i40.com - Technology

Updates to theFridgePoet

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Mon, 08 May 2006 07:02:53 -0400

Recently, while working on another project (SimplephotoShare.com) I came across an idea to improve theFridgePoet.com some of you might remember from several months ago. The "unused" words are now in a small frame "WordRepository" (so there is less screen clutter) which can be moved around to make it easier to create poetry anywhere on the page.

When you drag a word back onto the Word Repository it automatically gets put back in alphabetical order, making words easier to find.

Let me know what y'all think.

-Jason

WYSISWG/Spell Checking.

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 22:01:44 -0500

Alright. I finally have a WYSIWYG editor and and spell checker running correctly in Firefox. This shouldn't have been nearly as hard as it was, but being as bad a speller/typist (yea all my errors are typing errors honest ) I was having issues with just about ever solution I tried.

Google tool bar has a nice spell checker with it but when you spell check in web (java) based wysiwyg editors it leaves a complete mess behind. The one time i didn't catch it was an email to all my customers.

So what was the solution?

Performancing

It's a Firefox based wysiwyg editor that has blogging hooks for all the major blogging software (including LJ and serendipity. It's not "web based' which means it's not as finicky as all the web based wysiwyg editors out there.

I got the idea from Wil Wheaton's blog WWdN: In Exile: state of the exile where he explains some of the options he's exploring for the next iteration of his wildly successful blog.

With any luck this will help me turn my "hey I need to blog about such and such" into actual blog posts.

Aiden is counting to 13 (although I alluded to him counting to 15 in a comment, that was premature). And he is starting to discover what being 2 is all about.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

-Jason

Boys and Their Toys...

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 10:20:36 -0500

For Christmas/Anniversary (of when we started dating 11 years ago) Cheryl got me a Nokia 770. Despite the fact that it is from Nokia, it is NOT a phone. It's a Linux based (Maemo - Debian ARM) internet tablet with built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (so I can connect to the internet through my cell phone w/o any wires). It weighs in at just 8oz but does 80% of what I use my laptop for.

Currently it comes with a web browser, email, a MP3/Video Player and a newsreader but it is under heavy development and since it's Linux it's trivial to "hack". I've gotten access to the command line (and ssh), and can use it to completely remote manage Linux and Windows machines.

The Screen is fantastic, although I am still trying to figure out the best video format to use for watching TV ripped from our Tivos on it.

Webbrowser

For text entry it either uses an on-screen keyboard (see the second screenshot) or text recognition (which I haven't quite gotten the hand of yet, it would have been nice if they had gone with Palms recognition system.)

There are a handful of games for it (Including one of my all-time Favorites "NetHack"), and more being compiled daily (the Joys of open source). Since Nokia is still developing it (They released it early in the product cycle to find out how people are using it) it's still a little rough around the edges. but the last update got rid of the memory issues, as well as some crashing I was seeing.

keyboard - xTerm

The community has already gotten bluetooth GPS working and, hopefully we can convince TOMTOM to support it.

The price has dropped $30 since we bought it, so todays mission is to test CompUSA's price protection policy. It should be easy since I want to apply that $30 to the cost of a 2 year service plan on it. ($45 for 2 years seems pretty cheap for something this delicate).

My previous post, about the media getting the miners tragedy wrong was done entirely from my 770 and my Cell phone (to take the picture of the newspaper) while at lunch.

-Jason

TheFridgePoet

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 12:47:26 -0400

The Fridge Poet is up and running. The interface should be familiar to anyone who enjoys a cold soda.

Right now it only has a single word-set of 1000 words (plus duplicates), but I am actively working on (and seeking volunteers to) creating new themed word-sets, as well as revising the current word-set.

If The Fridge Poet strikes your fancy, I'd love it if you would spread the word. Include screen captures of your favorite poetry, etc.

I'd also like to find a neater (as in "Golly Gee that's neat", or at least cleaner) way of displaying that many words in a confined space. If you have any ideas, conceptualy (I can handle the technical side of it) please don't hesitate to let me know.

Anyone who would like to help create a word-set just needs to type them into a text editor, word processor, or email application and email them to me. In return I'm offering to host a private refrigerator for you with that (or any of my word-sets) that you can share with whoever, a license to install the refrigerator on your own site (php, and mySQL needed), or a percentage of all revenue related to that word-set (Sales, Ads, Movie Rights, Merchandising, etc).

I would like to start out with decade word-sets (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s), romantic, adult, etc. If you have me host a private refrigerator or you install it on your own site, you can have a private word-set (for example if you are a musician, you can include all the words from your lyrics).

If you have any questions, please email me at jason@thefridgepoet.com.

-Jason

The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 16:31:50 -0400

I am Stunned and dismayed that 1) I didn't think of this:

The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!

and 2) that the lucky bastard has made $289,000 off of it so far.

Anyone wanna help me do a similar site? I have an idea for it already.

-Jason

More Spell with Flickr

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 09:08:56 -0400

This one is dynamic, and will change with each page refresh.. (but is not LJ friendly).

Cool hack from http://metaatem.net/words/

-Jason

EDIT: I have Noticed it does Mispellwords almost as often as I do.

Google Power Searching

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:17:53 -0400

I just wrote an article on the i40 Wiki that some of you may be interested in on complex searches in google.

I40Wiki: Google Power Searching

feel free to pass it around.

-Jason

JustBlogIt

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 08:40:44 -0400

JustBlogIt with a simple right-click.

Alright, I found a cool website (that will be in the next entry) that I wanted to blog about. But I hadn't gotten around to installing a Firefox extension to facilitate easily blogging about a website (and I certainly don't want this to turn into a website of the day type blog). So I went hunting around. For anyone running Firefox (And if your not why not?), who blogs, "justBlogIt" is very handy. Right click on the page you want to blog about, and it brings up your blog editor for what ever blogging system you use (LiveJournal, moveable type, blogger, etc) and even allows setting up for blog software it doesn't know about (Like Serendipty which I use on i40.com).

It also allows you to store 4 different blog profiles, so you can choose which blog you want to post in. (Although can't use it to post to more than one blog at a time, luckily serendipity handles that for me).

Next Post. Corporate America tries to squash the little guy.

-Jason

Fun with Google Maps

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:34:07 -0400

Many of you may not know my father lives on a sailboat. Sure he has tivo, laptops, GPS, GPRS Modem, DSL and cable (the later 2 only when not under sail) but a sailboat none the less. If I had been paying attention when he had been going on and on about his boat I could tell you how big it was. I do know it was made by 'Dufor'.

He is setting sail today on his annual vacation (I didn't realize people who lived on boats, needed a vacation) sailing from New Rochelle, NY to Newport, RI (Rhode Island, for those of you who's maps aren't printed in wall sized, is the tiny little state robbing both Connecticut and MA from some valuable shore line.)

Originally he was planning on soloing part of this 4 day journey, and having seen too many episodes of Gillians Island, Survivor (Richard Hatch is from RI, and we all know how messy THAT could get, and LOST) I decided it was a good excuse to mess around with Google Maps.

I created an email gateway that allows him to email latitude and longitude (from his GPS) to a certain email address which captures his position, and adds a data point to a scrolling (Thanks to Google) updating (thanks to me) map.

From a technical standpoint this may appeal to some of you, from a 'where is my dad' standpoint, it will appeal to even fewer of you. You can see the fruits of my labor at WheresDad or for people with Internet Explorer WheresDad For IE (I couldn't get some of the graphics working in IE).

How it works.

I have my email system set up to pipe email sent to a particular address to a php script that parses the email, extracts Lat, Long, and the accompanying note and inserts it into a mySQL database.

The website is a php script that reads the database, centers the MAP on the last (Chronologically) position, and draws a path backwards to the starting point. Any point that doesn't have a note attached to it gets added to the path, but no icon.

The overlay (in the non IE version) is a hacked up graphic. I use z-layers to get googles map to appear under it.

If anyone has any questions about Google maps API, or has a project that could take advantage of google maps (Gigs? family? etc) let me know.

-Jason

MP3Mystic in the press!

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 13:28:41 -0400

Popular Science's (Yes the people with the geeky magazine)website has an article on streaming music across the internet. MP3Mystic is the first product mentioned!

Perhaps it's coincidence but I actually did work on Mp3Mystic last night, and am planning on releasing a brand spanking new version soon (with hooks for the Wimpy MP3 player integration. Hopefully I will squash some outstanding bugs at the same time.

It's not the first time mp3mystic has been picked up by the press (I have a print magazine with a review of it from last year), but it's always nice to get some free advertising. I don't know when the article went up (it is the most recent article in their How 2.0 section) but I have noticed the increase traffic.

Cheryl and Aiden met me for lunch today. That always makes my day better!

-Jason

Tivo Hacking (Again).

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 08:29:04 -0400

Just the other night I was joking with Cheryl that I was going to have to re-hack the Tivos again. And she laughed in a nervous politeness that indicated I better be kidding.. I was..

Our Tivos have been working flawlessly since the last time I hacked them, the week we got them. I had one of them cracked opened, and torn apart before the FedEx truck got out of the driveway. As marvelous as the Tivos are, I knew we could get more out of them. DirecTivos (Tivos with DirecTV built into them) have great picture (same stream that comes from the Satellite) and Sound (Dolby Digital Encoding) but lack some features that stand alone Tivos brag about.

There is no way to Schedule recordings remotely (like when I'm at work, and remember something I want to record).
There is no way to pull programs off the DirecTivo and save them on DVD for friends, family, and archiving.
There is no way to pull a program from one Tivo and watch it on another Tivo

All these things are useful and the only way to get them on a DirecTivo is to hack it. So Hack it I did. It was a 2 weeks of research (the Tivo hacking forums are Hostile to anyone who doesn't do due diligence before asking a question, and step by step guides are severely frowned upon since the technology changes so quickly), cussing, Green Screens of Death, more cussing, and eventually celebration.

This morning I finally got another feature working, I successfully took a DVD and inserted the program onto one of the Tivos, which means I now need MORE space on the Tivo to store DVDs so I can put the originals out of the way of our 17 Month Old.

I was also reading, just this week, that the new software version will be forced on me sooner or later, and my life will be simpler if I do the upgrade myself rather than re-hacking the units after the upgrade takes effect (and the
upgrade has some nice features including faster browsing).

So now the research begins again, and I can already hear Cheryl asking "Why can't you just leave this stuff alone!?!?!?!?!?".

For a list of good Tivo Hacking resources see this Wiki Entry.

-Jason

Wimpy Wimpy wimpy...

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:55:36 -0400

I just found a new toy, and thy name is Wimpy mp3 player. It sits on your website, and lets visitors listen to multiple streaming tracks of music. As soon as I get back from vacation I'm going to set up a full demo (If any of my musical friends would like a track or two of their featured please email me permission, if I have the track already cool, if I don't let me know where I can get it). Users will be able to listen to the music, but not download it. I of course will give credit, and a pointer to your website/cdbaby/what ever you'd like.

Feel free to take a look at Wimpy, and let me know your thoughts.

-Jason

Site Upgrade

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 22:40:57 -0400

I just updated to the latest verison of serendipity. If you notice anything amis, please let me know.
This entry isn't copied to LJ, why would they care?

-Jason

Poor Mans Video Production

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:26:07 -0400

I just read a good article with links to 3 freeware/open source applications that when combine make for a very powerfull video production suite. The applications are:

Cinepaint for frame by frame video editing
Blender for 3d Animation
Jahshaka for video editing and post production

Here is the Article

-Jason

Blogs now syncronized

jason@i40.com (JasonR) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 16:52:34 -0400

I have managed to get both my blogs i40.com and Live Journal Syncronized (thanks to this plug-in). All posts made to my main blog at i40.com will be echo'd at livejournal. Comments wont cary over back and forth, but it will have me from having to double post. Maybe, I'll figure out how to have comments mirrored.. somehow.

i40.com is run on my own webhost via a program called Serendipty. If anyone would like a free blog account just drop me a line.

I don't know how images will cary over, I'll have to test it. Maybe... just maybe.. I will increase my blogging now. For my LJ friends you may want to head over to the i40.com blog and see what you've been missing.

-Jason