The Digital Jedi's Words

Is the iPhone 4 the king of modern smartphones? Probably not, Motorola is coming with a solution that would place it in direct competition with HTC EVO 4G, iPhone 4 with the looks iPhone users have been falling for.

Here is a video demonstrating how fast Motorola Droid X is:

I know it’s been a while since I have posted something but today I felt the need to post a finding.  As the iPhone 4 ships I can’t help but wonder why all the hype?  Most Android devices do the same plus more.  With Android now having Flash 10.1 and this player, you have all the tools needed to view 99% of web content unlike Apple iPhone 4.  One of Android’s major shortcomings is its lack of compatibility with many audio and video filetypes. Fortunately, double twist stepped in to fix the audio problem, but what about video playback? That’s where RockPlayerBase comes in!

Compatible with a plethora of video formats, including MKV, AVI and DivX, RockPlayerBase combines great compatibility with a simple interface. Controls are overlaid on the screen, so you can still see the video track whilst using the controls.

When testing on the Motorola DROID, I found playback quality to be predominantly good. I tested a DVD rip encoded in AVI which played back without any problems, although audio

output was sometimes a little pitchy and inconsistent.

I also tested a 720p MKV file, albeit with less successful results. Whether it’s a hardware or software issue is debatable, but video

playback wasn’t even remotely smooth, and I was lucky if I got even a second of audio playback before having it cut off too.

FeelAndroid tested the player with various formats, and found some interesting results… continue reading…

Here is a proper Step by Step tutorial for anyone wanting to install this on their Droid, and hopefully this will help answer most peoples questions. I had done this to my DROID and love it even more now than I did yesterday.

SholesMod Updater will backup all of your existing data, but if you would rather be safe than sorry do a backup of your stuff before continuing.

If you have WiFi, go ahead and enable it now as it will make the download process go by much faster.

Here we go:

1. Go to Android Marketplace
2. Search for SholesMod Updater, donate your $5 and download the app (or download from Sholes)
3. Open SholesMod Updater
4. “Your phone is not rooted”. Select Root my Phone (update.zip will download to your SD card)
5. When you get the “Reboot into recovery mode message”, press the home button and power off the phone
5. Reboot into recovery mode by holding the X key on the keyboard while powering on.
6. When the MOTO logo changes to recovery (white triangle with yellow exclamation point and phone picture ) press and hold the volume up button and then press the camera button
7. Once in the menu select Apply sdcard:update.zip with D-pad and select with center button
8. Once it’s done applying update.zip select reboot with D-pad and select with center button

Congratulations! Your Droid is now rooted, but we’re not done just yet. If all went well, you should see a new icon in your app drawer called Superuser Permissions.
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Many people ask me why there is no built-in Administrator account available in Windows Vista and 7 like previous Windows versions? Why can’t we use the default Administrator account? The answer is “Yes! The default Administrator account is created in Vista and 7 but its disabled by default for security purposes.”

You might want to enable it for troubleshooting or to get rid of the annoying UAC prompts while tweaking your system. So here I’ll describe a few methods to enable / activate the hidden Administrator account in Windows Vista and 7:

1st Method:

1. Right-click on My Computer icon on Desktop and select “Manage“, it’ll open “Computer Management” window. ( You can also open it by giving “compmgmt.msc” command in RUN dialog box or Startmenu Search box).

2. Goto “Local Users and Groups -> Users“. In right-side pane double-click on “Administrator” account. It’ll open its Properties. Deselect “Account is disabled” option and Apply it.

2nd Method:

1. Type “secpol.msc” in RUN dialog box or Startmenu search box, it’ll open “Local Security Policy” window.

2. Goto “Local Policies -> Security Options“.

3. Double-click on first option “Accounts: Administrator account status” and select “Enabled” and apply it.

3rd Method:

1. Click on “Start button -> All Programs -> Accessories“. Right-click on “Command Prompt” and select “Run As Administrator“. If you are prompted to enter password, enter the password and continue. You can also open Command Prompt in Administrator mode by typing “cmd” in Startmenu Search box and press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter“.

2. Now provide following command:

net user administrator /active:yes

3. Thats it. The Administrator account will be enabled. If you want to disable it again, simply replace “yes” with “no” in above command.

NOTE: Never activate the hidden Administrator account until required. Its better to use other general accounts for better security. Also the Administrator account has no password, so if you enable it then don’t forget to set a strong password for it.

With all the hype surrounding what Apple is doing with the new A4 CPU, no one has heard of a company called Nvidia which produces excellent chips.  Anyone heard of the snapdragon processor which is in the Nexus One, well they are the ones behind the architecture, which in my opinion is pretty damn sweet.

Tegra 2 is official and put simply, it looks awesome. NVIDIA estimates that it is four times faster than the original Tegra chip while staying in the same power and thermal envelope. And looking at the diagram, we can understand why: the chip combines 8 processors: two Arm Cortex A9, one ARM 7, an image processor, an HD video decode processor, an HD video encode processor, and audio processor and a graphics processor (GPU), phew! Thanks to all this power, NVIDIA says that it succeeds in playing local 1080p video and stream HD video (flash) where competitors like Qualcomm and Intel fail. And it does it while using less power. NVIDIA’s battery life estimate is 140+hrs for music playback, 12hrs for 1080p video playback and 6 hours of continuous HD web streaming. According to these numbers, Tegra 2 consumes about 7x less than Snapdragon. The chips will come in different packages to address markets like smartphones, multimedia players, automotive entertainment, but also smartbooks. Developer boards are already available.

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Here is a video that I found interesting to the point I had to share with my readers about wireless encryption.  I myself have used this program to hack wireless networks in the past.  My tool of choice was Back|Track 3 at the time.  But now they have a new version out called obviously Back|Track 4. Here is a step by step video on how to crack WEP passwords with Back|Track 4.

BackTrack has also updated to run from a USB Flash Drive since I last used it, but the process appears to have remained basically the same. The interesting thing about BackTrack is how easy it is to crack a WEP-encrypted network, which serves as a very good reminder to use WPA or WPA2 encryption to significantly boost your home network security.

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for most of us to store our important business and personal files in digital format, whether these items are documents, music files, photographs, or any other type of media. However, just like that shoe box of old photos can be damaged from being stored in a leaky basement or that printed copy of a 50-page term paper can be ruined by a spilled cup of coffee, it only takes one careless mistake or an accidental hard drive failure to destroy these precious digital files. That’s why it’s extremely important to make sure that you back up your files on a regular basis.

To this end, there are a number of backup and restore utilities available for the Windows operating system. Each of these applications has a wide variety of user options and features. The one that I’m going to focus on in this review is Easeus Todo Backup, a free backup and restore utility developed by the same company as Easeus Partition Manager. We’ll take a closer look at Todo, concentrating particularly on its range of features and ease of use.

EASEUS Todo Backup Highlight Features:

* Backup entire system partition including the system state and all files to an image   file.
* Backup whole disk including the operating system and all data to an image file.
* Restore backup up image within minutes.
* Create a bootable disk function based on Linux to restore the system partition.
* Create a WinPE based Bootable CD which can support Windows 7 and Hardware Raid, etc.
* Restore system partition from Bootable CD/DVD.
* Clone disk to another one with fast file-by-file clone method.
* Mount the backup image file as a virtual physical partition to explore or copy files in it.
* Unmount the virtual partition.
* Check backup image file to make sure the system state, disk or partition can be restored successfully.

The EASEUS Todo Backup is able to run on Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server.

Easeus TODO Backup supports major Windows systems, like Windows 2000 Professional/XP/Vista/7 and Windows Server 2000/2003/2008.

So, EASEUS Todo Backup no doubt is a good data backup software that helps novices one (even without having IT knowledge) to backup their entire system and important data.

I’m here today to start a new idea I have been pondering for a long time, even though I review tech I also love going to the movies, hence the name ThE DiGiTaL JeDi.  So My first review will be of the movie Edge of Darkness.  It’s been 8 years since Mel Gibson last graced the big screen, and yet, somehow it doesn’t feel like he’s been away all that long. Maybe it’s because in the meantime he’s managed to direct two impressive and uncompromising films, and he also found the time to get arrested for drunk driving. Still, a lot of people have been talking about Edge of Darkness like it’s some big comeback, and they weren’t sure whether he had it in him anymore. Well, Mel definitely delivers, although the rest of the movie around him is not necessarily perfect.

The marketing left a lot of people thinking that this was going to be a Taken clone, but that’s not quite true. Based on a BBC mini-series from the mid-’80s, Edge of Darkness is also a political thriller, and not simply a straight up action revenge flick. Despite this potential misdirection, you may still find it to be surprisingly satisfying… assuming you don’t mind a bit of government conspiracy with your blood-soaked vengeance.

Thomas Craven is a Boston police detective who lives alone. When his 24-year-old daughter comes to visit for the weekend, she falls strangely ill, but avoids telling him exactly what the problem is. As they head out the front door to take her to the hospital, she is suddenly shot dead by a mysterious stranger right in front of his eyes. Craven convinces the police department to let him investigate, and in doing so, he finds out that she was in the midst of uncovering some high level corruption involving nuclear weapons at her workplace. Now he must track down the truth to finish what she started, and ensure that her death does not go in vain.

Edge of Darkness is directed by Martin Campbell, the same guy who did the original BBC mini-series, but who is also best known for doing the James Bond

films Goldeneye and Casino Royale. Believe it or not, it does feel like a Bond movie in some ways, particularly with its world-threatening intrigue and evil corporation factor. Unfortunately, it also suffers from the same problem that most Bond movies do: you don’t really understand what’s going on half of the time. In the end, the most important details are laid bare, but the complicated path of clues leading Craven through his investigation do feel a bit nonsensical and overwhelming at times.

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I was all into the hype yesterday for the Steve Jobs Keynote. But after the about 60 minutes into the keynote it was just a regular presentation. Let me explain the iphone software is good on a phone but this device needs to be , no have more. The Apple iPad is a cool device don’t get me wrong but it gets pwned by a netbook which has a full blown operating system. The big problem I had was in trying to understand what the iPad was for: the answer, it seems, is everything. NOT!!!
It attempts to do almost everything that your laptop can, while also offering almost everything your smartphone can do as well. Surfing the web is a breeze, while it plays video smoothly and handles a variety of games pretty well. You can use any of the existing iPhone applications straight away, though it is disappointing when you realise that they become blocky and almost childlike when expanded to fill the larger screen.
Switched into ebook mode, the way the iPad emulates the printed page feels fairly natural, if not entirely on a par with rival ebook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle. The backlit screen doesn’t come anywhere near the clarity of electronic ink, which means it’s going to prove a lot harder on the eyes of bookworms(it’s great for reading in bed, one Apple flunky told me, keen to stress the positive side). But what it loses here, it makes up for with the addition of colour and even video.

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With more and more netbooks hitting the shelves at the local computer stores it surprised me to find that there are very few dead-simple guides to creating a bootable USB thumb/pen/flash drive for a Windows 7 installation.  I cobbled together the following from VistaPCGuy and another source I don’t remember right now.

This will walk through the steps to create a bootable USB flash drive for the purpose of installing a Windows 7 OS.  These instructions assume that you have a computer with Windows 7 installed on it.

Required:

• USB Flash Drive (4GB+)
• Microsoft OS Disk (Windows 7)
• A computer running  Windows 7

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