The idea is that there’s sensors in an arm band that pick up low frequency sounds (inaudible to human ear) so that you when you tap different parts of your arm, it “sounds” different and so the computer knows where you hit and can act appropriately.  Totally cool but think about the implications – we could use this for helping handicap people to use computers.  What other ways do you think this could be used beyond the typical “coolness” factor?

Check out the full article at http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/19/microsoft.skinput/index.html?hpt=C1

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

Think differently about how online games and technology can change the world.

I hit a milestone in my life. While I have a 30 GB iPod to store my collection of CD music (which started in 1983 with Greg X Volz’s “River is Rising” CD), I found that I was continuously trying to find the 30 GB of storage space on my laptop. Now I didn’t want to just throw it all to my external firewire drive as that would mean I’d have to have the drive connected any time I wanted to listen to my iTunes and I’m a traveling kind of guy. But I also didn’t want to just reduce my library and delete all those CDs that I don’t listen to all the time but I wouldn’t mind them just being backed up and out of my iTunes library.

So here’s the technical finding for this week:

Problem: Too large of an iTunes library. Decided that I wanted to create a backup of everything and put it on my external hard drive. I wanted to keep locally on my laptop everything that was in my playlists (which is really what I use to listen to my songs anyways) but just keep a backup of everything else.

Solution:

1. First I wanted to get everything moved over to the external hard drive. I did this by changing my iTunes Music Folder location (on a Mac, it’s Preferences -> Advanced -> General tab). Click on the “Change” button and select your storage folder on your external hard drive.
2. Next, click “Ok” and then go to your menu bar and click on Advanced -> Consolidate Library. Make sure you have iTunes set to organize the iTunes Music Folder. This will move everything over to the hard drive. Give it some time especially if you have a large library (like mine) or if you are using a USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 hard drive.
3. Go to your local music folder and delete all of your music files.
4. Then I made sure that I had everything in Playlists that I wanted to keep and that my playlists were up to date.
5. I created a Smart Playlist that had as a definition where it was to Match “All” rules and then created a rule that said “Playlist is not _____” for each playlist that I had (including Movies and TV Shows). I also had a rule that was “Podcast is false”. This creates a Playlist of everything in your library that is NOT in your playlists.
6. After the new Smart Playlist (I called it – Not in Playlists) populates, go to it and select everything. Now you can’t automatically delete things from a Smart Playlist, so you have to hold down the “Option” key when you hit the “Delete” key. This allows you to “Delete from Library” but make sure you click on “Keep Files” or else it will delete them all from your external hard drive.
7. Now you have in your iTunes library only those items that you want to keep on your hard drive. So change back your iTunes Music Folder location (see step 1 above) to your music folder on your local drive.
8. Again, you’ll need to click on Advanced -> Consolidate Library which will bring over from your external hard drive all of the music you wanted.
9. Synchronize your iPod and you are ready to go!

I hope this helps someone out there that was going through the same thing as me. I know it took me a little bit to think this all through so that I didn’t loose any of my songs.

Problem: WordPress was designed to run on Apache and not on the Windows IIS server. However, my hosting is a Windows server and I want to use WordPress (which does basically work on Windows IIS) but I also want to use Permalinks (nice URLs, not those “?page=23″ type URLS). I’m on a shared hosting plan and my provider has PHP/MySQL but is not going to load a ModRewrite software package.

Basic Solution: I used a php.ini file, a customized 404 Error page, and modified a little bit of WordPress code.

Extended Solution:

My blog is in the root of my domain. I use WordPress as my blogging software and my CMS. You’ll need to alter this code as needed if you have your WordPress installation nested in the domain.

First, I put a php.ini file in the root of my directories (not the wwwroot but the actual root). This php.ini included the following lines:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0

It may take a little bit for this php.ini file to start taking effect (I’m not sure what on the server level kicks it in).

Secondly, I created a customized 404 Error page. Many shared host solutions allow for this now. I put a file called 404Error.php in the wwwroot of my domain and used my control panel to direct 404 Errors to this page (see your specific control panel’s help files for how to do
this). In this page, I put the following code:

< ?php
if (strpos($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], '.htm')) {
echo '< strong>HTTP 404 Error - Unable to find the requested page< br />< br />';
echo '< a href="/index.php" target="_self">Click here for The Roes Garden< /a>< br />< br />';
} else {
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URL'] = substr($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], strpos($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], ':80')+3);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URL'];
include('index.php');
}
?>

The first part of the “if” statement just sees if they are requesting a standard HTM or HTML file which means its a legitimate 404 error (since I run WordPress as my CMS). The “else” part of the statement does the work I need in redirecting.

Thirdly, I modified some WordPress code. I opened up the file link-template.php found in the WP-Includes folder.

1. Find the area for the function get_pagenum_link.
2. Then find the code:
   if ( $qs_match[0] ) {
$query_string = $qs_match[0];
$request = preg_replace( $qs_regex, '', $request );
} else {
$query_string = '';
}
3. Right after this, add the code:
   // Next lines to remove query string if its there because of 404Error
$phpError = "404;";
$pos = strpos($query_string, $phpError);
if ($pos === false) {
//Do nothing
} else {
$query_string = '';
}
4. Then find the code within that function:
   $request = preg_replace( '|^index\.php|', '', $request);
5. Right after this, add the code:
   // Next line is a replacement to handle Paging issues with IIS
$request = preg_replace( '|^404Error\.php|', '', $request);

Save the file and replace it on the website.

The first two steps allowed me to have Permalinks but after using the “Next Posts” link a couple of times, it got all messed up with 404Error.php garbage that it wouldn’t work past a page 2. The third part cleans all that up and makes it work better.

Search still doesn’t work for me but at least users can scroll through the several years of blogs I have.

Let me know if you have any improvements or if this helped you in any way.

Anyway, all this to say that we found (through eDOT’er Andrew) this great way of filtering your content and reporting on where people are going that use your Internet connection. It’s called OpenDNS.

Now many of you are probably wondering what DNS is. Well, to use this free service you don’t have to know what it is but if you do desire to know – DNS is Dynamic Name System which is when you type in “Google.com” that your computer figures out to go to the IP address 72.14.207.99 (kinda like an Internet Server’s phone number) to view that website.

While this way of doing content filtering is not 100% perfect (none of them are other than just not going online), it is effective and easy to set up. And best of all, it’s free!

So if you are a person that just doesn’t want to accidentally see some of the stuff that is in the Internet world, or don’t want to be tempted by it, maintain a computer center or small office, or have a kids in the house that you want to help protect their innocence – consider setting up OpenDNS on your computers and networks.

My Dad is a catch-n-release fisherman. He loves the sport but he is not out to hurt any of the fish. Unfortunately, there are phisherman out in the Internet world who are about hurting those online. Those of us online are the (ph)ishes. So do you think you can spot the “hooks” that are out there in cyberspace? Take this quiz to see if you can spot the “hooks” online

PS – I only got 7 out of 10

Sorry to most of my regular readers as you can feel free to skip them as they will be geekie and technical. So here’s the first one:

Problem: When using Front Row or Finder on Mac OS X, whenever I “preview” an AVI file, it seems to take forever to come up i.e. really long time. I was finding this especially to be true with Front Row when watching my movies and shows. Before it would be a second or two max before the show was ready to be viewed. Then something happened to make them take minutes (like 1-5 minutes depending on the size of the file).

Equipment: MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.10 (Yes, I have a Mac – No, I am not going to go on about how Mac’s are better – It seems I can crash anything, Macs and Windows alike. Even blew up a Linux install but that took some work). Using Flip4Mac to help with the AVI files within QuickTime

Solution/Fix: Aparantly, when my Apple automatic updates happened a little bit ago, it updated QuickTime to QT 7.2 . With this update, things went screwy. Now QuickTime 7.2 update on its own isn’t bad but it makes the Flip4Mac plugin now work properly so it creates the problems in bringing up the viewers. So to fix this, you need to reinstall your Flip4Mac. I understand this might also be the case with Perian and Divx. When I did this, everything started to work lightning fast again.

Hope this helps someone out there. If it does, please leave me a comment so I’ll know. Thanks.