Posts for category ‘Computers and the net’

So I finally joined the year 2002 and bought a Tivo from my friend Josh for 75 bucks. It’s just an old fashioned series one with a 30 hour recording capacity but I’m loving it!

I have to say I’ve had it two days and I already don’t know what the hell I did without one. It really makes TV something you watch when you feel like it or when you have the time. No more scheduling life around TV (or, as is more often the case, forgoing things I’d like to watch for real life commitments/slackness/forgetfulness).

So far on the season pass list:
The Simpsons
The Family Guy
Futurama
Nip/Tuck
King of the Hill
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
… and about 1/2 a dozen movies I picked out of the browsing list.

One of the most interesting features Tivo has is it trys to guess what kind of show you might like (based on what you have watched/recorded in the past) and if it has the disk space it will record them for you. So far it obviously doesn’t know me very well since it recorded Maury(daytime talk show) and some children’s show called Recess. I think the reason for the strange choices might be because some of the previous owners information is still stored in it’s little head.. but even Josh doesn’t watch children’s shows.

This weekend I plan to install TivoWeb and Tyserver which will let me program my Tivo from anywhere and download all of the shows for burning to DVD. If anyone knows of any other good Tivo hacks let me know and I’ll scope them out.

Oh the geekyness factor is huge ain’t it?

I was marveling at how much I have come to depend on FireFox‘s built in search engine feature this morning and decided to whip up a quick search plugin of my own for the phone book at UIC (my employer, in case you didn’t know).

It turns out this is much simpler than I expected it to be. The docs are right here if you want to take a crack at it yourself some time.

You can install my plugin by visiting the install page (WordPress doesn’t like j-script it seems, hence the other page).

One note; it currently searches only based on name, not netID or department. Since 99% of the time I’m looking up someone’s e-mail address it serves my purposes. If you have an interest in a version of the plugin that searches by the other criteria drop a line here and I’ll gladly hook you up.

Oh, and I know the icon looks like a bananna. I made it yellow because my phone is yellow, deal with it.

I love a good hack. I use XP and have been tinkering with custom themes lately. Like many I used TGTsoft’s StyleXP. This is a decent enough program but it runs as a service and takes up valuable system resources. In today’s surfing on the subject I found a nifty little patcher that will update your uxtheme.dll file to allow the use of non-M$ signed/checksumed themes! Joy and rupture. Here it is if you want to give it a whirl. It was made by the good folks at www.xp-erience.org. Regretfully it looks like their site has been shut down.

Note: This is for Windows XP SP1 ONLY! don’t be a tool and try to use it on something else and break it.

I was feeling witty and a little geeky today as I installed a fresh copy of FreeBSD 5.1 on my experiment computer this afternoon. I thought I would share my new motd, inspired by Stanley Kubrick, the USMC and Robert Jones:

FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0: Thu Jun  5 02:55:42 GMT 2003
---------------------------HOBBES----------------------------------
|  This is my unix box.                                           |
|  There are many like it, but this one is mine.                  |
|  My unix box is my best friend.                                 |
|  It is my life.                                                 |
|  I must master it as I master my life.                          |
|  My unix box, without me, is useless.                           |
|  Without my unix box, I am useless.                             |
|  I must secure my unix box well.                                |
|  I must secure it better than my enemy who is trying to hack it.|
|  I must dectect him before he dectects me.                      |
|  I will...                                                      |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|  If you don't belong here, please fuck off.                     |
|  If you do, have a nice day and be kind to the bandwidth.       |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok I went ahead and imported all of the old entries from my blosxom blog to this one. Some of the formating may have gotten fubar but all the important stuff is there.
Now to actually write something new.

As you can see I’ve moved my blog in an affort to write more in it.
Why you ask?
Simple really I felt that it didn’t belong on a work computer, and I felt that the fact that it was hosted at work limited the things I felt I could talk about.

You will also notice I moved from blossxm to Movable Type.

The main reason is that its just easier, esp since I don’t have a shell account where it’s hosted now.

Anyway I hope I’ll start writing in this again soon. Over the next few days I plan to move all the old stuff over and then on to the new.

Ciao for now.

So As mentioned ealier I’m a bit of a music “guy” no I’m not one of the
guys who spend thousands on super high-fi speakers and pre-amps and all
that jazz, but I do have a deep love and respect for music of almost all
kinds. I must have a bit of an inflated ego to think that anyone else
would like to listen to the music I do because I have had a shoutcast
server up and running for a few months now. As a way to tie it into
blog-o-rific I wrote an extremely simple little plugin that reads the
recent tracks log file from MALTX (my mp3 player of choice) and makes the
most recent one availible to blosxom. I am widely know as a bit of a
wannabe programmer so I’m sure the code is fundementally broken and I deserve to be shot.
So do you if you use it. You can get it here. You
can also see it in action on the top of the page right below the banner.

In my never ending search to find the best deal on anything and everything I stumbled upon the latest invention from our good
friends at Google. It’s called Froogle. A
cursory look seem to indicate some real good deals might be found here. For instance I did a quick and dirty trial on a few
bits of electronics.

Fuji A 201 Digital Camera:
Froogle: 149.78
Pricewatch: 141.00
E-bay: 140.99

Geforce 4 ti4200 128mb
Froogle: 119.00
Pricewatch: 125.81
E-bay: 134.50

120 GB EIDE HD (any brand)
Froogle: 107.97
Pricewatch: 96.99
E-bay: 129.99

As you can see it hangs pretty well with the big guns plus it’s only in beta! There are a few obvious features that
aren’t included (namely sort-by-price and a way to filter out and/or convert foreign currency). My only concern is that once
businesses find out about it the GoogleBombing will begin in
earnest. Check out while it still.. works..

I was getting sick of collapsed whitespace in my story blocks so I ripped off Robert Jone’s most excellent amps plugin to replace every instance of 2 whitespaces in a row with a whitespace followed by a non breaking space. It seems to work alright. If for some unknown reason you want to try this on your blog get the plugin here.

I was doing a little Googleing for open directories this evening. It is completely amazing what you
can find if you poke around a little. Todays top find has to be an
entire collection of bizzare and amusing shockwave files, complete with
two Mac/switch parody commericals (which I love). Check them out here and here.