Adventures in stupid technology
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Making a USB printer wireless
This weekend I decided to make my Canon i560 USB Inkjet printer available on my wifi network using a wireless print server. I picked up a “used” Linksys WPS54G from eBay and configured it to work with both my MacBook and Sony VAIO running Windows 7. It was kind of a pain, but here’s how…
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Migrate a Firefox profile from Windows to OSX
My parents gave me a MacBook for Christmas, so in an effort to “learn something new” in 2010 I’ve gotten accustomed to a multi-touch track-pad, command + c/v for copy & pasta and Safari for browsing the web. One thing I couldn’t give up though, was my Firefox with TabMixPlus and ReadItLater. Luckily the combo…
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Visual Studio 2008 project creation failed error
I’m still running the Windows 7 x64 Release Candidate and so I expect and deal with the occasional operating system bug here and there, but this was more of a Visual Studio 2008 problem. I VS 2008 Professional (after getting it free from school) a couple of weeks ago and needed to code a console…
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Setup a Pet Cam with Skype
I have two cats and checking up on them when I’m traveling can be a hassle. Last year I used a $5 dollar web cam and a trial subscription to some streaming video service I can’t remember but it only kinda worked and the image quality was terrible. This year I decided to use Skype…
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Google superfast DNS servers
Google recently announced that it has set up a couple of free public DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) in its continuing effort to “speed up” the Internets. Unfortunately after testing them it looks like I’ll be sticking with my Verizon provided DNS servers. Here’s what I found:
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Get PHPUnit to work in NetBeans 6.7
Unit testing is one way software engineers can meet quality assurance goals for large and/or critical development projects. PHPUnit is a popular choice among a number of frameworks designed for unit testing PHP code, but as I found out quite difficult to setup on Windows with NetBeans 6.7 and XAMPP. Here’s how to got it…
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Compare two files in two clicks
Windows is a great operating system for games, managing multimedia, and running millions of applications. For development though, I’ve always been used to Linux, UNIX or Solaris command line tools like “vi”, “diff”, “grep” and the like. Since I only have one notebook filled with gigabytes of family pictures, movies and mp3’s, a free copy…
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Create an RSS feed web app for the iPhone/iPod
A week ago I posted an article showcasing a basic RSS feed web app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. In this post I’ll attempt to demonstrate how I built that application so you can make your own. First a little background: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way of keeping up with frequently changing published content.…
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SimplePie + iWebKit + iPod/iPhone
I spent an evening looking at SimplePie and iWebkit and ended up building a web-based RSS feed application for the iPod/iPhone in just a couple of hours. The application lets me access my favorite APM and NPR podcast feeds without having to download or synchronize/find them with iTunes first. It streams the podcasts directly to…
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Exporting Google DOCS in Word format
A month or so ago I needed to collaborate on a Software Engineering project with a couple of classmates. The task was to write a requirements document for a fictional software application which our team would be working on for the remainder of the semester. I decided that we should use Google DOCS because of…