David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • IOGEAR 2 Port KVM

    I have a couple of computers I use at my desk. Space is limited at my desk and I certainly don’t want to dick around with two sets of keyboards/mice, so I got a KVM. I bought the IOGEAR GCS632 because it works with USB peripherals (my USB wireless Microsoft Mouse and wired USB keyboard)…

  • Get your Exchange email in Thunderbird

    I found a small java application called DavMail. This tool is essentially an OWA -> IMAP translator. It runs locally on your system and will connect on demand to your OWA account, download messages and deliver them via IMAP to any mail client of your choice. It also proports to translate calendar to CalDav and…

  • Banish Live Messenger back to the Notification Area

    Yes I still use Windows Messenger…well now known as “Windows Live Messenger” and I’m not afraid to admit it. There are several benefits I find to using a tangible instant messaging program over browser based apps like Gtalk, Facebook IM, etc. They accurately indicate whether you are busy/away/available, they work with keyboard shortcuts and you…

  • Share Google Reader items on Google+

    I’ve been using Google Reader to keep up-to-date on my favorite blogs, news stories and more. To share, I’ve always used the customizable Send To button at the bottom of each item. Sharing Google Reader items on Google+ however works differently and it took me a minute to figure out how..

  • Google ac-hires SageTV

    As pointed out by Rakesh Agrawal on his blog, SageTV has been acquired by Google. The announcement makes me happy because I’m sure that the folks who’ve worked hard on SageTV over the years got a fat paycheck today and sad because I am still a hardcore SageTV MediaCenter user and am worried about the…

  • Find and replace with SQL

    I recently changed the document root on my webserver. Subsequently I found that some of my WordPress blogs store the document root in the database (i.e. tables for wp_options, wp_commentmeta, etc.). To fix this I had to run some SQL queries on my WP databases to change the document root from the old /home/dvielmet/ to…

  • Diy noise cancelling headphones

    This post will show you how to turn an old broken set of headphones into some pretty impressive passive noise canceling headphones for about $30 bucks. Passive noise canceling doesn’t use the latest Bose quiet comfort electronics…it accomplishes noise reduction the old fashioned way…by blocking it. I was lucky enough to pick up a used…

  • XML driven calendar

    Recently I’ve been playing around with various Calendar scripts. There’s Adam Shaw’s Full-calendar and Ross Haney’s GCE plugin for WordPress. Either of these work work great with a Google Calendar events feed, but what if you’ve got multiple XML files, each of which represent a single event? Well to handle that scenario I had to…

  • Bypass a sysadmin with a trial of Windows Intune

    As far as your online security is concerned, there are few things worse than an unpatched windows computer. So what can you to do if your company been locked down your systems ability to get critical windows updates and your systems administrator is too busy to patch computers regularly with WSUS or Systems Center? Well,…