“It sort of came at a bad time in my life, when I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to think about working. It’s hard to explain why you end up in Eragon and not GoodFellas.”
– John Malkovich,
on turning down the
role of Jimmy Conway
Starting Apps via Outlook
So my new Motorola Triumph phone has a nice big screen and rich sound via headphones. I used to use an Archos AV-420 to watch downloaded video, but when its AC adapter died, I switched over to using my iPod Nano to watch TV shows and movies. But while the Nano has a vibrant screen, it’s awfully small. And the iPod requires most videos to be converted to mp4 – a simple process using VidCoder, but an annoyance all the same. With the free MoboPlayer app for Android, I can watch those same video files on my phone – with its relatively giant screen – without conversion!
Here’s the thing, though: as of now I only have an 8GB memory card in my phone. With storing camera pictures and videos, apps, data and music for Spotify I only have around 4GB of free space on the card. This is plenty for the moment, as TV is mostly airing re-runs until after Labor Day.
One day soon I’ll upgrade the card to a 16GB model. But in the meantime I use HFS (a simple HTML-based file sharing app) to share my video folder on my local network. I watch a video on my phone, delete it, and then fire up the phone’s web browser to download a new TV show or movie to watch.
But the thing is, I’m lazy. I don’t want HFS running all the time on my computer, but I don’t want to go “all the way” upstairs or get out of bed to start it up as needed, either. And that’s where Outlook comes in.
There’s a little known feature in the rules section that allows you to start a program when an email arrives that meets certain criteria:
In my case, I set up a rule for Outlook to start HFS when it receives an email with the subject line “WH47H*QA-HFS” (not the actual text I use, but something similar). I then created this simple batch file which forces HFS to exit:
taskkill /f /im hfs.exe
exit
I then set up another rule, which runs the batch file any time an email is received with the subject line “WH47H*QA-KILLHFS” (again, this is not the actual text I use, but it’s similar).
So now when I need to download a new video to my phone, I just use the Gmail client on my phone to send an email with the appropriate subject line to my POP account. True, I have to wait 4 minutes for Outlook to do a send\receive before starting HFS, but it’s a small price to pay for laziness. And you could use this method to start (or end) any number of tasks remotely.
Try it out for yourself and let me know what you use it for!
Knuffingen Airport
Ever heard of Knuffingen Airport? You probably haven’t, because depending on how you look at it, Knuffingen is either the world’s smallest airport… or it’s the world’s largest model airport. I can just hear my mom making a “more money than sense” comment, but this is just the most awesome thing ever:
If I’d had unlimited funds as a kid, I would have totally made this!
Although the video is embedded above, it’s really worth your time to watch it full screen in 1080p… seriously!
A Random Fact
More than a few American cities are situated in counties of the same name. For example, the City of New York is in the County of New York in the state of New York. Here’s a fun fact: the city of Montgomery, Alabama resides in Montgomery County, Alabama. But the city and the county are named for two different people!
The city of Montgomery is named for General Richard Montgomery, an Anglo-Irish army officer who switched from the British to American side in the Revolutionary War and was killed at the Battle of Quebec in 1775.
The county is named for Lemuel P. Montgomery, an attorney from Nashville who joined the militia during the War of 1812, was commissioned as a major in the 39th Infantry of the United States Army and was killed at The Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The battle took place around 40 miles from Montgomery.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-08-21
- It's Bo time! #
- YES! TLC Cancels 'Kate Plus 8'!!! #
- @wagnerofficial Wow: Thanks for spoiling it for those of us who are still a few episodes back! :p #
- @wagnerofficial STOP IT WITH THE SPOILERS! #
- My battery life multiplier: x1.80 with JuiceDefender #Android http://t.co/VPmtzrD #
- 'You Lie' Rep. was right: http://t.co/V499Zx0 #
- Christie to run in 2012? AWESOME! http://t.co/IqSEyyv #
- Ouch! Majority of Android OEMs lose Linux distribution rights – Neowin.net http://t.co/GQOkPBd #
- Biggest threat to the 3DS and PlayStation Vita? Your smartphone http://t.co/oeEfGIY #
- "Seriously, when the going gets tough, you don't want a criminal lawyer. You want a CRIMINAL lawyer. You know what I'm saying?" #
- It's official – he's a bust! Steelers waive wide receiver Limas Sweed: http://t.co/gZ2rmLL #
- Gerard Depardieu urinates in plane cabin after he's refused permission to go to toilet | Mail Online http://t.co/hcQSAMz #
- @1outside What's that food pic of? #
- @1outside Well that just looks damn delcicous! #
- Freakonomics » Reason No. 1,382,992 to Hate Politics http://t.co/CyM5Onf #
- @KymArmstrong What up, guuurrrrlll! 🙂 I didn't know you were on the Tweeter! #
- Oh my! #
- I'm Tweetdeck's bitch… #
- OMG – he's dating a 22 year-old with a perfect rack? Yes, that's TERRIBLE honey. #
- There's no other way to say it: Firefox for Android sucks. Badly. #
- @BretEastonEllis How about BOTH of those songs suck? #electropop forever! #
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SONGS I LOVE: “The Painted Desert”
Such a pretty song… too bad it’s almost forgotten.
You met a new friend in the Canyon or so you wrote,
On a blanket in the cooling sand you and your friend agreed;
That the stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap.
The Painted Desert can wait till summer,
We’ve played this game of just imagine long enough, wait till summer.
When I am sure the rain has ended, the blooms have gone,
Everyone killed by the morning frost.
Was a cactus blooming there as you watched the native boy?
In a Flagstaff trailer court you wrote the line,
‘He kicked a tumbleweed and his mother called him home
Where the Arizona moon met the Arizona sun’.
I wanted to be there by May at the latest time,
Isn’t that the plan we had or have you changed your mind?
I haven’t read a word from you since Phoenix or Tucson,
April is over will you tell me how long before I can be there?
A Gmail (Droid) Tip
Many people have switched over to Google’s Gmail service. But there are millions of folks like me who still use POP accounts from web hosts or ISPs. And this presents a problem for people with Android phones: how to get that POP mail on your phone.
Let’s be honest: while the Gmail client for Android is pretty slick, the native email app kind of sucks. And while there are several worthy replacements (like K-9 Mail, for instance), it’s kind of silly to have to use two different email apps on your phone.
The obvious solution would be to have Gmail pull the email from your POP account(s). But this presents two problems.
For one, Gmail only pulls POP mail every so often, using a secret algorithm that’s roughly based on how many emails the POP account receives. So a POP account that gets hundreds of emails a day might get checked every 20 minutes or so, while an account that gets a handful of email a day might only get checked once a day (or less!). This is unacceptable, because an important email might sit in your POP account, unchecked, for a couple of days before it’s pulled down to your phone.
Secondly, Gmail can suddenly stop pulling emails from the account for no good reason. In fact, this happened to me just the other day. It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t seen any POP emails in my Gmail inbox for several days. I logged in to Gmail from a desktop computer, and low and behold, the POP account settings said: “last checked 4 days ago”.
Thanks Virgin Mobile!
If there’s one thing the Internet seems made for – aside from porn, cute kitty pictures and fantasy football leagues – it’s complaining about bad customer service. And that’s not for nothing: if you spend enough time at The Consumerist, TripAdvisor or Elliot.org you’d think that most companies don’t just have bad customer service, they’re becoming downright hostile to customers these days.
But this isn’t one of those awful customer service stories. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of that, a story about great customer service. And it involves Virgin Mobile.
My parents gave me a Virgin Mobile Samsung Intercept phone for Christmas last year. Coming from Tracfone’s relatively ancient LG 600g handset, the Intercept seemed like magic. And for the first couple of weeks, it was! But then odd things started happening. The phone would lock up often, requiring me to remove the battery to restart. It would lose connectivity, apparently unable to gracefully switch between 3G and Wi-Fi. It would reboot for no good reason. Many of the stock apps (and parts of the OS itself!) would crash. Most worryingly, the phone would gradually slow down – not just in a given session, but overall, like a Windows computer loaded down with malware.
The phone shipped with Android 2.1, and Virgin Mobile promised that most of these issues would be fixed with the 2.2 (Froyo) update, which was due in February… then March… then April. I’m an IT guy, and I understand how software releases get delayed. So I was OK with that, but was getting tired of resetting (wiping) the phone every few weeks to make it usable. Wiping the phone was great for restoring performance, but every time I did so I’d lose my SMS messages and call logs, and then had to spend an hour or more reinstalling my apps and tweaking the phone (notification settings, sounds, etc.). Anyway, the upgrade was finally made available in April, and I upgraded. And yes, a few things were fixed… but the phone was still slow and still locked up far too often.
Happy Birthday, Madonna!
I do this every year on the blog, so let’s get to it: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MADONNA!
It’s hard to believe that she turns 53 today! Gawd, we’re all getting so old! By the way, I really hope the rumors of Madge working with Ladytron on her new album are true! That would be all kinds of awesome! 🙂
Bannerama!
I use the WP Random Header plug-in to change the header image each time you load a page here at the site (a feature that is now built in to WordPress, by the way. I guess I’m too lazy to reconfigure it!).
I sometimes add or remove one of the banners, and every so often I’ll go nuts and replace all of them at once. I did just that this past weekend. In case anyone’s curious, here are the new banners:
Lisa Gerrard, lead singer of Dead Can Dance; has also done several movie soundtracks, including Gladiator.
John Henry Newman, Anglican priest and founder of the Oxford Movement.
Edwin Hubble, astronomer who confirmed the existence of other galaxies and that the universe is expanding.
Bryan Cranston as Walter White from the TV show Breaking Bad, one of the best shows ever!
John Harrison, an English clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer and solved the “longitude problem”.
Idris Elba as John Luther from the BBC series Luther, one of the best modern cop shows around.
Isaac Newton, the English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, alchemist and theologian.
Grace Kelly, American actress, later Princess of Monaco, and most beautiful woman in history.
Norman Borlaug, agronomist and Nobel laureate who saved a billion people’s lives in the Green Revolution.
I hope you enjoy the new banners!