1. Install ES File Explorer (free) from the Android Market.
2. Install RockPlayer Lite (free) from the Android Market.
3. Open ES File Explorer and change view to LAN, then hit ‘New’ then ‘Server’ (from menu).
4. Enter your server/NAS IP address, then a forward slash, then your share name, and any credentials if necessary.
5. Hit OK, now you should be able to browse all the files on your Samba share with ease.

Now, when you tap on a movie file (avi/mpg/wmv etc.), you will get a prompt to choose which video player to use. Select RockPlayer Lite, and your movie will start playing within a few seconds. I’ve tested this for a variety of movie file types and sizes and RockPlayer Lite works really well, including skipping forwards and backwards through movies. For HD movies, expect to wait a little longer for the movie to buffer before it begins to play (e.g. > 10 seconds), once it gets going it seems pretty stable (no buffering). I’ve also tested this approach on an Android smartphone (LG P500 Optimus One, as well as the Samsung Galaxy S, both running Android 2.2) and it works just the same on the phone as the tablet). Awesome! And of course, you can also use this approach to play music and view photos from your server anywhere in range of your wifi signal

Can iPad do that!? :p

1. Open Meridian
2. Press Menu, then Preferences
3. Go to Music and check the Headset Buttons option.

Now TuneLink will trigger Meridian to play automatically.

1. Create a new app pool or change the default app pool to target .NET 4 (see IIS->Application Pools).
2. Run this from the command line:
   %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

MSDN has more info on aspnet_regiis command line options here.
Just putting this on my blog so I can remember this magic command line.

Go get it here.

Also can be used if you are just bored on a Friday afternoon.

Download it here.

1. Create a new class which extends from the ‘View’ abstract base class. E.g.
   public class MyCustomControl extends View
2. Provide constructor overloads for ALL of the following prototypes, where initView() is a method in which you perform initialization of things such as Paint objects:

   public MyCustomControl(Context context)
   	{
   		super(context);
   		initView();
   	}
   
   	public MyCustomControl(Context context, AttributeSet attrs)
   	{
   		super(context, attrs);
   		initView();
   	}
   
   	public MyCustomControl(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle)
   	{
   		super(context, attrs, defStyle);
   		initView();
   	}
   

3. Override onMeasure() in order to scale your control to the parent drawing area, such as shown in this good example.
4. Do your canvas drawing operations in onDraw on the supplied Canvas object.
5. Instantiate your custom view in a layout xml file (e.g. main.xml), for example:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
       android:orientation="vertical"
       android:layout_width="fill_parent"
       android:layout_height="fill_parent"
       >
   	<com.android.samples.MyCustomControl
   		android:id="@+id/myCustomControl"
       	android:layout_width="fill_parent"
       	android:layout_height="fill_parent"
       />
   </LinearLayout>

I found that if I didn’t add the 2nd and 3rd constructors, I got an exception when calling setContentView(R.layout.main) from onCreate() of the main Activity. You can instead construct an instance of the view manually in onCreate() of the main Activity, and then call setContentView(yourCustomViewInstance) if you don’t want to use XML layout.

However, provided your partition (in this case Z:) has no label, you can do this:

echo Y | format Z: /FS:NTFS /X /Q
An inferior alternative to this is to use a VBScript that uses SendKeys like this:

set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
wshShell.run "c:\windows\system32\format.com Z: /FS:NTFS /V:QuickWipeDrive /X /Q"
wscript.sleep 1000
wshshell.sendkeys "QuickWipeDrive" & "{ENTER}"
wscript.sleep 1000
wshshell.sendkeys "Y" & "{ENTER}"
wscript.sleep 5000

The downside of this script is that it will only work when the computer is not locked since SendKeys requires a console session that is logged in an active.

I’ve written a small utility that may help with issue (it works for me, but I’ve only tested on my own bluetooth headphones – Sony DR-BT50). It works in conjunction with another utility I recently posted (that allows a program to set the default audio device), and provides control over connecting / disconnecting the available bluetooth services for all your paired bluetooth devices in Windows. It also provides a shortcut specifically for bluetooth audio devices which automates the process of getting a frustratingly silent pair of headphones / speaker to spring into life with a single click.

Download the utility here. I hope it works for you!

The end result is that, no thanks to Microsoft, we finally have a way to do this, and I’ve created a console application in case others would like to control this as well:

Usage: SetDefaultAudioDevice.exe [deviceID] [role]
Where:
[deviceID] is a GUID including braces
[role] is either ‘console’, ‘multimedia’ or ‘communications’.

Example: SetDefaultAudioDevice {24dfc80a-680f-4748-8627-c340cb14f187} multimedia

Your audio device IDs can be found in the registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MMDevices\Audio\Render.

Feel free to download this utility here, source code is in my SVN repo.

Thank-you to EreTIk and Jonny Best and everyone else on the above forum post!

To move data between SD cards in your Android phone, just copy it to a computer (with the phone plugged in – via enabling USB mass storage mode from the phone), power down the phone, insert new SD card, boot up, and copy data from computer back to new SD card in the phone. Easy.

Detailed version:

My Android (LG Optimus One) came with a 2Gb micro SD card, which did the job for about 6 months. Now I use my phone for listening to music in the car and elsewhere, and the apps I installed started to consume space as well, so I needed upgrade the SD card to something bigger. The biggest the most phones support right now is 32Gb, so I bought a Lexar 32 Gb micro SD card (class 10) for $AU100 (retail). I was a little concerned about the exact procedure to move the data from the 2Gb to the 32Gb card, but it turns out it was really simple (assuming you have not partitioned your SD card):

1. Connect phone to PC via USB (with old SD card install still inserted), and copy everything off the SD card into a folder on your HDD. I got a few errors trying to copy some ThinkFree Office files, probably due to the path length being too long, so I just skipped those files (they didn’t look too important anyway).

2. Power off phone, insert new SD card, boot up phone.

3. Connect phone to PC via USB, copy everything from the folder in step 1 to phone’s SD card, and disconnect USB.

That’s it.