so, go to Extras > Authenticate.

2. Your browser will now fetch the Flickr account link page. There will be two “Next” button. Click the right one.

3. Go to Extras > Settings, check the “Try to get all photos” box.

4. Enter your Flickr username (your display username, not the one on your URL) and click “Search“. Doing this will fetch all photos from your Flickr account. If it doesn’t, click on the “Search more” button.

If you only wish to backup part of your Flickr photos, you can filter the result by date range, tags, fulltext, place, only Creative Commons or only Geotagged.

5. Once all your photos are fetched, hit Ctrl-A to select them all. All your photos will be highlighted after you have done so.

6. Click on the “Download selected” button.

There is no way to pause and resume your photo download. Keep your PC and connection on until the download is complete to avoid any interruption.

Otherwise you would have to manually repeat the steps above up to step 4, then manually select the remaining photos that are yet to be downloaded.

Send How-To Videos to Computer-Illiterate Parents

Vincent — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:15:07 +0000

Being a tech-savvy bunch, one could only imagine how much tech support the folks working in Google have to play whenever their loved ones run into the slightest issue with their computer. They feel the pain, and created Teach Parents Tech to relieve you from the same pain.

They have made some 50 how-to videos, ranging from basics like copy and paste, changing time on PC, to something more advanced like starting a blog, video chatting, and making calls from a computer.

Before you get started, you need to get two things done:

Make sure your parents already have an email address and know how to use it
Make sure they already know how to play an embedded YouTube video

Once done, you can head over to Teach Parents Tech, select some how-to videos that you think your parents would benefit from (and you indirectly), complete the email template and send it to their way.

This is how your email might look like, depending on your settings:

And beware, you parents might reply with

Thanks for sending me such an insulting tech support care package
I can officially describe myself as a tech ninja.

The Google folks should really make a video on “Any key”.

How-To: Downgrade from Windows Live Messenger 2011

Vincent — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:32:31 +0000

Windows Live Messenger 2011 might spot a cleaner interface and better Facebook integration, but to many users, these doesn’t justify the inability to change display name and other missing features like handwriting.

Read on if you are one of those Windows Live Messenger 2011 haters and wish to downgrade to an older version.

Uninstall Windows Live Messenger 2011
This part is vital. The installation of an older version of WLM later might be unsuccessful if WLM 2011 is not cleanly uninstalled.

Standard uninstalling procedure:

Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall a program
Select and uninstall Windows Live Essentials 2011

You are required to uninstall everything that comes under Windows Live Essential 2011, not just WLM 2011.

Install Older Version of Windows Live Messenger
Now that you have successfully uninstall Windows Live Messenger 2011, let’s source for the installation files of the older versions.

Download Windows Live Messenger 2009 installer from any of these sites:

If you are looking for anything older than WLM 2009, go to FileHippo and select your preferred version on the right sidebar.

If you face error messages like “Your computer has a newer version of Windows Live Messenger than the one you are trying to install“, try uninstalling WLM 2011 using Revo Uninstaller, ZapMessenger, or WLMuninstaller for a cleaner uninstall. No guarantees though as I have not tried any of them.

If all else fails
If nothing works after following the above instructions, you still have one last option—to use a portable version of Windows Live Messenger. It works exactly the same as the normal WLM would, except you don’t have to install it, thus eliminating installation problems.

Download portable Windows Live Messenger from this site (versions available ranges from 6.2 to WLM 2009), or directly download version 2009 from Rapidshare
Place the .exe file in a folder of its own (portable WLM will create a new folder at the same location the .exe is located to store app data)
Launch the .exe file, and voila, you will now see the old familiar Windows Live Messenger 2009

This will almost certainly work. Since it requires no installation, you can even place the .exe on a USB flash drive and use WLM on computers that doesn’t allow installations.