Tuesday, June 12, 2012

What are QR codes?

What are QR codes?  "Quick Response codes" are those little boxes full of black & white squares that you see all over printed advertising and product labels these days.  By scanning a QR code with your camera phone, you will be taken directly to a web site that presumably tells you more about the product.  With the proliferation of smart phones these days, QR codes do a much better job than do printed URL's of bringing people to your web page because they're so much simpler to use.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Upgrading Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 and 12.04

I run Linux on most of my computers at home.  I try to keep a few different distributions going at once, and currently have Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS in operation.  My main desktop box runs Ubuntu, and I try to stay on top of the latest releases.  Other work has pushed upgrades to the back burner lately, so I recently found myself running a year-old version.  I finally sat down this week and updated version 11.04 to 11.10 and then immediately to 12.04.  Not everything went smoothly, but I think we're all good now.  Let me explain...

Friday, June 1, 2012

Updating Transform (M920) to Transform Ultra (M930)

When we upgraded my son's Android smartphone, he wanted to copy all his info from the old phone to the new one.  This included not only the apps, but all of their associated data.  While copying things like contacts, pictures, and even apps is trivial, copying the app data is not.  I managed to get it done, though.  Here's how.