Had some time tonight to do some winter cleaning of my blog. I found a new theme that is a little lighter (Thanks Bob :)) And finally found a plugin called Google Code Prettify which allows one to easily display code inside blogs (Something that is utterly pain to do in vanilla WordPress). I also added a related blog posts at the buttom of each blog entry so that it’s easier to find other blogs with similar content. Enjoy 🙂
I’ll be attending the Future of Web Applications next week. The conference seems to have quite a few interesting talks, I’m particularly looking forward to hear Paul Graham talk since I enjoy his writings immensely.
I received a letter today from my insurance company about a service where one can access account information using their web site. What I noticed was, in the letter, they specifically mentioned that the site was only open from 7am to 10pm. Why would such a web site ever be closed? If they need to run some maintenance they can always just schedule it. Sometimes I wonder if some people didn’t realize that we are now in the 21th century?
Last friday I was very afraid that I was not going to be able to attend FOSDEM due to a large amount of snow in most of Denmark. Luckily our flight was not canceled so it was just a matter of getting to the airport. Easier said than done, the busses was not driving because of the weather and the taxi companies phone system was overloaded. But we managed to reach the airport in time and after several hours of delay in both Aalborg and Copenhagen, we landed in Brussels late friday night.
It was my first time there. I’ve been to linuxtag and linuxforum before and I must say that this event beats both hands down. There was a lot of interesting talks, some of which can be found here, and in general everyone seemed to be in a very good mood – especially sunday. My favorite talks was Jim Gettys OLPC talk, Miguel de Icaza’s mono talk and Federico Mena Quintero’s extremely funny Profiling talk. Be sure to watch that one, it’s both entertaining and learningful.
I have so far projected the picture of my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector onto the wall. Clearly this is not optimal, so I have been looking for a screen for a while. I decided to built it DIY-style this weekend. It’s a lot cheaper than buying one from new and can give excellent results. Plus there is nothing to beat the feeling of having created something yourself.
For the project the following materials was used:
The wood was bought at Bauhaus and the paint at the local paint shop.
After we carried the board up the stairs it was quite clear that it was perhaps a little too big for the wall. But after some rearranging we got it to fit 🙂
Here’s a picture of the screen being painted.
I have been super happy with how it turned out. First a picture of a TV source (4:3) projected on the screen.
Finally a picture of the result with a 16:9 source.
Sadly the camera on my phone doesn’t do the final result justice. More pictures with real camera here on flickr.
I recently bought a Nokia 770 to use as a remote control for MMS (among other things). The first thing one notices is the screen: very clear, big and with great contrast. The built-in IM client is great. It’s excellent for when you’re not near the computer but want to chat with people anyway. It’s quite easy to write on the screen, I’m currently using the virtual keyboard but have also tried the recognition briefly without much succes.
The Opera browser included is very light-weight and quite fast but doesn’t work correctly on all pages, so sometimes one needs to use Minimo (firefox port). Sadly Minimo is a lot more heavy on the system and can cause the system to spontaneously reboot?! I have no clue how a browser can cause the whole system to come crashing down. I thought we cured that when we moved away from Windows 98? 😉
Furthermore the built-in rss reader is quite nice. The font is nice and big which makes it easy to read. I like to read the latest news on the device when I’m eating breakfast in the morning and it saves booting up the computer. The Nokia is ready in seconds.
Before I bought the device, I read in a lot of reviews which claimed that the battery time sucked. That might be true if you’re using it constantly, but if you’re not using it for a little while it will shut down the screen and will wake up in ~1 second again. That way it can easily keep running for quite a few days of rss feed reading and browsing. So you get battery lifetime comparable to a normal phone.
A last thing that I have been using the device for is VOIP. The device has a built-in microphone and speaker so one doesn’t need anything extra to make it work. I would have liked to use my headphones but it appears that for the time being that is not yet supported. By downloading gizmo project software one is able to make very cheap (even free) phone calls to phones in Denmark (and to almost any other part of the world). The sound quality is comparable to Skype.
I havn’t started hacking on it yet but from the brief encounters I have had with the documentation and development enviroment it looks quite nice. To be continued 🙂
My TV crashed (luckily it didn’t burn) so I was looking for alternative solutions and finally found the perfect one. The Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector does 720p HD and is very quiet. Looking around for a modeline for X I found several ones which should work but really doesn’t. I finally found the following one which seems to work rather well:
Modeline “1280×720” 74.400 1280 1728 1768 1984 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync
I’ve watched different kind of content on it from TV, XviD, DVD to HD and it works really well with all. I was a little afraid that XviD ~800kbit would be very blocky but it is actually not a problem. Of course HD just looks amazing.
Joysticks are arriving tomorrow, then it’s old school arcade gaming time 🙂
So last week I bought an Ipod Nano. Up until now I have been using my good old 20GB Neuros Audio which has worked very well but is a little big to carry around. Someone on AAU was selling an Ipod Nano that he won for 2/3 of the original price so I couldn’t resist and bought it 🙂
My biggest concern with the Ipod has been the lack of proper codec support. I have a large part of my music collection in Ogg and thus it would be unusable with the Ipod Firmware. For a while I have been looking at the Ipod since it’s rather slick and found that one can install rockbox on it and then play a whole range of codecs including ogg and flac.
So after I bought it I installed rockbox and so far it has really blown me away. The crossfade, games support (frozen bubble, pac man, doom? :)) are icings on the cake of a really powerful music player that plays everything worthwhile playing. Rock on! 🙂
So about a year ago I was starting to get a lot of spam so I tried different techniques to combat the problem. Long story short, the solution I found to be the most effective was simply to use bogofilter. After using it for about a year without any retraining I finally had to retrain my filter as there was 2-3 specific kinds of mails it kept misclassifying as non-spam. During that period only 100-200 spam mails had been registered as legitimate mail and 45000 spam mails had been correctly classified. I stopped checking for real mails classified as spam after about 2 weeks of no false positives. That’s pretty damn impressive. All hail bogofilter 🙂