# Flavourswap 1.1! Now with flavor!

Hot on the heels of the initial Flavourswap 1.0 release is the highly anticipated release of Flavourswap 1.1!

Changes in this release include support for arbitrary browsers. No more browser specific code!

Because I wanted to keep this lightweight I'm not using any external libraries. It's pure python and shouldn't add much overhead. However, you're limited to simple string matches. You can match anything that the find method of a string will match.

If you're the sort of person who runs pybloxom and want to customize your site with a unique look based on the person's webbrowser, download it today and give it a spin.

Also, this release means that OmniWeb users now get to enjoy the same rendering speed boost that gecko users enjoy. Unfortunatly Safari as shipped still doesn't recognize © and   so only OmniWeb gets the boost.

posted at: 2007 Apr 19 17:17 UTC | category: tech | (story link)

# OS X Tips Article That Actually Helped Me

A just ran across this article over at Mac OS X Tips. I knew about some of those but some I didn't know about.

posted at: 2007 Mar 21 17:25 UTC | category: tech | (story link)

# Life Hacks: Dishes

They're one of life's constant companions. They may as well be the 3rd certainty in life. They're the enemy. The nemesis. The scoundrel.

Yes, I'm talking about... DISHES.

Silly dramatics aside, I'm one of those people who can't seem to actually do dishes. I keep things sanitary. I don't leave dishes with food on them for weeks. I do, however, leave dirty dishes for weeks. They've been rinsed and scraped clean (not necessarily in that order) they just haven't been done. Typically I've gone through every dish in the house before I buckle down and do the dishes.

I think I've finally figured out how to change that. The secret is filling a bottle with diluted dish soap. I bought a 1 liter spray bottle and I find that 300ml of soap is just about perfect. Now, instead of having to fill the sink full of suds, or using a huge amount of soap to clean a couple items, I can just rinse, spray, wipe and rinse. Voila! All done.

Easy dish cleaning, combined with a new household policy of "A dish doesn't come out of the cupboard so long as there's one like it dirty and not in use" means I may actually keep clean dishes in the cupboard.

posted at: 2007 Mar 18 23:07 UTC | category: life | (story link)

# Announcing Flashmounter!

It mounts, it performs backups, it slices and dices your data with the greatest of ease!

Er, wait. Wouldn't slicing and dicing be a bad thing?

Anyway, I have written what I feel is the coolest software to be conceived of and written in 3-4 hours this week!

I have this mythtv machine with a built-in SD reader. My camera uses SD. It's currently a PITA to connect any of my SD readers to the mac mini. So I wrote a script that monitors the state of that SD reader and mounts my SD card as needed. It also watches for certain files to show up in the root of the device. If it sees "unmount" it will unmount the device. If it sees "backup" it will tar up the contents of the device in a location I set, by date and time.

The really cool part is that it has growl support. Thanks to netgrowl.py I was able to deliver growl messages to my mini. I'm also running netatalk, so I can use the SD reader in my mythtv machine without even sshing to that machine. I just create the proper files as part of my workflow. After work, I'll set up some automator flows to automate my photography workflow even more.

I've taken a screenshot of flashmounter in action, though it's not much to look at. You can download flashmounter too.

posted at: 2007 Mar 15 21:44 UTC | category: tech | (story link)

# The $3000 iPhone?

I haven't really written, or even said much, about the iPhone. Until it's been released and people are able to hold it in their hand I haven't seen the point. However, Chris Seibold at Apple Matters just published the most ridiculous article I've read about the iPhone yet.

In the article he adds a lot of claptrop about how much the iPhone "really" costs, and of course he inflates the prices as much as he can.

iPhone: $499
$500 bucks for a cell phone? Its an outrage. Well, remember that it is also an internet device, a camera, an iPod, and a game-playing wonder. Now how much would you pay?

This is actually not a bad price for a cell phone. Remember when the Razr was first released? It was a $50 phone in a thin case that cost $500. The StarTac was over $600. The Treo 650 was in the same price range. Still think the iPhone price is all that bad?

Cingular service: $39.99(450 minutes) to $199.99 (6000 minutes)

Why is this included as part of the phone? You'd have to pay this no matter which phone you get. Let's throw this number away, since it doesn't affect the actual price of the phone.

Bluetooth earpiece: $50
If you're cool enough to have an iPhone, you're probably legally required to have the Bluetooth iPhone earpiece jammed in your ear canal

Chris' reasoning is just silly here. Another cost we don't factor in, because it's the same for every phone.

Data package: $20-$50
The smartphone connect with unlimited data is only $20. You think Cingular is going to let you get away with that? Surely you jest. More likely you'll be hit with the $50 Blackberry connect fee.

Chris' speculation is not unreasonable, but it's also wrong. There's no reason that you have to speculate here, however. Cingular has already said that you will need the same plan as other PDAs, like the Treo 650. The cost? $40/mo.

Getting out of your current contract: $200.00
Sure, you say, there is no way you'll pay it, but start setting some dough aside.

Here we see Chris adding costs in that really don't belong, just to inflate the price. Another cost we can safely drop.

Car charger: $40
Your plan is to keep the iPhone charged, right? With a five-hour battery life a portable charger is not an option, it is a necessity. And since the phone is new youll have to pay an exorbitant amount.

This one is pure FUD. The iPhone uses the same dock connector as every model of the iPod, except for the shuffle. I'd wager that a large portion of the iPhone's target market already has a car charger for their iPod. But I'll be a little bit fair to Chris, we'll give him this one for now at $15.

Case: $50 Cmon, youve spent all this jack for a phone and youre going to try to shave a few pennies off the cost by skipping or making your own cover? I think not!

A $50 case? I suppose you could spend that much. I think the cost will be more along the lines of $25 at most, but maybe if you have a lot of disposable income you'll spend as much as $50.

So what's the final price? With two years of service and the above costs completely factored in, I total $1500 over 2 years. Of that $1500, $540 is the upfront cost and the other $960 is spread out over the next two years in the form of the data plan. Somehow, that doesn't seem quite as bad to me.

I'm making a couple assumptions here, but I think they're resonable assumptions. First, I'm assuming that you already have a cell phone plan. Second, I'm assuming that you either are no longer in contract or will find a way out of your current contract without paying. Given the audience for my blog I'm pretty confident that both situations apply.

Finally, the question I've been asked most. Will I get an iPhone? I don't know yet. I would love to have one but that's not the only factor. Dad already offered to buy me one in June, after he gets the rest of his inheritance. I don't know that I'll take him up on that, however. I carry a cingular phone for work, so I'll have to either activate a iPhone through work or switch to cingular for my personal phone. I don't think I want to go to GSM, which has shitty coverage outside of major cities. Plus, carrying two cingular phones would be pretty retarded.

posted at: 2007 Mar 01 16:47 UTC | category: tech | (story link)

# Smoke Free Still

Well, if you were hoping to see constant updates here on my smoking situation, you were sorely mistaken. You should know by now that I don't update my blog often enough for that.

Anyway, I've made it through the worst part. I did slip during that trip to Seattle, but two packs of smokes later I quit again, and have managed to not start again. I think I'll be OK for a while.

posted at: 2007 Feb 26 18:25 UTC | category: life | (story link)

# 1-31-07 - NEVAR FORGET

posted at: 2007 Feb 02 04:39 UTC | category: misc | (story link)

# Quitting Smoking is Easy, I've Done It Lots Of Times!

So I quit smoking again. 36 hours without a cigarette now, except for those butts I fished out of the ashtray at 12 and 24 hours. I barely count those, they were only 2 or 3 puffs each and kept me from going to the store.

I think I'll be ok if I make it through the drive to Seattle on Friday. That will be my toughest battle for the first week.

One benefit right away is that I'm not coughing up so much crap. I didn't have to force myself to keep my vitamins down because they were trapped in a web of phlegm.

posted at: 2007 Feb 01 18:33 UTC | category: life | (story link)

# Yate on OpenBSD

This entry is here for the search engines, since I don't think anyone that reads my blog would be interested.

So I'm doing some telephony stuff at work. One of the things I need to do is setup a machine to take calls in from a PRI, and deliver them to a MeetMe room or a PM3 via a T1 circuit. I'm looking at using Yate to do this.

I'm hoping I can use Yate on an OpenBSD machine to do this. After working with Diana on IRC (Much thanks to her for helping me with this) we got it to compile on OpenBSD mostly cleanly.

Diana didn't want the resulting diff, but it'll be useful for anyone else that wants to use Yate on OpenBSD, I think.

You can find the patch here.

posted at: 2006 Nov 18 23:01 UTC | category: tech | (story link)

# My new iPod Shuffle

So my current iPod (a 40gb 3g model) has a battery that lasts aproximately 5 minutes. Not wanting to buy a new iPod or deal with the hassle of replacing the battery I bought myself one of the new 1gb shuffles.

I can still use my 3g iPod when it's plugged into a power source, but I have a ground loop in the car I can't get rid of. It's not noticable with music, but it's very noticable with the podcasts I listen to (Mostly the Penn Jillette show and NPR.) So I decided my shuffle would be used for podcasts.

The shuffle does an excellent job at playing these podcasts, and they sound perfect in the car. I haven't had a chance to run the battery down yet, but apple claims 12 hours of battery life, so I figure that 10 should be easy to achieve, which is plenty for me.

The only problem with the shuffle? It's a second-class iPod when it comes to podcasts. First, there's no automatic syncing of the shuffle, I have to use autofill. Autofill lets you pick your entire music library or a playlist, and iTunes then picks a selection of files to load onto your shuffle. Seems like that'd be perfect, and I can just pick iTunes' Podcasts playlist, right?

Unfortunately that's not how it works. You can't pick the built-in Podcasts playlist, and a smart playlist that pulls from your Podcasts playlist doesn't actually fill your shuffle with anything. I had to find another solution.

The solution I came up with was to add all my podcasts to NetNewsWire instead. I then deleted them from iTunes, so I'm not downloading everything twice. I went into NNW's preferences, and set it to download all audio enclosures and add them to the iTunes playlist "NNW Podcasts." I can then fill my shuffle from this playlist using autofill.

That was nice, but not nice enough. I still have to manually delete podcasts after I've listened to them. Smart Playlists to the rescue.

I setup a Smart Playlist called "My Podcasts" with the following rules:

• Match "all" of the following rules:
• "Playlist" "is" "NNW Podcasts"
• "Play Count" "is" "0"
• Limit to "700" "MB" selected by "most recently added"
• Match only checked items
• Live updating

I can then fill my shuffle from this playlist. The shuffle, like all iPods, keeps track of the playcount and will update iTunes with that count when you plug it in. I can then hit "Autofill" and my shuffle will be updated with any new podcasts since my last sync, and any podcasts I've already listened to will be removed. Almost perfect.

I'd still like to have it automatically update, but I suspect I'd need to write an applescript that runs whenever I plug my shuffle in. I don't know if AppleScript has any sort of hooks or triggers for that sort of thing. I could always write a quick shell script that uses osascript I suppose.

posted at: 2006 Nov 13 18:45 UTC | category: tech | (story link)