NoobTech Blog

I love the physical home button on my iPhone, it comes in handy during those times on the go when I can’t be fiddling around, it just has to work.

But the rest of the time I am using my phone, I want to save the wear and tear on the phone by avoiding use of the physical home button.  I discovered that iOS has an Accessibility feature that lets me do just that.

To enable it, turn on AssistiveTouch from the Accessibility menu in Settings –> General –> Accessibility.  Scroll down to Physical & Motor section and enable the AssistiveTouch feature.

After you have it enabled it, you will have a transparent “dot” on the screen that you can move around.  You can see the “dot” in the screen shot below located in the top right hand corner.

The dot can be moved around and it will automatically snap to 8 different locations on the screen shown by the red arrows.  (You would want to move it if it was in the way of something you want to press)

Touching the “Dot” will bring up 3 new buttons. Gestures, Device, Favorites and Home.  Touching Home will do the exact same thing as your hardware Home button.

There are some other interesting features you can play with from here but I mainly use the Home button and don’t have any need for anything else.

If you want to explore around, there are a few more useful actions under the Device menu:

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

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I have a lot of VMWare machines lurking in my storage.  For whatever reason that made sense at the time, I created them with disks that were split into multiple files.  I didn’t know this until recently, you can actually consolidate all of them into a single file without breaking the VM.  I want to do this anyway, since I have heard somewhere that it can improve performance especially on non SSD mechanical drives.

In command prompt, navigate to where you have VMWare installed.  For me it was

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation

In that folder you can use the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe program to perform this operation

vmware-vdiskmanager -r MyVirtualMachineDisk.vmdk -t 0 SingleDiskFile.vmdk

Replace MyVirtualMachineDisk.vmdk with the full path and file name of the first file of your split VMware disk set.

The “-t 0” means to turn it into a “single growable virtual disk“.  If you would rather pre-allocate all the storage for the disk, use “-t 2” instead, which means “preallocated virtual disk.”

You can view more command line options by running the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe with no parameters.

After the operation is complete, you will want to delete the original VMware disk set.  Then rename the output SingleDiskFile.vmdk file to whatever the original name was for the first file of your original VMware disk set.  Also make sure it is moved to the same folder where the original files were before so that the VMWare machine can find it again when it is started back up.

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

VMWare consolidate, disk, management, virtual, vmdk, VMWare

My friend found this iPhone 4 on the street, it appears as if a car ran over it.  The screen is totally crushed with bits missing from it.  The the thing that amazes me is that it still works.  The bottom half of the touch screen though was badly damaged so that part was not touch sensitive anymore.  …Read more…

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

Videos cell phone, Video

Every time I want to print something I always have some problem.

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Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

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Reading people’s tweets about this subject, I felt the need to clarify the situation around Usage Based Billing (UBB). There are people on the sidelines, who are saying things like “what’s so bad about UBB”. The same people also argue that companies such as Bell and Rogers have invested large amounts of dollars therefore they need to recoup their costs by implementing UBB. They appear to fear that if we don’t pay up our networks will get “clogged up” and will therefore end up with slow internet service.  This is simply propaganda in my opinion.

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Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

Internet CRTC, internet, ISP, politics, UBB

I find this Mercurial workflow made by SecretGeek very convenient.

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

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I use a VMWare virtual machine for development.  Lately though, I have been having issues with my disk thrashing uncontrollably, slowing everything to a crawl.   This especially seemed to happen right after suspending my VM.  The disk thrashing seemed to go on for a good 10 minutes before it came back to normal.  This made my host machine completely unusable during this time. …Read more…

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

VMWare, Windows Tweaks, VMWare

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

Videos Video

I’ve got a tonne of apps that are installed in my iPhone.  But there are a few that I use regularly, and deserve special attention.  I have downloaded all of these apps from the un-official Cydia store, where you can find a lot of free, and payed apps that will only work on JailBroken iPhones.  For those who don’t know, out of the box, your iPhone is restricted by Apple so that your apps cannot do things like run in the back ground.

On with the list.

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Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

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Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

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