Shoaib Ali It's bloggin time

Well, its day 2 - I went one step ahead and bought myself nokia e71. Gota tell you. It beats iPhone hands down!

In every bloody aspect!

It's got some really neat features that it doesn't even mention on the box! or even any review that I've read so far.

Here are a few that I havn't seen any other review mentioned.

It plays flash! Youtube works like better then iPhone. It has a wider screen then iPhone. It doesn't even just play flash. It even plays real media, mp4, mpeg2, xvid!

You switch between modes like if you are at work you dont have any thing to do with multimedia then it can go in to business mode and also connect to the appropriate wireless access point in that "mode".

I've seen reviews say that "it doesn't have a 3.5 mm audio jack" but they don't say that its got a 2.5mm jack which can be easily adapted to 3.5!

It actually is lighter then iPhone.

While I was reading up on this interesting topic of Thermochromism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermochromism. I ran in to some cool projects. These are quite old technologies but yet new to me. Thought I might share.

I can see how this can be so useful for law enforcement agencies and traffic wardens or business to promote their product.

The next technology is heat sensitive fabric that changes color. Also known as Hypercolor t-shirts. These are commercially available and surprisingly enough quite cheap too. I am planning to buy one :D

Came across article so, thought I might document it here as well.

As I always struggled in command line to work out disk quota, usage and other statistical means of working out what could be using the disk. Apart from df -hl, I was unable to work out directory sizes and order them and so on. Just like you would be able to in a graphical user interface.

So, here are some commands and tools to assist in that process.

Quoted from linux.com article :

The CLI way

The df utility displays the disk space usage on all mounted filesystems. The -T option prints the filesystem type as well. By default, df measures the size in 1K blocks, which could be a little difficult for a desktop user to decipher. Use the -h option to get more understandable output:


$ df -h -T
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 ext3 20G 9.3G 9.1G 51% /
/dev/hda7 reiserfs 13G 2.1G 11G 17% /mnt/suse
/dev/sda1 vfat 241M 152M 90M 63% /media/usbdisk


Today, I completed my set of car audio. Following is the implemented sound in my car.

Everything now runs via 9 Band parametric graphic equalizer for optimum sound! Using two amplifiers, one for 4 channel speakers rear and front. The other Sony 125 WRMS amplifier to power the mid-range compnent speakers in the rear (boot).

A couple of weeks back I posted a blog entry about caching all youtube videos on to your squid proxy server. This is working great, but now youtube lacks the ability to loop your video again and again and again... unless! you add the same video a million times in your quick playlist.

Nevermind, Greasemonkey script to rescue! You need to make sure you have greasemonkey installed. If you do you will have a little monkey icon (bottom right corner).

Greasemonkey can be installed from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Once you have greasemonkey you will need to restart firefox. The thing I like about installing greasemonkey scripts is that I don't have to restart my firefox :D

Now you can install Loopy for YouTube. Once installed, go back to your youtube video and hit refresh.

This is where all my freelancing money goes in to. Projects!

Ordered a brand new touch screen with built in tv tuner of eBay. I just wanted to try it out, how the LCD would fit in the dash. Took me 5 minutes to install the LCD. No cutting required, no modification, no screwing around. I've seen people spend millions of hours just to get this part right. More details on how I did it will be posted when I have finished the project :)

For now here is quick peek. Sorry about the picture quality - next pay i'm getting a better camera.

Next step for me is to find an appropriate CPU+motherboard with PSU to suit my needs. This is going to be the hard bit. I have been seeking advice related to rules/laws and regulations of such project - again will post details at the end of project.

I have been having a lot of trouble with my car lately. It's a honda so no surprise there, never the less I like my Honda Prelude XX 1989 4WS 2 Ltr twin-carb. I wish it wasn't made by honda. You don't find a car these days even NEW with these features

4WS (4 Wheel Steering) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4WS#Four-wheel_steering
ALB (Anti-Locking Brake) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system
Cruise Control
Manual
Sunroof

Find me a car with all the above under $2K NZD.

Anyway, recently I have been noticing some roughness in the cars RPM and idling speed. It didn't drive smooth either. The possible cause could be

Ignition Control Module | Distributor | Ignitor
Vacuum leak
Ignition Coil

I replaced the ICM from Pick A Part, but it was still troubling with its annoying rattling idle rpm. While I was driving the module failed. Lesson learned : Never trust or rely on parts from second hand/ damaged cars i.e Pick A Part

Luckily I own two of these preludes 1:1 copy. So, I was able to get the distributor out of the other prelude and stick it in and was back on the road. Not only that, the idle rpm was smooth as well.

This is what i've spent my sunday morning hacking around.

I seem to watch content over and over again on youtube and other websites. This was costing me a lot of bandwidth so, I decided to use my Squid proxy server to cache it.

The requirements are very simple. Had to do a bit of tinkering around to get a basic setup working.

1. Squid >= 2.6
2. Python >= 2.4
3. Python-urlgrabber (urlgrabber module of python)
4. Python-iniparse (iniparse module of python)
5. Apache (httpd) Web Server

You can find those details on http://cachevideos.com/installation

I did mine with lighttpd. Infact you can you use any webserver as long as it can serve files over HTTP.

On Debian

You can install Python-urlgrabber using apt-get. The Python-iniparser you can download of here http://code.google.com/p/iniparse/

Extract it and run the following


cd python-iniparser
python setup.py install


Basically all that fancy setup.py script does it copy files over to /var/lib/python2.4/ directory. So something is really bothering you then you can take things in your own hands.

Ran in to another interesting google gadget while searching for more interactive charts and visually appealing. You can see it in action on iGoogle spreadsheet

The real time play gives a very good correlation between certain factors that do or do not effect the trend.

Another open source flash charts I found that you can interact with using ajax. I was going to use these for realtime network bandwidth/load display.

You can see them in action at Open Flash Charts

Found this really cool way to lock your mac osx workstation! Any osx experts out there might be able to tell if I can convert this in to a keyboard shortcut or an icon?

Currently I run it using terminal shell script


/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend