Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

Gallery Updated, Windows 8 Backgrounds Added

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

Just a quick and friendly note to all our users: we’ve been working on the NeoSmart Technologies image gallery and have pushed out a number of updates that should make it both easier on the eyes and easier to navigate.

Some of the changes include nicer icons for all the albums (verses a mosaic of contents), links to full-size images on our extensive collection of tech-related wallpapers, fixing of overall alignment, and a few other cosmetic issues. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or feedback, please do share because we’re (as always) all ears.

For lovers of beautiful backgrounds, we have two “new” collections to share: the official Windows 8 wallpapers to date, and the OS X Lion wallpapers bundle. We’ll be updating the Windows 8 backgrounds with each released build, so check back often! Some samples after the jump.

Continue reading →

EasyBCD 2.1 and Some Big Changes

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
22

EasyBCD LogoFor all our loving users, readers, and members out there, EasyBCD 2.1 has just been released and is ready for consumption. Freshly baked, tenderly prepared, and lovingly made, it brings the usual host of new features and updates that a new version of EasyBCD usually brings.

Use our Windows recovery disks to:
✓ Fix all boot errors
✓ Resolve startup BSODs
✓ Restore registry and settings
✓ Clean up virus infections
Easy Recovery Essentials is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows XP and Windows Server editions are also supported.
Download Easy Recovery Essentials

But this build of EasyBCD is a little special — we focused a lot more on improving the user experience over adding new features. We’ve fine-tuned every line of text, every button, every icon. We’ve hidden all we can hide, automated all we can automate, but never at the cost of advanced options; instead, everything is just that much smarter and more intelligent, cutting out the extra steps that left room for confusion. Simply put, EasyBCD 2.1 is all about smoothing out the edges of what has become the world’s most popular bootloader utility.

With EasyBCD 2.1 also comes some exciting changes from the developmental side of things. As you all may or may not know, development at NeoSmart Technologies has largely been a one-man show, with Mahmoud doing the coding and research, with help from an amazing team of moderators (chief of which are Terry, Justin, and Peter) providing most of the ever-important tech suport on our forums. What most people don’t know is that while NeoSmart Technologies has, alhamdulilah, reached epic heights over the past few years, it’s being run entirely on a part-time basis by all of its volunteers.

Continue reading →

Gevey Sim and iOS 5 Unlock

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
32

iOS 5, WWDC 2011

UPDATE: iOS 5 Beta 2 and up!

Gevey unlock (and other turbo-sims/interceptors) do not work on iOS 5 beta 2 and above, including the final iOS 5 release!

Yesterday at WWDC 2011, Apple announced (amongst many other things) iOS 5, the upcoming version of iOS that’s to be released with the iPhone 5 later this year. iOS Developers and certain tech bloggers have been given access to this build, and we’re sure one of the biggest question the hordes of iPhone users around the world are asking is: Will my Gevey-3G unlock SIM interposer work???

With iOS 5 beta (build 9A5220p), the modem firmware has been upgraded to baseband 04.11.04 and cannot be downgraded to earlier versions, meaning the only possible SIM unlock would be a turbo sim/interposer (currently either Gevey-3G or Rebel SIM); hence the worried and nervous questions going around the online iPhone community.

And the answer? A relieving yes. At least for now, for iOS 5 beta 1, it does. The process remains unchanged — just insert the interposer, restart your device, accept the welcome message, dial 112, and toggle the Airplane Mode feature a few times. The Gevey SIM will still work to unlock iOS 5.0 beta.

Continue reading →

Open Source, 100% Compatible ln for Windows (and Junction Point library)

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
17

We’ve been huge fans of symlinks for forever, and even posted about Windows Vista’s new mklink commandline utility with quite the passion back in 2006 when the ability to create soft-links from the commandline was first added to Windows.

However, there are a few things that have forever irked us about the ln lookalike called mklink.exe:

  • It’s called mklink and not ln. (I mean, you just get can’t get around that fact)
  • The arguments are switched around. `mklink something_doesnt_exist actual_file` is just…….. wrong!
  • By default, mklink will create softlinks and not hardlinks. ln requires the /h flag to create a hardlink.
  • mklink isn’t smart enough to distinguish between files and folders. You need explicitly tell it via the commandline.
  • Even then, mklink has two different switches depending on the type of directory link you want. /D for softlink’d directories, and /J for hardlink’d directories.
  • mklink can’t be used outside of cmd.exe (such as in PowerShell). (Hat tip: Jason)
  • And, of course,  mklink isn’t open source.

So we made our own.

Continue reading →

Contributing to the Open Source Community

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
Reply

A week ago, we tweeted a promise to contribute more to the open source community. As a Research & Development organization, there’s a lot of random code samples, small libraries, forks/modifications of popular scripts, and more that’s just lying around, begging to be open sourced.

While a lot of these may prove to have little to no value to anyone, given how easy it is to make things open source thanks to github, there’s no real drawback to throwing them out there for anyone that may benefit at some unknown point in the future.

We have a couple of hundred miniature projects, test code samples, and other such content across a number of drives to sort through, and whenever we find something useful, this is our promise to the community to share it. To that end, we’ve set up a github repository at http://github.com/neosmart where we’ll be uploading the code, and from where you’re all more than welcome to check it out and contribute back.

Continue reading →

Happy New Year!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
2

To our dear members, readers, users, and beloved friends:

Happy New Year 2011 from everyone on the NeoSmart Team. On behalf of all the NeoSmart Staff, thank you for being here with us this year!

We’re looking forward to more great years to come, and thank you for being with us every step of the way.

Windows 7 Discontinues Ultimate Extras

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
31

Users attempting to upgrade from Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition to Windows 7 Build 7100 (the unofficial RC1 release leak), are greeted with the following "compatibility warning" dialog:

Windows 7 has discontinued Vista's "Ultimate Extras"

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition’s "Ultimate Extras" have been a constant source of derision and anger from Vista users ever since its release 3 years ago. If the blog posts are to be believed, millions of users purchased Windows Vista Ultimate Edition in the hope that the added-value "Ultimate Extras" package – which was left un-described and of unknown worth at the time – would turn out to be a good investment.

Continue reading →

Excellent Customer Service Means A Lot

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
7

At a time when the human touch comes at a premium, it’s always a relief to find a company or two that reply quickly, politely, and efficiently to customer support requests.

And the two companies that have impressed us with their support? Pubmatic and Assembla – both excellent startups that we highly recommend in their individual fields. Pubmatic is an ad-revenue optimization service that intelligently chooses between different ad providers to maximize your ad impressions and CPM rates. Assembla provides quality hosting of SVN and other services that cover all aspects of the software development cycles for teams & small companies.

Continue reading →

Windows 7 Wallpapers Now Available for Download

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
32

NeoSmart Technologies’ gallery of Windows Vista wallpapers has been a huge hit over the past several years – despite what anyone might say about Vista itself, its collection of wallpapers and fonts is top-notch. And now it seems that Windows 7 isn’t going to be any different – from what we’ve seen, the wallpapers shipping with Windows 7 are pretty darn good.

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

 

  

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

Continue reading →

Google Abandons Standards, Forks OpenID

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
40

A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.

But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been receiving for adding OpenID to all Live ID accounts just the day before yesterday)… because whatever it is that Google has released support for, it sure as hell isn’t OpenID, as they even so kindly point out in their OpenID developer documentation (that media outlets certainly won’t be reading):

  1. The web application asks the end user to log in by offering a set of log-in options, including Google.
  2. The user selects the "Sign in with Google" option.
  3. The web application sends a "discovery" request to Google to get information on the Google authentication endpoint. This is a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0. [Emphasis added]
  4. Google returns an XRDS document, which contains endpoint address.
  5. The web application sends a login authentication request to the Google endpoint address.
  6. This action redirects the user to a Google Federated Login page.

As Google points out, this isn’t OpenID. This is something that Google cooked up that resembles OpenID masquerading as OpenID since that’s what people want to see – and that’s what Microsoft announced just the day before.

It’s not just a “departure” from OpenID, it’s a whole new standard.

Continue reading →