Captain's Log

Ctrl-Backspace

I was just informed by MikeD (about 2 minutes ago) that much like Ctrl-arrow which you can use to jump around typed text, you can also use Ctrl-Backspace to delete whole words at a time. I suppose this is not too different than using Ctrl-Shift-arrow to select text and then hitting Delete or Backspace, but it is more key efficient.

I wonder what other neat keyboard shortcuts are lurking out there...

Soundcard Oscilloscope

I found an Oscilloscope for soundcards yesterday while searching for a way to analyze the output of a tone generator I was helping to make. The software is simple and straightforward, its features resemble what you would expect of an oscilloscope, and it doesn't require any special hardware or drivers. Just a soundcard and your input into the mic or line in. The frequency analysis function (like a realtime fourier transform) was really useful in debugging the tone generator.

The software written in National Instruments LabVIEW isn't freeware, but it's free for non-commercial use. It also has a function generator and a sound recorder built in. Works great for low voltage signals in the 0-20kHz range. You have to make sure that you don't blow out your soundcard by connecting too high a voltage to it.

The picture happens to be me saying "aaaaaa."

Automatic Update Prompts

If the box that pops up asking if you want to "Restart Now" after Windows XP installs an update annoys you, there's a quick way to get rid of it without changing any permanent settings. Go to the Services section under Computer Managment (right-click on My Computer and pick Manage) and open the properties for Automatic Updates. Stop the service and the reminder goes away. The service will restart the next time Windows starts, so you won't miss any updates, and it will still finish installing the updates when do restart.

So yes, I haven't made a post in a while. Motivation is low. Maybe I'll find some more soon.

Video Downloader

I ran into a handy Firefox plugin recently - Video Downloader. It lets you save videos that are normally played in browser through a flash applet. You can save the actual videos instead of just a link to the video and view video when you are offline. For some websites, such as Youtube, there are simple url hacks you can use to save the file. Keeping track of them for lots of websites can be a pain, and Video Downloader removes that hassle.

Something to consider before you start saving and sharing videos yourself is to check the website's Terms of Service. If you post content that someone else has the rights to, it's pretty easy to get tagged for it. At that point, it's just easier to link to original content, as long as the original site still has it. Most websites will let you save videos for personal (non-distribution) use, so if you just want to archive stuff you'll probably be fine.

Most of these websites have the videos stored in Flash Video format (FLV). To play these files you need to get a special player, as there isn't a straight Windows codec for it, unless your player specifically supports it. The one I tried was FLV Player and it did the job fine. You can also convert the video from FLV to AVI if you prefer to save it that way.

Edit: I just read on forum that there are some minor privacy issues with using Video Downloader. The page that pops up to save the video is not created locally - it comes from Video Downloader's home site, javimoya.com. It means that all your video downloads are probably logged at that site. Not too big a deal, but if you care, you can find other ways of saving the videos with a quick google search.

Streaming Media with Orb to Mobile Phones

In the past, being able to get to your data from anywhere just wasn't possible. In college we'd carry zip disks in our backpacks to keep projects and other data. The idea of having all your data web accessible was foriegn just 5 or 6 years ago. Now with cheap storage and well designed software you can store your data anywhere. Remote access software like the old PCAnywhere or modern day VNC or Windows Remote Desktop allows complete access to your local computer. So you can just leave everything at home and reach it there...except your media. The problem with most forms of media is that even in its super compressed mp3/mpg format, there isn't a good way to move that media over a limited pipeline (e.g. a DSL or cable modem line). Shoutcast was a good way to move mp3s, but it's design was more for broadcasting than a user viewing his/her own media. Well in the past year or so, things have changed.

If you haven't already seen the Slingbox, it's a device which takes any media you have on your home computer and streams it over a network connection. mp3s. music. video. live or recorded tv. pictures. Anything. It's a pretty nifty device for under $200. They've even done a good job of integrating it with DVR and Tivo boxes. In addition to the Slingbox, there are a few software solutions out there which can stream your media like SnapStream's BeyondTV. One software solution I just ran into beats the previously mentioned for two reasons. 1. It's free. 2. It works with my new cell phone!

Orb is a streaming server software which works in coordination with Orb's web server to let you navigate and view all the media on your computer. I recently got a Samsung A900 phone with an unlimited data plan. With Orb I can view all the songs, video, pictures on my computer through my phone anywhere. Sprint's new EV-DO service has enormous bandwidth (1.7 Mbps on a speed test at my desk), so the limitation is actually the upstream on my cable modem. The killer feature is the fact that I can view live TV through my TV tuner card. The concept of capturing live TV, resizing the image, encoding it to a streamable codec, sending it over the internet and then a phone network to a mobile phone, and then decoding and viewing it on the spot still amazes me. You don't have to have a new phone to use Orb though. Just a high speed internet connection and media that you want to view remotely.

The potential of combined technologies like this is amazing. There'll be a lot of new applications which can take advantage of the cheap processing power, storage, and bandwidth available these days. I can't wait to see the next one.

Minesweeper

About a year ago the guys in the office and I went on a little minesweeper kick and I discovered that while I'm usually pretty good at analytical problems, I was definitely missing something with Minesweeper. I played enough to where I just memorized patterns and guessed if I didn't recognize something. I could clear the board quickly, but if I didn't guess it would take me forever. I pretty much relied on guessing to get good times - and guessing that much means that half (or more) of the time I'd have to start over. For the most part you don't have to guess in Minesweeper. There are times that you do, but they don't come up that often, aside from the first few clicks. That got me wondering about how systematic minesweeper is, and what algorithms have been developed to solve it.

So after a few weeks of Minesweeper, I went searching and found out there's a lot of interesting stuff about the game. The Wikipedia minesweeper page has a ton of info, and I'll mention some of it. For starters you can see what the world records are and watch 'videos' at Planet Minesweeper. The best players in the world have combined times of 50-60 seconds for beginner, expert, and intermediate. The current leader has times of 1, 10, and 39 seconds at the three levels, Which is insane. The 1 second beginner time is just a random thing. If you play enough beginner minesweeper games you'll eventually hit one that clears instantly. You can watch some of the minesweeper videos if you don't believe that people can move their mouse that fast. (You need to get a codec linked on that page).

What got me interested again today was an article I read on the NP-completeness of Minesweeper. (You can brush up on P vs. NP at wikipedia) The above article references the journal article which first proved that Minesweeper was equivalent to existing NP-complete problems. Richard Kaye (the original author) developed minesweeper grids that were equivalent to the building blocks of logic - gates and wires, like AND, OR, and NOT. I thought this was pretty neat. (Click on the links 1 and 3 spots above this one to see some of the gates) Since the problem of determining the output of a set of gates/wires for any input is an NP-complete problem, the transformation shows that Minesweeper is also NP-complete. An efficient (polynomial time) Minesweeper solver would solve all other NP-complete problems in polynomial time. That includes prime factorization (modern cryptography), the traveling salesman problem, graph coloring problem, among others. In other words it would be one of the biggest discoveries in math in a long time, and it would have practical implications. So I guess I won't find a Minesweeper solver anytime soon.

(Footnote: There are Minesweeper solvers, just not any that work in polynomial time)

Disconnecting a USB device

In Windows XP if you want to disconnect a USB device you can right click on the tray icon and follow that up with about 2-3 more clicks. I just discovered that instead of right-clicking you can left click the icon and you get a popup menu which will disconnect any connected device. I know to some of you this may seem trivial, but it was a revelation to me. Instead of thinking "Why did they use this horrible interface that takes so many clicks to unplug something?" now I can just do what I need to do quickly.

Removing Saved Windows Passwords

When you map a network drive or printer, you can have Windows save the login/password info for that account, so that you don't have to reenter it every time you use that resource. The bad part is that there is no normal utility built in to remove that login or change that login. This is especially annoying on my school windows network account, because I have to change my password every so often. What worse is that after a few incorrect logins (which the computer does for me) my account gets locked.

Well A quick google search found me a solution to the problem. Text quoted here:

Remote Desktop Tips

I use Remote Desktop to access my home computer from campus all the time. In Windows XP when you connect to a computer it disconnects the existing session from the console (the local I/O) and sends all the data remotely. It creates a logon session (the welcome screen) and that's what you see on the local screen. After you disconnect your remote session (not logoff) the local console remains locked. You have to physically login at the console to bring the session back. This became a problem for me, because when the login screen is up certain programs can't start correctly, because the session has no connection to the video driver. (e.g. video capture applications)

I spent a while searching for a solution to the this problem, and I finally found one. If you want to exit a remote desktop session and return it to the local computer (console) you can type:

if your sessionid is 0. If you don't know your session ID, you can use this nifty command. It runs a program and parses the output for your current session number. (Makes me realize that the NT DOS prompt isn't so chumpy)

Either way the desktop is returned to the local machine. The can be handy if you remotely fix someone's machine and you want to return it to the desktop without having to have them login. I realize this may seem like a nearly useless tip, but it is a very simple solution to what can be a frustrating problem.

Another interesting thing about Remote Desktop in WinXP is that concurrent sessions were enabled during the development of Service Pack 2 (SP2) but it was pulled before the final release. Luckily there is still a way to hack it into place. Basically you can login to one account onto a WinXP pro installation while someone else is using a different account at the console. It's not exactly the Terminal Server edition, but it's nifty if you remote desktop into a computer someone else might use. You can follow the directions at this website to enable the feature. Slight warning: you need to replace some files in safe mode to get this to work.

Pie charts, binaries, and another 'zilla

Quick post with some possibly useful programs.

If you need a good, free FTP client, try Filezilla. Gabe originally recommended it, and I've used it ever since. Free and functional. What else do you want?

Another Gabe recommendation (I need to find out what else he uses that I don't know about yet) is Grabit. Parker, Gautam, and I have been using it for a while now to grab binaries from USENET newsgroups. It's designed for grabbing lots of binaries so it's not really useful as an article reader (although you can read articles if you want). It does the job really well, despite the occasional bug. I can barely remember what it was like to use Agent or manually cut, paste, and uudecode binaries in the olden days.

Sometime when I wonder where my disk space has gone, I go directory by directory and either look at what's inside or go to the properties of each folder. This takes forever, and you never really get a good feel of how much space is taken up by each folder, because you can't hold all the numbers in your head. If you want a little utility to make that task easier, try downloading JDiskReport. It's another free, open source program that does what you ask of it without a ton of crap or nagging you every time you start up. You pick a folder and it generates tables/graphs of the space usage in several different ways. (size distribution, type, date modified, largest files, and of course directory breakdown). With this program it only take a few seconds to hunt down a rogue temp file which wasn't deleted or figure out that most of your my documents directory is pictures. You may think it's an unnecessary program, since you can figure the same stuff out with effort in explorer, but I think it saves a ton of time. Plus the UI is nice to look at.

Firefox 1.0 released!

Just to let everyone know, Firefox 1.0 is out. It might be a decent idea to wait a few days for 1.01 or whatever the next minor release is, if you don't intend to update your Firefox often. It'll be easier to update now, since Firefox 1.0 should be able to update itself without a hitch for minor revisions. I'll be downloading it soon. Mozilla.org is hammered at the moment. Hammered enough that my 'Get Firefox' button isn't loading.

Here's a list of mirrors from a /. post.

Quick MT Tip: Entries fading away?

If you want to control the entries on your index by last number of entries instead of last entries in X days, then you can just refer to this text, taken straight from the MT help file (From Weblog configuration, Preferences):

Winamp 5 Media Library

Most of the people I know use Winamp as their music player. Hopefully people are either using Winamp 5 or 2.91, and not Winamp 3, because it sucks. If you are using 5 or 2.91, then you have the Media Library available to you, but I'm guessing that most people don't use it. I think it's pretty useful and neat. If you ever use the jump to feature in the playlist, then you'll like the Media Library

You have it scan through your mp3 folders, and it catalogs everything based on ID3 tag (or filename if necessary) and stores it in the media library database. Normally if you wanted to find a song, you'd have to navigate your directory structure, browse around, and find the song. Now you can just type any part of the song (title, album, artist) in the search box, and it pares down the listings in the box to the ones that match. Want to play Push the Hand by the Toadies? Just type 'push' in the box, and it'll list the songs that match (5 in my case), and you can click to play or enqueue the song. There are a ton of options to configure, so you can get the behavior of the list just the way you like it. There are some other neat features, like the fact that it keeps stats on what you play, how often you play it, and the last time you've played any given song. Also you can play/control external devices (i.e. mp3 players) if you have the appropriate plugin, but I haven't tried this yet.

So if you are using Winamp 5, then you might as well give it a try, since it's already available. Those who still use Windows Media Player need to give Winamp a try for playing audio.

As an additional treat, here's a list of most requested Winamp features that are plugins. (for v5) Makes for a good list of useful, handy plugins.

Annoying Windows XP Search

Here's my weak attempt at sliding in an August post. My excuse is moving back from Tennessee to Houston, then back to Austin, and then moving from one apartment in Austin to another. And laziness. Anyway, on to the real reason for posting.

Windows 2000 had a pretty easy to use file search, much like Windows 98. In Windows XP they changed the search, I guess to make it more user friendly, but it's been more annoying for me. So if you want to know how to get the 'classic search' back it's pretty easy.

I did a quick search for the registry hack, and it's here. But the way that I normally do it, is to install Powertoys for Windows XP. It has that option under Explorer/Settings/Use Classic Search in Explorer. It also has tons of other little hacks that you can use, like an automatic login (but this doesn't encrypt your password when it saves it, I think) and various desktop tweaks. I use the autologin for the computer I have in my car and attached to the TV. It allows a remote restart, without having to be present at the computer to login, while still being able to password an account.

Deleting stubborn, big AVI files

For a very long time I've had a stupid problem where I can't delete a large AVI file for no apparent reason. I would keep trying and it would eventually work, maybe after a restart or logoff, but not always. I tried all the delete tricks I could think of, and I even tried to see what program (my guess was explorer) had a handle on the file. Eventually I found the answer, and I'm posting to save sometime for whoever might read this.

Stolen from here.

Good Torrent Sites Revisited

So Bittorrent has taken off in a big way since I posted about it last year. I get a ton of search hits for torrent sites, even though I don't have a very good list, so I thought I'd at least make a new post with the torrent sites I use most.

Before we get to the sites, here are some of the things that I think make a good torrent site:

1. Traffic - More people coming to the site = more torrents, longer lasting torrents, less chance of a torrent with no seed. More is better, unless you have too many...
2. Stability - In the early days of the torrent world, sites went up and down or changed appearance and functionality very often. Also trackers which have capacity or DNS problems can kill otherwise thriving torrents. It's important for a site to supply enough hardware/software support to handle the load they expect.
3. Tracker info - I think it's important to be able to tell what the seed/leech ratio is like and what the file size is before you download the torrent. This is a strike, in my opinion, against forum based torrent sites.
4. Responsible users - Some torrent sites enforce ratios, which is a positive thing in my opinion. Even if the majority of people at least put back as much as they take, then the burden of supporting the leechers falls upon the seeders. Enforcing ratios leads to better torrenting for all who participate.

So here are the sites that I frequent:

• Suprnova is probably one of the best, largest sites. It has a wide variety of stuff, high traffic, decent stability. It has a decent mirror system which helps to cope with traffic levels that have brought many other torrent sites down.
• For new TV releases you can go to the website for #tvtorrents or #BT. Both have up-to-date TV releases, and have always been reliable for me.
• Phoenix Torrents is a forum based site with a very strong community. Requests actually get filled, and there is some enforcement of decent ratios. It has a wide variety of content and a large number of torrents.
• TorrentBits is a registration site with lots of restrictions. The have limited their user base to 75000 users, but that is still a decent number. They have pretty strict rules on how long torrents live, ratios, uploading, etc. They have quality stuff, and since so many of the users have good ratios, there's often a problem where torrents have too many seeds and noth enough leechers to build up your ratio. Which I think is a welcome problem. This is my favorite site at the moment, because I can build up my ratio by seeding, and then download as necessary later.
• TvTorrents.com is a registration required site which focuses on TV shows. It keeps track of your net upload minus download, which it calls credits. A pretty good number of torrents and a decent community
• I don't use TorrentReactor much, because I can usually find what I need on the sites above. And if I can't find it, then it likely isn't here either. It's still a decent site, with a crisp look.

Some time in the future I'll have to sort out the mess that is all the different torrent clients. If I left off one of your favorites, just post a comment.

Make Acrobat Load Faster

Here's a tip to make Adobe Acrobat Reader load WAY faster than it normally does. Stolen directly from this /. post.

"Go to your Acrobat\Reader folder and take everything from the "plug_ins" folder and move it into "Optional" except the following: Search.api, Search5.api, IA32.api, EWH32.api, EScript.api. Printing and search will still work, and it will load 75% faster. This is on Reader 6.0."

Also, in one of the replies, it lists a program which basically does the same thing.

(The may not seem post-worthy, but I've decide to relax idea of post-worthy so I actually have stuff to post. This is useful, neat, and I would want to know about it, if I didn't know already. Those criteria are enough for me.)

YahooPOPs!

While browsing around the Fatwallet Hot Deals Forum (which deserves its own blog post), I ran into a thread about free email services. Inside that thread someone mentioned a way to check Yahoo mail by POP for free. Yahoo started charging for POP access about 2 years ago, and I subsequently stopped using it. This program is called YahooPOPs!, and it functions much like Hotmail Popper which I mentioned in an a previous blog post. It's a POP proxy that you run on your local machine that sits between your mail client and Yahoo's server. It's bit slow at retrieving large numbers of messages, but it works fine. I installed version 0.5 and used it without a hitch.

I checked the Hotmail Popper page, and it appears they've advanced way past the version I use (1.02) with version 3.02, but it's limited shareware now (only 100 messages downloaded until it stops) which sucks. My old one still works fine, and if you can't find the old download, but still want it, let me know and I can try to get it to you.

Also Parker informed me the other day that Wonderfalls is cancelled. You can hear it from the mouth of the executive producer, Tim Minear, here.

Firebird extensions

So if you aren't using Mozilla Firebird yet, you are behind the times. If you have no idea what it is, go here for the FAQ. I could rant on about why reasons why you should switch but we'll save that for another post. Until then, you read about why you should use it here or the Firebird page. Even though it's only at version 0.7 it's pretty solid. Much more solid than Mozilla was at 0.7. Anyway on to the real topic of this post.

For those of you who do use Firebird, you should check out all the extensions available. Go to the extensions page to install any of these and read the summaries, if you don't need to full scoop at the author's homepage.

• Gestures are the cream of the crop when it comes to extensions. They let you perform tasks by holding a mouse button and moving the mouse instead of using menus and toolbar buttons. You might think it's not very useful, but once you try them out, you'll be hooked. (My favorite version is All-in-One Gestures. It has other additions like rocker gestures and use of the scroll wheel to navigate through the history or through tabs.
• One of the neat features of Firebird is the integrated search bar just right of the address bar. It makes a Google search a lot easier. Well I just learned that you can search a bunch of different places, like IMDb using the same bar. Just click on the search icon in the bar, and hit 'Add engines...' which takes you to the Mycroft page at mozdev. There you can choose from a ton of popular search engines/sites to add to your bar. Searching for things just got even easier...
• Flash Click to View is a great way to avoid the ads that you can't block because they are flash applets. Instead of automatically running a flash applet when a page loads, it displays a button in its place, which you can click to start the applet. It can be a hassle on flash-only sites like Homestarrunner, but otherwise I think it's really useful.
• Paste and Go is a really simple extension that takes a URL you have in the clipboard, and automatically loads the page if you press Ctrl-Shift-V. Or you can right click and choose 'Paste and Go' instead of just 'Paste' from the context menu in the address bar. Again doesn't seem that useful, but it saves time.
• Text/Plain is in the same vein of Paste and Go. Sometimes people write urls or site names without linking them. (e.g. cnn.com). With Text/Plain, you can highlight the text which makes the site address (it doesn't have to have the http) and open it in a new tab or window or in the current tab. Another handy little extension.
• EditCSS is a useful tool for people developing pages. It lets you edit the CSS for the page you are viewing in realtime. It keeps you from having to make changes to your live web page just to see what something might look like. The CSS comes up in a sidebar and changes are instant. Very useful for developing.

There are a bunch more extensions that are cool, so you should check the extensions page yourself. You might find a new plugin you like.

This post was brought to you by the number 23.

Duke Nukem 3D!

Duke Nukem 3D is an excellent game that came out a long long time ago (back when I was still using a 486). It was around at the same time as some other first person shooters (FPSs) like Doom and Wolfenstien, but it preceeded games with true 3D like Quake. There was more up and down movement and firing than in Doom and Wolfenstien, but it was still 2.5D. Nonetheless it was a great game. What made is truly great was the interactivity of the environment. Duke could break things, drink water from a fire hydrant, use a toilet, even interact with a stripper. The overall gameplay was great, and Duke was just a badass. Who else could deliver the line "It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum.....and I'm all outta gum!" (Originally taken from the movie They Live) In multiplayer Duke would deliver awesome taunts (in actual audio) like, "You're an inspiration for birth control!" or "It hurts to be you!"

Sunny, Yono, Jackson and I played a whole lot of Duke3d over the modem back in high school. It was the first game that ever made my wrists/hands hurt, since that was before I knew that mouse look was infinitely better than keyboard look. (I was young and stupid.) The single player mode was interesting enough, but you could also play deathmatches and even coop, in which Sunny and Yono proceeded to beat most of the game over the modem. Here's a very old screenshot where Sunny's got me in his crosshairs just after dying. Guess I beat him to the punch that time. I even made that little map we were playing on. It was a big rectangle with a 'fort' at each end. 'Fort' being a small wall to hide behind. Notice the old handle, Maverick. Since there are a billion Mavericks out there, and it didn't really mean anything to me anyway, I've seen gone to the arguably lamer ramk. But it works and no one else uses it. Except for the person who stole ramk.com...

So why am I reminiscing? Because in April 2003 3D Realms released the source code to the game. Within a few days there were working ports for Win32 and Linux. There's been time for those ports to mature, and there's an excellent version out at rancidmeat.com, coded primarily by David Koenig. All I had to do to run this version was extract the zip, then copy the duke3d.grp file from my old duke3d directory into the new one, and it worked perfectly. I even cranked my resolution up to 1024×768. I had tried my original DOS version, but it had sound, video, and control problems when I ran it under Win2k or WinXP. On top of that there was no TCP/IP networking support. Since I'm not that interested in playing by myself, I hadn't resurrected it, until now. This new port allows multiplayer over UDP. It takes a tiny bit of effort to get going, but it worked ok. Jackson and I tried it out for about 30 minutes today. I learned yet again that the rocket launcher should never be my weapon of choice in any game. I did alright with the other guns though, especially the chaingun. I like the chaingun...

So go download the port and let me know when you want to play! It's really easy to setup, and while it might not have the graphical beauty of the games coming out today, it's has classic gameplay. In what other game can you kill your opponent by shrinking them and then stomping on them! It was unlike anything else at the time, and a precursor to all the interactive FPSs that would come years after.

Computing on the Move

I've struggled for a long time to get external audio playing in my car. To make a long story short, I finally found an auxiliary input adapter for the head unit of my car stereo, and then I followed that up by sticking a whole computer in the trunk of my car for music. More details are in the extended entry link, and pictures are here.

In my old Corolla I had a tape adapter, but then my tape deck stopped working with it, so I had to resort to an FM transmitter. I kept with the transmitter when I started driving my Civic, because it didn't have a tape deck. FM transmitters don't produce the best audio, and you often have to switch frequencies, depending on nearby radio stations. That's too much of a hassle when driving. I found a pretty decent transmitter at Hobbytron that I wired into my car for a while, so I could reasonably listen to my Nomad while driving. It worked pretty well, except that the frequency it transmitted on varied with temperature. Enough so that in the morning I had to tune 0.2 MHz down, and it would gradually rise back as it got warmer. That was annoying enough that I didn't bother to pull out my Nomad most of the time, unless it was an extended trip.

Parker was looking for a way to get audio into the head unit of his new car, which also didn't have a tape deck. He found an auxiliary adapter which was custom made to fit the proprietary connection in his car. Since he found one for his, I went looking for one from my Civic, and finally found one. I had searched really hard before I bought the Hobbytron FM transmitter, but I couldn't find anything. I thing I have decent googling skills, but I just didn't know what people called the thing I was looking for. P.I.E. makes a HON-AUX auxiliary input converter which fits right into the back of most Honda head units that can control a CD changer. I found an entry in a blog which had some details on installing the adapter. I read the page and tried to do the installation the next day, and ended up scratching my dash a little, because I forgot to loosen some bolts. In the end I was basically able to pull off a panel and stick my hand all the way to the back of the stereo and plug the adapter in. I also had to remember to attach a grounding wire between the converter and the frame of the car. I plugged my Nomad in and got CD-quality sound and access to all my music. It was quite a moment.

But that wasn't enough for me... Sunny, Jackson , Yono, and I had aspirations to build a car mp3 player during the summer of 1999, way before portables and in dash players were prevalent at all. In a two week span we managed to get a decently working system going, although we had some problems with our LCD. That computer ended up residing under my dorm room bed, and then got split up and travelled with my along with all my other leftover computer parts. Since I still had all these leftover computer parts hanging around, I figured I'd make an attempt to throw them all together and get a computer going in my trunk to play songs.

As for software, I'm running Windows XP on the computer and using the joystick for control. I trimmed as much off as windows as I could in terms of services and programs running. I found a program called Joystick 2 Mouse 3 which can translate joystick button presses into keyboard and mouse actions. Then I setup bunch of keyboard shortcuts for all the functions that I need, like starting a playlist, skipping a track, jumping to winamp, or shutting down. To add a little more flavor I made a VBScript to start and stop the Windows Narrator. The Narrator can read the lines of an Windows Explorer window, and you can play and enqueue specific songs and albums that way. Normally the computer takes under a minute to boot. Sometimes I hibernate the computer instead of shutting it down or just turning off the computer, because it goes down and comes back much faster. The hibernation is pretty neat, because the computer comes back in the exact same state it was when you turned it off, even if it was in the middle of playing a song.

In terms of hardware, I originally planned to try to place it under the driver's or passenger's seat, but then there's fan noise from the computer and inverter, and it's likely to get kicked by someone sitting in the back seat. Plus the whole package has to be really small. So instead I decided to stick the computer and inverter in the trunk. I bought lighter jack extension cable, with a switch that the inverter plugged into. Somehow I felt better about having a 12 V DC cable running through my car in comparison to a 120 V AC cable. The computer plugged into the inverter in the trunk. The audio out from the computer, the lighter jack extension, and the USB extension cable snaked through the gap of my fold down seat, under the floor mats, and then up to the front car. I also rigged a CAT 5 cable to carry the signal for power and HD activity LEDs to the front of the car, along with a soft power switch. I punched some holes in a little removable panel in my dash for easy access to the power switch and the LEDs. I used a bunch of audio cables and splitters, so that I could also separately plug in my Nomad. I had to add a Ground Loop Isolator (GLI), since the ground voltage on the computer seems to be a little off from the ground voltage of the head unit. The GLI is just a 1-to-1 transformer that passes AC signal, but not DC voltage differences. I also picked up a good amount of alternator whine until I put the GLI in. I think it introduced a little hissing, so I'm going to see if I can ground everything better and go without it. The joystick is an old MS Sidewinder Freestyle Pro that I bought a few years ago. I labeled the joystick with some of the important functions.

It took a decent amount of effort to get the whole system working smoothly. At one point I didn't want to bring the computer back up to my apartment, since I basically wired it to the console, so I brought a monitor and keyboard down to debug. To fix that problem, I cut the CAT 5 cable, crimped on some RJ-45 jacks and got a coupler. One of the harder parts was working out a reliable, not-bloated, software system. At first I was using Windows 98, which probably botted a little faster (but not much faster). I run WinXP on all my other computer, and I had no shortage of old RAM, so I decided to go with WinXP. I had a couple of times where cables became disconnected, and I spent 30 minutes chasing a down a solution to a simple problem.

Some ideas for improving on the system:

• An LCD - maybe when I get a few hundred extra dollars to spend. I only spent about $60 dollars on the computer project outside the HON-AUX adapter, which I would have bought for my Nomad anyway.
• Wireless ethernet - Then I could remote desktop to my car from my apartment! It'd let me easily manage what was going on the computer and update my mp3s without having to pull the computer out of the car.
• UPS - This would make the WiFi more viable, so I wouldn't have to leave my keys sitting my car while I worked on the computer in my apartment. Also it would making not shutting down less of a concern.

Here's a rough list of everything that went into the project:

• ECS P5SSme Motherboard, AMD K6-3+ 450 MHz processor, 192 MB RAM
• 12 GB Quantum Bigfoot HD, courtesy of Dan, courtesy of Akash
• 400W Coleman AC-DC inverter
• MS Sidewinder Freestyle Pro controller
• PIE HON-AUX adapter
• Ground Loop Isolator
• USB, Lighter jack extension cables
• A bunch of audio splittters/extensions
• CAT 5 for LEDs and a switch
• Three days of fun work

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the system now. I can turn on my car, and within a minute be listening to most of my music at the press of a button. On top of that it's easy to control, in terms of skipping tracks. I still have my Nomad and the regular in-dash CD player if I want to listen to a song that's not on the hard drive. Andrew said the joystick gives the passenger a pretty neat feel, since there's actually something for the passenger to do. Leave any comments, ideas, or questions you have below.

Ridding myself of spam.

So you might have noticed yesterday that I had some spam commented on my blog. I just deleted it all, but it would be a real hassle if it kept happening. It's a 'growing problem.' The reason its happening is that so many people have MovableType blogs that it's easy to generate a script that automatically fills spam into comment forms. What's even worse is that is that if people place links in the comments, they end up as part of your webpage which search engines (i.e. Google) use to rank pages. It's a real nuisance.
Luckily since there's such a large MT user base, solutions to these problems appear pretty quickly. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist has a bunch of features which should pretty much eliminate any spam you get. It's an MT plugin which looks for certain phrases, checks comment IPs vs a blacklist, and does a few other handy things. Another solution suggested by Kevin Donahue was to add a CAPTCHA test to the comment posting. A CAPTCHA test is very simple for humans, but very complex for computers, at least at this time. So in essence computer scripts shouldn't be able to post spam comments, but live people can. I think it's a pretty neat 'security' feature. James Seng implemented a CAPTCHA test as an MT plugin/hack, so that was what I installed. All you have to do is read the 6 digit security code and type it in the box below the picture. It looks like it's working, so feel free to leave comments...as long as they aren't spam.

Here are two pages with tips and links on the matter.

(Just to clarify I mean i.e. not e.g. when I was talking about Google. It is the search engine as most people know.)

Lemonade Tycoon

I saw an ad for Lemonade Tycoon on Yahoo Games, so I thought I'd give it a try. I've always liked sim and econ based games, so I figured this would be entertaining. I downloaded the demo, and it was fun, although a little mindless at points. And it only lasts 60 minutes. There are a whole bunch of variables for you to manipulate (price, recipe, location, advertising, equipment) that affect your daily income. The object of course is to maximize profit, and you can upload your stats to the LSX (Lemonade Stock Exchange) and see how you compare against other players. (Although it seems there a lot of people who do nothing but play this game.)

The real 'wonder' of the game is that you can download it for your Palm, where mindless entertainment is useful. It's a step above the little games that people have on thier phones, and can surely keep you occupied when you are bored. But unfortunately I don't think it's the best thing to eat up your time when you are at home. Also the Yahoo Games demo is a newer version than the registered version floating around the internet. (Not that I found a registered version or anything.) It's has a lot fewer upgrades for your Lemonade stand and makes the game get boring much much sooner.

If you have an afternoon to kill sometime, this game is an excellent candidate, but it gets repetitive pretty fast.

More Bittorrent

(Edit: For a more recent post on this topic go here.)

So Gabe wrote: So what happened to all the torrent sites? seems like bytemonsoon and filesoup are both borked, and torrentse.cx got a cease and desist letter...bummer.

Yeah, I think it's an ongoing battle with copyright people, DDoS attacks (from who knows where), and of course the huge traffic surge that hits as soon as a site becomes popular. But there will always be torrent sites. The quality will vary from time to time, but there's just so much demand that people can't help but try to put up sites.

For links try:
http://www.torrentlinks.com/index.php?action=displaycat&catid=1
http://www.btsites.tk/

Looks like some of the good sites left are:
http://torrentreactor.com/
http://www.suprnova.org/
http://www.torrents.us/
http://www.sharelive.com/ (follow the bittorent link at the bottom)

The only one of these I've used regularly is suprnova, but I'm sure the others will pick up as sites like torrentse.cx and bytemonsoon go down.

The Best Keyboard layout?

After following through a link on /., I came to an article about the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard layouts. It seems that most people think that QWERTY layout is inferior, because it's slower than the Dvorak layout. This article seems to say that's not the case. I pull out the most interesting paragraphs (to me) and have excepted them here:

So given this info, I'm a little more confortable with my QWERTY layout, how ever non sensical it may seem. Another /.er posted that the QWERTY design wasn't intended to slow typists down, but to let the typewriters work faster, if that makes any sense. Engineering at work, it seems.

Hotmail Popper

If you want to check your Hotmail with some program other than outlook, then all you need is Hotmail Popper. It runs a POP3 proxy on your computer that sits between the Hotmail servers and your POP3 client (e.g. Eudora, Netscape). It's pretty easy to setup and takes a few MB of RAM to run. I leave mine running all the time, so it's use is transparent to me.

Now if I only got real mail instead of 99% spam from my Hotmail address...

Bridge Builder

A good game doesn't need to be complicated. Bridge Builder is a simple game where you try to build a bridge across a depression using a limited number of segments. It's a cross between puzzle solving and engineering, and I found it addictive when I first tried it. The game is pretty old now, but every so often I find myself playing it for a day or two, revisiting my old designs and trying to improve on them. If you have never played it, it's certainly worth giving a try. The entertainment/size ratio rivals Tetrinet, as the installer weighs in at only 122 kb.

You can download it here, and the website above has tips, info, solutions, cheats, and talks about the sequels to bridge builder.

Media Player Classic

Tired of Windows Media Player (WMP), but using it because there's no good alternative? Well then try Media Player Classic. It's a third party, semi-open source player, that has played every file most of the video files I've tried, more than media player. Also it plays Quicktime and Real Media, assuming you have the respective codecs installed. Which means that you have to install the other programs anyway, but at least you get the features and ease of use of Media Player.

The keys and options pretty much mirror WMP, and it doesn't have any sneaky DRM or reporting back to Microsoft like WMP 9 does. Best of all it's a single 700k exe file! And it doesn't pretty much everything WMP does without extraneous stuff like skins and a media guide.

Curious about your hard drive temperature?

I was reading a /. post today, and the guy mentioned a little utility to check hard drive temperatures on newer SMART enabled drives. I tried it out, and it seems to work, reporting 31 C for my 80 GB Maxtor. Thought some of you might be interested in checking it out, it's called DTemp.

Celestia

A few years ago, Jackson made cool Lightwave/Premiere fly around of the solar system with info about the planets. It took him a lot of time, and in the end it looked pretty cool, compared to anything else that I'd seen done by a single person. The planets had textures, the constellations were in the distance, and the solar system was in the correct position. You can see the video badly converted to mpg here. (I took the file down from the web to save space, but if you want to see it, just leave a comment or email me and I'll get it to you.)

While crusing a thread on /., I ran into a post about 3D space simulator called Celestia. I went and checked it out, and it's even more awesome than I thought it would be. Jackson's movie was spectacular at the time, but this program is more than a small step up, it's a giant leap (for mankind). It has most of the significant objects in the known universe, all the local planets are textured, the lighting is cool, it's true to reality, and you can roam around freely at any given time! I went back a few days in the simulation (night of May 15th) and looked at the Earth's shadow pass over the moon. Sped up time, slowed it down, reversed it, and froze it. Zoomed in and out. Jumped to the moon and back. What's even more awesome is that the back drop is true to reality. The stars you see and the proportions of the planets in the distance are real. I'll stop raving about it, so you can go try it for yourself. They have cross-platform downloads available and screenshots if you don't believe me. Check it out!

One other note, this thing eats up your processor, and it does much better with a good 3d card, so I dunno how it'll run on slower computers, but it's worth the try. It even has Hubble and the ISS!

Spam filtering

Spam is becoming more of a nuisance for everyone who uses email. For some people it's starting to hurt the functionality of their email. Blocking addresses and other header-based filtering techniques don't work very well, as spammer change addresses/servers/subjects. One thing they can't really change too much is their content. If a spammer want to say 'Click here for a prize,' there are only so many ways he/she can reword that. A content-based filter that actually looks at all the words in the email would do a much better job of figuring out what is spam and what isn't.

That leads us to Bayesian spam filtering. By looking at how often a word appears in both spam and normal emails, you can say that if that word appears again it's more likely to be the one in which it appeared more frequently. A message with 'click' and 'here' is more likely to be a spam message than a normal message. There are plenty of software packages out there that do this statistical content-based filtering. An easy to use one is Mozilla's mailer, but Mozilla is on it's way out, and you'll have to wait for the new standalone mail client. So I'll tell you about the one that I use. POPfile is a cross-platform POP3 proxy that can run in between you and your mail server. When you check your mail, it'll go you server and fetch it, then decide whether it's spam or not (based on email that you have trained it with). It adds a tag to the email that you can filter by in the client. The POPfile homepage has good intructions on how to download and setup things, bu if you need an extra advice you can just email me.

The filter works really well for me; it gets about 96% of it's classifications correct. Also you don't have to just sort between spam and normal email. I divided mine up between spam, normal email, and informational messages I get from the university, which I usually don't read, but are interesting on occasion. The program is very customizable and is in continuous development. It'll really helps you if you have a spam problem.

A cool tip for Mozilla

Soon, Keyur and I will be unveiling a Mozilla switch page. We're hoping to target IE users much like Apple has targeted Windows users. I don't know if our page will be as snazzy as their campaign, since they have a somewhat bigger budget than we do. I do guarantee you this: Switching from IE to Mozilla will make the browsing aspect of your life much better. And we all know how important browsing is.

Until then, Mozilla users (2/3 of the visitors to my site) can feast on these cool little add ons:

(credit to Keyur on this one) Ever wanted to quickly look up a word in a dictionary or spell check text from a web page or form? It's not too difficult to copy what you need, find the appropriate bookmark, and paste, then click, but here's a little trick you can use to cut two steps out of that. Highlight the word below, and then click on the lookup link. (hit back to come back afterwards...)

amortize

Dictionary Lookup

The neat part is that you can bookmark that link. Anytime you highlight some text and go to the bookmark, it'll take you straight to the lookup for that word at The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Also if you just need to type a word and look it up, leave the page unhighlighted, and then it'll popup with a box for you to enter text into. It doesn't work with text highlighted in forms, so you'll have to copy the text and place it in the Javascript popup.

You can also do the same for spell checking a word or phrase at spellcheck.net by highlighting this text and using the link below. (It only catches the first misspelled word.)

a mispelled word.

Spell Check

Finally you can make it ultraconvenient by placing the bookmark on your personal toolbar for easy access. Hope you guys enjoy this tip, I love it and use it all the time. Even while writing this post...

Bittorrent and some updates

(Edit: For a more recent post on this topic go here.)

Bittorrent is a file distribution protocol that works well at distributing a single set of files to a large number of people while only using a small amount of upstream of the original server. It does this by using the upstream of all the downloaders to send pieces to other downloaders. Since the data isn't sent sequentially, you effectively add to the servers bandwidth with every downloader who joins. (supply scales with demand) You can read more about it how it works and download it at the above link. An upstream bandwidth limiting client is available here.

Recently Bittorrent was used to distribute Red Hat 9.0 isos since Red Hat's servers were slowed to a crawl with downloaders. The huge experiment was a real success, and the system has averaged a 4 MB/s upstream over the past 15 days. That's a total of 31.52 TiB (tebibytes). Here are some stats on the first three days of distribution.

I don't care about red hats, you say? You can also find movies, games, music, concerts, programs, and a ton of tv shows over bittorrent. All of these things to download fit the description of 'lots of downloaders, not a lot of servers.' Some places to look for torrent files are:

For links to other sites:
http://smiler.no-ip.org/BT/BTlinks.php
http://www.torrentzone.tk/
For torrent downloads:
http://torrent.milfclan.com/ for TV shows (http://torrents.noneleft.bm/ is down)
http://www.torrentse.cx/ (for everything)

Also on Buddyzoo: It's growing insanely fast. There are almost 810000 people signed up at the time of this post. Go Join
Also on Audioscrobbler: There are some problems with the submission server that's causing it to miss some songs. This will be fixed soon, says RJ.

Audioscrobbler

To save myself some trouble, here's a description of Audioscrobbler from the front page of its website:

"In a nutshell, Audioscrobbler endeavours to be your personal music advisor. It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music. You can also view data showing what your most-played artists are, and find out who likes a particular artist the most. Basically The Audioscrobbler Project is turning into a fantastic way of discovering new music, and discovering people who like the same music as you."

I'll say that it's very interesting, and it's beginning to do what it says it can do. The setup is really easy. Go to the website, register, then download and install the winamp plugin, and make sure you enable it. That's it! The plugin runs completely transparent, and even caches data if you are offline. Then you can go to the Audioscrobbler home page and view your statistics as well as the statistics of others. To give you a feel for what you will see, here are some stat pages to look at:

My personal stat page
What people are currently listening to
The most popular artists. (It's pretty rock-centric)

What Jackson, Keyur, Dan and Gautam are listening to. Tag your songs G!

The the creator, RJ, made it has a project for one of his CS classes, and it just took off. There are forums with active people, and they are actively improving the system every day. It's a little rough around the edges some time, but still pretty neat. Hopefully people will find new artist they like with this system. If nothing else, it gives stat-whores like me something to look at.

Tetrinet

Tetrinet is one of the best multiplayer internet games I've ever played. It's a multiplayer tetris that allows up to 6 people to play on teams or individually against each other in Tetris (much like the old game boy head to head). Also it adds a twist with the option of adding special blocks. You can use them on your opponent or even yourself to add lines, clear lines, shake a field, or even switch fields between players.

It's been around since 1997, and people still use the same version! I don't know many other games that I still want to play that zip up to less than 400k...except maybe Oregon Trail - that rocked. Click here to download one of the best games out there, byte for byte. After you get it, just read the readme and you'll be set. If you don't read it, you WILL ask someone a question that's already answered there, so save everyone some time. If you sensed a change in my tone, it's from having to explain how to play over AIM 100 times, when people could just RTFM.

If you want to play, drop me a line or message me. If I'm not around you can play with random people. Go to tetrinet.org and click on Servers/IP list.