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Paul's Time Sink

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Memory ball alarm clock

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2005 09:07

BallradioI saw this post on Gizmodo for this Memory Ball alarm clock radio.  When I first saw the picture, I though that in order to turn off the alarm you would have to roll the pall to a particular position, or a sequence of positions.  This would be something similar to the alarm clock that rolls away from you when you hit snooze.

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Jinzora importing

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2005 08:02

I have played around with Jinzora a little bit, and I have found it to be a pretty cool program.

But, there seems to be some problems with importing media.  I tried to have Jinzora import my music using the folder structure only (since this is what the page recommends).  On the same screen there is a pop-up that describes how, what I thought was, the meta information should be presented to the user.  I guess I picked the wrong option.  All of my artists got interpreted as Genres and all of the albums got interpreted as artists.

The strange thing about this was that when I looked at the information for a specific track, it had all of the correct information.  It looked like the browsing information was just wrong.  I didn't see a way to rebuild the browsing structure.
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Free Opera

Paul Westbrook | 30 August, 2005 10:32

Opera is having it's 10-year online anniversary, and is giving away licenses for its browser, for today only.  The Opera browser is available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS 9/X.

Here is the page that has the registration information.

[via The Apple Blog]

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Jinzora

Paul Westbrook | 29 August, 2005 20:31

I installed Jinzora today.  It looks like it has promise, especially since netjuke is not supported anymore.  (In fact, the web site is not running anymore.)

There are a few things that I like about it are:

  • It can automatically transcode music to support slower connections.
  • It can display a list of similar tracks

There are some things that don't work with it.

  • I was only able to import music when the meta data was read from the folder structure, and not from the tags.
  • You can not remove all of the tracks from the database from within the interface.  I had to drop the tabes, and the recreate them again.
  • I have not been able to figure out how to change the interface.  I set it up in the install wizard, and I am not able to change it.

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netjuke and PHP5

Paul Westbrook | 29 August, 2005 10:15

I wanted to get some streams from my netjuke installation, and when I tried I got some php parse errors.  I am sure that this is happening now because I am using PHP5, which I wasn't using before upgrading to Fedora Core 4.

I will look into fixing these problems, but if it takes too much time, I will look into installing Jinzora.

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Vonage and ADT

Paul Westbrook | 28 August, 2005 19:32

Today I tested my ADT security system because wanted to find out if it is actually working with my currently wiring setup.  I have connected the phone line from the security system to our patch panel.  This is connected to our Vonage ATA. (Similar to the article in Make magazine)

Supposedly, this is not supposed to work, like modems and fax machines are not supposed to work.  If it didn't work,  I would have thought of either

  1. Buying the cell service connector for the ADT system.
  2. Buy the ABN Broadband Adapter from NextAlarm.com, and switch to using their service.
  3. Switch to using Alarm.com for service.

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Changes in iSync

Paul Westbrook | 28 August, 2005 18:41

Since upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4, I had noticed some changes to iSync.  I had noticed that the .Mac icon in iSync doesn't do anything.  Also, the iSync menu item can not initiate a sync with my phone.

Chris Holland wrote the same thing on The Apple Blog.  But he also mentioned Sync Now, "re-adds" the feature to sync your devices without launching iSync.  The program works perfectly

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Free games

Paul Westbrook | 27 August, 2005 20:19

I just saw this article on CNET.com.  They list 10 free full featured games that can be downloaded.  I used to play Marathon a while ago, and it is neat to be able to download the games.

The versions that are available, for Mac OS, is only Mac 9 applications.  So if you want to run this on Mac OS X, you will have to use Classic.  Bungie open  sourced the code to Marathon in 2000, and there has been work to continue development on it.  You can download a Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux client from this project.

[via dealmac]

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Personal Radio Recorder

Paul Westbrook | 25 August, 2005 19:15

Morphy Richards Dab EpgPVR Wire has a post that mentions a digital radio that can schedule recordings with a program guide.  The Morphy Richards DAB EPG Radio records audio content to a SD card.

I wonder how they are doing the EPG.  I know that HD Radio includes the program information for the programs that are on now, but I didn't think that it included future programs.  Maybe the EPG has to be loaded on the SD card.

I do like the idea of a recorder for radio.  When I am listening to my XM radio coming to work, I hear of upcoming programs.  I usually am not able to hear them since I am not in the car.  It would be great to record these programs and listen to them while I drive.  I know that the XM MyFi will record programs, but I want something that is better intergrated with my car stereo.

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cron jobs with launchd

Paul Westbrook | 24 August, 2005 21:12

In this post, I described ClamXav and how it will install a cron job to scan files as well as updating the virus definitions.  In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple has created launchd to replace crond, init, and xinitd.  So I wanted to replace with the cron jobs with Launch Actions.

Here are the plist files that I have created to replace the cron jobs.  I created these plist files with Launchd Editor, I wasn't able to get the scripts to work when I created them with Property List Editor
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Google Talk in Proteus

Paul Westbrook | 24 August, 2005 07:44

I set up Proteus to access the Google Talk IM system.  Google Talk appears a service that is intended to compete with AIM and Yahoo IM.  It uses the Jabber open standard for communication.  The instructions that were posted at TUAW and Make: Blog worked perfectly for Proteus.

I can't tell if Google is allowing communication from Google Talk users with other users of other Jabber servers.  Ideally, they would allow this since this is one of the benefits of using an open standard.

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POP3 server on Mac OS X

Paul Westbrook | 23 August, 2005 14:59

I set up ClamXav to run with a cron job on my laptop.  Since this is using cron, the output of the job is mailed to the my local account.  I wanted see if there was a way that I could use the native mbox files in Apple's Mail.  There were a couple of posts on Mac OS X hints that described doing this (hint 1, hint 2).

I discovered, as Joe Maller did, that Mac OS 10.4 doesn't use the mbox format to store its messages.  It looks like it is using separate files for each message to allow Spotlight to index the messages.

The only way that I thought that it would be possible to read these messages in Apple's Mail was to setup a POP3 server on my laptop, that would read these mbox formatted files, and present a protocol that Mail can understand.  I found this post that described setting up qpopper.  I was actually able to skip from the unpacking step to the step that runs configure.
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ClamXav

Paul Westbrook | 22 August, 2005 21:28

I use ClamAV on my mail server, but I really haven't tried out ClamXav.  ClamXav is a Mac OS X wrapper around ClamAV.  It provides a way o manually scan folders as well it will automatically scan certain folders.  For example, it can automatically scan your download and mail folders.

The MacDevCenter has a good article on setting up ClamXav.  At the end of the article, there is an interview with the developer.

[via TUAW]

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NewsFire will support Spotlight

Paul Westbrook | 22 August, 2005 21:02

A screenshot has been posted on the NewsFire blog.  It looks like the 1.2 version of NewsFire will have Spotlight support.  It looks like you will be able to search for NewsFire posts from the Spotlight menu.

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Europe gets the cool car head units

Paul Westbrook | 21 August, 2005 21:51

It seems that all of the cool head units are available in Europe and not here.  A while ago, I was looking at Single DIN Navigation units for my car.  I don't like the look of the ones that have the screen that pops out of the unit itself.  There were only two available in the US.  (The Harman Kardon TrafficPro and the Blaupunkt TravelPilot.)

Europe has a lot available.  Here is a page from the gps warehouse that lists all of the single din navigation head units.
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