News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

  • SplashBlog and GCW

    I know this isn’t new, but now that I have a Treo 680, I have been playing around with SplashBlog. SplashBlog is basically a photo sharing site (a la Flickr), but with the added twist that it supports PDA/smartphone synchronization. Here’s what Six Apart says:

    SplashBlog lets you instantly publish photos from your smartphone to an online photo album (photoblog) to share with others. SplashBlog includes everything you need to share your photos, including software for your smartphone and a free online photoblog account at splashblog.com. Just install the FREE software on your smartphone, create your free splashblog.com account and start photoblogging!

    At some level, this is the killer app for a smartphone. Wherever you are, whenever something cool happens, you can snap a picture and push it to the web in about 30 seconds. You don’t even have to describe the picture before posting it, because you can go back afterwards (either on the phone or via their web client) and fill in the details. Of course, it eats data charges faster than Lucky can eat his supper, but it’s still very cool.

    Once I could upload pictures effortlessly, I wanted to make it equally easy to share them with my friends, so I started looking around for a way to display them at NfGCW. I figured I was on the right track when I found “district 30″‘s Photo Sidebar widget but, unfortunately, this doesn’t support SplashBlog out of the box. It was trivial to add the support, however, by including…

    elseif (strpos($item["link"], "http://www.splashblog.com/") >= 0) {
	//SplashBlog
	$item_url = $item["description"];
	$start_pos = strpos($item_url , "<img src=")+10;
    	$end_pos = strpos($item_url , """, $start_pos);
	$item_url = substr($item_url, $start_pos, $end_pos-$start_pos);
}

    … in the code that decides how to pull out the picture URL (i.e. $item_url) based on the different feed types. I also bashed the code to remove the randomization of the order that the pictures are returned. Given the way SplashBlog works, it seems like showing the most recent photos is more interesting.

    All in all, a fun bit of hacking for a Saturday morning. If you haven’t noticed already, you can check the side bar of the main page to see my latest images. Apologies for the portrait shots being displayed sideways. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to fix them at SplashBlog, so I’ll just have to remember not to hold the Treo sideways when I take them.

    Btw, if you do want to check out all the pictures on my SplashBlog site, you can go to:

    McQ’s Treo Shots

    SplashBlog is gone now, of course, so my Treo Shots site is too.

  • Upgrading the BIOS on a T30

    So, I finally got Deb to give me her old T30 to play with [Thanks, Love], and the first thing I did was to wipe Windows XP off of it, and replace it with Ubuntu.

    I have to say, as desktop OSes go, Ubuntu is pretty nice. I honestly don’t know why the average user would need anything else — web, mail, IM, office suite, you name it. And it performs well on the T30, unlike XP. I could even turn on XGL and get the amazing wobbly windows! 🙂

    Of course, with any linux install the issue is whether or not it will find/configure all of your hardware properly. In this case, because of the ubiquitousness of ThinkPads I would guess, the support for Ubuntu on them has been well tuned, and I had no problems getting everything installed… or so I thought.

    It turns out there were two issues, one a minor annoyance, and one quite serious:

    1. If you put it to sleep, when it wakes up the sound is disabled
    2. As far as I can tell, attempting to connect to a wireless network, “hangs” the machine. That is, if I try to connect to my home network, it silently does nothing, and leaves me in a state where I can no longer start any gui processes.

    According to Google, the solution to the former problem is to upgrade your BIOS, and given that the BIOS on this machine is still the original 1.0 version, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that upgrading would fix the wireless problem too.

    The link to download the bios (and many other T30 updates) is here:

    Lenovo Support & downloads – Drivers and software – ThinkPad T30

    Well, no it’s not, of course, and I don’t think it’s worth looking for an updated link at this point.

    According to that page, I actually need to upgrade two different things: the BIOS and the “Embedded Controller Program”. This is where things start to get scary. Apparently, if you need to update both, then you have to update the BIOS first, but if you read the description of the BIOS, it claims that it won’t run without the updated ECP. Um…

    What I hope is true, is that you can update the BIOS and it will still run well enough to let you update the ECP, even though it’s running on the wrong version. Of course, it seems like the best way to do that would be to use the minimal set of hardware/software capabilities to do the updates [can you imagine attempting this from within Ubuntu?], so time to build some boot floppies.

    Erk! No floppy drive.

    So now what do I do? Has anyone gone through this process? Anybody in Ottawa with a spare TP floppy drive? Anybody want to hold my hand while I do the lobotomy?

  • Genetic hardware design

    It’s been a while since we’ve had a link of the day, but this is a good one. Check it out:

    creatures from primordial silicon

    Warning: there’s a problem with the certificate for that site, but it does still seem to be up if you click through the warnings to get to it.

    It’s not clear that this generalizes in the way the researcher hopes, but it’s still pretty amazing. What do you think?

  • OLPC as e-book reader.

    So why would I buy a Sony reader when I could get this:

    I’m not too happy about the position of the forward and back buttons, but for $175 I could live with it. Compare the functionality of that versus the Sony Reader.

  • The Treo keyboard works, but…

    …but I wouldn’t want to write a novel with it.

    How do people type with two fingers on these things? When I try it, the thing flops around in my hands to the point where I can actually go faster by holding it with one hand and typing with the index finger of the other hand.

  • What’s on my phone.

    I have added a new page that describes the apps I use on my Treo 680:

    What’s on my phone.

    Well, I guess I took that page down at some point. I don’t think the content is particularly relevant any more anyway, but it might have been nice to have it for historical reasons.

  • Opera Mini on the Treo 680

    No luck on first install, but a bit o’ googling got me these instructions…

    1. Go to Prefs
    2. Go to IBM Java VM
    3. Choose “Opera Mini” from the drop-down box at the top of the page
    4. Check the box: “Use Double Buffering”
    5. Check the box: “Use High Resolution Coordinates”
    6. Set Memory Maximum at 4mb
    7. Set Maximum Java Thread Stack Size at 32kb

    … that did the trick. (Thanks, “freakout”.) Seems to work fine now.

  • Canada + Cell Data Plans == nightmare

    Getting a cellular data plan in Canada is senseless. Here are the best deals I could find by wandering around the vendor websites:

    Bell$100 = 250Mb/month + $3/Mb after
    Rogers$100 = 100Mb/month + ?/Mb after
    Fido$100 = 200Mb/month + $5/Mb after
    Telus$100 = 250Mb/month + $3/Mb after

    For comparison purposes, in the US, unlimited internet access on your smartphone is 20 dollars!. Don’t believe, me? Here’s a chart snipped from the cingular website:

    It looks like it costs more if you want to use the phone as a modem for your laptop, but even then it seems that you can get an unlimited plan for $60. Wow! Only $60 for per month for unlimited internet access! Hey, Rogers: I will personally guarantee that if you offer that pricing plan in Canada, I will sign up for at least one full year. I bet I know several other people who would go for it as well.

    The Canadian vendors really have to realize that their pricing just doesn’t make sense any more. Think about the iPhone. At one point there was a rumour that Rogers was going to carry it. Would it make sense to own an iPhone connected to a Rogers network? No. The iPhone has a real web browser on it. Using that, in the way it was intended, could blow your entire monthly allotment in a single session. Heck, just doing the research for this article cost me 5Meg or so of data. Bah!

    Not that it will do any good, but if you feel like venting your frustration about this, there’s an online petition you can sign — well, there was at one point, but the site is gone now. I signed it.

  • Listening to “Ideas”

    [Long post warning: Read if you want to record internet audio streams on the Macintosh]

    I’m a big fan of the CBC Radio1 show Ideas. Over the years, I have found that it provides some of the most consistently thought-provoking content available on radio. My only problem is that the broadcast time for Ideas is weekdays from 21h05 until 22h00, a period when I am almost always busy. To circumvent this, I need a way to time-shift the program so that I can listen to it later (typically, either when I go to bed or on the way into work the next morning).

    As most of you know, I am a Mac-weenie. This website lives on my G5 server/DAW, as does my iTunes library. I sync my iPod to that library, so the easiest way to access the Ideas content is using the iPod. Given this, the problem statement becomes: How do I record CBC Radio1 (weekdays from 21h05 to 22h00) and convert the result into something I can listen to on my iPod?

    The Content

    Like all forward-thinking broadcasters (:-P), CBC Radio is available on the web, which means that I ought to be able to record it, without needing to physically hook up an FM tuner. Unfortunately, they have standardized on Windows Media Player, which they tell me is the “most commonly used” format. They would, of course, have been better off standardizing on the most compatible format, rather than the most popular one, but at least they make the content available.

    The CBC online listening page explains that Mac users should use the Flip4Mac Windows Media plugin to play WMA content. I have this plug-in, but for me at least, if I follow the Ottawa Radio1 link, I get dubious results. There is something wrong with one or more of…

    • the CBC stream,
    • the Flip4Mac plug-in, or
    • Safari’s caching strategy

    … that causes the resulting embedded Quicktime player to play the same 10 minute clip whenever I go there. That is, it will only play 10 minutes of audio before the “thumb” on the player reaches the end of the scrollbar, and returning to the same page at a later time will cause it to play the same 10 minutes of audio as last time — not very useful.

    I imagine others have had problems using the WMA streams as well, since despite the claim that they were going to standardize on one format, it turns out that you can also listen to an Ogg Vorbis stream of (at least) Toronto’s Radio1 feed. I would have prefered getting the stream from Ottawa, but given that Ideas is available on both, I am set.

    Or am I?

    Setting Up the Recording

    It turns out that iTunes is not able to play the “.m3u” wrapped Ogg Vorbis stream, but it at least recognizes that it is continuous (i.e. not just 10 minutes long). As usual, when faced with an audio or video file that I cannot play with the standard tools, I then pull out VLC, which is a very nice freeware audio/video player available for all major operating systems. I can’t say enough good things about VLC; if it wasn’t for some un-Mac’ish GUI choices, it would always be my first choice.

    VLC happily connects and starts playing the OV stream, but wouldn’t you know it, it too stops after 10 minutes. Very odd. It has worked fine for other streaming content I have tried, which seemingly adds credence to the theory that there is something wrong with the way the feeds are being created, but who knows?

    After trolling around on the web for a while, I discover that some problematic audio will play correctly from the command line VLC player, even though it will not play in the GUI application. Sure enough,…

    /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC \
    http://www.cbc.ca/livemedia/cbcr1-toronto.m3u

    … works perfectly, so I finally have something that I can use to listen to CBC. Whew!

    The next step is actually recording it.

    I believe the best application for recording the audio output of arbitrary programs on the Mac is Audio Hijack Pro. I purchased the Pro version because it has some nice features that I use more for digital audio work. There is also a non-Pro version, which seems like it would be perfectly fine if all you want to do is record something at a scheduled time. As of the time of this posting, it costs 16 $US (it’s a whopping $32 for the Pro version).

    You can configure Audio Hijack to:

    1. Start any program you want on a flexible, repeating schedule.
    2. Record the audio output of that program (and not any other sounds your Mac is making) to a file of your choosing, optionally appending a timestamp to allow multiple recordings to be kept.
    3. Mute the output of the program, so that you don’t hear it, even though it is being recorded.
    4. Automatically exit the program after the recording is complete
    5. Import the resulting file into iTunes

    As you can see, this is perfect for the task at hand. There is a wide range of format options for the recordings, including both MP3 and AAC at many bitrates. I use 48kbps AAC to record Ideas, which produces a listenable recording in an approximately 20Meg file (for 55 minutes).

    The program I run is just a shell script that has the above command line in it, and that’s all there is to it.

    A Final Note

    It would not surprise me at all to find out that there are simpler ways to get this process going. What I ended up with is largely a result of trial-and-error. It works, but it’s not pretty. If you have found a better answer, feel free to leave a comment.

  • Woot! Thanks, Apple!

    From the latest Apple Java Update:

    This release improves reliability of the SWT_AWT bridge implementation first released in the SWT Compatibility Libraries for Release 4, and is now installed as a standard part of J2SE 5.0.