Paul's Time Sink

3 Jan, 2009

A few months ago, I signed up with Loopt.  Loopt is a social network that allows you to share your location, and status, with your friends. I didn't do much with it, as I didn't want to spam my friends with invites for yet another social network. A few weeks ago, some of my friends got Loopt account, and I guess they saw that I had a Loopt account and they sent me an invite, so now I have people to broadcast my location to.

 So far, I am not impressed.  Maybe it is because I am updating status from my iPhone.  Since Apple hasn't released support for applications running in the background, I need to constantly launch the Loopt application in order to update my status.  What I really want in a location based updating service is something that I can set the frequency that my location is sent the service, and only if I want to change my status would I have to launch the application.

The other problem I have with Loopt, and other location base social networks, is that I have to maintain a seperate friends list.  I have accounts on too many social networks,  (Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, flickr, Google Friend Connect....) so I don't want to manage another list of contacts.  Ideally, Loopt would use Google Friend Connect/Open Social or Facebook Connect, and then get the friends list that way. 

Technorati tags: Loopt, facebook, iPhone, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, Apple

3 Jan, 2009

I am an avid user of Google Reader.  A while ago, Google added the ability to share an item with a note.  I assumed that this note used the same mechanism as Google Notebook, even though I wasn't a user of Google Notebook. 

Today, I tried out Google Notebook from my phone, as I wanted to jot down some ideas that I had.  I was expecting that the notes that I had written from Google Reader would be there.  They didn't appear anywhere in Google Notebook.  It looks like the notes from Google Reader and the notes in Google Notebook are completly seperate (which I think is pretty silly).

Technorati tags: Google, Google Reader, Google Notebook

3 Jan, 2009

I have intalled several add-ins and programs on our Windows Home Server.  I have been curious about how loaded the server is.  The WHS Task Viewer will show you what your CPU load, and physical and virtual memory usage is in the Windows Home Server Console.  Previously you would have to logged in via RDP and launched the system viewer.

From my  brief view of my system, it is not overloaded at all.

[via We Got Served]

Technorati tags: Windows Home Server, Task Viewer, WHS Task Viewer, RDP

3 Jan, 2009

Normally when you log into a Windows PC via RDP, Windows disables the Restart and Shutdown commands from the Start menu.  This is a pain, especially if you want to force a reboot.

This post has the instructions on how to reboot a PC over RDP.  Here is the command that I use:

 shutdown /r /f /m \\

Technorati tags: RDP, Windows, reboot

3 Jan, 2009

We bought a couple of of Kodak EasyShare W1020 picture frames for gifts.  These are 10" picture frames that can, in addition to displaying photos from memory cards, can display photos from flickr and KodakGallery. We wanted to use these frames as a way to share pictures with family members.

The initial setup of the frame was pretty straight forward.  Once you turned on the frame, it detected all of the wireless networks.  When you select one, and enter the password, it waits for a PC or Mac that has the Kodak software installed.  When you install it, you will be able to configure various channels.

The problem that I had was getting flickr to work.  The firmware that was initially installed has support for rss photos feeds.  I was never able to get any of the rss feeds from my sets to work.  But the built in flickr feeds worked fine.

I noticed that the frame tried to update its firmware, but the upgrade failed.  There isn't a menu option to manullay upgrade the firmware, so I just tried to power cycle it.  On the next boot the firmware upgrade was successful (version from 10/2008)

 (More)

Technorati tags: Kodak, EasyShare, W1020, picture frame

3 Jan, 2009

A while ago, I mentioned that it would be good if a GPS device would give navigation directions that would maximize fuel effeciency.  It looks like Audi and Nissan are working on something like this.

Technorati tags: GPS, navigation

18 Dec, 2008

Since we have transitioned from using our macs to using Windows and Linux, we haven't had a solution for importing our movies from our camcorder.  I looked today for an application that has the same functionality as iMovie for my linux laptop.  Kino looks like it will do the job.

You can import your video via firewire into Kino.  Kino will control a DV camcorder during the import.  Then you can edit and export into various formats.  It seems that Kino is faster at exporting to flv or mpeg4 than iMovie is.

The only problem that I had was when I initially tryed to import the video.  I got an error message that stated: "raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write /dev/raw1394" To fix this, I needed to give myself permsion to access /dev/raw1994

 chmod 777 /dev/raw1394

Technorati tags: Kino, DV, video, linux

14 Dec, 2008

A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Lips. Lips is a karaoke party video game.  The game play is pretty simiar to the rythm based music games, but instead of pushing buttons in time with an onscreen display, you have to sing along with the song.  Using the included microphones the game detects your pitch and compares it to what it thinks is appropriate for the song.

They put a lot of nice touches on the microphones.  There are embedded LEDs that pulse and change colors with the music.  Also, there is an embedded accellerometer in the mic, and you can impove your score in the game by moving around.  In a party situation, other people who are not singing, can use the controllers to play backup instruments.

I am not a singer, my wife is, but this can be a fun game, especially in a party situation.  

I do have some problems with the game. The main problem that I have is that it appears that this game was ported to the Xbox 360, but doesn't correctly implement some of the main features.

1. Achievements - Most games that allow multiple to play on a single Xbox 360 use the Xbox user that is associated with a controller to determine who gets Xbox Achievements.  So normally, if I and my wife are logged in, I will get achievements for the accomplisments that I do, and she will get them for hers.  But in Lips, only the person who launched the game gets the achievements, even if they were earned by the other player.
2. Downloadable Content - Most games that have downloadable content will use that content, if one Xbox account has downloaded it (The DRM that the Xbox 360 uses makes content available to every user on the first Xbox that downloaded it and the user who authorized the download on any Xbox.   But not Lips.  In Lips only the user who downloaded the content can use it to sing.  So if a different user launches Lips, that content is not available.

Update: This problem has been discussed the Lips Xbox forums.  You need to launch Lips as each user that wants to access the DLC.  Then you need to select the content that you want to add to your library.

Technorati tags: Xbox 360, Xbox, Lips

5 Dec, 2008

I really like the potential of Google Friend Connect.  The ability to add social network features to any web site is pretty cool.  One problem that I have is that I have to change the way that I read information to take advantage of Friend Connect.

I normally read blogs through Google Reader.  When I do this, I miss all of the social enhancements provided by Friend Connect.  What would be cool would be if Google Reader could present a Google Connect widget if you are reading a feed where the main site has the widget installed.  Then you would be able to see what other users are reading.

5 Dec, 2008

Google has released Friend Connect today. Friend Connect allows you to add social network features to any web site. 

 

I have installed it on this blog, as I am curious on how it takes off.

[via Official Google Blog]

Technorati tags: Google, Friend Connect, social network

4 Dec, 2008

As I have mentioned before, I have been playing with solutions to get my Google Calendars to sync with my iPhone.  I had settled on using NuevaSync to sync calendar events wirelessly to my phone.  I have gotten fed up with the fact that on my phone, all of the calendars got merged, so it is hard to look at events.

On my wife's computer, I had installed OggSync.  This syncs her calendar to Outlook.  Then from there, the calendars will can be sync'd to Mobile Me.

Yesterday, I found SyncMyCal.  This essentially has the same functionality as OggSync, but it seems more polished.  Both offer free and paid vesions.  I installed it on my computer, and it works well.  I think that I will uninstall OggSync from my wife's computer and install 

Technorati tags: Outlook, Google Calendar, OggSync, SyncMyCal

6 Nov, 2008

This is pretty funny.

 

[via EngadgetHD]

23 Oct, 2008

Ever since I switched to VMware from VirtualBox I have had a problem with audio.  If I launch VMware after launching an application that has played some audio, the audio will not work from guest OS.  Also, if I launch VMware first, no Linux application will be able to play audio.

It looks like the problem is that VMware is using OSS for audio, while the sound mixer that Ubuntu uses is ALSA.  This forum has instructions to get this to work.  Essentially the solution is to use the alsa-oss library to have VMware audio go through alsa.

Technorati tags: vmware, linux, alsa, alsa-oss, oss

2 Oct, 2008

In this post, I decribed that I wasn't able to have Google Reader export a feed of the last 24 hours of shared items. The feed that is generated by Google reader uses the publish date from the original article as the pubDate of the item in the feed.  It would be great if Google embedded the "shared" date in the feed for each item.

In the mean time, I have created a Yahoo Pipe that will do this.  Unfortunately, this requires that the previous period's feed needs to be saved somewhere where this script can access.  I have set a cron job to fetch the feed once a day.  Then the yahoo pipe  uses that cached feed and compares it with the latest feed.

Technorati tags: Google Reader, rss, feed

2 Oct, 2008

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