counterearth.com

Setting up EventGhost

Tarl — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:53:44 +0000

Update: You can download my EventGhost configuration file from the downloads section of this site. Add it to your EventGhost folder and select File>Open in EventGhost to load it.

I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to reinstall and reconfigure EventGhost. I say unfortunate, because all was configured and working well until yesterday when my HTPC locked up and I had to hard reboot it. This is when I figured out that the configuration wasn’t saved…

Anyway, I thought I’d share start to finish how I’ve configured it to work with my box. I’m running a dedicated HTPC Windows XP machine with an AMD Athlon II dual core 3GHZ and 2GB of RAM installed. I currently have XBMC and BeyondTV installed. I know, I know, BeyondTV is heading down the road to destruction, but that’s not the point of this post. It works for me at the moment.

Video recording and remote control capabilities are provided by a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 card. I’ve also replaced the remote that came with it with a Harmony One universal remote.

The configuration I run allows me to run either BeyondTV or XBMC from the desktop by pushing one button on the remote, and controls either program correctly. I used to use the ir.exe that came with the Hauppauge, but configuration was a pain in the butt. EventGhost is so much faster and easier! Hats off to the author!

Let’s get started.

First of all, if you haven’t already click on the EventGhost link above and download the latest version of the program. Double-click on the filename to install the program. I won’t cover the install here, because it’s very basic and self-explanatory.

Don’t Lose That Data!

Tarl — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:12:25 +0000

From the friendly reminder department – Online Backup : If you’ve never heard of the concept of Online Backup, you owe it to yourself to visit Backup To the Web. Imagine having all your important data, from pictures of the kids to sensitive business info, backed up securely to a site hundreds of miles away! Stop by and visit.

Splitting a post into multiple pages in WordPress

Tarl — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:48:17 +0000

Ok, it’s apparently my day for beating my head against the wall. Just so that maybe I can prevent someone else from doing the same, I’ll share this little tidbit about splitting a long post into multiple pages on WordPress. I’m sure the long-time bloggers know how to do this, but I’m a newbie at this and sure couldn’t find a complete explanation anywhere.

What I wanted to accomplish is to simply break up a post into pages on the homepage since it was kind of long. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong! Firstly, I looked at the toolbar to the built in editor – you know the one:

Great, nifty, but where is the page break? Maybe it’s that cool one at the top, five from the right that looks like two sheets of paper. Sounds good, let’s do that. Typetity, typetity, I come up with this:

More? Funny tag name, but what the hey. Let’s preview and see what we get.

Not exactly what I was looking for…

Try again. A little research gives me the tag. While there’s no button for this on the toolbar – don’t ask me, I’d find it useful – it can be inserted by doing a SHIFT-ALT-P in the visual tab of the editor or manually typed in in the HTML tab. Score! That’s gotta be what I want! A little editing, and now I have this:

Gotcha now! Let’s preview!

Sweet! Perfect! Now publish it and check the website just to be certain…

Wha-hunh? Ok, now I’m confused. Where did all the cool page numbers go? Where did the rest of the content go, for that matter? No site or search I did led me to any answer on why this wasn’t working, so I had to figure it out myself. Here’s what I came up with eventually. All the pieces are there, we just have to combine them. Like this:

Note the original “more” tag has been added above the first page break. That at least gives us a “click to read more” message on the front page. Sorry, I never have figured out how to put the page numbers on the front page, if indeed this is possible. The result is this:

Clicking on the “Continue reading” then gives us our page numbers:

If anyone knows how to get the page numbers on the homepage, I’d love to hear. Until then, this at least keeps my large posts from cluttering the homepage!

Ubuntu Netbook Defies All Efforts To Install

Tarl — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:23:15 +0000

I’ve played with linux off and on for several years now. I say played with because I have to say that in all honesty I would never trust any distro that I’ve ever tried on a production machine. At least not as a desktop machine. I’ve tried everything from Debian to Mandriva, DSL to Ubuntu, Mint to Xandros, and never truly found anything I’d be willing to risk important data on.

I like the idea of linux, just not linux itself unfortunately. That being said, I must admit that for some reason I have a morbid fascination with it. I guess it’s not unlike a car accident at the side of the road – something just forces you to look.

My latest masochistic endeavor is to install linux as a dual-boot with XP on an Acer Aspire One Netbook I picked up a couple of months ago (thanks, Woot!). I thought to myself, hey how hard can it be? I’ve put up dual-boot systems before! I still look back on that with fond remembrance of how young and naïve I was back then. When was that again? Oh yeah, at least three days ago…

Since then Pinhead has taken me on a tour of the bowels of Hell.

With apologies to the True Linux Believers, I give you my pain – a journey that would have Odysseus reaching for a spork to pull out his own liver.

Godaddy gotta go…

Tarl — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:59:05 +0000

As I was registering and renewing a couple of domains on Godaddy.com today, I realized that Godaddy has got to go. I’ve had my domains registered through them for several years now, but trying to slog through their interface today has made me rethink my decision. It’s amazing how many things they’re trying to sell you between the time you put the domain in your cart to the time you actually pay! I’m all for the free market, but there eventually comes a limit!

Worse yet was trying to redirect the MX record for the domain I just registered. Even the domain management interface is so cluttered with ads and unnecessary menus that you can hardly find anything anymore. It took me a good five to ten minutes to find the right place to change the information. At this point I thought, “There’s got to be a better way”, so the quest for a new registrar began. The main points I was looking for were reliability, a cleaner interface, and a comparable pricing structure.

After poking around the internet for a bit, I came across www.name.com. I set up a quick account with them and purchased a test domain name. The process was fast and easy without the blitz of “extras” being offered to me for my wallet-emptying pleasure. When I went to change the MX record, it took all of about 10 seconds to figure out where to do it. See for yourself:

Compare that to the clutter and confusion of the Godaddy interface:

This is even a cleaner version of what it was in the past. They’ve removed some of the clutter, but unfortunately it’s still difficult to find all but the most basic things easily.

Price-wise, both sites are comparable with name.com being slightly lower. One thing I really do like, though, is the inclusion of a private who-is service for free with the domain purchase. Anything that keeps my personal information from free-floating around the internet is fine by me.

Granted, I’ve only had a name.com account for less than a day now, but I already like what I see. If I continue to like it, you can bet those other domains are going to be finding their way over to name.com eventually. If I don’t continue to like it, I’ll be back here with an updated review

Murder a victimless crime in Kansas

Tarl — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:48:21 +0000

Interestingly enough, murder is now a victimless crime. At least in Topeka, Kansas. Andres Arteaga-Vega, who according to witnesses was lured outside of a Topeka pool hall and shot to death during an attempted robbery, is apparently not a victim according to Shawnee County District Court Judge Evelyn Wilson. She has sided with defense attorney Tina Buck who argued that calling him a victim would bias the jury against her client. Arteaga-Vega is now to be referred to by his name or as “the deceased”.

Perhaps we should go the fully politically correct route and refer to him as “life challenged”. Surprisingly, Ms. Buck has not called for a dismissal of the case. I would think that would bias the jury against her client, also. I can just imagine the jury members thinking, “Hmm. This guy is on trial. You’re not tried if you’re not guilty. Must be guilty.”

King Tut died of Malaria

Tarl — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:35:33 +0000

Of interest to Egyptology junkies like myself is the news that on Tuesday researchers revealed that King Tut most likely died of malaria. Also, x-rays showed that the boy king had multiple diseases and probably had to walk with a cane. This is probably pretty sound considering there were over 130 walking sticks found in his tomb when it was opened by Howard Carter in 1922. This pretty much puts to bed the theory going around some circles that Tut met with foul play or that his adviser, Aye, either murdered him or had it done.

Also announced was the DNA testing of previously unknown mummies that resulted in the positive identification of Akhenaten, Tut’s father. Tut’s reign was marked by an attempt to return to the old values that Akhenaten had moved away from.

The Brøken – My thoughts

Tarl — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:23:21 +0000

Last night I watched The Brøken and I was impressed. A psychological thriller with a touch of gore, it definitely keeps you guessing. Lena Headey plays Gina McVey, who sees herself drive by in her own car. You can imagine this would be a bit disturbing, and it contributes to her wrecking her car in an accident. When she recovers, she tells the therapist that she doesn’t think her boyfriend is really her boyfriend. Reality starts sliding further and further away, and she tries to hunt down the woman she saw to get some answers.

This movie played with my head, which to me is the mark of a great movie. I love the movies that get inside your head and mess with your reality. Some of the best I’ve seen are The Jacket, The Machinist, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Cube. The ending was fairly obvious in retrospect, but I have to admit I didn’t see it coming. I’m also going to have to watch the film again at least once, because I think I missed all kinds of cool things the first go-round.

On a side note, the therapist suggests to her the possibility that she has Capgras Syndrome, which is a disorder in which the patient thinks an acquaintance has been replaced by an exact copy. Interesting stuff. I’d never heard of it before!

First Post – Let’s start this on an up note!

Tarl — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:46:50 +0000

Ok. Let’s start this site out on a positive. I’ve owned this domain now for a number of years, but I’m FINALLY getting around to developing it! I envision this site being a place for me to vent irritations, give kudos, speculate on the meaning of life (ok, maybe not, but it sounds good), and distribute some of the software I’ve written as I get back into programming. You are free to listen or not, do as you will. A quick precis about myself:

- I started programming on the ZX81 Sinclair in top-down BASIC (yes, I am THAT old). I recently went back to school to get trained up on all that new-fangled VS 2008 stuff.
- I am hopelessly left-brained, and have no interface or web site design skills whatsoever, as you can probably tell by the site…
- I’m currently half the man I used to be – well at least two-thirds. I will give a quick plug to www.solutionsforlifewichita.com. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, except for the fact that they showed me how to lose 107.8 lbs since 18 August of last year. I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Early and his staff!

Now for some possibly incoherent ramblings going way off topic.

All of the programs on this site are written in C# unless otherwise noted, so you need the .NET Framework 3.5. They’re tested on a machine running Windows 7 and not bloody much else. I don’t see why they wouldn’t run under earlier versions of Windows, though, so feel free to give it a shot and drop me a line telling me what happened. All freeware comes with the shiny new guarantee that there is no guarantee whatsoever – hey what do you want, it’s free! Most of the apps posted on the site are things that I have built to fill a need I had. The freeware tends to be things that I have not found a good app for, or that there is a good app, but the author is charging for it. Some of these apps are so piddly, they should just be free…

Full disclosure time. I AM connected with Backup To The Web as a partner, so you may see the occasional quick ad in the software or the site, just because I can [insert evil laugh here]. Seriously, though, the “ads” right now consist of a URL in the about box on the software, and a URL on my signature on the support forums, so they shouldn’t be TOO annoying.

Let me just mention though, that I use the service myself. Fortunately I do, because just yesterday I had to restore a project that VS 2008 ate for some reason. Don’t know what happened, but suddenly all the objects on the menu strip and the status strip went bye-bye. The methods for the vanished objects were still there, and if I tried to add the items back with the same names, VS would complain saying they already existed. Not the first time VS has eaten a project, so I learned my lesson and back up every night now. Thirty seconds later, I had restored and had the undorked project back.

That’s all for now, further bulletins as events warrant.