My current employer does not provide coffee. So I find myself bringing coffee to work. This is not a bad thing, only that I tend to forget my Thermos at work. They do offer coffee to purchase in the café, but this can become pricy. Overall, I have found that I enjoy making coffee at home. I like to use a stronger coffee on some days and then some flavor on others. However, on the days I forget to set the coffee maker or don’t have a mug to take it with me to work I don’t like this arrangement.
I have toyed with bringing my Senseo to work. For those not acquainted with the Senseo is single cup brewing system. Corporate rules don’t allow coffee makers so I would have to hide this.
An alternative is to use single brew coffee like Starbucks VIA. This solution only requires you to add hot water. The downside to VIA is the cost.
I recently read an article on lifehacker that discussed how to make your own portable coffee. I am not on a quest to do this process. Simple coffee the way you like it in a few minutes.
I found a great site for creating custom QR codes.
I had a project a few years back where I had to generate QR codes, so I wrote my own engine. Then I used the .net framework to impose images on top of QR codes using GDI+. The qrhacker.com site does a great job of putting the elements I did a while back into an easy to use site.
The issue I had with the program we wrote, is that depending on the QR code generation the logo or icon you placed over the image would cause the QR to not render. What I like is how they let you know when you may have caused the QR quality to be out of range. I have just a generic version that generates a QR code based on size quality at tilde32.com/qr.aspx.
QR codes have come along way in the past two years. Part of the reason I created my own generator is that I could validate the quality and also have control when needing to batch the QR generation. Here is the previous post on some discussions on QR codes – http://jimiz.net/blog/2010/12/qr-code-generator-2d-barcode/
This has been a great book so far. Not only is Kevin a very sociable person but he is a very entertaining writer. His stories are amazing. To think that he left some out.
I was watching some CES news and ran across a new gadget that I would like to purchase. It looks like I’ll have to wait till March for this one. Only $50 dollars. It is called feedair.
I have tried in the past to use the Ambient orb to get something like feedair to work. Weather forecasts, information, etc… I think I even wanted something like pointcast to be delivered to my TV. I can’t wait to see what I cn program to be delivered on this.
I recently purchased an ip camera for the house. I have wanted one for a long time and finally made a purchase. The reason for the camera was to monitor the kids and also the garage. The camera I purchased was a dlink DCS-930L. It was on sale at Best Buy for about $55.
The reason I chose this camera was for the price. There are many more expensive camera that allow for Dark viewing (LED) and also pan and tilt. This is an entry level IP camera and has limited resolution.
With that said, this is a great camera. I am planning on adding it to my garage where I can view the kids and any motion detection. Currently the camera is sitting in the bay window that is viewing the new construction of the house next door.
The camera comes with a great application to use called mydlink.com it allows you to access yor camera from anywhere even on your phone. A neat feature I have found is that it also streams audio as well as video. Nothing is better than using it when away to have the kids share with you what they are up to.
I have also paired it up with my linux server and a software package called zoneminder. Zoneminder is a security camera package that allows you to monitor multiple cameras. It allows you to set motion detection. I currently have it set to record when motion detection happens.
This new year I plan on blogging more. For one reason, it is a good stress relief. The other reasons revolve that I like to do it.
To make the process easier I plan on utilizing Windows live writer. The reason for using live writer is the simple ease of use and great layout functions it allows. I currently use WordPress as my blog engine. It is fantastic and I can’t say enough about this blog engine. However, I find that writing in the small text window is difficult when attempting to add a lot of content.
Live Writer is basically a scaled down word processor. It works seamlessly with WordPress and give you the ability to do offline writing. I have used it in the past but did not make blogging that much of a priority.
Here is a great overview of live writer from PCworld
There is a fantastic photo that shows all the statistics of what is happening on he web every 60 seconds. The article is title “Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet” The internet is so vast that everyday people use it for so much. Imagine when you extrapolate that 60 seconds for the entire day. The youtube videos, status updates, photos… there is so much.
I am a fan of Hak5. I’ve been watching them for a few years now. Darren and Shannon do a great job with a show for tech lovers. “Your Daily dose of techno-lust”. Recently Paul, who runs their AV and does all the behind the scenes work did a segment on what is used to record the show. I’ve always been an AV geek at heart. This is good to watch.
I am not a designer. In fact, I’m pretty bad with design. However, I can tell when something looks good. It is just my way of saying I appreciate good design, I just suck at it. Here is a great video showcasing how design (brands) work. This is great work done by Erica Gorochow
I updated all devices at our house today. Ipads, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4s. Everyone now has ios 5 and all devices are backed up and have iCloud working. If you have not ever heard of all the “i” things can you imagine what I just said. Before the iPhone people did not even know what an app was… now we talk in clouds, sync, and siri.
If you are interested in cutting the cord and syncing with wifi here is a quick tutorial. We have many iOS devices in our house. I sync a few with my computer and a few with my wife’s. Our media server (windows media server) holds almost all the songs and videos. We just map a drive (that is a topic for another day). However the use of wifi sync is great. I have consolidated to the media server to be the itunes primary for a few devices. This allows for that machine to always run itunes (in the startup folder) and the devices to just connect to it via wireless.
Figure 2
To set this up you first have to enable wi-fi sync. Plug in your device and select the summary tab of your iOS device. Add a check box to the options area to “sync this iPad over Wi-Fi”. (figure 1)
Once you have done this the basics are complete. Your next step is to connect your iphone or iPad to a power outlet and watch it sync over wifi. You need the iOS devices to be on the same wifi network as the computer that has iTunes. NOTE: also the computer should have iTunes already running before the sync will happen.
I’m not sure of why the device needs to be plugged in, but that is needed. Here is the screen from your iOS device (figure 2)
I decided to upgrade iTunes and also my iOS version to 5. The install of iTunes version 10.5 took about 20 min to download and install. The install of iOS 5 is taking a bit of time to install – 8 hours. Eight hours, that is one heck of a long time.
I did a quick speed test just to validate that I had a good connection speed. I had close to 17MB download speeds and it still shows about 8 hours to download. How many people are downloading the iOS 5 version with me as well. It would be great to see what kind of traffic that Apple is generating today.
For the last 2 months I have been standing up at work. I’ve borrowed a rolling laptop cart to be my stand up desk. You can see from the pictures that it is adjustable and also has a mouse tray to the side.
The stand I am using is an instand, deluxe with roller wheels. Using a standup desk has been a great learning experience. The first week my feet were killing me. At the end of the day all I wanted was to sit down and take off my shoes. After about 5 days my feet got used to it.
I also found that people are very curious about the stand-up desk. I work in a large corporation and there are many cubes in my area. I would get about 1 person a week stopping over and asking me questions. Most of the questions were regarding health. Many people asked if I was doing this because of back issues. I find that interesting that everyone relates standing to back pains.
The reason I decided to give this a try was from an old email I found. I had wanted to know how long I had gmail and looked back at the oldest email I had in my account. I had forwarded an article about a future treadmill desk from one of the furniture makers. In that article they talked about the benefits of standing while working. I did a few searches and found that it is a growing trend and a health one. I’m not saying that I’ll die if I sit at work like this article, but standing could be healthier.
There are many solutions and desks available for standing, I chose this one because it wsa available. The only issue I have is that there are 3 rollers on the bottom and because of where I have it positioned one sticks out towards me while I am working.
Overall I have found that standing is a great way to work. I am not sure I could go back to sitting all the time. I have found that for some tasks sitting is more appealing. I find that I am most comfortable talking on the phone when seated. I also realized that If I am doing any type of heavy mouse usage that sitting helps.
While starting to write an android application I had to re-install the Android SDK on my new system. When I did this and tried to execute the Emulator I go the following error:
"invalid command-line parameter: Files.
Hint: use '@foo' to launch a virtual device named 'foo'. please use -help for more information"
After some google searches and some testing I finally found a fix. The issue it appears is the referenced path that Android is using. Since I have an x64 system, the location that the default android install is : C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk
One of the posts and install documents I read was to add that directory to your “Path” in windows. I made that change and still had the same issue. After some more digging I found that the issue is related to the spaces in the folder path. To solve this issue I added the “SFN” directory location into the PATH variables.
Short File name is sometimes called 8.3 file name. Because it envokes a limit on the filename and extension length (wikipedia)
Since x64 machines place files that are 32bit into a different Program files directory the install location is : C:\Program Files (x86)\android\android-sdk
SO THE FIX IS:
Add the location sfn name into the path. My 8.3 file location for the sdk is:
C:\PROGRA~2\android\android-sdk
This will remove the spaces from the path. To add a folder location in your path on windows 7 you need to:
go to control panel
System | Edit the System Environment Variables
Click the Environment Variables button
Scroll Down under “system Variables” until you find path
Place a “;” before you add the path to the sdk folder (C:\PROGRA~2\android\android-sdk)
I’m a huge fan of a tool called nmap (nmap.org). It is a network tool that can do many things. The most simple is to determine if a host is active. Anytime I connect to any network I run a quick scan to see who my neighbors are on the network.
To do a network scan with nmap you only need one bit of information. Your IP address. Below is a scan from my local network. I was able to do a quick ipconfig to see my local IP was (192.168.2.118) armed with that information I can tell that the network segment is 192.168.2.1/24.
To scan the network you only need to issue the command
nmap -sP 192.168.2.1/24
Here is the result on my windows machine.
The scan took 9.16 seconds. This is a pretty fast network scan. In 9 seconds I was able to determine I have 12 devices connected, a few iphones, ipad, printer, and other machines.
I am always interested in performance and I wanted to see if my linux machine would do the scan faster. (NOTE: the windows machine is using a 802.11 G network and the linux machine is over the LAN bridge using Wireless G as well)
The Linux results of the same nmap command ran in 5.4 Seconds. In this simple test the linux nmap process was a bit faster.
Overall it is always a great idea to see what and how is around you when on a network. I did not go into more detail but you can always use nmap to do more investigation. I can cover that in a later article.
My current employer does not provide coffee. So I find myself bringing coffee to work. This is not a bad thing, only that I tend to forget my Thermos at work. They do offer coffee to purchase in the café, but this can become pricy. Overall, I have found that I enjoy making coffee at home. I like to use a stronger coffee on some days and then some flavor on others. However, on the days I forget to set the coffee maker or don’t have a mug to take it with me to work I don’t like this arrangement.
About Me