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Paul's Time Sink

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After-market navigation with XM data

Paul Westbrook | 29 December, 2004 21:52

Pioneer Electronics AVIC-NC2 In a previous post, I mentioned that XM is delivering navigation data in their stream, and the Acura RL is using this data in its navigation stystem. I was hoping that someone would come out with an after-market system that uses this data. This post at Droxy mentions that Pioneer has announced their AVIC-NC2.

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Replaced router

Paul Westbrook | 29 December, 2004 11:44

Last night, I replaced our Netgear FR114P with a Linksys WRT54GS. I wanted to get this new router for a couple of reasons:

  1. Better QoS. The QoS in our Vonage ATA only handles upstream bandwidth. The QoS in the Linksys does QoS on both upstream and downstream. (previous post)
  2. Better reliability. I was never sure about how reliable the Motorola VT1000v is. Since the Motorola VT1000v was connected directly to the broadband connection, and the Netgear was connected to the Motorola, if the Vonage ATA crashed, my whole network would be in accessible.

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s/mime certificates

Paul Westbrook | 27 December, 2004 13:54

A while ago, I setup s/mime certificates for my email accounts. I just noticed that the certificates are about to expire. So I created some new certificates, and these are the steps that I followed. These certificates will work with Apple's Mail as well as Mozilla.

There are several reasons that I do this:

  1. Whenever I send emails, I always sign the messages. Many email programs (Apple Mail, Mozilla, Outlook) will automatically notify the recipient that the sender has been verified, and that the message has not been modified. So when someone receives an email from me, they can be certain that I sent the email.
  2. Signed messages get marked with a lower score from spam filters, so there is less of a chance of false positives
  3. When sending email to a recipient that also has a s/mime certificate, most email programs will give you the option to encrypt the message.

I originally got these instructions from this page at macosxhnts.
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DVDAttache

Paul Westbrook | 26 December, 2004 12:31

For Christmas we got a lot of DVDs (Baby Einstein 15 DVD collection), and last night I wanted to enter them into the application that I use to manage our DVD collection. During the process of entering the DVDs, the application started crashing. So, I decided to find a different one. DVDAttache is the best one that I have found.
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Fixed bug in plog xmlrpc

Paul Westbrook | 22 December, 2004 11:52

I fixed a bug in the code that I did for implementing MetaWeblog xmlrpc support. If no categories were specified for a post, the server would get an error.

The thing that I want to work on next is to get the dateCreated that is specified by the client to be used for the resulting article.

I have posted the updated script here.

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Post with tips for dealing with stolen blog content

Paul Westbrook | 21 December, 2004 22:01

The ProBlogger blog has a post that describes some very good steps to take when you find that someone is stealing your content.

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Upgraded PostNuke

Paul Westbrook | 21 December, 2004 21:31

Since there is a new worm that is using Google to spread itself to phpBB forums, I decided to upgrade my PostNuke and PNphpBB to the latest versions.

After backing up my previous installation, I downloaded the latest version of PostNuke. I then followed the steps listed here. (They should do something similar to gallery, where the archive always expands to the same name, so it is easy to do upgrades).

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Door Knob Covers

Paul Westbrook | 21 December, 2004 12:40

It is fun watching our son defeat the childproofing devices around our house. We have the Safety 1st Secure Grip Door Knob Covers on one of our door. I had been noticing that the door was open when I could have sworn that I had closed it.

Normally an adult will squeeze both sides of the covers and then turn the knob. A kid can't do this so I was interested how he was getting in.
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Google Response for copyright infrigement

Paul Westbrook | 21 December, 2004 12:21

In a previous post, I mentioned that there was a web site that had been posting my content without permission. I had contacted Google since this web master was attempting to make money by posting Google AdSense ads on these pages.

The response that I got was that Google only is responsible for the contents of the ads, and not the content of the the web pages that the ads are displayed on.
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UPS works

Paul Westbrook | 21 December, 2004 11:56

This morning the power went out at our house. This was the first real use of our Tripp Lite UPS 1500VA system. The power was out for about 40 minutes, and the UPS was up for about 35 minutes. I was very pleased that we got it.

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UPS to RSS

Paul Westbrook | 20 December, 2004 18:49

Jason (his blog) made a comment on my previous post about getting a RSS feed for FedEx tracking information. He wrote cgi that generates an rss feed from UPS tracking information. The post that describes this.

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Delphi SkyFi2

Paul Westbrook | 17 December, 2004 20:39

Skyfi 2In my previous post, I was wondering if the Delphi SkyFi2 would work with all of the original SkyFi components. From Delphi's product page, it looks like it is completely backwards compatible with all of the old accessories

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Firefox Inline Autocomplete

Paul Westbrook | 15 December, 2004 17:53

The Geek Ramblings blog entry, Firefox Inline Autocomplete, describes how to enable autofill in the location bar

To turn on inline autocomplete in Firefox...

Enter about:config in the URL field
Right-click on the page and create a new Boolean value
Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, case-sensitive: 'F', not 'f')
Set the value to true

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Site displaying content without permission

Paul Westbrook | 15 December, 2004 08:36

It looks like there is a web site out there that is displaying content from this blog witihout getting permission or placing the proper citations on their web site.

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Doctor insurance scam

Paul Westbrook | 15 December, 2004 06:52

We have been dealing with what appears to be a scam by an anesthesiologist. In September, our daughter was born by cesarean. We knew that the surgeon and the hospital was a part of our health insurance network, so we knew that their charges would be covered.

A couple of months later, we received a bill for the anesthesiologist, requesting payment, since the insurance company only payed 70%. Since the hospital assigned the anesthesiologist, and the hospital was under the contract with the insurance company, I though that it was strange that the anesthesiologist wouldn't be covered. I call my insurance company, and then they said that they agreed to pay 100%. But that is 100% of what they deem to be the correct cost. So I am still liable for the difference.

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