A few weeks ago I traded in my trusty old 2003 Toyota Highlander (174,000 miles) for a new 2013 SE model. In addition to all the automotive and mechanical advances in a 10-years’ newer SUV, I finally have built-in Bluetooth and iPod integration! (I know, welcome to 2008, right? 😉 ). Toyota’s Display Audio system has a lot of cool features, but as with any “new” technology, it’s not without its share of end-user frustration.
Continue reading ‘Using my iPhone with Toyota’s Display Audio system’ »
Why does Google keep killing the stuff I actually use? First iGoogle and now last week they announced they will be shutting down Google Reader on July 1st.
I immediately went on a quest to find a decent replacement. After trying out a few alternatives like The Old Reader and NewsBlur, I got a recommendation from a friend to try Feedly. I wasn’t the only one making the switch as the site supposedly gained 500,000 new users in the days after the Google announcement.
It’s been a week and I have to say I like Feedly the best out of the others I tried. It’ll take a little while longer to completely adjust my Google Reader usage habits to Feedly, but at least the initial setup was pretty easy as Feedly uses Google Reader in the background (they claim to have a backup plan in place (called Normandy) to switch to their own engine once Reader is shut down). Check out the comparison screenshots in the gallery at the end of this post to see my Feedly in action. It even has a free iOS companion app (I don’t normally do a lot of RSS reading on my mobile device, but it’s nice to have just in case).
It is the spring of 1241. The Mongol takeover of Europe is almost complete. The hordes commanded by the sons of Genghis Khan have swept out of their immense grassy plains and ravaged Russia, Poland, and Hungary … and now seem poised to sweep west to Paris and south to Rome. King and Pope and peasant alike face a bleak future – until a small band of warriors, inheritors of a millennium-old secret tradition, conceive of a desperate plan to kill the Khan of Khans. Their leader, an elder of the order of warrior monks, will lead his elite group on a perilous journey into the East. They will be guided by an elusive and sharp-witted young woman, who believes the master’s plan is insane. But this small band is the West’s last, best hope to turn back the floodtide of the Mongol Empire.
I received “The Mongoliad: Book One” (by Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, E.D. deBirmingham, Mark Teppo, and Cooper Moo … whew!) as a Christmas gift and finally got around to reading it.
“The Mongoliad” apparently started as a social media experiment, a serialized subscription service by Stephenson and his fellow co-authors. Each chapter was published online with related materials (graphics, etc.) and encouraged community discussions. When the story was complete, the “definitive” text was then published in three volumes in the traditional way.
Four months ago I bought my daughter a Microsoft Surface RT tablet for her birthday as a laptop replacement. Last month I got a Surface Pro to use at work (also as a laptop replacement). Having now used both versions of Microsoft’s first tablet I wanted to jot down a few of my own observations about the Pro and how it compares to the RT version.
On February 16, 2013, TiVo owners everywhere suddenly found that they were unable to transfer recordings off of their DVRs. Third-party applications like kmttg and even TiVo’s own TiVo Desktop were suddenly broken. The problem was tracked down to an expired server-side cookie which, inexplicably, was hard-coded into the TiVo software to expire on 02/16/13.
TiVo’s workaround was to set your computer’s clock back to before February 16, but obviously that’s not a great solution. TCF user morac found a way to fix TiVo Desktop by making a change to the curl.conf file and other application developers made similar changes to their software to essentially use a “dummy” cookie to get around the expired one … much better than changing your system’s date/time.
When someone filed a bug in SourceForge that Galleon was affected by the same problem, I decided to see if I could fix it. It turned out to be a simple, 1-line addition to ToGo.java. Before the fix, after selecting a recording to transfer, I would see this in the log:
20:47:28,196 DEBUG [DownloadThread] DownloadThread - Picked: org.lnicholls.galleon.database.Video@c1d7d2 20:47:28,746 DEBUG [DownloadThread] ToGo - Status code: 400
And after the fix:
21:08:47,684 DEBUG [DownloadThread] DownloadThread - Picked: org.lnicholls.galleon.database.Video@1e00f69 21:08:51,977 INFO [DownloadThread] ToGo - Downloading: The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (Recorded Wed Feb 27 2013 11 35PM WFLADT).TiVo 21:18:13,890 INFO [DownloadThread] ToGo - Download rate=4372.78033848837 KBps
Galleon development has been dead for some time (the last official release was back in 2009), so although my code change has been checked into CVS on SourceForge there won’t be a new install you can download. If you need the patch, you can grab my revised jar file here. Rename it to galleon.jar and drop it into the lib directory of your Galleon installation (you might want to make a backup of the original and your configure.xml file first). Restart Galleon and your ToGo downloads should work again.
Hopefully TiVo will fix this soon, but initial indications seem to point to them “fixing” it in TiVo Desktop and not in the TiVo codebase itself, which means workarounds like this one will still be necessary for third-party apps.
In what is shaping up to be an annual trip, my daughter and I spent a free weekend in Miami, tagging along with my wife who had business in the area.
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal bengal tiger.
We started “reading” the audiobook version of “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel back around Christmas time and on the way to Miami this weekend, finally finished it. Too bad Ang Lee’s movie is out of theaters now, guess we’ll have to rent it.
If you’ve seen any of the trailers for the movie, you probably know that the main plot of the story revolves around a young Indian boy named Pi, shipwrecked and trying to survive on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger. That’s pretty much all I knew going in so the rest of the book really surprised me, in a good way.
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?
Back in January, I saw the Broadway musical “Wicked” for the 4th time. Three years prior, when we had taken my daughter to see it (her first time, my third), I had purchased Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” novel intending to read it but never did. As evidenced by this post, I finally got around to it.
Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’ »
Like nearly 4 million other iPhone users, I had been waiting for iOS 6 to be jailbroken for a long time. I’ve had my iPhone 4S for almost a year and have been “stuck” on iOS 5.1.1 since last May because I didn’t want to lose my jailbreak by upgrading to iOS 6. This past Monday, the evad3rs came through and released evasi0n, making it possible to jailbreak Apple’s newest iOS 6.1 release on just about every iDevice available, including the iPhone 5 for the first time.
It was no secret that evasi0n was coming (although initial rumors had it coming out on Super Bowl Sunday) so I was prepared to take the plunge right away: I had a current iTunes backup, used PkgBackup to backup all of my Cydia apps, took screenshots of all my springboard screens and folders, etc. I was ready!
The Prime are the Commonwealth’s worst nightmare. Coexistence is impossible with the technologically advanced aliens, who are genetically hardwired to exterminate all other forms of life. Twenty-three planets have already fallen to the invaders, with casualties in the hundreds of millions. And no one knows when or where the genocidal Prime will strike next. Nor are the Prime the only threat. For more than a hundred years, a shadowy cult, the Guardians of Selfhood, has warned that an alien with mind-control abilities impossible to detect or resist–the Starflyer–has secretly infiltrated the Commonwealth. Is the Starflyer an ally of the Prime, or has it orchestrated a fight to the death between the two species for its own advantage?
I started Peter F. Hamilton’s “Judas Unchained” immediately after finishing “Pandora’s Star” which was a good thing since “Judas” picks up immediately where the previous book ended without any intro or recap. The Commonwealth is still reeling from the initial Prime invasion which claimed 23 planets after the barrier fell. The new Navy is re-lifing suspended criminals for soldiers and building warships and super-weapons as fast it can to fight off the Prime threat. All of the characters from the first book (plus a few more with some surprises), along with their complicated back-stories and plot lines are back in the conclusion of the Commonwealth Saga.
The escalation, action, and intrigue continue up until the final chapters, in which (most) questions are finally answered. Who was the Starflyer agent on the Second Chance mission? Who erected the barrier around the Dyson pair and how was it shut down? What is the Starflyer? What have the Guardians of Selfhood been planning on Far Away? Is genocide against the Primes the only way to save the human race? (and countless others).
The sheer number of characters, locations, astronomical distances, and ultra-powerful weapons in “Judas Unchained” made it difficult to follow at times (especially since I was only reading bits and pieces over the course of three months), but it was a very enjoyable read. The end was satisfactory, although I was surprised at what characters seemed to drop out of the story line about halfway through and which ones emerged as more important players near the end. I might have to revisit Hamilton’s universe (and apparently some of the same characters) in the Void trilogy in the near future.