I’ve been using CoPilot 7 for a couple of days. It’s a great application for GPS navigation on Windows Mobile devices.
One big drawback for me is that it doesn’t have the ability to silence the voice without also turning down the master system volume. If I do this, then I can’t hear any other application that needs to make a noise.
So I created my own silent voice. It consists of nothing but blank sound files for every bit of speech. This way, I can select the Silent voice in CoPilot, while leaving the system volume at its normal setting.
Just unzip the files, and copy the ‘Silent’ folder into the same directory as the other voices for your language. Then in CoPilot, you should see ‘Silent’ as one of the voice options.
I find the Ubuntu automated check-for-updates a bit limiting. I want it to check for updates daily, but as it uses a daily crontab to manage this, the PC has to be switched on at the time the cron job is expecting to run. If my usage pattern changes, I can end up going several days without an update check because the PC happens never to be on at the right time.
I could change it to do the check every ten minutes, but that hammers the Canonical servers unnecessarily. What I really want to do is check for updates once per day whenever the PC happens to be switched on.
So I wrote this little script that I put in /usr/bin/apt-update . It simply checks to see whether it has been run already today (by comparing the current date against the modification date of a touch file). If it has been run today, then it doesn’t perform the check. Otherwise, it performs the check, and touches the touch file to prevent further runs.
I have been reading ebooks on portable devices since I got my first Palm PDA way back in the 1990s. More recently, I have been using O’Reilly’s excellent Safari book service to read a huge number of technical books online whenever I need them.
As great as it is to be able to read books “on demand”, there are some problems with current book readers - and the formating of the ebooks themselves - that make reading them a clumsy business, nothing like the experience with a paper book.
Can we make an ebook reader that makes good use of the technology on which it is built, without causing unnecessary pain?
In this article, I describe the way that I think technical ebooks should work, and discuss some of the markup challenges this entails.
Interesting talk by Mikel Maron at Where2.0. Maron discusses the potential for social networking technologies, such as Twitter, to be used productively in disaster situations. Although these technologies have been used in an ad-hoc fashion in past disasters and emergencies, Maron explains the problems that have emerged, and identifies the ingredients that are required for a successful implementation ‘pattern’.
Often Amazon’s non-US sites have less detail for books than Amazon.com does. Also, Amazon.com seems to have more books that you can look inside before buying, and the book viewer is better than on (some) international sites. This script turns the ISBN-10 and -13 numbers into a links that search the US site for that ISBN number, which will usually take you to the page for the book on the US site (though note that not all books in all countries will be sold on Amazon.com, or not with the same ISBN, but many will). This means that you can quickly click through to the US site to check out a book in more detail, before deciding to buy it (click back to the non-US website first, obviously).
I find it particularly useful because amazon.com tends to have many more reviews for each book than amazon.co.uk (unless the book is British).
I spend a disproportionate amount of my time wading through an endless sea of angle brackets and verbose tags desperately searching for the vaguest hint of actual information. It feels wrong.
Indeed. I have recently been wading through configuration files which use XML as their format of choice. This is “a bad thing”, especially when XML is being kludged into pseudo-programming language behavior. There is simply no way that XML can be sensibly made to handle if-then-else constructs.
UPDATE: I had a genuine LOL at this comment by ‘Mo’:
XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using enough of it.
The Asus P750 is a great PDA. As supplied, it has QVGA resolution, but it actually uses a VGA screen.
Some clever guys in Russia have managed to produce a hacked ROM that allows you to use the VGA screen at its full resolution. I’ve tried this ROM myself, and it does work. However, the one problem with it is that it suffers from a memory leak, so the ROM isn’t quite ready for the big time yet.
If you want to try it yourself, here’s how to upgrade the ROM.
Open Settings - Connections screen.
My ISP: Add a new modem connection.
Name: T-Mo
Select a modem: Cellular line (GPRS)
Access Point Name: general.t-mobile.uk
User name: user
Password: one2one
