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Paul's Time Sink

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links for 2007-05-29

Paul Westbrook | 29 May, 2007 02:21

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Related plugin for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 28 May, 2007 02:40

I have written a plugin for LifeType that generates a list of articles that are related to a given plugin.  This currently only uses the keywords from the title, so the list of related articles is not that great.  The next change that I am planning on making is to extract the relevant keywords out of the body of the post.

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links for 2007-05-27

Paul Westbrook | 27 May, 2007 02:19

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HP Photosmart C3180 Airport Express Update

Paul Westbrook | 25 May, 2007 01:50

In this post, I linked to a workaround to get the HP Photosmart C3180 to work with Airport Express. The reason that this workaround was need, was because the driver wasn't compatible with remote printing. 

Out of curiosity, I decided to download the lastest software for the HP Photosmart C3100 series, and tried to configure remote printing again.  Once the new version was installed, printing through the Airport Express worked perfectly.  In fact, even high quality photos look good printed this way.

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New Navigation Mode

Paul Westbrook | 24 May, 2007 23:36

Yesterday, it cost $50 to fill up our van with gas.  This got me thinking that I should be using our navigation system to help reduce our gas usage.  The navigation unit will give the most direct route to the destination, so this should reduce mileage.

The only problem with this solution is that the route doesn't take into account whether the route is the most efficient for our car.  For example, the most direct route may be on city streets, while our car may not get the best mileage on those roads.

 (More)

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XM Satellite reception

Paul Westbrook | 21 May, 2007 14:48

While driving around today, I noticed that reception on our XM radio was pretty spotty.  I just saw this post that mentions that one of XM's satellites is not working correctly, and their repeaters having problems.

Update: It looks like the problem has been solved. Here is an email I received from XM:

XM Radio Resumes Normal Levels of Service XM Satellite Radio has resumed normal levels of service for customers who experienced outages or significantly degraded service starting yesterday. The problem occurred during the loading of software to a critical component of the satellite broadcast system, which resulted in a temporary loss of signal from one of the company’s satellites. After you turn on your XM radio, please allow five to ten minutes to reacquire the XM signal. XM apologizes for any inconvenience this has caused.

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links for 2007-05-20

Paul Westbrook | 20 May, 2007 02:21

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Copy Protection and Comcast Problems

Paul Westbrook | 20 May, 2007 00:01

I got this message on my TiVo Series3. 

Subject:    Information Regarding Your Premium Channels
From:       TiVo Customer Support
Date:       Thu 5/3

This is an important message that may impact your ability to
receive premium channels. Please read it carefully.

Comcast has recently announced plans to enable their Copy
Protection Management Systsm in the Bay Area.

As a result, in order for your CableCARD(tm) decoders to
continue decrypting premium channels, they will need to be
properly "paired" within the Comcast system.

Here's how to ensure each of your cards is properly paired:

-From TiVo Central, select Messages & Settings. Then select
Settings, Remote CableCARD & Devices, CableCARD Decorder,
Configuring CableCARD 1, CableCARD Menu, Condition
Access

You should not be on the Motorola Conditional Access
CableCARD screen. If your card is paired, you will find a line
that says "Host Validation: Valid." This means that your TiVo HD 
expierience WILL NOT be impacted by theic change, and there's
nothing further you need to do.

However, if it says "Host Validation: Unknow" your card is
not properly paired.  Pleace contact Comcast Customer
Service and share the information from the CableCARD data
screen with the agent assisting you.

Please make sure to repeat tthe above process with 
CableCARD 2.

Even though I was able to record premium channels on both tuners, I checked the status of my CableCARDs.  When I did I noticed that one of them was not paired correctly.  I called Comcast's customer service, and they were not able to get it paired over the phone, so I scheduled a technicians visit.

 (More)

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Mail.app message list column settings

Paul Westbrook | 18 May, 2007 23:56

I was playing around with some of the smart mailboxes that I mentioned before, and I noticed a minor annoyance.  Mail.app only has a global set of columns that are used for all messages list (excluding the Sent folders).  So if you want to see the the recipient of the messages in the "Recently Sent" folder, the To column needs to be added to all folders.

Ideally, the list of columns would be a property of the message list itself.  This will allow the "Recently Sent" folder to show the To column instead of From

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HP Photosmart C3180 and Airport Express

Paul Westbrook | 17 May, 2007 23:09

I finally got around to setting up the HP Photosmart C3180 that we got with the Mac Book Pro.  For printing, I want to be able to send print jobs from all of our computers, so I decided to connect it to a Airport Express.  Unfortunately HP doesn't list this the Photosmart C3180 as a compatible with Airport Printer Sharing.

This post has instructions on getting this printer working with Airport Printer Sharing, using Gutenprint.  The only problem that I have with this setup is that the print quality of photos is pretty poor.

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links for 2007-05-15

Paul Westbrook | 15 May, 2007 02:21

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Jonathan Coulton in NY Times

Paul Westbrook | 14 May, 2007 11:57

The New York Times has an article on Jonathan Coulton.

[via Slashdot]

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Findory Neighbors

Paul Westbrook | 14 May, 2007 11:22

I just discovered that Findory generates an interesting "blog cloud" of the blogs that are related to each other.  Some of the blogs listed on my cloud are pretty interesting.

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DeepSleep

Paul Westbrook | 14 May, 2007 10:54

Normally when I bring my computer between home and work, I shut it down.  I mainly do this to prevent it from waking up, and have the drive jostled while it is spinning.  The downsides of this are that it takes a long time to start back up, and I lose all of the current state.

I have started to used DeepSleep to put my Mac Book Pro in "hibernate" mode.  In this mode, The state of the memory, registers and CPU state are stored on disk.  When the computer starts up, this file is read, and the state is restored.

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links for 2007-05-11

Paul Westbrook | 11 May, 2007 02:20

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