August 5th, 2010 by jeff
After filling up with gas, this debug output came out along with my receipt. Leftover from previous maintenance?
ThreatFire silently blocks Plants vs Zombies and other steam games from running
February 23rd, 2010 by jeff
Apparently there’s an incompatibility between ThreatFire and steam. Trying to play Plants vs Zombies just results in it trying to load and then silently failing without any error messages. Simply disabling ThreatFire protection isn’t good enough; I recommend uninstalling completely.
There’s a forum threat on the issue – http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65000
Use Google Docs as a lightweight ’syncable’ shareable shopping list for your mobile phone
February 22nd, 2010 by jeff
I’ve been looking for an ideal way to have a shopping list I can easily edit on my PC and then access with my mobile phone while I’m at the grocery store. Evernote and other programs which provide true file ’syncing’ work okay, but just felt a bit too heavyweight for my task.
Enter: Google docs. I have a spreadsheet named ‘Shopping list’ that I can very quickly edit from *any* PC connected to the net. On my phone, I use Opera Mobile and have a bookmark directly to that specific spreadsheet. With saved passwords enabled, it’s only a few taps total to bring up the list. The mobile version also supports limited doc editing, although it’s too slow be all that useful.
*Bonus* – If you share write access to your shopping list doc, your significant other/housemates can add to the list without your intervention!
I’ve been using this system for a few months and found it to work wonderfully. Of course you won’t be able to access your list if you don’t have cell coverage at the store, but that’s never been a problem for me.
Personal IRC logging for easy remote reading
May 25th, 2009 by jeff
There’s a plethora of knowledge and insightful conversations that continue 24/7 on IRC. I’ve looked into easy ways to read these conversations at my leisure, but all the ‘ready-made’ apps came up short. I ended up using some scripts on my NAS to maintain a current archive of conversations in HTML format viewable remotely from any browser. Continue reading ‘Personal IRC logging for easy remote reading’
Using email filters to reduce distractions
April 22nd, 2009 by jeff
I use gmail as my main email provider, and have been checking it using both Gmail Notifier and IMAP on my Fuze mobile phone. I never realized how much ‘junk’ went into my main inbox until my phone started alerting me upon every received message. I’m not talking about actual spam, but newsletters and notifications that aren’t really important but which I still enjoy reading in my downtime. I could have just disabled the alert, but that would be admitting defeat and negating a potentially useful capability of the phone.
Continue reading ‘Using email filters to reduce distractions’
Remote control Xbox 360 music using a cell phone (or PC)
March 5th, 2009 by jeff
Since my AT&T Fuze is basically a portable computer, I’ve been trying to find cool (if not entirely useful) uses for it. For my latest project, I wanted to use it as a remote control for my Xbox 360’s music playing. Ideally, I’d like to use my 360 as a music player during a party and have the ability to remotely control the song selection without navigating the clunky Xbox interface which lacks any search features. What follows is a guide on what works (and especially what doesn’t work) for accomplishing this.
Continue reading ‘Remote control Xbox 360 music using a cell phone (or PC)’
Bulk upload data when using app-engine-patch
February 3rd, 2009 by jeff
I’ve been interested in learning more about both Django and Google’s App Engine, so I’ve been playing with app-engine-patch, a project that simplifies using Django on App Engine. I like it so far; it seems pretty simply, and it’s really easy to just extract the sample project and start modifying it.
Many of the personal projects I’ve been working on have needed some kind of ‘preset’ data. E.g. makes of cars, categories of food, etc. Data that won’t change frequently, but should most likely live in a database. It probably *could* just permantly live in a database, but since I’d rather not do that since I haven’t yet committed to a schema (or really even framework!). I’d prefer to keep the data in a simple external file like a spreadsheet if possible.
Continue reading ‘Bulk upload data when using app-engine-patch’
Successfully modded my Wii
January 29th, 2009 by jeff
There’s something incredibly appealing about giving hardware extra features just by loading some code. Now my Wii joins my Xbox and PSP in being opened up to the homebrew community.
There are tons of guides on Wii modding online. After reading through most of the current ones and comparing/contrasting them, I settled on a relatively straightforward guide at afterdawn. The process was relatively straightforward; the only stumbling block I ran into was when I received a cryptic error while trying to install the homebrew channel. Turns out I was using a bad/incompatible SD card, using a different card worked fine.
My biggest unexpected surprise came from the Homebrew Browser. This ingenious app acts just like the Shopping channel, but hosts free homebrew games and utilities. You simply click the app you want, and it automatically downloads and ‘installs’ to your SD card. It’s amazing that the homebrew scene can put together a more cohesive experience than some commercial platforms.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a way to run commercial games off of an external USB hard drive. I’m not interested in piracy, but my Wii quite frequenty has problems reading game discs. I already spent $60 to get it ‘repaired’ by Nintendo, but the problems started again a month or so later.
Looking forward to whatever else the homebrew scene has in store…
Building Windows Mobile apps using QT
January 17th, 2009 by jeff
Because I use multiple platforms on a daily basis, I’m a big fan of cross-platform software. I’d been previous considering writing my personal apps in python/wxPython for this purpose, but with the recent announcement of QT going LGPL, I thought I’d try out QT and see if I could compile a program to use on my Fuze running WM 6.1 Professional.
Didiom Review – Stream music from desktop to phone
January 10th, 2009 by jeff
I’m constantly looking for new media/phone software to play with, and just came across Didiom, a free pair of programs that lets you stream all your home pc music onto your phone over your data connection.
Continue reading ‘Didiom Review – Stream music from desktop to phone’