Paul's Time Sink

13 Oct, 2006

Google Apps was mentioned on episode 207 of The Geek News Central podcast.  I wanted to check out how well it would work for my domains.  I currently have a server hosted that filters all of my spam and virus messages.  Switching to Google Apps could potentially alleviate me from having to maintain his server.

I switched one of my domains over there, and the transition went very smoothly.  I am not going to switch my main domains over there for a couple of reasons:

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Technorati tags: Gmail, Google, Google Apps, IMAP, POP3, mail

13 Oct, 2006

This post describes a tip to help reduce the time that Dashboard widgets take to load.

Technorati tags: Dashboard Widget, Mac OS X

13 Oct, 2006

The clock radio in our bedroom started to die.  Whenever the alarm would go of the displayed time would start to blink.  Sometimes when this happened the time would jump forward or back several hours.

We bought the iHome iH5 to replace the clock.  This is an AM/FM clock radio with an iPod dock.  This allows you to set your alarm to play any the radio or your music from your iPod.

There are some interesting features:

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Technorati tags: alarm clock, clock radio, dock, iHome iH5, iPod

11 Oct, 2006

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see what would happen if I plugged our TV into our cable line.  We don't get our television through cable, since we have DIRECTV, but we do use a Comcast cable modem.  I was really interested to see if any HD channels were accessible this way.

When I connected the cable, and had the TV scan for channels, over 100 channels were found.  Many of these were HD channels.  Here are some of the interesting things that I noticed:

• The Over-The-Air SD and HD channels were present.
• Many of the basic channels were also available
• Many cable HD channels were available (ESPN HD)
• All FM radio stations were present in Audio only channels

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Technorati tags: ATSC, cable, Comcast, ESPN HD, HDTV, NTSC

11 Oct, 2006

A while ago I mentioned some features that every iPod dock should have.  The iPod integration that the 2007 Audi S8 will have is pretty amazing.  The iPod gets placed into a tray, and the tray get inserted into the dash.  And the iPod menus appear on the navigation screen.

[via Gizmodo, Autoblog]

Technorati tags: iPod, Audi S8

11 Oct, 2006

Today I noticed a problem in the rss feed generated by the script that I wrote.  An invalid character (character code 0x93) was included in the feed.  The problem was that the page stated that the character set was iso-8859-1, even though there are characters in the cp1250 character set.

Here is the updated script. I also had to apply the patch described on this page that allows the RSS module handle multiple byte characters

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Technorati tags: Caltrain, perl, rss

11 Oct, 2006

(From the Mountain View station) It would be nice if Caltrain updated their website with these status updates, when they happen. This would allow passengers to plan, and not wait outside.

Technorati tags: caltrain, train

11 Oct, 2006

I am used to writing html documents, but now it seems that everything is done with wikis.  So I needed to figure out how to convert html documents to use wiki markup.

The HTML::WikiConverter perl module makes this conversion very easy.  This simple program outputs text with wiki tags from an html file:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
 
use HTML::WikiConverter;
my $wc = new HTML::WikiConverter( dialect => 'MoinMoin' );
 
# Or fetch it from a file
print $wc->html2wiki( file => "file.html" );
 

Technorati tags: html, perl, wiki, HTML::WikiConverter

10 Oct, 2006

I have been using the Expert Playlist to randomize my music.  This post describes another set of smart playlists that  "simulates" a radio station

[via The Apple Blog]

Technorati tags: iTunes, playlist

10 Oct, 2006

This post describes a way to have the bash prompt specify the last 'n' folders in the current directory.  This pretty useful, especially when traversing a large directory structure.

Technorati tags: bash, prompt

9 Oct, 2006

Now that I have been using Google Reader exclusively, I have noticed that other people have also made the transition (1, 2).  (I have just noticed that there is a Refresh link below the list of the subscriptions.)

Technorati tags: Google Reader, news aggregator

9 Oct, 2006

I have been wanting to get rid of Stuffit Expander for a while.  I saw this post that mentions The Unarchiver.  This is an open source application that unpacks many formats.  Now I have deleted Stuffit Expander.

Technorati tags: Mac OS X, Stuffit Expander, The Unarchiver

9 Oct, 2006

Someone pointed out a problem with the rss that was being generated from the script that I wrote to create the Caltrain rss feed.  The problem was that iso-8859-1 characters were being included the rss feed, when the feed stated that it was utf-8 encoded.

The fix was to just convert the characters to utf-8 before parsing.  (The character encodeing should really be determined from the document, instead of hard coding iso-8859-1.)

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Technorati tags: Caltrain, perl, iso-8859-1, rss, utf-8

9 Oct, 2006

The problem where my G4 PowerBook wouldn't start up, continued to happen.  Then the computer just started freezing.  When I tried to boot it back up, it wouldn't start back up.  So we decided to get a new MacBook Pro.  I drove to the Apple Store and picked it up.

Setting up went smoother than I expected. I removed the hard drive from the PowerBook, and put it in a firewire enclosure.  Then when I ran the setup process, I used the import data from mounted drive, and after several hours, the installation was finished.  All of my settings and applications had been copied over.  (Thank you J.S.)

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Technorati tags: Little Snitch, MacBook Pro, PoweBook G4, Sizzling Keys, Synergy

5 Oct, 2006

The problem, with the Linksys PSUS4 losing it's configuration when power is lost, has been bothering me.  I didn't like having to reset the router manually every time this happens.  I decided to try out the the Remote Printer Access on the Airport Extreme.

I used an usb extension cable to extend the cable from the printer to the Airport Extreme, the printer automatically appeared in Printer Setup Utility, via Bonjour.

Technorati tags: Airport Extreme, Apple, Bonjour, Linksys, Linksys PSUS4, Mac OS X, Remote Printer Access