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Paul's Time Sink

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OCR for SpamAssassin

Paul Westbrook | 21 August, 2006 20:54

I have been getting pretty annoyed with the image spam that has been getting through my mail filters.  These are some interesting emails.  They generally include an image of some text at the top of the email, and then a bunch of random text (In one case, the text was related to resumé writing and English as a second language)

I saw this page that describes how to setup an optical character recognition (OCR) SpamAssassin plugin to help identify these spam messages.  This plugin uses gocr uses as the OCR engine.  I have set this up, and will see how well it stops these messages from getting through.

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iPhotoToGallery

Paul Westbrook | 21 August, 2006 01:32

I needed to upload a bunch of photos from vacation to our web gallery.  Normally I would export the files from iPhoto to the desktop, and then upload them ti Gallery through the web interface.  This would take to long for over 100 photos.

I reinstalled iPhotoToGallery, and it worked very well.  (Unfortunately with our broadband upload speed, it is taking  while.)

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mon.itor.us

Paul Westbrook | 20 August, 2006 21:45

I mentioned before that I was unhappy with SiteUptime.  I got a comment suggesting mon.itor.us.  mon.itor.us is a free site, by Sourcio, that offers monitoring services.  It has a neat Ajax interface that is pretty easy to use. 

I am not sure how they are planning on making money.

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blogging from within digg

Paul Westbrook | 20 August, 2006 14:39

I just noticed a feature of digg.  You can post on articles on digg directly to you blog from within the digg site.

There are some problems with their implementation.  The interface to configure the metaWeblog settings, do not all allow spcifying the blog ID, which is required for he metaWeblog API.  Also, the blogging interface doesn't allow categories to be specified.
 (More)

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Digg Card

Paul Westbrook | 20 August, 2006 13:13

Digg Card is an interesting site where you can create your digg profile that you can post on your website. 

One thing that will make this easier to use is if a Javascript is provided to embed this on a site.

[via digg]

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Asus WL-700gE

Paul Westbrook | 10 August, 2006 22:04

979 LRemember when WiFi base stations were just wireless base stations?  The Asus WL-700gE WiFi router is more than just a base station.  I has a built in 160GB drive, a iTunes client (daap, I assume), and a BitTorrent client, that can download directly to the device.  Also if another drive is connected, it can be configured as a RAID.

The product web page states

iPod Users can Manage Music Stored in the WL-700gE with the iTunes Interface

I wonder how this works.  Normally iPods will only sync with local files, and not with files through the daap protocol.  Maybe if you connect an iPod directly to the WL-700gE with USB, you can go to a web interface to select files to be transferred to the iPod.

[via Gizmodo]

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WEB2DNA

Paul Westbrook | 10 August, 2006 21:35

There is yet another way to visualize web pages.  WEB2DNA will take an html page, and analyze the tags and spit it out a image that looks like a graphic representation of human DNA.

Here is the one for this site:

Paulstimesink Dna

[via Download Squad]

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web crawlers and JavaScript

Paul Westbrook | 10 August, 2006 19:07

Many web pages use JavaScript to modify the content of the page.  The effects of the javascript can be seen by anyone who has JavaScript enabled in their browser.  But most web crawlers do not interpret and run the scripts when crawling pages.  This is a problem when this content is intended to be seen by the web crawlers.

For example, BlogRolling is a site that lets you store links.  Then you can insert a JavaScript into your web page to display a blogroll.  One use of these blog roll sites is to link to other sites that you find interesting.  Ideally these links would help affect the Google PageRank or the Technorati rank.  But, it appears these crawlers are not intepreting JavaScript, so they are not picking up these links.
 (More)

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Mac mini and HDMI switcher

Paul Westbrook | 09 August, 2006 21:10

The HDMI switch has worked out very well for switching between our DIRECTV HD DVR and the Mac mini.  There has only been one problem.  If the Mac mini boots when the HDMI switch is set to the DVR input, the Mac mini can not sense the display, so it defaults to a low resolution that can't drive our TV.  Putting the Mac to sleep and waking it back up, while the switcher is switched to that input, fixes the problem.

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softwareupdate

Paul Westbrook | 09 August, 2006 20:50

Yesterday, I have my first chance to use the softwareupdate command line tool.  I didn't want to use VNC to run Software Update on the Mac mini.  The softwareupdate command line tool allows you to do everything that you can from the UI.  (This was added after I left Apple, after working on Software Update.)

One problem is that some of the installers are not written well.  If you run an update for iTunes, while iTunes is running, a dialog appears informing you that iTunes needs to be quit.  Unfortunately, this also appears when running this from the command line tool.  This script should be changed to present the prompt on what ever interface launched the update.

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NetNewsWire referrers

Paul Westbrook | 09 August, 2006 20:15

I subscribe to several rss feeds to track incoming links, on sites like Technorati, Talk Digger, Google Blog Search  and Daypop.  Sometimes these feeds will contain one of my posts.  When I view these posts in NetNewsWire, the linked images do not appear.

From looking at my logs, I found out why.  I have a mod_rewrite rule that denies http requests for images when a referrer is specified, and it is not from this domain.  It appears that NetNewsWire uses the domain that the rss feed originated from as the referrer for all links.  I actually think that this is a good thing, as content providers can still tell where their content is linked from.

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Google Reader for phone

Paul Westbrook | 09 August, 2006 01:06

I mentioned one feature that NewsGator Mobile was missing was the ability to flag articles to be read later.  Today I saw this post that mentions the "portable" version of Google Reader.  Not only can you "star" posts from you phone, but it appears that Google formats the text and images to work on a phone

There are a few things that I would love to see:

  1. Be able to mark the 9 listed posts on a page as read at once.
  2. Have a way to export/import the list of read and unread posts so you can read posts with either Google Reader or with a desktop aggregator, without having to read the same article twice.

One interesting thing is that the page that lists all of Google's Products doesn't list Google Reader in the mobile feature list.

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PHONifier

Paul Westbrook | 09 August, 2006 00:14

I have noticed that the browser on my Motorola E815 doesn't handle large web pages well.  Usually an out of memory error would occur, especially when there are large images.  So I wanted to find a proxy that would format web pages for the phone.

One of proxies that I found is PHONifier.  This is a simple php script that makes web pages simpler for displaying on the phone.  Unfortunately, it doesn't resize images, it does have an option to block all images.

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USB EVDO adapter

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2006 22:33

Cdu550-2Franklin Wireless has announced that later this month they will release a USB EVDO  adapter.  This will supposedly make it easier to connect to these networks on systems that either don't have PCMCIA slots or don't have the drivers that support these cards.

Hopefully, they will make Mac drivers available, or make this device support a standard USB networking profile.

[via Slashdot]

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WDS

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2006 22:12

We have continued to have problems with our wireless network.  Our reception was pretty bad in our living room.  It probably didn't help that out Airport Express was behind the metal boxes of electro-magnatism of our A/V equipment.  So my goal was to move the base station somewhere where there wouldn't be interference, but also out of reach of the kids.  Unfortunately, those places weren't near an ethernet drop. 

So I am trying WDS again, with the base station above the kitchen counter.  Hopefully this will improve the signal strength downstairs.

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