Evan Sims » Tips

Bookmarklet: Share with Google Buzz

Evan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:55:02 +0000

All my blogging juice has been sapped by Google Buzz this week. I’m having way too much fun with it. It mashes everything I like about Google Reader up with FriendFeed. I’m especially digging the real time updates on shares and comment threads.

Anyway, here’s what I wanted to share: Since Buzz integrates heavily with Google Reader, you can use it’s “share” bookmarklet to forward links on to Buzz. Here’s a Bookmarklet I hacked together that works really well for this…

javascript:window.open('http://www.google.com/reader/link?url='+
encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+
'&srcURL='+encodeURIComponent(location.href));

Just drop it in a bookmark, load up a page you want to share and click. You can add a note too, if you like.

Enjoy.

A Better Instapaper Sync for Kindle/Mac

Evan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:55:32 +0000

I’ve been using my Kindle with my Instapaper feed for a few months now. It works really well, but I wanted an easier way to sync the two. The Instapaper blog recently pointed to an Automator script that makes the process much easier, but I thought I’d take it a bit further.

My variation of this Automator workflow will:

Detect when a Kindle is mounted.
Confirms if you want to sync your device with Instapaper.
Deletes any old Instapaper files on the device.
Downloads a fresh Instapaper archive and places it on your Kindle.
Asks if you want to dismount the Kindle, and does so if chosen.

Once you have this workflow in place all you really need to do is plug your Kindle in and wait for it to do it’s thing. Couldn’t be easier.

One issue to be aware of: while you have your Kindle mounted, any insertion of USB drives (or anything that will show up in /Volumes for that matter) will start the script. I’m looking for a workaround on that one, but it’s a relatively minor issue. Plug it in, sync it, unplug it. That’s the point of it, anyway.

You must also be signed into your Instapaper account through Safari for the Instapaper archive to be downloaded successfully. Automator uses your Safari session to grab the file.

Finally, the script should work with any number of Kindle devices, but only one may be plugged in at a time for the sync to work properly.

Download

You can download my workflow and customize it for yourself. You’ll want to move the file to your ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Folder Actions directory and work with it from there. Alternatively, you can build the workflow manually.

Install the Workflow

If you downloaded the pre-built workflow, ensure it’s been copied to the location I mentioned.
Open Finder and press Control+Shift+G. In the prompt, enter “/Volumes” and press Enter.
If you don’t have the path bar enabled in Finder, go to the View menu and select “Show Path Bar.”
Right click “Volumes” in the path bar and select “Folder Actions Setup…”
Attach the “Update Kindle with Instapaper.workflow”, ensure both checkmarks are checked.

Plug in your Kindle, and watch the magic. ;)

Build The Workflow Manually

Open Automator and create a new Folder Action. Set the “receives files and folders added to” drop down to “Volumes” (select Other, then press Control + Shift + G and enter “/Volumes”, press Go and then OK.)

Add a “Run AppleScript” action with the following code:

on run {input, parameters}

  tell application "Finder"
    if exists disk "Kindle" then
      return input
    else
      error -128
    end if
  end tell

  return input
end run

Add a “Ask for Confirmation” action. This will allow us to cancel our Instapaper update if we’re not ready for a fresh copy.

Add another “Run AppleScript” action to check for any existing Instapaper files on the Kindle, and move them to the trash for us.

on run {input, parameters}
  
  tell application "Finder"
    set kindleFolder to "Kindle:documents:" as alias
    set instapaperFiles to every file in kindleFolder where
      name of it contains "Instapaper-ReadLater-"
    move every item of instapaperFiles to trash

    -- If you'd like to automatically empty your trash, uncomment:
    --empty the trash
  end tell
  
  return input
end run

Lines 5 and 6 should be on one line.

Add a “Get Specified URLs” action. Delete the default URL and add http://www.instapaper.com/mobi.
Add a “Download URLs” action. Point the Where value to your Kindle/documents folder..
Add another “Ask for Confirmation” action. This time we’ll be asking whether we want to dismount our Kindle or not.

Add one more “Run AppleScript” action to dismount our Kindle from the file system, allowing us to just unplug the device without any further steps.

on run {input, parameters}
  
  tell application "Finder"
    if exists disk "Kindle" then
      try
        eject "Kindle"
      end try
    end if
  end tell
  
  return input
end run

Hack: Getting Lessn to Work on lighttpd

Evan — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:55:24 +0000

Over the weekend I decided to bite the bullet and move my domains from an Apache setup with Slicehost over to a peppier lighttpd server with Linode. All of my web apps transitioned to the new configuration easily (including WordPress) with a little lighttpd.conf magic, but I had a hard time getting Lessn to work nicely. I tried url.rewrites and url.redirects in all sorts of combinations, but was never able to find a solution for passing the token variable directly. Ultimately I decided to go an easier route and put in a minor hack into Lessn itself.

First, here’s what the related portion of my lighttpd.conf file looks like. We’re just replicating what Lessn’s own .htaccess file tells Apache to do.

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/g/-/" {
  server.error-handler-404 = "/g/-/index.php"
}
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/g/" {
  server.error-handler-404 = "/g/index.php"
}

Important – I have my Lessn installation located at /g, so you’ll want to tweak these rules to match wherever you installed yours.

Now open up Lessn’s /index.php. Beneath the includes we’ll be adding a few lines to grab the token from the request uri, like so:

include('-/config.php');
include('-/db.php');

if(!isset($_GET['token'])) {
  if(isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) {
    $_GET['token'] = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],
          strrpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/') + 1);
  }
}

There you go: a functioning instance of Lessn on lighttpd. Enjoy.

Getting the Dragon Age Toolset Running on Windows 7 x64

Evan — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:02:18 +0000

This took me the better part of the afternoon to figure out, so hopefully I can save someone else the time.

Install the Dragon Age Toolset, ensuring that you uncheck the “Install SQL Server 2005″ option.
Download the x64 versions of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and SQL Server Management Studio Express.
Install Server and Management Studio with the default settings.
Open Management Studio Express and connect with the default settings.
Right click “Databases” and select “New Database.” Set the name to “dragonage_toolset” and press OK.
Select “dragonage_toolset” from the list on the left and click the “New Query” button in the toolbar.
Paste the contents of this file in the blank window, and click the “Execute” button in the toolbar. You may see some warnings, but that’s OK.
Repeat the process, this time pasting the contents of this file.
Close Management Studio Express.
Run “ConfigureToolset.exe” from your Toolset installation folder.
Click next on the first screen. On the “Content Database” dialog, uncheck “Use the default database” and paste the following into the Database field:
Provider=SQLNCLI.1;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=False;Initial Catalog=dragonage_toolset;Data Source=MACHINE-NAME\SQLEXPRESS
You will want to change “MACHINE-NAME” to match the name of your PC in all capital lettering.
Press Next, and then press Finish. Start the Toolset and you should be good to go.

Hope this helps!

Fix broken volume and media controls under Windows 7

Evan — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:31:08 +0000

I few days ago I noticed that my Logitech G15 suddenly stopped controlling the volume on my Windows 7 x64 installation on my desktop. After a little research, I realized that the service responsible for media control functionality on keyboards had magically set itself to “Manual” instead of “Automatic” startup. Here’s how to fix the issue if you encounter it:

Go to Start, and type in “services.msc”.
Scroll down to “Human Interface Device Access”. Right click, go to properties.
Change the Startup Type to Automatic, and click the “Start” button. Press OK and close the services manager.
Try using your volume or media controls. All fixed!

Hope that helps someone out there. It was driving me nuts.

Adding a Bloom Effect to Warhammer

Evan — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:01:50 +0000

Fellow WCPI member Alufei of The Blue Scribes recently came across a trick on the Alliance forums for enabling a “bloom” effect to the game. Those of you who play Warcraft or EverQuest 2 (or the hordes of other games now supporting this technique) will know just how dramatic an effect this can have on the visual quality of a game.

The trick is to copy a modified DirectX rendering DLL into the same directory as WAR.EXE. Games instinctively look for DirectX DLL’s in their installation directory before falling back to the latest version in your system folders, primarily so that older games can ensure a compatible version is installed with the game and will continue to work years after release. This gives talented developers a means of doing interesting things like this.

I loaded it up this afternoon and I have to say, I love it! It makes the lightmaps really pop and noticeably reduces the jaggies around models. I haven’t noticed any drop in performance for using the effect, either. I’m really curious why Mythic didn’t include this effect in the client itself.

Could not use HTML 5 or Flash for playback. You can download the file as MPEG4/H.264 or Ogg Theora file.

Video demonstration of the bloom effect.

Read more about enabling this bloom effect over at The Blue Scribes, and the original forum thread over on Warhammer Alliance.

Skip Reentering Your Warhammer Password in the Patcher

Evan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:02:11 +0000

Another tip for you folks of the WAAAGH persuasion: do you hate having to re-enter your account password into the patcher each time you start? There’s a simple XML hack to bypass that.

Open up C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsWarhammer Online – Age of Reckoningpatch_user.xml in your favorite text editor. There’s only a couple lines of code.

All we need to do is add a password attribute there, like so:

Obviously replacing “account username” and “account password” with your appropriate credentials. Save the file and launch the patcher. Your password will be all filed out for you, and all you need to do is press OK. Simple, eh?

Optimizing Warhammer Online's Game Performance

Evan — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:26:19 +0000

Warhammer Online is a beast of a game, and by far the biggest complaint I hear about it is how poorly it performs on players PCs. I can’t argue, Mythic still needs to do a lot of work on tuning things up. Patch 1.2 (which goes live tomorrow) improves performance a bit but there are still some measures you can take to improve your frames per second right now. I’d like to point out that some of these tweaks may potentially reduce the visual quality of the game for you… that’s the way it always is with this stuff: you sacrifice quality for performance. I leave it to you to balance the options and decide what you’re willing to sacrifice.

Ingame Tweaks

Lightmaps & Specular — By far the biggest performance booster. Disable these options and restart the game client. You will notice a drop in visual quality, but get a huge boost to your FPS in return. This impacts the lighting quality of the game.

Shadows — I recommend setting this to Balanced. This will set all NPC and PC (including yourself) shadows to simpler, non-dynamic textures. They still look pretty decent, and this tweak can help a lot in crowded areas like Altdorf or Inevitable City, or during keep, fortress or city raids. I haven’t noticed a huge performance difference disabling them completely, and I think the effect they give is worth the few frames.

Disable EAX — If you have a Creative card that supports EAX, I don’t recommend using it. Especially if you’re an unfortunate soul running Vista.

XML Hacking

Open up C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsWarhammer Online – Age of Reckoning, and look inside the User folder. Inside you’ll find UserSettings.XML. Open this file up in your favorite text editor (I recommend Notepad++.)

What we’re looking for is two lines that define the custom quality settings ingame, Custom 1 and Custom 2. These lines begin with “perfcustom”. Here’s what mine looked like, for example:

What you want to do is change the texture_Cache=”0.00″. This variable indicates how much room to reserve for texture cache memory. The value you decide to go with here is very relative to your graphics hardware. I have a graphics card with 640MB, and found that 1.00 works nicely. So, I changed my lines to look like this:

Remember, you’ll need to set your ingame quality preset to Custom 1 or Custom 2 for this effect to register with the game, and you may need to restart the game for it to work it’s magic. I’ve noticed a significant performance boost with this tweak.

Graphics Driver Tweaks (NVIDIA)

First, ensure you have the most recent NVIDIA drivers installed. If you’re on a desktop, you’ll find those here. Laptop users can grab theirs here.

Right click your desktop, and launch the NVIDIA Control Panel. If asked, launch with Advanced options. If you aren’t asked, you may need to switch to Advanced by going to the View menu and selecting that option.
In the treeview on the left, select Manage 3D Settings, then pick the Program Settings tab. This is important- if you do not pick this tab, you’ll be changing your graphics settings for all your games, which is something you don’t want in this case.
Press the “Add” button, and navigate to your C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsWarhammer Online – Age of Reckoning folder, and select WAR.exe.
I applied the following overrides to my default settings:
Antialiasing- Transparency: Multisampling
Force mipmaps: Trilinear
Maximum pre-rendered frames: 1
Texture filtering- Antistropic: Off
Texture filtering- Negative LOD: Allow
Texture filtering- Quality: High Performance
Texture filtering- Trilinear optimization: Off
Threaded optimization: Auto
Triple buffering: On
Vertical sync: Force on
Press the Apply button at the bottom of that window, then close the NVIDIA Control Panel. You’re ready to play.

The Usual Suspects

Defragment! — Do it often, especially after game patches. I recommend JkDefrag for advanced users, or AusLogic’s Disk Defrag for those who want less of a hassle. They’re both freeware, and much more effective than the built-in Windows defrag.

CCleaner — I run CCleaner (freeware) at least once a month. Use it to clear out the numerous temporary files your system is holding onto, but more importantly use it’s registry cleaner to get rid of old, garbage registry entries slowing down your system. You’ll be shocked at how much garbage this tool will find on your system.

Ditch the garbage antivirus suites — Seriously, McAfee? Norton? The big name antivirus and Internet security tools are absolute garbage. These are the biggest culprits in slowing your system down. I recommend switching to ESET Smart Security (a strong, lightweight commercial security suite) or a combination of Sygate Personal Firewall (freeware) and AntiVir Personal. Just make sure you completely uninstall any existing suites before you install these, as they will not be compatible. I also recommend installing and immunizing your system with SpyBot Search & Destroy rather then using memory-resident anti-malware clients like Windows Defender. Just my opinion here, take it or leave it.

14 free or open source Windows applications I love

Evan — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:59:02 +0000

“What do you use to do this?” or “What application do you recommend for that?” I get asked these kinds of questions a lot, as do most folks in my line of work. What surprises a lot of people is that much of the time, I respond with a free or open source solution. I’m not against commercial applications by any means… I use Photoshop over Gimp and TextPad over Notepad++. But sometimes you discover applications that are so robust, and so well done that they blow the socks off anything you can buy… these are a few of those apps.

WinSCP — An open source FTP/SFTP/SCP client. This tool is indispensable in my web development work, and I use it pretty much everyday. It’s rock solid and feature packed. I switched to WinSCP earlier this year from SmartFTP.
7zip — A powerful archiving tool. Fully supports 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR, and can extract ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z. The 7zip archive format for which it’s named is also very robust, and supports a better compression ratio than ZIP. Excellent alternative to shareware tools like WinRar and WinZip.
VirtuaWin — An open source virtual desktop manager, allowing you to define an arbitrary number of desktops and hot swap between them. Think Spaces on Mac OS X, or similar functionality under Linux. I’m kind of an organization freak, so it’s great to be able to have a workspace devoted to IM/Twitter, another just for code, and another with Warcraft running on it. =)
Privoxy — A web filtering proxy that filters advertising, removes pop ups because they hit your browser, manages cookies and much more. It’s an advanced tool with a lot of options, but the default configuration is enough for most folks who are just looking to protect their privacy a little bit more. As a Google Chrome user, this is a great way to get rid of ads without missing AdBlock for Firefox. bFilter is a similiar filtering tool, but uses heuristics (like your virus scanner) instead of blacklists to filter content. It’s also a bit easier to configure for less advanced users. Both work very well.
Google Chrome — Google’s innovative web browser, based on WebKit (the same rendering engine that powers Safari.) It’s not for everyone, but I love it. It’s the first mainstream browser to take advantage of threaded processing, in which each browser tab resides in it’s own CPU process; if a page crashes a tab, it doesn’t take down the whole browser. It also features a very fast Javascript engine, putting script-intensive sites like Gmail much faster. The only downside right now is the lack of an extension API, but the developers are planning on adding one.
ImgBurn — A freeware disc burning and backup application. Not much to say here, aside from the fact that I’ve never lost a disc from a bad burn using it.
AVG Free — You don’t have to spend a bunch of cash on antivirus protection… in fact, you don’t have to spend any. AVG is a great antivirus tool, frequently updated and easy on system resources. It comes highly regarded from editors and users alike. Avira AntiVir Personal and Avast Home Edition are both great, free antivirus tools too.
CCleaner — Windows has a built in system cleanup utility called “Disk Cleanup”, but it doesn’t hold a candle to this tool. Aside from cleaning up Windows itself, it supports a slew of other applications, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Java and many, many more. It also includes a very thorough registry cleaner. I recommend running both functions of the tool several times a month
Foobar2000 — I’m a loyal iTunes user, but if I’m running a lot of memory intensive programs, or if I’m on battery power and I’m looking to get every drop of time I can out of it, Foobar2000 is a very capable music manager and player. I just set it to monitor my iTunes Music folder, and Foobar will add everything to it’s own manager. The two programs can coexist very comfortably.
Last.fm — Although it began it’s life as Audioscrobbler, a simple habit tracking and statistics generating website for music lovers, Last.fm has blossomed into a very robust and useful site, with a number of desktop and mobile applications that extend it even further. In particular, I love the Last.fm desktop and iPhone clients, which provide a Pandora-like customizable Internet-radio feature. On a side note, Pandora does offer an iPhone app, and has a Adobe AIR-based desktop application, but I don’t think they’re really taking advantage of the desktop space as well as Last.fm is… yet.
VideoLAN — An open source media player that runs on just about any desktop operating system out there. It will support just about any video format on the planet out of the box, without requiring you to work through the tedious process of installing codecs. I use it for video playback only, but it does support audio too. Other honorable mentions are Media Player Classic and ZoomPlayer. An excellent codec package for Windows XP is XP Codec Pack, which I believe will also work on Vista.
Windows Live FolderShare — I’ve been using FolderShare for about 3 years now, and it’s a tool I don’t think I could live without. Basically, FolderShare allows you to easily set folders on your PCs to sync between each other. Unlike most tools these days, FolderShare doesn’t back anything up to the Internet, it’s strictly PC-to-PC, and that’s why I like it. I use it to keep my iTunes library, source code, web development projects and invoices in sync between my desktop and laptop, so I’ve always got the latest versions of everything ready to go when I need to head out the door, and my desktop is up to date with any revisions as soon as I get home. It works over local networks and the Internet alike, and will function nicely behind most firewalls. Microsoft announced they’ll be renaming and upgrading the service at some point this month, doubling the amount of files you can keep in sync. If you’re looking to store things in the cloud, I highly recommend Dropbox.
Picasa — I’ve used Picasa to manage my photo library for years, and it’s never let me down. I recently toyed with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is also an excellent library management tool, but not as mature and polished as Picasa. You can use the open source Picasa2Flickr tool to ease the uploading of your Picasa photos to the popular photo hosting service.
Evernote — Potentially my most recent addition to my favorites list, Evernote is a free note taking application for Windows, OS X and a variety of mobile devices, including iPhone. This app is packed with so many features I’m not even going to try to cover them all, but trust me: you need to try it. You can publish and share your notes on the web if you chose to, and optionally store them in the cloud so they can be kept in sync between multiple machines. The commercial version offers more bandwidth for note sync, and HTTPS support for better security while you’re on the road.

There are more, of course, but these are the favorites that come to mind. If you have any recommendations or alternatives, please share!

Getting your extensions to work in the Firefox 3.1 Beta

Evan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:32:26 +0000

If you’ve been running the Firefox 3.1 beta for the last few days like I have, you’re probably beginning to miss all those fun extensions you took for granted in 3.0. Sure, you could install nightly tool addons to disable version checking for you, but I feel dirty having a hack like that running all the time in the browser. Instead, I discovered a far more elegant solution: just edit the XPI.

First, grab 7zip. It’s a free archive manager like WinZIP or WinRAR, but it plays nice with the XPI format. Now, go to the Mozilla Addons site and find the extension you’re looking to install. The “Install” option will be disabled, but no worries, just scroll down and hit the “All Versions” link. Now you’ll have one or more versions listed with enabled Install buttons, but using those won’t work: they’re marked internally as working with Firefox versions up to 3.0.*. This is what we’ll need to change.

Right click the Install link for the most recent plugin version, and save the XPI file to your desktop. Now, load 7zip and open that XPI file in it. Find the “install.rdf” file, right click and pick Edit. There’s a lot of nonsense in these files, but all we’re worried about is one string:

em:maxVersion="3.0.*"

Once you locate this line, change it to read:

em:maxVersion="3.1.*"

Save the file, allow 7zip to update the archive, then close 7zip. Now, in Firefox, go to the Addons window from the Tool menu and switch to the extensions tab. Drag the XPI from your desktop into your addons list. Firefox will install the addon for you without complaint. Restart Firefox and you’re done!

This hack will work for most extensions as there has been very few changes to the core functionality of Firefox in 3.1; most of the changes are to the Gecko rendering and JavaScript engines. I’ve successfully installed all my essentials in 3.1 without any problems, but if you do end up running into an addon incompatibility issue you can always start Firefox in Safe Mode from the Mozilla Firefox group in the Start menu.

Hope this helps!