The Node

Archive for September, 2011

So you’ve followed the article about how to connect Linux to Windows using Samba, but you have a problem…each time you want to connect to your secure Samba share, Windows keeps asking you for your Linux login details in order to access the user share, even though you’ve checked the box that says “remember my credentials”. Doesn’t actually do that and it’s pretty annoying, right? As it turns out, this is a problem with Windows (surprise), not Linux or Samba. While there are various hacks which involve Registry hacks and Windows command line batch files, there is a simpler way…
It can be fixed with the little-known Windows Credential Manager. Navigate to the Credential Manager under Windows Vista/7 with:-


Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Credential Manager


Click “Add a new Windows Credential” from the top right and enter the Windows NetBios network name for your Samba share. If this doesn’t show up under your Network Explorer, make sure you have the nmbd daemon running on your Linux server. Add the network address and the user and password to the credentials vault. You should end up with something like: -

Internet or Network Address: [\\Samba NetBios name\Samba share]
User name: [your samba user name]
Password: [your samba password]
Persistence: Enterprise

Now, you should have access to your mapped Samba secure network shares without constantly having to type in your Samba/Windows credentials each time. Once less annoyance :-) You can even backup your Credentials Vault file and save it somewhere secure if you like. Remember, though, using this technique is only going to be as strong as your Windows user account as it’ll connect automatically to Samba using your stored credentials for this user account. But you already figured that out, I’m sure :-) It’s also not a good idea to use this sort of thing outside a local area network for obvious reasons.

While the screensavers on Amazon’s Kindle are quite tastefully done, I would like to keep a page open, especially if it’s a textbook. Since Amazon don’t allow you to set the time limit anywhere that I can see in Settings to set how long the Kindle must wait to kick in, I was forced to take rather more drastic measures as I was sick of flicking the power switch each time I wanted to refer back to my book. Here is how you can disable the Kindle screensavers completely. It’s not as ideal as having a settable timer for the screenwavers, but it appears to do the job.

First, press Home so that you are on the home screen of your Kindle and not on any page in a book. Next press Enter and type: -


;debugOn (press enter)
~disableScreensaver (press enter)
;debugOff (press enter)


It’s a bit hack-y and I have no idea if this works on any other version of the Kindle apart from Kindle 3, but it does work :-) Why Amazon felt the need to include screensavers at all on an e-ink display that takes up no power simply to display yet take up power to bring up the screensaver image itself, I have no idea. Nor why they couldn’t throw in an option in settings to change the wait time or disable it in a user-friendly manner.

Perhaps these little niggles will be fixed in the next version of the Kindle, which I’m betting (based on the Amazon Android App Store) will be Android-based (yet still Linux!) and will probably include a touchscreen. I wonder how that will affect the e-ink display?

Okay, I know that the posts have mostly tailed off recently (work-related mostly), but I’ve decided to have a crack at Android. While my ultimate plans are for some sort of retro-style Android game, I’m going to start with a “proper” application which will probably be a more advanced version of my PodGrab Linux command line utility. This should cover most “regular” aspects of Android and put me in good stead for eventually linking my Arduino to Android. I’ll post anything interesting or useful as I go.

On the Linux front, I have a couple of articles planned for Apache virtual hosting, SSL certificates and HTTPS which will also happen at some point soon and maybe some bash programming nuggets. There are also a few minor updates to the Linux version of PodGrab that I’d like to throw in like downloading of textual RSS articles.

BTW, what’s people’s opinion of the Xbox 360 version of “Dead Island”? As buggy as the PC version?