Adventures in stupid technology
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DIY HD DVR v2.0
My home theater has been built around a home-made DVR since 2003. It started off on a used Dell Optiplex GX150 and moved to a bigger case with more hard drives and a P4 in 2006. It worked great for nearly 3 years, but in December I earned some extra cash and upgraded my DVR…
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Grabit on the Mac
Heard about WineBottler for the Mac? It’s open source software that lets you “bottle up” Windows applications and run them on your Intel Mac OS X. Since there aren’t any good or free usenet downloaders available for the Mac (boo), I tried bottling up Grabit from Shemes and it works! Here’s how:
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Irfanview on MAC with WineBottler
There are a lot of Windows Apps I miss on my MacBook Pro. One of them is an awesome free Swiss army knife of image manipulation tools called Irfanview. It lets you batch rename/convert/modify entire directories of images and it’s not bad as an image viewer either. Well, here’s how to get it running on…
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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…