jump to navigation

Looking for a movie… January 6, 2010

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

So I’m looking for a movie. It was a short film. The world was about to end (explode) and some guy meets a girl and they spend the rest of their lives together (though that’s only about half a day). It was pretty awesome and featured the song Emperor Norton by Electric Winter. I’d like to watch it again.

Here’s the annoying thing. I opened the history window in Firefox and typed ‘Emperor Norton’. This got me to the last.fm page that I visited after watching the movie but after that 2 things went wrong.

1) Since I used the search thing I couldn’t see sites visited before and after this one. Clearing a search doesn’t keep the focus on the selected entry.

2) Since I clicked on the link (and thus visited the last.fm page) Firefox CHANGED the history so that the last.fm page is now listed as being visited today ONLY.

So even though I know that I went to this last.fm page shortly after viewing the movie I now apparently have no way to back-track through my history (short of reviewing every entry individually) to find the movie. If I could remember what it was called I could search for that but I can’t remember so it seems I’m out of luck.

Bummer.

Update 6 January 2010

Aha! I found it. It’s called Forever’s Not So Long.

Night Training Update January 2, 2010

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

We’ve had some success with Isaac though nothing consistent yet. When he does wet the bed it’s right as he wakes up and only a small amount so he’s almost there. I think he’s enjoying not wearing a nappy and is disappointed when he doesn’t wake up dry.

N900 Music FAIL December 17, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

My new office is noisy (bugs in trees outside the window) so I’m trying out the N900 as a music player because it’s got noise-canceling earphones.

The earphones feel good in the ear and the silicone cap seals out noise quite effectively. However the clicker is too heavy so you need to have it anchored on your shirt or it’ll pull out the bud. The plug is non-standard (too long) so it doesn’t work in a regular device. I might consider getting a pair of regular earphones like this. I do seem to “hear” anything that touches the cord which can be a bit annoying.

Anyway, the earphones weren’t the worst of it. It turns out the mighty N900 can’t handle playing back my puny 128k MP3s properly. At first I used the media player widget on the home screen but that resulted in the music skipping quite often. Removing that widget from the home screen and actually launching the media player stops most of the skipping. Now it seems to only happen when something specific happens to the phone rather than every now and then. While playing music the whole phone runs many times slower than it usually does. This makes the usual “did that tap get registered?” problem much worse. The N900 will happily queue up taps so you have to be really patient if you try to do anything. I ran top but nothing is chewing up all of the CPU. Probably a latency/buffer problem. This thing uses PulseAudio and that’s widely regarded as a piece of crap.

So N900 as a music player? FAIL.

Windows/IE .zip recursion FAIL December 14, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

I was using my family’s computer on the weekend and for some reason, .zip files weren’t working how they should. It seems someone had set them to open with Internet Explorer…

I found this out when I clicked on a .zip file and IE went into a recursion-of-death loop. An IE window showed on the screen briefly, only to go away. Then it happened again. In fact, apart from a few moments of unexplainable IE hangs, it just sat there creating a window and removing it again over and over. I guess IE had decided it couldn’t handle .zip files and was passing the file to Explorer which consulted the associations and gave the file back to IE.

I installed 7-zip and told it to take over the associations but the FAIL didn’t end there. I actually had to log out and back in again to stop IE’s seizure-inducing window flashing.

I have an N900 December 14, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

I got assigned to a new project at work and part of that will be writing software for the N900 so I now have one.

First impressions aren’t that good. The device does seem to do well as a “hacker’s phone” (heck, I broke the thing while running dpkg from the command line – you can uninstall the phone’s software doing that!) but even the Greenphone (which wasn’t a polished and released product) didn’t have some of the obvious and glaring problems that the N900 has.

The thing has an abysmal partition layout. Only 80M free space on the root filesystem and app packages are allowed to write there?! Oh, and apps in the -devel and -testing repos like to install into /usr.

There’s a front camera but no software to use it? The thing has Skype for crying out loud but can’t do video calls!

There’s no on-screen keyboard mode indicator. The virtual keyboard can be easier to use as a result of this (though it’s crap for fast entry because it doesn’t support multi-touch).

I’m sure I’ll post more about the N900 over time. Maybe it’ll grow on me.

OVI FAIL December 14, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

I wanted to get Fring for my E90 so I went to store.ovi.com but you have to login before you can download (even though it’s a free app). I try to login but I can’t remember my password. I try to fetch my password but it says it doesn’t know who I am so I try to sign up but it says my login (a1291762) is already taken. WTF? FAIL!

Night training Isaac December 14, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

Since it’s summer and we can wash his sheets every day we’ve started trying to night train Isaac.

Unlike the last time we tried this he does seem to be staying dry through the night, wetting his bed just as he starts to wake up. We’ve been going for a few days now and he seems to be doing less wee each day. I think with another week or so he’ll be waking up dry.

Misbehaving TiVo November 27, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

TiVo, why didn’t you record Good News Week on Monday?! Good thing they put their episodes on the web.

Switching browsers November 17, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , 2comments

I recently switched from Safari to Firefox at home. Firefox is my preferred browser on Windows and Linux and these days it is integrated with Mac OS well enough for me to be happy with it. Most importantly, it brings me to feature parity with the other platforms I use. Extensions are primarily what made me switch.

Force Re-download November 17, 2009

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

So I have noticed that Thunderbird will sometimes corrupt the offline copy of an IMAP message. The symptoms I’ve seen are attachments that are incomplete.

Most people answering inquiries of this nature seem to go on about how it’s the IMAP server’s fault and how certain hidden prefs should make the problem happen less often. I am not satisfied with this buck passing attitude (the prefs didn’t help me anyway) and sought a better solution.

This thread got me thinking. A simple right-click menu with a “Force re-download” option shouldn’t be too hard to write, should it?

Well here it is. Force Re-download.

This is far from polished. It works for me but I can’t warrant that it’ll work for you too. It adds a right-click menu entry to force a message to be re-downloaded. This actually works and can be used to fix incomplete attachments. It uses the same mechanism that Thunderbird uses but it ignores the existing local copy.

Caveats:

There’s a forum over here with more details. If you’re familiar with Thunderbird development and can help me overcome these limitations I’d love to hear from you!