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

1. Download the source rpm from Red Hat
2. rpm -Uvh php-*.src.rpm
3. cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
4. edit php.spec to include "--with-mcrypt "
5. rpmbuild -ba php.spec
6. cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386
7. rpm -Uvh php*.rpm
8. 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.

64.68.84.9 - - [21/Jul/2004:23:01:17 -0700] "GET /atom.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 1085 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

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.