Category → Geek Stuff
Making an audio book
I purchased this book, but don’t really have time to read it, so I cut the binding off with my jig saw:
I then put the loose sheets into my ScanSnap 1300 scanner. In 15 minutes I had a 250 page pdf. Using a PDF to TTS app on the Android phone, I’ve turned this physical book into an audio book. It works great!
Flawed EPA mileage reporting
We are looking at buying a mid-sized SUV, so I started doing a bit of research. I found two models, both with similar EPA gas mileage numbers. I then found out that one of them, the Nissan Pathfinder, requires premium gasoline. All the car sites just give the EPA numbers, and don’t say what grade of gas was used for the test, so I went to the EPA’s own website. Sure enough, the Pathfinder was tested with Premium gas. Being that Premium gas is on average 11% more expensive than standard unleaded, the Pathfinder’s 16MPG becomes 14.4MPG when accounting for the higher cost of the fuel! I suspect very few people realize that this is an issue.
Hello WordPress!
Blogger stopped supporting blogs published to non-blogger sites (like wymore.net) on 5/1/10, so I moved the blogs to WordPress. It’s amazing how much more powerfull and flexible WordPress is compared to Blogger. The “Wymore Family Blogs” page that shows the latest post on each of our blogs is actually a fifth WordPress blog, with an RSS feed widget in the left bar. I set the left bar to be the width of the screen, so that’s all that is shown. So much easier than the old way!
Sunday Stuff
Cleaned the garage. Helped Trish clean the basement. Made a website for Tricia’s daycare.
All in a days work.
Actually, making the website was pretty interesting. I used NetObjects Fusion 7 to create the site. I had received a complementary copy of NOF7 a while ago, so I thought I would give it a whirl. Making a website using a tool like NOF was very different than doing everything in HTML by hand like I’ve done so far. Some aspects were much faster, but occasionally I would get to a point where I couldn’t get NOF to produce an effect that I could implement in HTML manually with 30 seconds of effort. After a steep-ish learning curve, though, I was able to get it to do my bidding (once I accepted the fact that I was not in control).
It’s like that whole “I’ll collect your garbage for you but you can’t use pointers directly” thing that Java does. In that case, I say good riddance. In the case of NOF I’m not so sure.
Too big, too big!
Standing over the shoulder of someone trying to load my blog, I thought “wow, this thing is way too huge!” With over 10 megs of images, the blog takes a horrific amount of time to load. So now, when clicking on my link in the “Family Journal” page, you’ll be taken to a page that just contains the latest ten entries. Nice and small(er). From there, there’s a link to the entire blog as well.
As long as we’re talking shop, I’m using CSS now to render the page (as well as XML and XSLT). Here’s the stylesheet. It puts the white border around the images (except the ones it doesn’t!) and centers images in tables.
I knew it!
When I saw the Segway, I thought “Come on, how hard can it be?” After all, the guy who taught my Saturday Academy Robotics class when I was in High School, Neldon Wagner, had built a two legged walking robot. It seemed to me that the Segway is just a two motor platform with a gyro (like the one in the R/C helicopter I had in college) to let it know when it’s falling over.
It’s so nice to see that someone has demonstrated that that’s the case.
Rockin’ C++ routine o’ the day
Wow! strtoc! What a function!
Sunday Tomfoolery
So much for progress: I spent a good part of the day trying to get my video capture card, an ATI TV Wonder VE, to work. I guess if you don’t use it for a while the drivers go bad. Anyway, I finally had to move it to my PC to get it to do anything at all. You get what you pay for, I guess.
I also took apart one of our dehumidifiers to see if I could adjust the humidistat, but there were no potentiometers on the circuit boards.
Hey, there’s our house!
Just found our house using GlobeXplorer:
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July 2nd, 2001
The image on the right shows our approximate property lines. Note the car in the driveway for scale. The grey building in the lower center is the detached garage, and the white building next to it is one of the two 8’x12′ sheds on the property. The other one is immediately to the right of the first, and is mostly obscured by the trees.
Since the GlobeXplorer logo is always in the same location relative to the picture frame, I screen-captured three different images with slightly different locations (so that the position of the house relative to the logo changed), then used PhotoImapct’s Clone tool to copy the logo-less sections from the other images over the logo-ed sections of my master image.
Never mind.
Here’s a broader view – the field to the left of our house is where the new house is currently being built. The road is on the far left.
We’re off the grid (sort-of)
Yesterday night I installed our Internet-based telephone system. Basically, there’s a box (the ATA-186) that plugs into the router, and then the phone plugs into the box. The phone works the same as it did plugged into the phone jack. There are several providers of this service – we went with Vonage, as it offers area code 845 phone numbers. Here’s a diagram (from Vonage) of how it works:
There several advantages:
Cost: $26 a month for a “phone line” with all the usual features, free local and regional calls, and 500 free long distance minutes a month.
Portability: The phone number is associated with the ATA-186 – if I take the box (and my phone) anywhere in the world and plug it into an internet connection, when someone calls my home phone, the phone will ring! If we move across town or to another state, we can keep our old phone number
The primary disadvantage is reliability: If the cable modem connection fails, bye-bye phone service. Fortunately, we can call the cable company using the cell phone. Power failure is also a problem, but we have a 450VA UPS which should power the cable modem, router, and ATA-186 for quite some time.
…So, I called verizon and cancelled our service with them. Its pretty amazing that phone calls can be thrown around on the internet in real-time – being attached to the phone company with thousands of feet of copper wire suddenly seems so passé. Of course, we’re still attached to the cable company, but one utility is better than two.