David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Adobe Ideas

    Michelle got an iPad for Christmas and it’s mostly been used for watching movies and playing games. In fact, until I discovered the Adobe Ideas App a few months ago, I never understood all the iPad hype. Sure, it could browse the web and send emails, but without a tactile keyboard or a real browser…

  • March madness basketball schedule

    Thanks to the super awesome Google Calendar Events plugin for WordPress by Ross Hanney, creating a this beautiful NCAA basketball game schedule took only five minutes. Beyond displaying game info, this it also demonstrates how easy it can be to display pubic Google calendar events with your own CSS flair in WordPress:

  • XML well-formedness checking in TextMate

    I’ve been working with a lot of XML lately and finding out where your document is not well-formed can be a hassle. Imagine having to find an improperly typed closing node in a ten thousand line XML file with thousands of nodes. Talk about your needle and haystack type of situation, right? Well I two…

  • Snap windows in OS X

    Hyperdock lets you tile/maximize windows by dragging them to the edges on your screen. Quickly snap windows to screen edges using keyboard shortcuts. Create custom keyboard shortcuts for each Application to quickly open new windows/documents. Preview open instances of applications by hovering over the open App in the dock.

  • Internet TV with Playon

    Around Christmas, Playon.tv had a special where you could get a year of Playon service for $19 bucks. I figured it was worth a shot and signed up. Playon is software that runs on your PC and allows you to stream internet video content to your Xbox, PS3, Wii or mobile device (similar to tversity pro).…

  • Delete EFI partition in Windows 7

    So I bought myself an external 1TB USB hard drive the other day. The idea was to use it for backups on my MacBook, but later I decided to use it on a PC instead. Since I had initially formatted the drive in OS X, the Windows disk management tool listed an EFI partition on…

  • Print from iPad/iPhone using AirPrint

    Sharing your windows printer for use on the iPhone and iPad was originally made possible by elpamsoft.com. ElpamSoft’s free tool named Windows Airprint Installer could install the airprint executable, dll’s and service that work in conjunction with iTunes and the Bonjour service to make Windows printers available to IOS devices. The problem is that tool…

  • Das DOS to the rescue

    Lets say you’ve got a folder with a bunch of files and subfolders…each subfolder in turn contains a bunch more files of which you are only interested in one with a specific name. You could perform a search in the root folder and quickly find all the files with that name. Copying them from that…

  • Add a social bar to wordpress

    Last week I spent some time evaluating at social social media plugins for my WordPress blog. While there are lots of options, I found most of them pretty tacky looking…with limited options and none really suited my site design. I really wanted a floating social media bar on the left hand side of the browser with specific…

  • Chicken roulades with spinach and mushrooms

    I made this last night and really enjoyed it. When I’ve had one of those days where nothing really worked right, I take solace in the fact that I can still throw good ingredients together and make a scrumptious dinner. What’s nice about this recipe is that it doesn’t require as much effort as you’d…