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Funny Characters

July 22, 2010 Posted in Geekery, Quotes by Matt

I’m just reading Joel Spolksy’s excellent 2003 article on Unicode and character sets, I think for the first time. If you’re a programmer and have the least bit of doubt about character encodings, I’d go read it now, if I were you. Not least because it’s so damn well written.

The IBM-PC had something that came to be known as the OEM character set which provided some accented characters for European languages and a bunch of line drawing characters… horizontal bars, vertical bars, horizontal bars with little dingle-dangles dangling off the right side, etc., and you could use these line drawing characters to make spiffy boxes and lines on the screen, which you can still see running on the 8088 computer at your dry cleaners’.

via The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) — Joel on Software.


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Batch Processing Files in Audacity

July 14, 2010 Posted in Audio, Geekery, Screencast, tutorial by Matt

I’ve just recorded a short screencast that shows you how to create a new chain in Audacity and apply it to multiple files. This lets you process a whole batch of audio files in pretty much any way of your choosing pretty painlessly.

Probably best watched on YouTube itself in the original 480p (you may need to use the video quality pop-out menu), so you stand a chance of reading the screen.

Note I’m using the Audacity 1.3.12, in the beta series, not the 1.2 stable. If you want to follow along with the video, I’d recommend grabbing the beta. It’s not crashed on me yet, and it’s got lots of new features and bug-fixes over 1.2.


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WordPress Twenty Ten Theme Flower Header

July 1, 2010 Posted in Geekery, Graphics, Photography by Matt

The new WordPress 3 comes with a pretty nice default theme, Twenty Ten. I predict this will be just as successful as the previous Kubrick default, i.e. all over the web, pretty soon, as will its eight default header graphics.

If you want your blog to look at least a bit different from everyone else’s, adding a custom header picture is probably the best first step. Changing themes entirely would do a more radical job, but there won’t be many themes yet that take advantage of all the WordPress 3 features like Twenty Ten — which is built to showcase them — does.

So, here’s a couple of shiny header graphics I created from this snap of mine taken on last year’s Worldwide Photo Walk, and this one taken just this afternoon. These links take you through to the full-size versions; they’re pretty small files, weighing in 40KB max: Full size daisy. Full size Cosmos (the purple one!)

daisy

Cosmos

Daisy and Cosmos. If you want to use either image on any site, feel free: I’m licensing the photos under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license, so it’s okay to use commercially or non-commercially. If you can attribute it, even in a quick blog entry, and link back here or to Flickr, that would be nice, but I won’t shout if you don’t.

Once you’ve made your header, or grabbed mine, the page you want in the WordPress 3 Admin interface is under “Header”, under the “Appearance” sub-menu. It’ll be there by default in a fresh install of WordPress 3, as part of the Twenty Twenty theme.

Just upload the file using the top option there. There won’t be any prompt to crop the photo if you’ve used one that’s exactly 940x198 pixels. Both of the files above are exactly that size, so once you’ve uploaded the file, that should be the job done!

Wait for WordPress to tell you the new graphic is in place, then go view your site and you should see your new, non-default header, and have a WordPress site that doesn’t look exactly like all the other new WordPress 3 installs!


Creative Commons Licence
Daisy Daisy by Matt Gibson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.


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Getting the Apple iPhone Remote App Working With a ZyXEL Router

May 16, 2010 Posted in Geekery, tips by Matt

Yesterday I replaced my old Belkin router, which had been randomly blocking Safari from looking at websites where lots of small images loaded at once.

I bought a shiny new ZyXEL P-660HN. It’s a lovely little ADSL wireless router, it got a string of 5-star reviews on eBuyer, and everything worked well out of the box. I only had one problem — well, apart from not being able to spell “ZyXEL” — which I’m documenting here just in case anyone else is having it and desperately looking for help on the internet.

I couldn’t get the Apple Remote App for iPhone to work with it. Not reliably, anyway. It would occasionally work, after rebooting everything, but it wouldn’t stay working. Crucially, I also couldn’t get the AirTunes Remote Speakers (hanging off my Airport Express) to work, either.

After I shuffled around the internet for a bit, I thought it might be something to do with Bonjour, but the ZyXEL didn’t seem to be clamping down with its firewall on the Bonjour ports internally. In fact, I eliminated the firewall completely: turning it off didn’t fix the problem.

Plunging further into the net, I found a couple of places that tangentially mentioned a couple of other apps in the same breath as the Apple Remote, including the 1Password app, which syncs with 1Password over WiFi. I tried that app for the first time with the new router, and what do you know? That didn’t work either.

My big clue came from this blog entry at packetevents.com, which goes into some really geeky detail about what happens when you fire up the Remote App:

When the iPhone remote starts, it began to send  a Multicast-DNS packet to 224.0.0.251. This is a multicast which means the devices and computers in the same group will hear this packet.

Screen shot 2010-05-16 at 09.36.07.png

Multicast. That’s the secret. I remembered seeing a setting for that on the ZyXEL, which I didn’t think was on by default. Sure enough, on the Network > LAN > IP page of the router’s configuration screens, there’s an Advanced Setup button. Click that, and there’s an RIP & Multicast Setup section. Multicast was set to “None” on my system.

I had no idea which of the options to choose — IGMP-v1, 2 or 3 — so I just chose the biggest number, on the grounds that version 3 of things is generally better than version 1 or 2. As soon as I’d chosen that and hit “Apply”, everything started working just fine. 1Password started syncing, my Remote app started working, and I’m listening to music over the AirTunes speakers right now.

So — got a problem with a ZyXEL router and your iPhone apps? Try enabling multicast!


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I Has Made a Web Site

May 15, 2010 Posted in Writing by Matt

‘This is just like when you post what you think is a really fucking original photo to Flickr and the first fucking comment you get is “Hi! I’m an admin for the ‘Upside-down photos of penguins wearing bobblehats (shot on Velvia)’ group, and we’d love to have your photo added to the 2,947,341 photos that are already in our group pool.”…’

I have created a new web site. Purely for a rant. It’s called domainillneverfuckinguse.com.


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