Archive for the ‘Gadgets’ Category

My Love/Hate Relationship With Verizon

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

I’ve been a Verizon customer for years. Their network coverage is superior to all others, but…

I have one rant about them…

I recently bought a Blackberry and am paying them for voice and data service. This Blackberry has an internal GPS that *should* be accessible to any application that I install on my device. I recently installed Google Maps and the location service is less than accurate because it’s only using cell tower triangulation to approximate a location. Apparently, Verizon disables the internal GPS on almost all Blackberry devices on their network!

What gives them the right to disable functionality on a device that I own, just because I pay them for voice and data service??

What’s interesting is that Verizon just happens to offer a service called VZW Navigator that will use the internal GPS for location services… and they want me to pay $9.99 a month to use a GPS that I already own!!!

That’s total bullcrap!! You know it, I know it and I’m sure that Verizon knows it too!

I love Verizon’s voice and data service, but I think that the FTC needs to step in and take care of this!

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Making the Gigaware 25-297 webcam work with Ubuntu 7.10

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

This webcam is sold under many names – mine is a Gigaware. This is what lsusb shows:

ID 093a:2468 Pixart Imaging, Inc. Easy Snap Snake Eye WebCam

Ubuntu 7.10 includes the gspca driver which is supposed to handle this webcam, but doesn’t. A minor change needs to be made to the driver source to make it work.

First, open up a terminal.

Next, unplug your webcam and make sure the gspca module is not loaded with this command:
sudo rmmod gspca

Now download the gspca source code and the tools to build it with these commands:
sudo apt-get install gspca-source
sudo apt-get install build-essential

This will place the source code into the /usr/src directory.

Next, we go to that directory and expand the source with these commands:
cd /usr/src
sudo tar xvjf gspca-source.tar

Now we will download a patch and apply it to the source:
cd modules/gspca/Pixart
sudo wget http://www.vanbrunt.com/pac207.patch
sudo patch -p0 < pac207.patch

Finally, we will build and install the modified driver:
cd ..
sudo ./gspca_build

And that, my friend, should do the trick! I recommend trying it with Camorama:
sudo apt-get install camorama

Enjoy!!

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