Don’t want to make Apple richer by 99 USD?

You already own the latest 4X smart TV, an Xbox 360, a PlayStation, an impressive AV receiver with an equally impressive set of speakers and one or more iOS devices. Now the audiophile in you has a desire to play the music collection on your iOS device wirelessly to your 5.1 or a 7.2 AV receiver and enjoy it thru the carefully placed speakers all around your living room.

The only solution which seems to give you the result requires a minimum investment of 99 USD. You would need to get an Apple TV, unless of course you can convince yourself to replace your existing AV receiver with a new one which has built in Airplay support, like the Denon AVR-1912 or Pioneer VSX-1021-K, both of which would set you back by at least a 500 USD.

If you did convince yourself, I would doubt if you were successful in convincing your wife. If you weren’t and you still looking at alternatives read on...

Bluetooth Devices

You could get yourself a Bluetooth device like the Belkin F8Z492TTP Bluetooth Music Receiver or the Logitech Wireless Speaker Adapter for Bluetooth Audio Devices. These devices can be connected to the Audio Input of your AV receiver.  Once you have successfully paired your iPhone with one of these Bluetooth devices, the device would be listed as an airplay device on the music application of your iPhone/iPad. This would let you stream the music from your Apple device over Bluetooth to the AV receiver and enjoy the music thru the speakers connected to the receiver. These Bluetooth devices are available on amazon for less than 40 USD. However as you are aware the distance between the two paired Bluetooth devices has to be less than 20 feet for reliable playback.

iOS Application

If you are still feeling tightfisted and don’t want to spend even 40 dollars, you could still get the functionality by spending just 1.99 USD, only if you happen to already own a DLNA device or even an Xbox. FullBlast available on the App store is the poor man’s airplay alternative. It is as of now the only application which lets you control music playback directly when streaming to an Xbox or PS3. Except for a small delay in response when streaming to an Xbox the application works pretty well. The steps to configure the app and get it working are available on the Apple website.

Apple TV

Well you might be wondering why the Apple TV costs 99 USD when a 1.99 USD application can stream music over the wireless. The Apple TV does much more than just let you stream music over your wireless network. It can play music, movies, videos and photos from your apple device to your TV. It can also play movies and TV shows from Netflix and Hulu Plus, browse videos from YouTube and Vimeo and much more (not available in certain countries). It can mirror your iPad screen on your TV as well.

Did I just give you enough reasons to convince yourself to dig into your pocket and pull out a 100 dollar bill for the Apple TV?  

 

Feel Lucky, Wonderful, Trendy, Playful, Stellar, Hungry etc. with Google.

Google has replaced the decade old “I am feeling lucky” button on the Google home page with a button which changes text when you hover over it to “I am feeling wonderful”, “I am feeling hungry” etc. Each of these adjectives gives you a different search result.

The very familiar “I am feeling lucky” button since its introduction would skip the search result and redirect your browser to the first page on the search result. This feature was made redundant after Google learnt to peep into your mind and predict what you were thinking with the Google instant feature couple of years ago. Google instant would start displaying results as soon as you have entered the first letter and would keep updating as you keep typing the rest of your query.

If you keen on trying this new feature, you will have to go to the google.com website as this feature is not available on to the regional Google pages like google.ae or google.co.in etc. To force your browser to stick to the google.com page and not redirect you to the regional page type in http://www.google.com/ncr in the address bar. Now if you hover the mouse over the “I am feeling lucky” button it would change to one of the new variants of this button. Each of the new adjectives delivers a different result which in most cases is using a different Google application or project.

I am feeling hungry button would display you a list of restaurants close to your location. If you have used http://www/google.com/ncr the results would not be accurate as you have asked Google to ignore your location and use the .com website.

I am feeling trendy button would show you the hot searches on Google relevant to your location.

I am feeling artistic takes you, to the Google Art Project. The page doesn’t like the fact that you are using IE and suggests you use Google Chrome.

I am feeling wonderful takes, you to the World Wonders Project.

I am feeling Puzzled takes, one to the Google a day website.

And so on… If you are feeling adventurous fire up your browser and try this new Google feature.

BlackBerry smartphone displays Error message “507” when upgrading BlackBerry Device Software to Version 7.1.x.

I got hold of Version 7.1 for Blackberry 9900 after few hours of effort on Google. Tempted to upgrade to the latest OS,  I decided to take the risk of bricking my device.
I will list down the steps I followed to upgrade my device.

·         Ran the executable (85_9900_7.1_b1333_*.exe) on my Windows 7 laptop. It installed the software and the update.

·         Connected my device to the Desktop manager and tried upgrading the device, but the desktop manager couldn’t find any upgrade for my device. This I assume was because the update was not for my carrier.

·         I deleted the “Vendor.xml” file in  “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\AppLoader” and then ran the Loader.exe file. It came up with the OS 7.1 upgrade options. Couple of clicks and the device upgrade started.

·         While on the “Load JVM and System State” phase it seemed to take quite a while. It finally threw an error of not being able to communicate with my device. When I checked the device it had and error message 507 displayed on it and suggested that I visit www.blackberry.com/507. The page doesn’t exist on the RIM website when I checked.

·         There were few posts which suggested that I would have to reload my OS to the last version I had using KB03621

·         Another KB on the RIM site seemed to have an explanation for this error. It seemed that the Power Management options on the Laptop turn off the USB Port when it senses no activity on the Port. The post further suggested that one disables the power management and reload the OS using the App loader. Details available on KB11320.

·         Call me lucky, I just plugged out the USB cable from my laptop and plugged it back in. It made that pleasant “dong” sound announcing that it has found a device on the USB port. Then I clicked on retry on the App loader and the upgrade continued like a charm. The device is running 7.1.0.402 (133) after the upgrade.

·         I think it would not be necessary to reload the OS as the App Loader picks up the installation from that state.

·         It took another 15 minutes for the upgrade process to complete and another 5 minutes for the device to restore the backup it had taken before the upgrade. Then it proceeded to do the device activation on my BES and popped the “Activation Complete” message.

The device certainly seems to be faster with the new OS. The new features which come with this release include:-

Blackberry Tags using NFC.  You can invite a contact to BBM using Blackberry Tags. The devices have to be aligned back to back for the devices to communicate using NFC. Blackberry Tags can also be used to share contacts, media and files thru a simple touch between the devices.

There is a new “Battery Saving Mode” available which will reduce power usage when the battery power drops below the specified threshold.

There is a new Media Server option also available. Other uPNP devices connected to the same Wi-Fi network can stream media content from the blackberry device. DLNA devices are currently not supported.

I couldn’t find the Hotspot feature on my device. It might not have been included in the build I have.

Wi-Fi Calls can be made using the carrier’s Wi-Fi calling service (UMA-lite or GAN-lite), if available. My carrier doesn’t provide this service and hence couldn’t try it.

To sum up the 7.1.xx release is not a major release and the features added are not very impressive. Look forward to some remarkable features in the next release.

Win2008 R2 SP1: The Remote Desktop Services service terminated unexpectedly. Error 7031.

Win2008 R2 SP1: The Remote Desktop Services service terminated unexpectedly. Error 7031.

After I joined a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 machine to the domain and rebooted, the remote desktop services would connect, display the applying group policy setting and then terminate the session.  It would throw an error when you try to connect again as if the remote desktop services were not enabled.

I logged into the server using iLO and noticed that the Remote Desktop Services was in a stopped state. Check the system log and found the error 7031 with a description “The Remote Desktop Services service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 2 time(s).  The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.”

Started the service and tried logging in again and issue repeated. However I was able to log in as a local administrator after the service was started. It was only crashing when the login was attempted using a domain account.

Spent some time troubleshooting and finally hit on KB 2667402 which explained the reason for this behavior to be a security update which places a wrong version of the Rdpcorekmts.dll file. The explanation is as below.

"After you install security update 2667402 on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, and then you install Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, the binary version of Rdpcorekmts.dll is 6.1.7600.16952 and not 6.1.7601.17767. In this scenario, you may be unable to create a remote desktop session to control the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer. "

Uninstalled the KB 2667402 and rebooted and the ghost vanished and it let me connect on remote desktop. Was tempted to reinstall the KB and see the result, but didn’t. As per the article reinstalling the KB should resolve the issue.