January 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Roundup of note taking software for Android
Now that school’s back, I’ve been looking for a good Android note taking app. I thought my criteria is fairly common and obvious, but so far I haven’t been a 100% satisfied with what I’ve found on the market (ha!). The criteria is as follows:
Stable: this one’s pretty obvious, as I’d hate to lose lecture notes for no good reason
Combines text input and...
3 tags
Netgear N600 vs. Linksys/Cisco E3200
We got a CIsco E3200 dual-band router for Christmas and decided to test it out. To improve the test machines a bit, I picked up a 5GHz friendly dual-band wifi card for Marko’s Windows 7 laptop. With only the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks enabled at a time and a fixed channel, the following are roughly the figures we got for shooting a file over the LAN with the computers
E3200:
2.4 GHz:...
December 2011
1 post
Greg Smith's Note Magnet: A Linux write cache... →
November 2011
1 post
4 tags
Touchpad Cyanogenmod sleep of death: what worked...
Things got a bit ridiculous with my HP Touchpad: it would fall asleep and not wake up after as few as 10 minutes, even after the Alpha 2 update, requiring a hard restart every time. What resolved it for me:
Backup all apps with Titanium Backup, without backing up system data. Copy the backup over somewhere just in case.
Uninstall Cyanogenmod using ACMEUninstaller (see the official Alpha 2...
October 2011
1 post
4 tags
Novacom complaining "failed to connect to server"
While trying to install Android on the HP Touchpad (the Cyanogenmod alpha, to be precise) I kept getting an error when trying to run novacom boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller:
failed to connect to server
Turns out the novacomd daemon wasn’t running. If you’re on OS X and have already installed QuickInstall to load up Preware on your Touchpad you should already have novacom and its...
August 2011
1 post
2 tags
Stoner chickpea curry
This is a fairly simple and delicious curry that’s pretty fantastic even without any drugs, and it’s guaranteed to work for everyone invited as it happens to be vegan and gluten free. That wasn’t actually intentional now that I think about it, but you really don’t need any meat in this one.
There is a lot of leeway in making the dish. If you don’t have certain spices...
June 2011
7 posts
Symphonious » contentEditable in Mobile WebKit... →
A mostly RFC822 compatible email address regex →
Something that bizarrely nobody seems to write regex for. Accepts addresses like “Jimi Hendrix” <jimi@virgin.com>, John Lennon <john@ilikecatcherintherye.com>, and “<cobain@shotguns.com>” <cobain@shotguns.com>
4 tags
VIM pain resolved: yank buffer overwritten after...
Often I yank a line, change something in the area I’d like to paste into, and then realize that my changes and deletes overwrote what was yanked. Yanking into a special register takes longer and is rather annoying, but there’s a workaround:
From the VIM help, we know about the unnamed register:
Vim fills this register with text deleted with the “d”, “c”,...
Current Git Branch Listed in Bash Prompt →
I’ll finally remember which branch I’m on!
Motorola SB5102 on TekSavvy
…works just fine. Bought one off CraigsList, after checking the serial number and MAC address with the online Rogers tech support rep to make sure it isn’t a blocked stolen rental. TekSavvy had no problem setting it up although the Rogers tech that came by the house for the ‘installation’ remarked he’s never seen a modem like this. Shock?
May 2011
2 posts
Growl notifications for Beanstalk commits using... →
5 tags
Keyboard layout not changing after waking Mac OS...
I’m most certain this is a bug, but in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, if you have multiple keyboard layouts set up, you cannot change them at the login dialogue that shows up when waking up the computer from sleep or the screensaver.
That means, if you had a non-English layout selected before the computer locked up and you’ve got a password that uses English characters, you will not be able...
April 2011
2 posts
Spring 2011 CSC263 notes
This semester I made thorough use of the Wacom Bamboo tablet received for Christmas, particularly for note taking in most of the computer science courses. Here are the almost complete notes for the Spring 2011 CSC263 course with Sam Toueg (missing amortized analysis notes):
http://d.pr/8MZs
January 2011
1 post
Activate the most recent versions of MacPorts
sudo port outdated | awk 'NR > 1 {print $1" @"$4}' | xargs -L 1 sudo port activate
Sometimes, things don’t go quite as expected with MacPorts, and you end up having to rollback to previous versions of libraries using port activate [portname] @[version] Then, after a while, you realize it didn’t really help, and you’d like to update all the ports back to the most recent...
December 2010
2 posts
August 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Kobo mini review
I didn’t get to spend much time with the Kobo, unfortunately. Unlike the heavier touch screen Sony PRS-600 my friend’s got, the Kobo looked appealing with its uncluttered design, clean UI and beautiful sharp screen. Due to probably the lack of the touch screen, the fonts also looked sharper than the Sony, something that must certainly hold true for other non-touch readers. The black...
May 2010
2 posts
New home
So, the blog now lives here on Tumblr. It’s free, it’s pretty easy and fun to configure, and I can put the few donations I receive towards something programming related rather than hosting on DreamHost.
April 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Re: Thoughts on Flash
Nowadays, a web application is a bit of a frankensteined creature. But, even though we’ve got a long way to go, the standards are indeed brewing, and will eventually catch up. The way it stands today, we already have some flavours of persistent storage, animation, video, vector graphics, client-server communications, and some interesting frameworks on top of it all to make things a bit more...
2 tags
CHM to EPUB conversion
Calibre really is a superb library management and book conversion tool. Recent versions added support for CHM books, a format not currently (and likely ever to be) supported by most eReaders on the market. Since both CHM and EPUB are compressed collections of HTML files, conversion between the two is fairly trivial. The only problem I personally encountered is code blocks, like in the Python...
March 2010
7 posts
4 tags
Tumblr photolog with Flickr
Inspired by Jon Garcia, I present you with the Flickr-to-Tumblr Yahoo pipe that will automatically post all your new Flickr photos on Tumblr like a magical helpful creature that it is. To set it all up:
Clone the pipe; I think you need a Yahoo account for this
Go into Edit Source, and change the URL of the Feed module to your own flickr RSS feed URL. Your feed URL should be at the bottom of your...
3 tags
Pogo Sketch review
After using both tablets and tablet PCs, the Pogo Sketch stylus turned out to basically be waste of money. Perhaps I should’ve lowered my expectations a bit but here is why I think it isn’t worth the price unless all you need is to move about the iPhone OS without doing any sketching:
Thickness of the tip. About 5mm in diameter, it is simply too thick to tell which part of the tip...
Comments on tumblr pages
Not sure why tumblr doesn’t insert DISQUS comments on pages, but the fix for the problem turned out to be fairly easy.
Adding the script into via the HTML button of your page’s rich editor should do the trick. Of course, you first have to inject jQuery. I’m pulling it from Google since I figured doing that is probably faster than writing a home-brewed getElementsByClassName().
1 tag
RLG232
Not sure if this’ll be offered down the line, but this was one fun course. A film screening every week, response papers on interesting issues, and not a whole lot of material reading. Also, Sarah Kleeb is the awesomest prof I’ve had this semester.