Since AppleScript doesn't have a built in capability for encoding or decoding HTML entities, or even a search a replace capability, I went looking for some sample code that does a search and replace. This page has a good example of how to do this.
Technorati Tags: AppleScript
I have updated the Post Trackbacks AppleScript. It looks like ecto now html encodes the urls when using the link tool (which is the correct thing to do). Now the script correctly parses the urls out of the body text, and it un-htmlencodes the url before calling curl.
You can download the script here.
Technorati Tags: AppleScript, ecto
Unfortunately, these only have a USB interface, so they require a Windows driver installed in order to use them. I would love to see one of these compatible with the PlayStation 2. When I play SOCOM II, I usually wear headphones on top of the headset, so I don't wake the kids or my wife up. This gets pretty uncomfortable after a while. I would love it if someone would make a headphone that integrated a microphone. Then the cable would have two ends. One with a headphone plug to connect to the main sound source, and then another mini jack plug to connect to the headset port.
[via Engadget]
In the May 2005 issue of Linux Pro Magazine there was a review of the Bluefish HTML editor. I downloaded it through fink to try it out. It looks like a pretty good program to edit html. It looks better than Mozilla or emacs, which is what I have been using.
The screen never did get popped out of the door, but the door seemed pretty unstable, and was falling off the track. Also the screen was pretty dark, so it was hard to seen in and out through the screen. After about 3 years of use, some holes started to appear, I decided to just go to Home Depot and pick up a standard screen.
The other thing that I would like to see is the ability to rate tracks on the iPod Shuffle itself. Apple is marketing this as a device where a random sample of your music gets added to the iPod Shuffle. Then you play it in a random order. Since everyone probably has music in their collection that don't like as much, there will be some songs they don't want to listen to, it would great if you could do something on the iPod that would help to train the AutoFill random selection.
pLog 1.0.1 has been released and includes some new features and bug fixes. It can be downloaded from http://www.plogworld.net
Technorati Tags: pLog
Version 4.1.0 of the official BitTorrent client has been released. This version has support for trackerless torrents. This allows you to download files, even when the centralized tracker is not available. Also this is helpful for people publishing content, when they are not able to run a tracker.
After I upgraded the rpm, I neede to make two changes in order to get this to work for me.
The upcoming version 1.0.1 of pLog will have built-in support for podcasting. Now audio files included as resources will be added as enclosures in the posts in the rss feed.
Technorati Tags: pLog
The latest version of Shrook now has integrated podcast support. Now you can download your audio podcasts directly into iTunes from within Shrook. It doesn't only handle audio enclosures, but handles any type of enclosures like video or torrent files.
Threre are two features that I would like to see:
Mark Pesce delivers a good speech on the threat the the television industry has with piracy. He also gives good suggestions on how the television industry can still make money. Here is a torrent, where it is available.
[via Mostly Muppet Dot Com]
I think that the server problem that I mentioned before is a memory leak in apache. When I restart apache, each of the worker threads take up a certain amount of memory. Then I make a request to a simple php script, and then the resident memory has increased after.
The simple script that I am using is:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
This is really annoying. I noticed today that I had a new site that linked to my blog, according to Technorati. I think that they picked my blog because I had a post that talked about light bulbs, and I guess that they are selling light bulbs.
But they are posting the articles that I have written on their site. They are not doing this automatically, since their blog is running on Blogger. They do have links to my blog, but the posts say that they are posted by "Ron".
They don't have any AdSense or any other ads on this page, so they are not trying to get direct revenue from the content. But since this page does link to the page that actually sells the light bulbs, I think that they are trying increase their PageRank.
I would be interested in these bulbs if they were dimmable, so I could use them with my X10 system. I couldn't tell from the specs if they are capable of dimming.
In a post I wrote a while ago, I talked about a way to make a TiVo make phone calls over a VoIP connect. Vonage used to have instructions on dial prefixes that would work. (It looks like they removed all of those instructions.)
I just got a new TiVo, and was trying to set it up, and the second phone call was failing. I did a search on the web, and I found these instructions that would allow the TiVo to make the phone calls over a broadband connection.
When I was copying music to the iPod Shuffle, I accidentally disconnected the iPod from my laptop. This caused iTunes to crash. I guess it didn't close the library file correctly, because when I launched iTunes again, I got the following error message:
" The iTunes 4 Music Library rile is locked, on a locked disk, or you do not have write permissions for this file."
This page has a description of how to fix this problem.
Update: The previous page is not available. Here is the page on Google Cache.
Update #2: It looks like the page is gone from Google Cache.
On Friday, my free iPod Shuffle arrived. I got this by using the FreeiPodShuffle.com web site. The one site that made it very easy to fufill the requirements is on the I Hate my Cubicle website. They have a banner program that if you use them as a referrer, you can have your referrer link added to their banner rotation. From this I got people, that I don't know, using my referral link.
Now, I am going to try to see if I can get a free Mac Mini or Photo iPod.
If you are interested in trying these out, click on these links (Mac Mini, Photo iPod), or go to FreeStuff-IHMC.
I tried and really like Delicious Library. It is a library manager for all of your DVDs, CDs, books and games, just like DVDAttache. It has a great polish.
The one unique feature that it has is that it can use a firewire web cam to act like a barcode scanner. This will allow items to be automatically imported, without any typing. In addition to this, you can enter items with title, UPC, or ISBN searches.
Also, you can export the library to your ipod. And they have added Spotlight indexing of the library.
I looked through all of the templates that are available for pLog, and I noticed that all of them don't show the full name for the authors of the posts. I made the following change to allow this to work.
<span class="date">
{$postOwner->getUsername()}
| {$locale->formatDate($postDate,"%d %B, %Y %H:%M")}
</span>
<span class="date">
{if strlen($postOwner->getFullName()) > 0 }
{$postOwner>getFullName()}
{else}
{$postOwner->getUsername()}
{/if}
| {$locale->formatDate($postDate,"%d %B, %Y %H:%M")}
</span>
The velcro holding the XM Commander display in our Odyssey got loose, so I reattached it with some stronger velcro. I also took the opportunity to position it better. Now the buttons are more accessible and the display is easer to see from the drivers seat.
Unfortunately, the strongest velcro that I could find is white, so it is a little more visible than I would have liked.
These telco powered devices are pretty funny, but also interesting. These are devices that are powered by the electrical current on telephone lines. I assume that most of these work by having a battery, and using the phone current to trickle charge the battery.
I think that the funniest product is the telco powered vibrator.
[via MAKE: blog]
The April 29th episode of the Make podcast, mentions smashTheTONES. This is a free service that lets you upload your own music to use a ring tone for your cell phone. It also lets you upload images as well.
I tried to use this with my Motorola T730c, but this phone only supports uploading images though this service. Also, I am not able to see the images on my phone, but I think that this is caused because I don't pay for Verizon's GetPIX service
This is an interesting web page that describes how a web page can automatically install a Dashboard widget. It also looks like Apple does not provide a way for you to remove an installed Dashboard widget.
This web page installs a moderately malicious widget. In order to remove it, you will have to manually remove it and restart the Dashboard.
Apple need to prevent these types of attacks.
[via Slashdot]
Twice today, my server got unresponsive where I had to turn it off, and then turn it back on. When it was in this state, I noticed that the hard drive was thrashing. After rebooting it the first time, I noticed that apache died because it wasn't able to allocate memory.
I think that one of the processes is leaking memory so bad that it eventually uses all of the swap space. I don't think that this problem is caused by anything external, as I can see a log of all of the connections though my firewall. Now I just need to find out what is leaking the memory.
Update: I found out what causing the problem. I had installed version 1.3.0 of munin. Since I had a cron job that got the statistics every 5 minutes and it appears that some of the processes were not finishing, so eventually the computer would run out of memory. I updated munin to 1.3.2, and it doesn't seem to have this problem.
I have decided to turn off FileVault on my PowerBook. When FileVault is enabled, your home directory is copied into an encrypted disk image, which is mounted when you log in. This disk image is supposed to be a sparse disk image, which is supposed to increase in size to fit the contents of the image. The size of the disk images is supposed to decrease when files are deleted.
It looks like Apple's implementation is not that good. When you create a new file, the disk image size is increased. This happens, even though a larger file was just deleted. The only time that the disk image is compressed is when the computer is shut down, and I hardly ever shutdown my laptop, but instead I just put it to sleep.
There is a new version of ecto, and it is pretty cool. Now ecto has explicit support for tags from Technorati, del.icio.us, and Flickr. This version allows you create and add tags from directly in the draft window.
Maybe, I will try getting the built-in VPN client to to work with my companies VPN server. If that would work, then I can install 10.4
In this post I mentioned that I added Growl support to the Post TrackBack AppleScript. I wanted to do this in a way that would work correctly if Growl wasn't installed. (AppleScript has a habit of popping up a dialog if it can't find an application that it was expecting.
This page has a great example of using Growl if it is installed.
This alarm also has a "Remote Controlled silence/test" feature, where you can use your TV remote to silence false alarms and test the alarm. I though that this would be a good feature, because then my wife wouldn't have to get on a stepping stool to silence the alarm.
A while ago, I had tried to use Proteus as my IM client, and I even registered it. I eventually switched back to using Apple's iChat since Proteus did not easily integrate with Apple's Address Book.
This weekend, I downloaded the latest version of Proteus, and I really like it. It now integrates well with Apple's Address book and displays the full name for a user, instead of the IM username. It also displays the picture that is assigned to the card in Address Book.
FlashGot is a pretty cool Firefox extension that allow you to have all of your download be managed by an external download manager. It adds a new radio button to the download dialog, which allows you to specify if you want the browser to download the file or send it to the download manager. Also, there is a preference that lets you specify that files with certain extension should always be sent to the download manager.
On Mac OS X, it allow downloads to be sent to Speed Download.
I have updated the Post Trackback script. Now, if you have Growl installed, it will present notifications with Growl instead of a dialog in ecto.
You can download the script here.
I've been pleased with my Home Assistant setup for some time now. One of my main focuses has been achieving local control. This ensures...
