Happy Christmas Eve!

Thanks to all who have helped with previous ones, which I posted on:

• March, 2005: Sat 05 Mar 2005, Sun 27 Mar 2005


• April, 2005: Sat 16 Apr 2005, Sat 29 Apr 2005


• May, 2005: Sun 15 May 2005, Sat 28 May 2005


• June, 2005: Sat 11 Jun 2005, Sat 25 Jun 2005


• July, 2005: Sat 09 Jul 2005


• August, 2005: Sat 13 Aug 2005, Sat 20 Aug 2005


• September, 2005: Sat 03 Sep 2005, Sat 17 Sep 2005


• October, 2005: Mon 03 Oct 2005, Sat 15 Oct 2005, Sat 29 Oct 2005


• November, 2005: Sat 12 Nov 2005, Sat 26 Nov 2005


• December, 2005: Sat 10 Dec 2005

Special thanks to taiji_jian for his suggestion and to tvn for his comment.

Here's my fortnightly update:

• 1. K-State Online: worst interface ever or just really horrendously bad? I gave up and will use K-State Online next semester. Look for lots of forthcoming rants. ;-) Also, I will still have my TikiWiki and the KDD Plone-based CMS. I'm sure they will run circles around KSOL.


• 2. Installing Gentoo and Ubuntu, Take 2: I'm going to redo Telperion this week using the Breezy Badger release of Ubuntu Linux instead of Hoary Hedgehog.


• 3. IP tunneling redux: I'm still not ready to try Monowall, but I'll see about NetBSD's IPNAT rules. This week, I will have more time for researching it.

Now for the new questions:

Locked out of Orkut

I have not been using my Orkut account, but I tried to log in about 7-8 months ago (and got back in then). About 3-4 months ago, I tried to get back in, and I think my password had stopped working. I've tried

Now, I just tried, and if I type a password I know is wrong, the main login screen says "Username and password do not match". If I type the one I remember, it lets me through to a second screen that requires me to link my Google account to my Orkut account. However, it won't take my Orkut password.

I clicked "I forgot my password" and put in the e-mail address I use in Orkut (hsuwh[AT]hotmail.com), but it just went back to the login screen without even confirming that it sent me anything. I've put google.com in my safe list, and nothing has come through in 3-4 days.

Any idea what this is about?


Carousel is a lie, there is no Renewal: iPAQ batteries

My iPAQ H3635 battery has developed a memory something fierce. It can still hold a charge of about an hour or two, but that's way down from the nearly 8 hours it could go without a charge in 2001. Even in 2002 I was able to play MP3s for something like 6 hours with a phono-to-car-stereo adapter. By 2003 and 2004 it had dropped to about 5 hours. Now it only lasts for one hour with my SanDisk 802.11b CompactFlash card. I suspect that part of it is the high power consumption of the antenna, because it still goes for about 2 hours without the card.

Is there any way that I can manually recondition it, though, or am I stuck sending it in for a factory replacement battery that will probably cost more than the iPAQ is now worth?


I see your true colors, shining though: Erasing the background of an icon

How does one erase the background of a PNG, GIF, or JPG icon? Specifically, I want to erase the white parts of this:



so that it's transparent to the background. Can someone point me to instructions and/or a tutorial?


--
Banazir