Saturday, January 26, 2008

WebMynd


WebMynd is a site that is supposed to save the content of all of the pages that you view.  Their claim is that you will not need to bookmark any site, but you will be able to search for any of the site that you have seen.



WebMynd is a Firefox add-on that stores the web pages to your local computer.



I am not going to install this.  I already have this functionality with Google Desktop.



 [via TechCrunch]

Connect 360


Connect 360 is a Mac OS X preference pane that lets your play/view content from your Mac OS X computer on your Xbox 360.  It uses iTunes to get the list of tracks and playlist, and iPhoto for photos.  You specify a directory to indicate what videos should be shared.



The demo worked for me, though I only used it to view videos.  The demo will let you view a good number of files.



I would love to use this to view all of my content on my TV.  This would allow me to remove the Mac mini from the AV rack and keep it in the closet.  Unfortunately, the Xbox doesn't support all of the video formats that the Mac mini can, so I would have to transcode many of my videos. 

Friday, January 25, 2008

Tail remote logs


In this post, I mentioned that I was looking for a way to tail log files on a remote computer. Stig commented with a suggestion.  You can specify the sudo and tail command to ssh




ssh user@hostname 'sudo tail -f /var/log/messages'



I am using this solution, but there are two problems:



  1. Your password will appear in the clear in the terminal window when entering it for the sudo command

  2. sudo has to be configured to work on a non-tty terminal, which could be a security hole.


Thursday, January 10, 2008

links for 2008-01-11

Recovering print job


Tonight, I needed to print something on our MacBook Pro.  The computer wasn't able to connect to the printer upstairs, so I decided to print it to the downstairs printer.  Unfortunately, Microsoft Word crashed when I attempted to print the file, and I had not saved the files. 



I didn't really want to retype the document so I went looking for the printer spool files from the They pdf files, so I just dragged them to the desktop and printed the files.

Jungle Disk 1.50a


Jungle Disk version 1.50a has been released.  This release includes some pretty cool features.



  1. File upload resume

  2. Block-level file updates

  3. Native linux integration using FUSE



Some of the features require a Jungle Disk Plus subscription.  They are currently giving away a free year subscription, if you sign up before the 15th.  After that, the subscription is $1 a month.




Monday, January 7, 2008

Squeezebox for kids bedrooms


Tonight, I was sitting downstairs working on the computer, listening to the baby monitor.  Then the CD in baby's room started to skip, and it woke her up.  This made me think about this post that I wrote a while ago.



The kids have a tendency to scratch CDs and break CD and tape players (cassettes can not be played in one of their radios any more).  I started to think of the ideal solution.  I like the way that the SqueezeBox is able to play my whole colection of music, and I am able to control it remotely (to turn it off after the kids go to sleep, or turn down the volume). And that is without the media being damaged.



SoundBridge Radio
The one problem with the SqueezeBox is that it doesn't have built-in speakers.  Ideally Logitech would come out with a SqueezeBox that integrates speakers and an amplifier.  Something like the Roku SoundBridge Radio would be great. Unfortunately the SoundBridge Radio doesn't support the latest version of  SlimServer.



 



 

Bill Gates' last day


This is a pretty funny video from Bill Gate's CES keynote address



http://embed.break.com/NDI5NDIw
Bill Gates Last Day Of Work - Watch more free videos

Nuvi 680 update


I have been using the Garmin Nuvi 680 for a while now, and I do like it.  There are some things that I don't like about it. 



  1. You can't specify a number destinations and have the Nuvi calculate the best route to all of them.  You can only specify a destination and a single "via point"

  2. You can't specify a road to avoid when routing.  For example, there is no way for you to specify that you want to avoid a particular highway on your route

  3. The traffic alerts do not indicate the time that they were last updated.  It is impossible for you to determine how likely a alert is to still be a problem.

  4. The microphone on the unit, when mounted on the dash is near the windshield.  So, when it is raining out side, it is hard for the other person on the line to hear you.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Switched back to Gnome


I have decided to switch back to Gnome from KDE.  I personally like the interface of KDE better, but there were two things that weren't working.



  1. KDE's built WebDAV client doesn't allow the clients to be mounted with write access, so I had to manually mount the server on the command line.

  2. The sound on the internal speakers on laptop was extremely quiet.


Both of these problems don't happen for me in Gnome.

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