David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Create a functional web calendar in 5 minutes

    If you have events to share with the world, you’ll need a way to them onto your website. A simple way to do this would be to create a page containing a list of events which you update every month. That’s not very functional and it doesn’t convey the date of an event very well.…

  • Free 5gigs of cloud storage

    Last week I managed to max out my free 2gb of cloud storage at Dropbox. That got me thinking…should I bite the bullet and sift through 2GB of accumulated crap to clear some space OR should I look for an alternative to continue my reckless cloud based file storage behavior? After looking around a bit,…

  • Intel G43/G45 video driver issues

    I bought an Acer Z5600 year ago and it’s been working pretty well for playing games and browsing the web. Then in August 2010 an important Windows update for systems with the Intel G43/G45 Chipset broke my display driver. Since the update it has been impossible to scale the display resolution to anything but the…

  • 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…