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Showing posts from August, 2012

Android Apps for your Road Trip Adventure

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I've been a big fan of Android's app's for many years. Lots of great free applications out there that help you do whatever - better. Couple that app environment with a smartphone, car mount, data plan, and you can have an amazing array of information to make you car trip more fun and less stressful. Here's my setup for family road trips: My Road Trip Hardware: I currently own an Motorola Droid Razr Maxx ( http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/DROID-MAXX/better-battery/96406,en_US,pd.html ) and use their windshield mount ( http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/Vehicle-Navigation-Dock-for-DROID-RAZR-MAXX/100141,en_US,pd.html ) with one slight modification. The current windshield mount stalk is a bit too short, so I use the old stalk from my original Droid ( http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-89396N-Window-Mount-Droid/dp/B002WC7RKU ). The extended length makes it possible to use the camera and easily keep the suction cup mount out of the pictures. The new Droid Maxx has fa

Upgrade buggy Kubuntu 12.04 Nvdia driver 295.40 to use KDE Desktop Effects

When I upgraded the machine from 11.10 Kubuntu 64-bit to 12.04, my machine essentially became unusable until I turned desktop effects off (ALT-SHIFT-F12). The story was well documented on the internet ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4ODQ - Good story on the failings of the 295.40 Nvidia driver that shipped with 12.04 LTS Kubuntu ). I suffered along not wanting to custom a version of Kubuntu expecting Canonical to relatively quickly update the version in the repositories - after all this is an LTS version. After 3 months of running my video on Kubuntu 12.04 by running desktop effects under the compositing type "xrender" for my Quadro NVS 210S/GeForce 6150LE graphics card instead of "OpenGL", I was fed up. Running under xrender was just as good as turning them off. I wasn't up to downgrading my drivers to the previous version or suffering through the continued development on the Nouveau drivers.  I even contemplated getting a new vid