ex libris

the sincerest form of flattery

Mike — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:23:14 +0000

I mentioned that I was using the Vitae SL theme on my wind. I discovered there was a windowblinds port of Vitae. I am a big fan of windowblinds. Running windows without windowblinds constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in my book.

The download of the windowblinds skin included some extras including a toolbar for something called Styler. I noticed the screenshot for the skin featured a very Finder-like explorer window which was creating using Styler and FindeXer (get it?).

I followed this tutorial and was able to achieve a pretty mac-like look on xp:

10/gui

Mike — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:53:28 +0000

I thought this video that Matt Mullenweg pointed out was really cool. Definitely more innovative than an oversized ipod touch and a nice counterpoint to my previous bumptop post.

snow leopard redux

Mike — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:04:56 +0000

I decided to take another whack at installing Snow Leopard yesterday. This time I ignored advice not to use Migration Assistant due to its flakiness. I figured it was worth a shot. I migrated everything except applications which I then just copied over manually. It seems to have worked pretty well.

I encountered an odd bug where for some reason growl was causing firefox not to focus when launched. Upgrading to firefox 3.6 resolved that. I was also happy to find that both liteicon and superdocker work just fine on SL so I was able to get the litho icons and dock background going again. Unfortunately, magnifique is a no go on SL so I needed to look elsewhere for menu bar and window theming.

I tried another tutorial for a black menu bar with the same results as last time. When that didn’t pan out, I ended up installing the Vitae SL theme which is pretty nice.

An added bonus: SL seems to be significantly faster…I scored an even 1000 on geekbench whereas Leopard only produced a 922 when not overclocked.

bumptop

Mike — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:51:22 +0000

Saw this post on cnet about the launch of BumpTop for the mac. There was already a windows version but I had never heard of this desktop replacement software before and it looked intriguing:

I decided to take the windows version for a spin and although the software is pretty interesting, I didn’t really feel it worked for me. First off, on my work pc, it was incompatible with the software that allows me to use my monitor in portrait mode. It also didn’t really get along with the Yahoo! widget engine which I run on that pc. Additionally, I simply don’t use my desktop as some random storage area. My desktops on both of my home computers are completely blank: no icons at all! I’m a little less anal about my work pc…I do allow program shortcuts to pile up there but nothing else really. I’m glad to see someone is thinking about other ways to approach the desktop and BumpTop may work really well for some folks, just not for me.

flight 1549

Mike — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:33:54 +0000

This time lapse video of Flight 1549 sitting in the icy Hudson and subsequently being lifted out is very cool:

Via cnet

archos ebook reader

Mike — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:52:28 +0000

I previously touched on both the broken drm of the adobe epub format as well as the idea of using the archos as an ebook reader. I decided to do some further experimentation in this area. For the record, I actually don’t have any personal interest in ebooks but was simply curious about what was technically possible.

The first thing that occurred to me was that the archos has a built in pdf reader. So I figured if I could convert the epub to pdf, that might work. However, the adobe acrobat pdf writer recognized that the epub had once been encrypted and refused to output anything.

I subsequently discovered Calibre, an open source ebook manager. It was able to convert the epub to pdf. I loaded it onto the archos but frankly, the experience left a little to be desired. The text was small, the table of contents did not live-link, no bookmarking features. In my test book, I actually had to scroll through thirty odd pages (many of them blank) before I arrived at chapter one. I probably could have come up with something better by fiddling with Calibre’s conversion settings but I think this reinforces the fact pdf is a pretty inflexible format best suited for printing:

Then I took a look at this OPF ebook reader created specifically for the archos by divx118. It is a slick little app written just in html and javascript. It works with ebooks in the Open eBook format. I think that OEB and OPF are the same thing but I could be wrong.

So now I had to get my epub into opf format. The instructions for the reader covered a lit to opf converter so I simply used Calibre to convert from epub to lit and then used the converter to go to opf.

The result actually seems quite usable. The reader supports bookmarks, adjustable font sizes, the table of contents works properly, etc. Here are a few screens:

2009 continues

Mike — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:11:24 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve considered Spin magazine to be a valuable source of information on music. That being said, I have been enjoying going through these two end of year lists of theirs to see what I missed:

Found a number of things that looked worth checking out and although I haven’t listened to all of them yet, I already found something that probably would have made my best of list on the second list: the album by An Horse is excellent!

archos hacking

Mike — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:05:55 +0000

Although it’s been quite some time since I’ve written about archos stuff, it seems hacking efforts on the 605 continue and there have been new developments. With the original GFT hack closed, users with newer firmware were locked out. But subsequently a GFT2 hack was accomplished followed by the “moldy cheese” hack which loads a version of avos with all the plugins unlocked. And now there is a GFT3 hack courtesy of sideways. All hacks are listed on this wiki page and the new GFT3 forum thread is here.

Unfortunately, it looks like the ability to load the modified avos with all plugins unlocked is currently restricted to the hard disk based models (I tried this on my unit and it resulted in a hard reset). There is some justification for bypassing the plugins at this point since archos no longer supports the gen 5 devices. That being said, the plugins don’t really interest me. If they truly had, I would have simply purchased them back in the day. I really just wanted to see if it was possible.

I only use my archos occasionally these days for one of four things:

Wirelessly streaming music from my media drive to my stereo.
Listening to podcasts in the bathtub. The archos can download them directly and since it has a built-in speaker and is relatively small, it is convenient to haul around.
Video capture. While I did capture a bunch of movies from vhs prior to moving, I still have a box to do but have not done any lately.
I use it as an SD card reader with my windows laptop.

So why did I revisit the archosfans forums yesterday? We just started offering ebooks through Overdrive at the library and I was curious if the adobe epub drm had been compromised. Sure enough, it was cracked almost a year ago. That led me to half remembering/wondering if someone had successfully put an ebook reader on the archos which led me back to the forums.

Ultimately, it doesn’t look like much is likely to happen in terms of new apps for this old archos model. It’s actually quite surprising anything has been happening with it at all. It looks like maybe archos learned something as they seem to be offering an sde for their new tablet to get developers onboard. But the chance of me buying another archos device is virtually nil. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice piece of hardware but I don’t think much of the company anymore…

drupal + beer

Mike — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:00:51 +0000

Since drupal is free as in both “free speech” and “free beer”, then drupal and beer is a match made in heaven. Which is why it’s cool there is now an Android (and iphone) app powered by drupal 6 called BeerCloud. The android-only feature where you can scan the barcode of a bottle of beer to get its info is super awesome! Check it out!

flexinode->cck

Mike — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:56:22 +0000

I wrote before about the sad state of our drupal-based intranet at the library…well that was two and a half years ago. Only on new year’s eve day did I finally get around to rectifying that unfortunate decision to use the flexinode module years ago.

I used the flexiconvert module to accomplish the conversion from flexinode to cck. It actually worked surprisingly well. There were some wrinkles but I managed to iron them all out. Between the readme file that comes with the module and this set of instructions, the info needed is (mostly) there. It was certainly helpful that I was able to test the process on a local copy of the installation rather than the live one. While working out the process, I did have to roll back a few times and start over.

One immediate stumbling block was a couple syntax errors in an sql statement in the 4.7 version of the module. Obviously, the developer never actually used or tested this version himself. The advice to rename your flexinode fields to simple more database-like field names is excellent. In flexinode, the field names and labels are the same, in cck they can be different. Also, I thought it would be smart to use shared cck fields where applicable but that did not make the converter happy so avoid doing that.

We are now in a position to move to drupal 5 which is still supported. I actually have a converted version running on my local machine and it’s looking good so that upgrade will probably happen soon. Then we can look at a drupal 6 upgrade which would put our intranet and new website on the same platform which should be beneficial.