Paul's Time Sink

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htaccess tools

Paul Westbrook | 29 May, 2006 21:08

The atmaspheric | endervors' page on del.icio.us, has a couple of links to pages that have some good information on htaccess files.

The first is a cheat sheet on various directives that can be used in the htaccess files. (I have a hard time remembering all of the directives.)

The second is a htaccess generator

Technorati Tags: htaccess

Google's cache as a service

Paul Westbrook | 29 May, 2006 20:20

I have been working on this blog for over two years, and I know that there are many links that are dead. This may be because the host is not available, or the file on the the web server was moved/removed.

I was thinking that Google's cache could help solve the problems of the dead links. This could be useful in one of two ways:

A web server could have the page that is displayed on 404 errors, have a link to the url in Google's cache.
On the host with the outgoing links, setup a process that walks all of the outgoing links, and when a 404 error is returned, replace the url with the url from Google's cache.

Technorati Tags: Google, cache

follow up on retractable iPod cable

Paul Westbrook | 27 May, 2006 21:34

A while ago, I got a retractable iPod cable made by Macsense. I mentioned that I thought that the moving part would make it more likely to break than the regular USB cable.

The cable has recently stopped being able to be only partially expanded. It remains expanded if I stretch it out completely.

Technorati Tags: iPod, USB

Jonathan Coulton in iTunes

Paul Westbrook | 27 May, 2006 21:10

I really enjoy Jonathon Coulton's music. I just saw that a couple of his albums are on the iTunes Music store.

He also hosts a podcast for Popular Science magazine

Technorati Tags: iTunes, Jonathan Coulton

Wiretracks

Paul Westbrook | 25 May, 2006 22:59

I saw this post on the Home Theater blog about Wiretracks. Wiretracks are mounting brackets for crown moulding, which also allows you to conceal wires behind the moulding.

I am going to order a set of these. When we moved into our house, I mounted the surround speakers near the ceiling, but the wires are not concealed. This will finish the work that is needed in this room.

Technorati Tags: Wiretracks

3D puzzles

Paul Westbrook | 19 May, 2006 23:28

The Make Magazine Podcast has an interview with Lee Krasnow, a puzzle maker that makes amazing 3 dimensional puzzles. These are some of the coolest puzzles that I have seen.

Technorati Tags: Lee Krasnow, puzzles

FeedPass

Paul Westbrook | 19 May, 2006 22:15

FeedPass is a site, similar to FeedBurner were you can promote your rss feed. The page that is presented for your feed, has many subscription options, like subscribing by email or web based aggregators. Here the page for my feed.

The one feature that is different than FeedBurner, is that you can use your AdSense id to monetize your content. This is also the feature that is a little controversial. It is possible to submit any rss feed and attempt to earn revenue, even if is not your content.

I would be upset if someone else attempted to make money from my content. That is why I am using the Non-Commercial Creative Commons license on this blog.

[via The Social Software Weblog]

Technorati Tags: FeedBurner, FeedPass, rss

bash_history tips

Paul Westbrook | 18 May, 2006 23:04

This post describes some tips for the history in bash

[via Geek News Central podcast]

Technorati Tags: bash

Album Art Widget

Paul Westbrook | 18 May, 2006 22:50

The Album Art Widget is a pretty cool widget. It will display the artwork from the currently playing track in iTunes. The coolest thing that it does it that if you don't have the artwork for the track, it will download it from any one of several sites, and can add the artwork back to iTunes for either the playing track or all tracks from that album.

I do kind of wish this were a standalone application, so I wouldn't need to launch the Dashboard to use it

[via TUAW]

Technorati Tags: Dashboard Widget, iTunes

Cars podcast on iPod

Paul Westbrook | 18 May, 2006 09:39

Earlier this month I noticed that the format of the videos on the Cars podcast weren't playable by the iPod. It looks like that the videos posted this week are now playable on the iPod.

Technorati Tags: Cars, iPod, podcast

Copying tracks to remote iTunes

Paul Westbrook | 18 May, 2006 00:40

We really enjoy having the Mac Mini in our entertainment center to play music and videos with FrontRow. There was is one problem with our setup. I only purchase, or rip music on my laptop. When I want to add music to the Mac Mini's iTunes, I need to mount the laptop's drive on the mac mini, and then manually add the tracks to iTunes, with VNC or with the bluetooth keyboard

I decided to write an applescript to automate this. So with the applescript posted below, I am able to sit on my laptop, and "send" tracks to the Mac Mini.

Here are the steps that are needed for setup:
(More)

EV-DO and E815

Paul Westbrook | 17 May, 2006 23:30

In February, Verizon started allowing some cell phones to be used as broadband modems. Unfortunately, they are not officially supporting the Motorola E815 for this.

I tried the steps that I mentioned before to see if they increased the speed for all devices, even unofficially. The download and upload speeds that I am seeing now is 112kbs/62kbs, which is faster than I saw when I first tried. Though it does appear that Verizon is capping the speed, as there have been other users of the speed test tool that have had faster reported speed.

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, E815, EV-DO, Verizon

DNS hosting

Paul Westbrook | 16 May, 2006 19:38

During my current transition to my new host, I decided to not host my own dns server anymore. I really didn't have a major benefit from hosting it myself. Since I was concerned about redundancy, I setup a secondary dns service with xname.org.

But now, I have decided just to use the dns service provided by GoDaddy, and I will rely on them to provide the redundancy.

Technorati Tags: DNS, GoDaddy, xname.org

Camera phone picture frame

Paul Westbrook | 15 May, 2006 02:57

Parrot has introduced a new digital picture frame that can accept images from camera phones, through bluetooth.

When I first saw this picture, I assumed that you could send the images via text messages, with image attachments. This would be a neat way to send photos to family, with a lot easier setup than the IP based picture frames (eStarling, CEIVA).

[via Gizmodo]

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, digital picture frame, Parrot

BackupMyBlog

Paul Westbrook | 15 May, 2006 02:13

I saw this post on BackupMyBlog. This is is a service that will backup data from you blog, so you can have redundant backups just in case the host becomes unavailable. If you want to use this service, you install a php script. It works by dumping the contents of your mysql database.

If you use this, make sure that you are careful of a couple of things.

Make sure that the user that you specify a mysql user that only has read-only access to the databases used by the blog. Update: The user will need write access to restore a backup
Often blog software store the passwords used to log in in the database. You should probably make sure that this doesn't get backed up. (You can do this by making sure that the mysql user doesn't have access to the table that stores the passwords.)

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htaccess tools

Google's cache as a service

follow up on retractable iPod cable

Jonathan Coulton in iTunes

Wiretracks

3D puzzles

FeedPass

bash_history tips

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Cars podcast on iPod

Copying tracks to remote iTunes

EV-DO and E815

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Camera phone picture frame

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