[the] Code Girl (aka UnrulyGrrl)

You can easily import your subscriptions from another reader. I was using Bloglines, but may switch to Google’s RSS reader. I like it a lot, so far. Check it out for yourself

I’m famous! well sort of. I made a post to SpreadFirefox.com recently about a letter writing campaign I did recently. I found a link to it on a german website!

Also, the SpreadFirefox admins liked my initiative so much they are sending me one of those super-cool limited editions Firefox coins, and some other swag. Cool. This all started because I checked out an article about how I could help spread Firefox (ie writing to your ISP, local net cafe, local officials, etc). Since my letter got such a good response, I created a template for it on the Firefox wiki

Please think about taking a minute and helping the cause. Every little bit helps combat the entrenched Internet Exploder. The easiest way to help is to put an ‘upgrade firefox’ link or image (pointing to getfirefox.com) on your site/blog somewhere

I was thinking I’d like to see the incoming subject lines of my email, not just how many new messages I had. So I wrote a procmail recipe that uses OSD:

:0c
| show_new_mail

and a one liner shell script called ’show_new_mail’ [really just to clean up the procmail recipe]

grep Subject|sed -e's/Subject: /New mail: /g'|DISPLAY=:0  osd_cat -f 9x15 -

Without the “DISPLAY=:0″ part, this fails with the error “Error initializing osd: No display” but only when it’s used as a procmail recipe. It worked fine from the command line.

This requires osd_cat, which is installed with xosd
———————————————————
7/8/2006 EDIT:
Good news for M$ Windows users: there is an xosd package available for Cygwin, so you can do cool OnScreenDisplay things just like linux/XWindows.

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:

• A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
• A collection of tools, which provide Linux look and feel.

Are you tired of Firefox taking up more and more RAM the longer you leave it running? Do you have to kill and restart it every day or two just to get back some RAM? Well suffer no more. It’s just one easy setting. Go to

about:config

and add this NEW value, of type Integer:

browser.cache.memory.capacity

The value is in KB, so to set it for 16MB, set the value ‘16384′. That should be plenty. By default this value is ‘-1′ which means ‘TAKE EVERYTHING I HAVE, PLEASE!’.

NOTE: This works on EVERY operating system [AFAIK], even sucky winDoze

using the mplayer plugin for netscape/mozilla you can view streaming Micro$oft media that is embedded in a webpage

Also works from the command line, but you will need to know the path to the stream. This not too hard to find:

1. View the source of the page with the embedded stream and look for something like this:

   <param name="FileName" value="webcam3.asx">

2. Pull up the .asx file in your web browser; it will be in XML.
3. Look for an ything starting with “mms://”, and you’ve found your feed url
4. run

   mplayer <feed url>

For Mac OSX users, there is a port of mplayer available, just for you!

One more thing I can cross of the list of stuff I thought I could only do with M$ WIndoze

Gentoo linux has just released a new version, “2005.0″. Check it out

Well that was WAY easier than I thought. Coming to you live from my laptop, over 802.11g with WPA-PSK for the encryption scheme. Now I get a new encryption key every time, auto-negotiated with the AP. It’s all seamless to me.

To get it working:

1. Emerged ‘wpa_supplicant‘ (already in Gentoo portage tree)
2. Added a passphrase to my AP
3. Configured

   /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

   like so:

   network={
        ssid=<my ESSID goes here>
        psk=<my passphrase goes here>
        priority=1
   }
   

   All other settings were left at the default

   To make sure the system would use it when I insert my DWLG650, I created

   /etc/init.d/net.ath0

   with the following contents:

   #!/bin/bash
   wpa_supplicant -B -K -t -Dmadwifi -iath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
   sleep 3
   dhcpcd -d ath0
   

I give the system 3-4 seconds to associate with the AP and negotiate the encryption keys before I attempt to request an IP address (hence the ’sleep 3′).

This isn’t the best solution, WPA with a RADIUS server would be, but it will do for now. At least I feel a little better about keeping out my nosy neighbors. At last count, I could see 8 other access points from my laptop. So far I’m the only one who is using a form of WPA.

Edit:

Ok, scratch this. I just noticed that my speed is stuck at 5MBps. I want my 54MBps back. :-/ I don’t feel like troubleshooting. Going back to WEP. Hopefully the problem is just the version of the madwifi I’m using

I have a decent sized setup of X10 devices around the house. It all started with the desire to have the light out front on when I got home from work. I had experience with X10 already, as my dad had used it for years to turn lights on and off at dusk and dawn, and to control the xmas lights around the house (old style Radio shack modules).

I changed out the wall switch with this. That was about it. I used HeyU to upload a macro to the CM11A with instructions to turn the light on at dawn and off at ‘bedtime’. As of right now I have 2 wall switch modules, three lamp modules, 2 appliance modules, a wireless wall switch and a few motion sensors.

I have lights on the outside and the inside of the house turn on at dusk/off at dawn [ determined by heyU, based on my lat/long]. When I really should be getting to bed, one of the living room lights turns off and the other dims down to give me just enough light to see so that I wont trip over something. That’s my cue. I ignore it half the time and use a little web interface [to heyu] that I wrote to brighten the light enough so I can still see the keyboard on my laptop :-D

I also have an XCam2, with a receiver that is connected to a linux server. I’m thinking of setting this up so that the front motion sensor being triggered will make the server turn on the xcam and record until motion is no longer sensed.