Galaxy S2 Comments

I ordered a Galaxy S2 and it eventually arrived. It’s pretty nice, but there are a few annoying things with it that I wish I could change

  • It vibrates when it’s fully charged and will wake you up at 3am
  • It’s length of vibration is too long for notification messages.
  • There’s only “silent” or “vibrate”. I have to turn vibrate off in the menu to have silent. I’d like vibrate > silent > noise
  • There’s no notification LED. Wtf?
  • The home screen is Screen 1, at the far left. It should wrap around to screen 7 when I move to the left, but it doesn’t.

Just little niggles, other than that it’s a good phone and I’m enjoying it a lot

update:
Having used it for about a month now, and flashed new firmware and got a new launcher, i can say this is a great phone. Using launcher pro I have the home screens how i want, and the new firmware has stopped the random battery drain issues with wifi sharing. Now I am just waiting for 2.3.4

 

Trading Gold and Silver

Well, looks like the silver retrace has completed. I hope. Maybe I’ll trade out of my gold and into some silver and get it while it’s cheap. Not sure how long JPM can keep this up. Probably eternity, I’m sure they have friends in the right places.

I get most of my gold and silver at Bullionvault. It’s like buying it physically, but stored in a vault in a choice of locations.

Buy gold online - quickly, safely and at low prices

SCCM, OSD and Bitlocker PIN

I’ve been having some fun this week sorting out a task sequence with SCCM that will deploy everything and enable bitlocker with a PIN. I want users to be prompted for a password when they boot their PC. I have the tasks correct, I used HP’s BIOS configuration tool to turn on the TPM. I then take ownership it with the following command

%systemroot%\System32\manage-bde.exe -tpm -o information

It’s then rebooted just to be sure. The problem I had was when I was running the command to enable the pin. I received a Group Policy error “The task sequence execution engine failed executing the action xxx in the group yyy with the error code 2150695008” and “Group Policy settings do not permit the use of a PIN at startup. Please choose a different BitLocker startup option.” I double checked and all my Group Policy options were correct. What gives?

Well, it turns out that the OSD doesn’t pick up any group policies that I could find. Running a gpupdate after using the F8 debug just hung and eventually errored. My solution was to export the registry settings from a working PC on the domain and then run an import as part of the task sequence. The settings are located HKLM\Software\microsoft\policies\fve . These are exported to a package with a program that just calls “regedit /s bitlocker.reg”. After the import, I run the command

%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\manage-bde.exe -protectors -add %SystemDrive% -tp 1234567890

This sets the pin and everything is now working well. Obviously, swap 1234567890 to something a bit less obvious 😉