My power supply came in the mail this week for my Toshiba A200 notebook so I decided to add Windows 7 to the installed OS list (currently booting Leopard 10.5.2 and Ubuntu 9.04).  As always Windows hijacked the master boot record with it’s inferior boot manager – I had to fix this immediately.

GRUB is not as complicated as people make it out to be. In fact it is a very elegant solution to handling multi-boot platforms. Here’s a quick guide to steal your MBR space back from Windows :

1. Boot into live CD such as Ubuntu or Knoppix – DSL works well and is fast.
2. Open a terminal, if your live CD boots into a GUI – press ALT+CTRL+F2 to access a different console.
3. type “cfdisk”

This part is tricky – you must find where GRUB currently lives – in the case of the image below (my rig) sda5 is where Ubuntu is installed – in GRUB this is equal to hd0,4 – since GRUB counts from 0, not 1.

Once you have determined what partition holds grub root files – close cfdisk (q) and type :

grub

root (hd0,X) <– where X is the grub count from 0 to your current Linux installation*

setup (hd0,0)

This will opverwrite Windows MBR installation and give access back to GRUB hooray!  Next step would be adding Windows boot back to grub which has already been covered in my “How To Dual Boot Hackintosh + Ubuntu” article.

* I have a difficult time expressing this simple idea – if Linux is installed on SD5 then grub should say (hd0,4).  If your boot partition is /dev/sda87, GRUB would be (hd0,86) – I hope this helps.

EDIT : I forgot to mention a huge congratulations to Microsoft for making an operating system that looks and feels like Vista with the intermittent stability of XP – huge upgrade IMO.. still far from Leopard.

Well I just received an invite to Google Voice and I must say I was quite upset to discover that it is not yet available in Canada… nonetheless I had a socks box in Cali so I tunnelled my registration and was ready to rock.

For those of you unfamilliar with Socks – it basically pushes all requests through a secure connection on a remote system and is quite simple to do – take a look at my “How to Watch American TV in Canada” post from a while back.

Once I was in I ran into another little snag, you can not set your call-in number to an international DID (in my case a Canadian DID).  So I just pointed them to my free IPKall number and was really cooking with gas (you too can get a free IPKall DID at ipkall.com).

For those of you anticipating an invite yuo can expect the usual Google UI (thank god (I adore simplicity)), you can also look forward to transcribing your voicemail messages to text – and have them emailed.  This functionality has been lacking in Asterisk which is why I believe this is going to drop a nuke on the Asterisk devs to get this module out – so support your * developers will ya!

I’ve really only done minimal “tire-kicking” but I expect this could have many telcos shaking in their boots.  Not only is it super feature rich, sociable and ridiculously easy to use – it is backed by a company who has provided extremely reliable services since day one.

It is interesting to see the callout function implementation.  There have been plenty of callout scripts for Asterisk (which pretty much work exactly the same – Asteristickies is one of ‘em) but once again Google has made it that much friendlier.  Callout is a dialing function when you input a number to call, it connects to you first – then dials the remote party.

SMS is a joy! I was lucky enough to have my sister visiting this week with her unlimited text messaging plan.  I popped open the SMS box and we were sending messages with ease instantaneously.  I especially love the contact manager.  Being able to maintain a list of contacts with click to call functionality is a very powerful feature.

Anyway, I am very excited to play with my new toy – feel free to give me a ring at

(361)-GEEK-HUT

Heh… or use this thing