Harmony Remote and Logitech
The harmony remote is the best universal remote that I have used. It has hard buttons, so it is a lot easier to use than the Philips Pronto remotes (which I have owned also). You connect it to your computer, and use their web based interface to program it. It work great with Mac OS X
It looks like Harmony was bought by Logitech. When you go to the harmony web site at http://www.harmonyremote.com, the browser gets redirected to http://www.logitech.com/harmony.
Motorola V3
Engaget has a post on this great phone. It is just 14mm thick, with a case made of titanium. It has a builtin camera phone, Bluetooth, a 4096 color external LCD, and a 26,000 color main display.
If this works with Apple’s iSync, this will be the best phone that I have seend
Touch Screen Smart Watch
The Tissot High T Touch Screen watch is a very cool watch. It receives personal content such as appointment reminders, or Instant Messages. It has a touch screen to interact with the interface. It costs about $725, and that includes 6 months of service.
Updating modified php install
There is a new update to php. yum offered to install the update for me, but I couldn’t do it since I modified my php installation. I compiled php with mcrypt, so I could use encryption with Maia Mailguard
These are the steps that I use to update php
- Download the source rpm from Red Hat
- rpm -Uvh php-*.src.rpm
- cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
- edit php.spec to include "–with-mcrypt "
- rpmbuild -ba php.spec
- cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386
- rpm -Uvh php*.rpm
- restart apache
google and atom.xml
I have been noticing that Google has been trying to crawl a file named atom.xml, even though I don’t have any links to this url.
I believe that atom is Google’s replacement for rss.
Since plog has the atom feed at /rss.php?blogId=2&profile=atom, I wrote a rewrite rule so my atom feed will be crawled by Google.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/atom.xml$ /rss.php?blogId=2&profile=atom [L,R]
New domain
I just registered a domain for this blog. I registered paulstimesink.com from Aplus.net, for only $5.95. The main reason that I wanted to do this is to add search to the blog. plog, doesn’t have a search functionality (which I think is pretty bad), so I am going to add a google search, since it can be set up to limit results to a certain domain.
I also have created a mod_rewrite rule to automatically forward traffic from www.westbrooks.org/blog to the new domain.
Motorola V710
Engadget has a post on the next phone that I want get. The Motorola V710 has a 1 megapixel camera phone, as well as BlueTooth. It looks like Verizon will be locking down the phone to only work with their software. If this will work with Apple’s iSync, I will get one of these.
Motorola Bluetooth adapter
Engadget has a post on Motorola’s bluetooth adapter. It adds Bluetooth functionality to Motorola cell phones that have a data port. The prices is pretty good, as it is only $39.99.
I will buy one of these for my T720, if I can verify that when using the bluetooth adapter it works with iSync. The phone currently work with iSync with the USB data cable. Also, if I bought it, I would think about buying the BlueTooth Car Kit. It does look like the car kit will only work with the V600 and the Timeport 270c. Maybe iw will work with my T720.
tinyurl.com
TinyURL.com is a very cool but very simple service. It will convert long urls to short ones. For example it converts:
to:
Right now the service is free, but I could see themputting ads into it. For example, when clicking on one of the tinyurl.com links, it could put the linked content into a frame, with ads around it.
cyrus imap ssl
Today, the certificate for my imap server expired, so I had to generate a new one. The problem was that I couldn’t remember how I generated it the first time. I looked online to find some instructions, and I found these
openssl rsa -in key.pem -out new.key.pem
openssl x509 -in req.pem -out ca-cert -req
-signkey new.key.pem -days 999
mkdir /var/imap
cp new.key.pem /var/imap/server.pem
rm new.key.pem
cat ca-cert >> /var/imap/server.pem
chown cyrus:mail /var/imap/server.pem
chmod 600 /var/imap/server.pem # Your key should be protected
echo tls_ca_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf
echo tls_cert_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf
