Værstasjon nå også på iPhone (og Android)

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Pål

Har laget en iPhone utgave av værstasjonens websider. Gå inn på vær.åfoss.no fra din iPhone (eller annen HTML5 kompatibel smartphone som Android). Viser litt ulik informasjon avhengig av skjermens orientering.

Portrettmodus

Landskapsmodus

Posted in Development, Fun, Været | Leave a comment

Moro med været

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Pål

Fikk en værstasjon til jul. Alt første juledag ble den satt sammen og montert. Står nå og logger været med de samme verktøyene vi bruker på jobb til å overvåke store vindkraft-parker.

Dette er tidenes minste BazeField wind-installasjon. En mølle og den produserer ikke engang strøm. Sjekk http://vær.åfoss.no/ for å se selv.

 

Posted in Development, Fun, Technology, Været | Leave a comment

NRK Dagsrevyen på Boxee Box

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Pål

Har anskaffet meg en Boxee Box fra D-Link og jeg er veldig fornøyd med den lille mediespilleren. Den spiser alt av formater fra gammelt divx til full-hd mkv. En annen kjekk ting er at den støtter streaming fra nettet og apps.

NRK har et kjempestort utvalg av programmet som de legger ut på NRK.no. Desverre er innholdet kun tilgjengelig via deres nettsider ved hjelp av Silverlight og Windows Media Player/ActiveX samt et par offisielle apps for iPhone og Android. Boxee Box spiller av WMV filer uten problemer, men den støtter ikke playeren på nrk.no.

Som en test og en mulig start på noe mer har jeg snekret i sammen en liten app for Boxee som lar deg se dagsrevyen for de siste 14 dagene på Boxee Box.

Appen virker på på Boxee Box og Boxee på Windows (muligens også Mac og Linux, men det har jeg ikke testet).

For å installere må du gjøre som følger:

  1. Åpne Apps menyen og velg repositories
  2. Legg til følgende repositry: http://dir.codewrench.net/
  3. Velg så NRK Dagsrevyen og installer denne

Legg gjerne igjen en kommentar om det virket eller ikke.

Posted in boxee, Development, Technology | Tagged | 19 Comments

Streaming live video to iPad/iPhone 4

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Pål

This post describes how to setup VLC to transcode live video streams to iPad/iPhone 4 compatible H264 mp4 format. Unfortunately the iPad/iPhone 4 does not support any kind of normal streaming, but something Apple calls Http Live Streaming. This means you need to do a bit more as well. Continue reading →

Posted in Development, iPad, Technology | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

FLL 2010 “Body Forward”

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Pål

Også i år stiller jeg som teknisk dommer for First Lego League turneringen i Skien. I år heter konkuransen “body forward” og ser ut til å være ennå mer utfordrene enn i fjor. Du kan se en video presentasjon av årets utfordringer på YouTube her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEwTO3S5eOs

Alt dette skal de altså løse ved hjelp av en selvgående robot de har bygget i Lego og programmert selv.

Continue reading →

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Apples vs Googles universe

Posted on October 3, 2010 by Pål

I’ve owned a HTC Hero for a long time now, and it’s running the relatively new Android 2.1. Recently I got myself an iPad (3G+WiFi) and after upgrading it to the latest iOS 4 (beta 2) I have made some observations I’d like to share.

In Android Market if you purchased an app and it did not live up to your expectations , you can uninstall it within a few hours and get your money back.

All application’s you have purchased in your account (no matter on which phone) is shown in a separate list so it’s easy to reinstall later on if a newer version might be better.

In Apples AppStore you cannot get a refund for purchases. And there are a lot of crappy apps out there. A refund policy would dramatically lower the threshold for buying and testing new apps. Not I won’t buy anything without a good rating and some good reviews. Even so I’ve bought some crappy apps that don’t work for me and I have thus uninstalled them. But how am I supposed to remember them and reinstall them later on? I can’t find any list of bought apps anywhere that lets me reinstall on demand.

I like iOS as a UI much better and it’s more “modern” than Android, but why the crippled shop Apple?

Posted in Android, iPad, Ramblings, Technology | Leave a comment

SABnzbd+ sidebar gadget

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Pål

After having created the Montastic sidebar gadget I decided to create another gadget that I’ve been missing for some time. This gadget is monitoring your SABnzbd+ usenet downloads and thus requires you to be running SABnzbd+.

Posted in Development, Technology | Leave a comment

Montastic sidebar gadget

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Pål

I’ve recently started using Montastic (the website monitoring service that doesn’t suck) to monitor my web sites. Can’t get much simpler or cheaper (free for 3 sites) and only $5 for 15 sites.

Anyways I noticed they had Widgets/Gadgets for the Yahoo widget system and the Mac OS X, but they had nothing for Windows Sidebar (Vista / Windows 7). So I made a quick port of the Yahoo one for Windows Sidebar.

The Montastic sidebar gadget allows you to keep an eye on your servers from your desktop.

Posted in Development, Technology, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Windows Home Server FAIL

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Pål

I’ve been a Windows Home Server owner for over a year now. The little server has been dutifully backing up the households four computers nearly every night. I’ve restored a PC once before, a HP laptop that was running 32-bit windows vista. It worked beautifully.

Tonight while fooling around with Visual Studio 2010 on my new Lenovo W510 laptop running Windows 7, 64 bit I ended up blue-screening Windows 7. The PC kept blue-screening on every boot attempt and the built-in boot recovery in Windows 7 could not find any problems.

Well, not to fear. I just took a backup, so I’ll simply restore it. Popped the client PC restore CD in the drive and booted.

Snag 1: The network card was not detected. Well I’ve read about that. That’s what the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder on the C: drive is for. I opened the backup on another PC and copied the whole folder to a USB thumb drive, the popped it in the PC to be restored and scanned for drivers.

Snag 2: The Lenovo W510 has USB 3 and the bloody thumb drive was not even detected. It seemed I needed to load USB drivers first. Luckily I remembered that the PC has two USB 3 and one USB 2 slots. I inserted the USB drive in the USB 2 slot and again click scan. This time the light on the drive flickered, but it still could not find and drivers. After googleing the web I found the cause.

Snag 3: Since I was running Windows 7 64 bit all the drivers in the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder was 64-bit drivers. The bootable client restore CD is running a stripped down version of 32-bit Vista and thus cannot load my 64-bit drivers. I actually need to download 32-bit drivers manually from Lenovo.com.

Snag 4: Drivers usually comes in a nice msi file or setup.exe file. That’s no good. I needed to extract the actual files from within the msi’s. The resulting file’s (.inf, dll’s and more) can then be moved to the USB stick. That’s the whole point of the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder. The drivers were supposed to be there “ready for picking”.

Finally after several hours my PC is now back up and running after a restore that should have taken only 30 minutes or so.

Microsoft: You really need to release a 64-bit client restore CD that supports the drivers. This is a major flaw in the way WHS works.

Posted in HomeServer, Ramblings, Technology | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Dell customer support

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Pål

Dell power supply

We own a Dell Latitude laptop. This week it suddenly stopped chargeing the battery and when we inserted the power supply there was an error message stating that there was something wrong with the power supply and that we needed to contact Dell support.

Bummer, I was sure this ment a trip back to the dealer and that both the laptop and the power supply needed to be sent away for months on end. But I called Dell customer support and a was greeted with nothing but understanding and great customer care. No problem they’d send a new power supply in mail straight away. It would not cost me anything (not even postage or handling fee). Two days later DHL  called and wanted to know what time was best for them to deliver the package straight to my door at home.

Wow. That’s what I call good customer support. I’m sure I’ll buy something from Dell the next time I get a chance too. Dell gets 10 out of 10 points for good service.

Posted in Ramblings, Technology | Tagged , | 2 Comments