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Paul's Time Sink

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Wordle

Paul Westbrook | 02 July, 2008 12:16

Wordle is an interesting site that will generate a stylized tagcloud for some entered text, a site or a rss feed. Here is the cloud that Wordle generated for the feed on this blog:

Wordle tag cloud

[via Sad Salvation]

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Trust, Privacy and Applications

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2008 22:49

There are some pretty cool new applications out there that I would like to try.  The only problem is that I have some problems trusting them.  Xoopit and Skyfire are two examples of this.

Xoopit is an extension to Gmail that lets you easily access and share your photos, videos and files that are in your Gmail account.  The problem with this is that you have to give them your gmail username and password, in order for them to index the data. 

Skyfire is a Windows Mobile web browser.  This browser is supposed to deliver a PC based browsing experience that is supposed to be really fase.  The problem that I have with this is in their implementation.  Essentially the Skyfire browser is a VNC or RDP client.  When you enter a web address in the "browser", it gets sent to their servers which fetch the html and renders web page, and then sends the rendered page to the "browser".  When people enter a secure https url, they have the expectation that their data will be encrypted between their browser and the server on the other end.  With Skyfire, the connection is encrypted between Skyfire's severs and the destination server.  I don't know how the connection is encrypted between the "browser" and Skyfire's severs.

I am sure that both Xoopit and Skyfire are not going to do anything malicious with my data, but what if their servers are broken in too.  For mail, I already am trusting Google with my data, adding another third party, adds another potential point of failure.

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feedly

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2008 22:18

I saw this post that mentioned feedly.  This looks like a interesting Firefox chrome application.  feedly presents you a start page that summarizes your content from Google Reader.  feedly also integrates with various social network sites to allow you to share content that you read.

I don't know if I will use feedly regularly for reading content, as Google Reader already has a good summary view.  I do like, and will continue to use, the interface that feedly offers for subscribing to feeds.  On one page, you can subscribe to and tag new feeds.  Since feedly relys on Google Reader as the backend, all feeds subscribed to in feedly are actually subscribed to in Google Reader.

I am interested in what they do with the social aspect of feedly.  It seems that feedly could enable other ways of sharing content, or discovering new content.

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TVersity

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2008 21:53

As I metioned before, I was looking for something to transcode my videos for playback on our XBox.  It looks like TVersity is the best solution.

TVersity is an application that is an UPnP/DNLA server that will share your content with any compatible devices.  In addtion to just sharing, it can transcode the content so it is playable on most devices.

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WebGuide

Paul Westbrook | 22 June, 2008 21:07

I have been looking for a solution for streaming and transcoding videos to our Xbox from the Windows Home Server.  I found WebGuide, and decided to try it out.

WebGuide is a plugin for Windows Home Server that lets you acess the content from your home server from the web.  This is different than the file based access that comes with Windows Home Server. You can view thumbnails of photos.  Also, you can stream music and video files from the server.  WebGuide relies on external transcoders to make your content playable.

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Photos with Windows Home Server

Paul Westbrook | 11 June, 2008 21:57

I have pretty much transitioned everything from our old NAS and Mac mini to our HP MediaSmart home server.  Copying the content to the server was very easy.  All of this content is easily accessible on all of our computers and can be played/viewed on our Xbox.

Windows Home server also has the ability to host "public" web gallerys. The intention is that you can select some photos to share with family members.  Theoretically, I could use Windows Home Server, and get rid of my gallery2 installation.

I made the assumption that once I copied all of our photos into the "Photos" directory, that these photos would automatically be available to be added to these Web Share galleries.  I found out that things don't work exactly this way.  It looks like, even if you have all of your photos in the "Photos" directory on the server, you still have to upload the photos through the web interface.  I wouldn't think that it would be hard to present an html representation of the photos in that share, to allow one of those photos to be selected

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Posting bookmarks

Paul Westbrook | 01 June, 2008 01:36

It looks like posting from within del.icio.us is not working. The last time that I saw this work was in April.

Now I need to find a way to post links to my blog. I could use the javascript to show "shared" items from Google Reader, but this will not allow me to link to things that I don't find from Google Reader.

What I would like to find is a way to post the links from an rss feed.  This would allow me to post del.icio.us links and shared items from Google Reader.

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Problem solved with Windows Home Server

Paul Westbrook | 16 May, 2008 22:02

In this previous post, I mentioned that I was having probelms setting up my HP MediaSmart.  I connected the server and a laptop to a router that wasn't being used.  Once I did this, the setup worked perfectly, and I configured it.

When I connected the server back to the network, the probelms came back.  I then discovered, that if I disconnected my D-link NAS, the problem also went away.

I then tried connecting to the MediaSmart with RDP, and that works, even with the other NAS connected to the network.  I am able to do everyhing, and more, through rdp that I could do through the configuration application.

There is something wrong with the configuration client.  Maybe it has something to do with both the NAS and the MediaSmart being on different workgroups.  Maybe the clients sees one workgroup, the one from the NAS, and then it stops looking for the MediaSmart that happens to be in a different workgroup.

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HP MediaSmart ex475

Paul Westbrook | 11 May, 2008 23:44

HP Windows Home ServerI have been interested in getting a Windows Home Server for a while.  Last week we got a HP MediaSmart ex475.  I was looking forward to installing it, and transfering everything off our NAS and our Mac mini.

When I plugged it in, it started up fine.  I installed the software fine on my laptop, but when the setup assistant tried to find the server, it failed.  It looks like this problem is happening to many other people. Reseting the server back to factory defaults didn't solve the problem.

I am extremely frustrated with this.  I am going to try creating a network with only the server and my laptop, to see if a noisy network could have caused the communication to be interrupted.  If that doesn't work, I will call HP techinical support.  (Unfortunately, this is hard for me to do, as they are only open during business hours, and I am at work at that time.)

I am very close to sending this back.

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apt-get download speed

Paul Westbrook | 09 May, 2008 15:24

This post has a good tip for speeding up apt-get downloads.  Ubuntu will check all of the mirrors to find the one that has the smallest latency.

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Sound, XPS m1330 and Ubuntu 8.04

Paul Westbrook | 08 May, 2008 22:40

In this previous post, I mentioned that everything was working correctly after upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04.  Unfortunately, after I wrote that post my audio stopped working. 

I went through several steps to get audio back, including building and installing the latest version of alsa.

I found that if I put the following line in my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file, everthing works

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-3stack

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Windows Home Server

Paul Westbrook | 26 April, 2008 22:51

HP Windows Home ServerI am thinking about getting the HP EX475 MediaSmart Windows Home Server.  I would replace our NAS with his server.  Also be able to install SqueezeCenter on it as well, and then I can disconnect the Mac mini.

I can use the Windows Home Server to share our photos, music and videos to our XBox for viewing on the TV.

Also, I was thinking that I could install some software that would allow my TiVo content to automatically be archived.

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Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04

Paul Westbrook | 26 April, 2008 22:21

This evening, I upgraded my laptop from Kubuntu 7.10 to 8.04.  I followed their recommended upgrade steps, where I used the alternate CD and then updated from that.  When I was prompted for conflicts for configuration files, I just selected "use the package mantainer's".  I was a little concerned about this, as this was necessary to get sound to work with Ubuntu 7.10, on my laptop.

After booting, everything seems to be working OK, including sound.

The only thing that I have had a problem with so far is that the upgrade upgraded my previous Firefox installation to the 3.0 beta.  Many of my plugins are not compatible with 3.0.  I know that this will be fixed soon.

Also, I haven't made the switch to KDE 4 yet.  I haven't configured it to how I like it, and until I do that, I will stick with GNOME.

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StupidFilter

Paul Westbrook | 31 March, 2008 22:17

StupidFilter looks pretty interesting.  This is an open source project to filter rampant stupidity.  When they release the core engine source code, I will write a plugin for LifeType.

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Daily sending quota exceeded

Paul Westbrook | 25 March, 2008 00:56

My wife has been having a problem sending email.  We currently use Google Apps for our domain, and when she sends email, she gets the following message:

5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded

This message is supposed appear if an account has sent more than 500 messages, or more than 100 when using a mail client.  The problem is that she has only sent 2 messages within last 24 hours.

 I have filed a trouble ticket, and have posted a message on thir Google Group.  In the mean time, I have set up one of our Godaddy email accounts, to allow her to send outgoing mail.

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