Category Archives: Tech
Grammar test
Woofi and finding an access point
One of the main points of an app like woofi is to conserve battery life, so implementing features in a resource-conscious manner is paramount.
Of course, the biggest thing we do is make sure the WiFi radio is on for the smallest amount of time possible. This brings us to the first trade off we have to juggle. We can’t know for sure if we want the WiFi radio to be turned on without turning it on and checking for available access points. If we turn on and then connect to an access point, all is good. If we turn on and there is no access point to connect to we just wasted a bit of your battery life.
What we want to do is turn on the WiFi radio and then only stay on for the absolute shortest time possible. The problem is this: we don’t know what the shortest time possible is! Some Android devices and some access points take longer than others. If we only turn on WiFi for 5 seconds and then decide no access point is available, but your device and access point normally take 10 seconds to establish a connection we’ve failed the user.
Our solution to this is to pick a reasonable default time, and allow the user to increase it if they have a slow-to-connect access point.
Related articles
- An Android WiFi App I Need (avc.com)

Placebos, dude
- Ben Goldacre shares some amazing studies about the placebo effect in stand-up comic format in this video.
- Daniel Keogh talks some more about placebos.
- HDL cholesterol makes you live longer.
- This is what it’s like to spend nearly thirty years in prison for something you didn’t do.
- Infographic of the day:

No wires for your monitor
Sure, it’s not ready for prime time yet, but I’m sure this will be available sooner than later.
From Engadget:
Well, Fujitsu’s taken it one step further here at CeBIT this week, throwing together what it claims to be the world’s first totally wireless desktop display — no video, no power. The imagery is handled via wireless USB and can connect to any appropriately-equipped PC, while the juice is sucked in using a newly-minted proposed standard for wireless power delivery called SUPA
Easier switching of sound devices in Windows with Soundswitch 3.0dev1.
I’ve got a beta-quality release of Soundswitch available now.
You can also peruse the source code.
The big changes for 3.0 are as follows:
- Configure Source1 and Source2 via tray icon.
- Select current active sound device from tray icon.
- Single left click of tray icon switches between Source1 and Source2
- Rewrites of core parts to reduce bugs and increase speed.
Please let me know about bugs.
Search PDF files using Windows Search in Vista and Windows 7 64-bit
If you wish for searches via the Start Menu or Explorer search boxes to search the contents of PDF files, you need to install Adobe’s iFilter.
You can get the version for 64-bit Windows, or if you install Adobe Reader you’ll get it for 32-bit Windows.
Why Windows Home Server is awesome…
I forget I even have it.
I don’t think there can be any better recommendation for a backup solution. My computers are all backed up daily, and I don’t even know it happens.
On top of that, there’s so much more that can be done with WHS. A list of some things I use my WHS for:
- Storage. I keep smallish hard drives in my PC’s (most of them are around
250GB) and then put big honkin hard drives in my WHS. Each of the indicated places in the screen shot on the right (take from Explorer in Windows 7) points to storage on my server.
- Reliability. You can selectively enable folders on the WHS to be “duplicated”. What this means is that every file in that folder is stored two times…on seperate hard drives. This is done transparently to the end user so you don’t have to worry about knowing which copy is the newest. The benefit is that if a hard drive dies (it will), your important data is not lost.
- Reliability, Part Deux. In addition to the safety of data stored on the server, the safety of each of my computers is important as well. If your hard drive in one of your PCs dies, or you royally screw up your system messing around, or some sort of malware just totally infests you, WHS makes it easy to restore your system. You just pop in the restore cd and reboot your computer. As long as your BIOS is set to boot from CD (if not, it’s an easy thing to turn on), the restore cd will take over and let you pick a backup from your WHS to restore. By default, WHS keeps one backup for each of the previous 3 days, one for each of the previous 3 weeks, and one for each of the previous 3 months. I set it to keep a just-fresh-from-a-new-OS-install backup so it’s easy to go back to that point.
- Development. I do a bit of hobbyist programming. Because many of the things I write depend upon a MySQL database, I installed MySQL on my WHS. This allows me to test my scripts on my local LAN.
Upgrading your AT&T Tilt to Windows Mobile 6.5 (tutorial)
I’ve been meaning to look in to how to do this for awhile, and finally worked up the willpower to do it…
Here’s how you can upgrade your AT&T Tilt to Windows Mobile 6.5. Why would you want to do this? Well…it’s new! 6.5 brings some nice feature upgrades, as well as generally making the whole operating system more finger-friendly. Here’s a couple screenshots of my phone now:
One last thing before we get into it. It seems like there’s a lot of stuff to do to make this work. Keep in mind that most of this stuff is only done once. Every other time you want to change your ROM it will be much easier.
Ok, on to the tutorial.
Read more »
My program for hotkey switching between speakers and headphones…
Herein find out how to survive a nuclear war.

- Image via Wikipedia
Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny. Some interesting stuff in there…
Kearny points out that many casualties in a nuclear attack might be due to people running to windows in major cities, looking at the sky lit up by SLBMs, only to be killed by blades of glass when otherwise-survivable ICBMs explode.
![captchas[1]](http://blog.contriving.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/captchas1.jpg)



