Blackberry Storm Unofficial OS

Well, Verizon is just taking too long to get out an official firmware update and RIM has been pretty free with the "leaks" so I decided to take the plunge.

I ran across this article today and the reviews were good, so I just finished the upgrade to v4.7.0.103.

So far so good. Overall the phone seems faster. The lock/unlock process is quicker, which is great. Cannot tell much of a difference otherwise. VyMail is not working at 100% and that sucks, but it does appear to still function. Most of what I want to see is improvement when making/receiving calls. I'll report back after using it for a few days!

Is it OK to talk about Coffee Machine on a Tech blog?

I'm not sure, but if there has ever been a coffee maker worth talking about, this is it!

So, the short story is that I have been working from home for years and drink a pot of coffee every morning. I had a coffee maker that I loved, but it made sub par coffee to say the least. I thought it was the best I could do at home and it just made me enjoy my bi-weekly splurge for a large, black coffee at Starbucks.

A few months back, I read an article talking about all the crazy myths related to what makes great coffee and basically it all came down to the heat of the water as it goes through the beans. That is why Starbucks is so good and strong without being bitter, the water temp! Anyway, it ends up that there are only two consumer grade coffee machines that achieve this temperature as approved by the "coffee machine association of the universe" (I have no idea what group approves this crap). One of them is the Technivorm KBT-741, which rang in at a whopping $265. Seeing that my 8 year old coffee maker was going strong (not to mention that is cost $50), I filed that article away in the back of my mind.

Well, two weeks ago, that old girl died on me and I took the leap. I figure if it can knock out my bi-weekly Starbucks trip, I will have paid for it within a year. Lemme tell you, this thing is AMAZING!!! Very strong, hot coffee with none of the bitterness that you are used to from brewing at home. Very, very close to a hot cup of joe from Starbucks (maybe even better in a lot of ways). If I would have known I could have had a cup of coffee like this at home, I would have dropped the money in a second.

The moral of the story? If you work from home and you love coffee, this is the machine for you. I couldn't be happier!

HDMI Green Sceen

So, I have a JVC HD-52G786 television that I love. It is a low profile, rear projection, HD-ILA, 52" beast that I bought for myself for the Superbowl two years ago.

When I got it, HDMI wasn't really mainstream yet, so I never had a chance to use the HDMI input that it has. About a year later, I finally got HDMI output on my cable box, but could not get it to work (I just got a green screen). After talking to the Comcast tech and scouring the Internet, I figured that it was a problem with the HDMI output on the cable box being bad. Oh well. So, a little bit later, I got a new laptop which also had an HDMI output on it. Excited to use the HDMI input on my TV, I plugged it in and yep, you guessed it, GREEN SCREEN! Ouch. At this point, I figured my HDMI board on the TV was dead and there was no way I would pay for JVC to fix it seeing as it was out of warranty. That appeared to be the end of HDMI for this TV, which was too bad to say the least.

Now, because I love technology so much, and I believe I was bored at the time... a couple of weeks ago I started searching to see if the green screen issue was common place. It was. Then, I started to search on if it was common in JVC TVs. It was. Wow! I started looking up JVC TVs in my series and good god, I found some great info.

Apparently, because HDMI was so new when this TV came out and had so many bugs (remember USB 1.0?), JVC built in a secret way to reset it. Genius! Of course, JVC won't tell you how to do it, says you need a special maintenance remote, etc... Just trying to get you to pay for service. But, people being as smart as they are, someone (Cesar Maciel as far as I can tell) found a way to do it yourself. I just did it and everything is working perfectly! I have outlined the steps below, mostly so that I will know where to look the next time I need to do it. Woo Hoo!!!!

1. Turn on TV
2. Make sure the remote toggle switches are set to "TV" and "VCR" respectively
3. Press the "Sleep" button
4. Simultaneously press "Display" and "Video Status"
5. Press "2" (Self Check)
6. Turn off the TV
7. Wait for fan to turn off (30 seconds or so)
8. Unplug TV
9. Wait for 30 seconds
10. Turn TV back on

It should be obvious, but you need to be using the JVC remote for the TV to do this...

There is no one place where I found all of this info, but most of it came from this page and the links found within.

Do You Have a Floppy?

I know I don't, but I tend to click it accidentally in Windows Explorer sometimes and it takes a few seconds to respond (which irritates me every time I do it!). So, as always, with a little digging, I found this tidbit that should hide it forever!

1) Open the registry editor by typing regedit in the Run Window.

2) Goto the following key. If it doesn’t exist, create it.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

3) Create (or modify) a 32-bit DWORD key named NoDrives & assign it a value of 1.

That's it!

Open Source Software

I am a big fan of software in the Open Source community. I have contributed to projects (albeit minimally) in the past and have a few projects out there that I would love to one day make "official" and public for the world. Aside from the obvious (free!), I find that most Open Source projects are far more agile and forward thinking then their commercial entities. I could discuss this for hours... and seeing that my personal livelihood rests upon the sale of the commercial software that I design/write/implement/support, I can certainly understand the many arguments against it. There is a fine balance. That said, here is a list of some of the applications I use on a daily basis that I believe have a wonderful place in the world of technology.

FireFox
Internet Explorer alternative
Web Browser. Far more "standards" compliant then IE (which is a plus for a any web developer) and utilizes an amazing plug-in architecture that allows anyone to create new functionality very quickly.

OpenOffice
Microsoft Office alternative
Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation editor(s). I cannot express in words my hatred for MS Office (mostly Outlook). This one is a no brainer for me and you can even open/save documents in MS Office format for all those professional users out there who have no choice!

VLC
Windows Media Player alternative
Media player that can handle almost anything you throw at it without the need of annoying "codec packs".

Handbrake
Video conversion utility. I use it mostly to convert DVDs and TV shows to iPod compatible format so I can catch up while I travel.

GIMP
Adobe Photoshop alternative
Image editing software. Not as feature rich as Photoshop, but if you are like me, you use about 0.001% of the functionality of Photoshop anyway.

uTorrent
Torrent Management. By far the most feature rich torrent software I have found. Right now I use it mostly to download TV shows that I miss. Hopefully, someday, more commercial entities will use the torrent idea in practice (Windows 7 Beta?).

mRemote
Remote Desktop Connection alternative
Remote control viewer that puts all open windows in a tabbed interface and saves the connection information. It does far more, like connect using different protocols (Citrix, VNC, etc...), but mostly I just want the tabs. This software may be going commercial very soon, I am not sure. It's a shame.

Digsby
MSN Messenger, AOL, ICQ, etc... alternative
A multi-protocol IM client. If you are like me, you have accounts with all the big guys (ICQ, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, GTalk, etc...). This allows you to communicate with all of them in one tidy window. Also connects to Facebook, MySpace, etc... Really a great piece of software.

Filezilla
FTP client software that allows you to save connections, establish secure FTP connections, resume interupted downloads, etc, etc, etc... The gold standard in FTP clients these days.

** I am just going to throw out there that a lot of the applications I discuss above are "donationware" meaning that they are free, but accept donations to help with the high cost of writing and maintaining software. If you can afford to give anything at all to the creators of Open Source software that you love, anything will help. Please support these developers!

Blackberry Time?

I just noticed that the time on my Storm was off by about 4 minutes. I dug around and found that in Options -> Date/Time you can set the time source to be either "Blackberry" or "Network". I want to sync with the towers, but I know that the blackberry (as with most PDAs) cannot sync timezones, so I went digging for more info.

I ran across this. Interesting.

Vista + WMP11 + NAS + Xbox 360

Holy shit! I don't want to be overly optimistic here, but I believe I have found a working solution to this problem. It is working right now, but I am fearful that it will somehow break spontaneously. Pray for me children...

What's going on? Well, I have a XBox 360 that I connect to my main machine via the WMP11 sharing services so I can watch videos. Works great and plays MP4, DIVX, etc... unlike the Windows Media Extender functionality. It is clean. I love it. So, I have a LOT of video since I have started encoding my DVD collection. Because of this, I am running out of drive space and want to keep stuff like that off my main machine anyway. So, I have a NAS device (D-Link DNS-323) running in a RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration. No problem, just map it as a drive in Vista, add it to the WMP11 "library" and bingo, watch everything from there on my Xbox 360. Wrong! I have fought with this forever, but today, I may have found the answer.

So, there are two things that I had to do to make this happen.

First, I had to change the Logon of the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service to use an account that has access to the NAS. Makes sense. But that alone did not do the trick.

Next, In the key HLKM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/MediaPlayer/Preferences/HME, I had to add a DWORD called EnableRemoteContentSharing and set the value to 1.

I restarted the service, turned on the XBox and BAM, I saw the Video folder I had shared from my NAS. While holding my breath, I started up Kung Fu Panda (better then you would expect) and it played! Yay!!!! Hopefully this problem is now resolved. If so, I will be getting a couple of HUGE drives for that NAS asap. If not, I will scream and yell and report back to you all via this blog. Damn, I hope it works!

I search high and low for this answer, but to give credit where it is due, I found the final pieces that put it all together for me in this article.

---

UPDATE 1: As of this morning, it is still working, but I have noticed that WMP's library (which the XBox 360 uses to generate its list of available videos) did not update automatically. I had to refresh it from my PC. I am not sure if this was a one time thing, or will be an ongoing problem. I will keep a close eye on it.

Keeping Up!

I am a big fan of reading news via RSS feeds. Have been for a long time. Because of that and also because I move around a lot and therefore like to manage a lot of things online, I am a huge advocate of Google Reader. If you read a lot of feeds, you should check it out.

I find that I constantly add more feeds to the list that I watch. One day it will get out of control. I thought I would share with you the things that I follow on a daily basis. It ranges from world news to technology to programming, sports and even cooking. A little bit of everything!

Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog
.NET Tip of The Day
Ars Technica
ASP.NET Daily Articles
ATI Catalyst
Atlanta Braves
BlackBerry Cool
digg
DotNetKicks.com
Engadget
Engadget Mobile
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets News
Gizmodo
Hacking NetFlix
HandBrake
Jungle Disk
Lifehacker
Maximum PC all RSS Feed
MoDaCo
msmobiles
Official Gmail Blog
Qusers
Ramblinwreck
RIMarkable
Rob Conery
SaintsReport
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen
ScottGu's Blog
Slashdot
TechCrunch
White House.gov
xkcd.com

Embedding iTunes Artwork into MP3s

I have a HUGE library of music that I manage with iTunes right now. This goes back to my college days at Georgia Tech when a buddy came back from working one summer in 1997 and showed us that we could rip our CDs to something more portable then that god awful Real format. Anyway, since then, I have collected, tweaked, manicured and loved my music collection and that is a process that will probably never end.

I am an iPod user and iTunes just works, even though it can be a little slow with that xml backend (can anyone say SqLite?). One problem I have is that after my hours, days, hell months, of painstaking work to make sure that every single file in my library has album art, I would really like to have all that art embedded into the actual MP3 files. I really don't care that it will take up extra storage space, I just want to have that artwork show up on whatever device or in whatever application I am using!

Because I already have it all put together perfectly within iTunes, I obviously have been trying to find something that will pull that artwork and embed it automatically. While I still have not found the perfect way to do this, I did run across a piece of open source software called iTSfv. It seems to work, but in a manual sort of way. It also has about a million more features then I would ever need, but it does succesfully take the "folder.jpg" that iTunes references and embeds it in each and every MP3 file selected. Better then nothing, but the search continues!

Vista Sidebar

I am actually a big fan of the sidebar. I loved the Yahoo Widget Engine in XP (formerly Konfobulator), but the simplicity of the sidebar in a little 200px window on your screen is wonderful to me.

Here is a list of the gadgets that I use:

ProWeather
I want to see the current weather and stuff and this thing tells you EVERYTHING!

Analog Clock (built in)

Calendar (built in)

All CPU Meter
This one measures multiple cores which is nice to see.

Hard Drive Monitor
It's nice to see what kind of space you get left!

iTunes Controller
Because I usually have iTunes minimized and am writing code when I get a phone call. It is easier to just hit pause from this gadget which is always visible then to dig around for the iTunes window, bring it up, hit pause, etc...