Jaker’s Blog 4.1

Written and proofread before a live studio audience.

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Pimp your Windows Media Player

Posted in August 31st, 2007
Published in General

I wasn’t a huge user of Windows Media Player for a long time. Every time I did use it, I noticed that for several versions now the visualizations included have been unchanged. Fortunately a visualization pack released by two Microsoft employees (one from the Vista screensavers team, and one from the Office team) seeks to [...]

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Internet Fads I

Posted in August 30th, 2007
Published in General

Click here.
You won’t regret it.
~Jaker

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WMA to MP3: Console Style

Posted in August 23rd, 2007
Published in General

All I wanted to do was convert some WMA files to MP3. At least 5 programs in Windows refused to work.
Solution?
for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader “$i” && lame -m j -h –vbr-new -b 192 audiodump.wav -o “`basename “$i” .wma`.mp3″; done; rm -f audiodump.wav
Delicious.
~Jaker

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Gentoo + Inspiron 1520: Work in Progress

Posted in August 23rd, 2007
Published in General

Getting Gentoo installed on the Inspiron 1520 has been a welcome challenge. It’s the first x86_64 Linux box that I’ve ever put serious work into, and it’s also filled with new and untested hardware. Sometimes it’s slightly frustrating trying to get something to work, but at the same time it’s a lot of fun. Here [...]

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Suddenly Web Development Got Cooler

Posted in August 22nd, 2007
Published in General

I was setting up Monodevelop on my laptop just now and noticed something rather interesting:
[ebuild R ] dev-util/monodevelop-0.15 USE=”aspnet aspnetedit firefox java seamonkey subversion -boo”
There’s ASP.NET in the USE flags now. Therefore, I can make the following assumptions:
Mono supports the development of ASP.NET on a Linux box. Therefore Mono supports the ASP.NET language. Therefore writing [...]

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Phishing Attack, ho!

Posted in August 22nd, 2007
Published in General

I think my work email address just got the memo.
In the past 14 hours, I have received 5 emails that resemble an email from MidAmerica Bank. My old bank was bought out by MidAmerica bank, so it got about 3 seconds of my attention. It wasn’t until I noticed some key things that marked the [...]

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Building Legos to Build Legos

Posted in August 21st, 2007
Published in General

I loved Lego’s when I was little. If you gave me some legos now, I’d still have a good time. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could make this:
It’s a Lego car assembly line made from the Mindstorm Robots collection. You can even choose what color you want your car to be!

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Very Cool Weather Report

Posted in August 17th, 2007
Published in General

That’s what he’s going to do.. 
<Unresponsive video removed>
~Jaker

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Spam Back II

Posted in August 6th, 2007
Published in General

It’s fun when you treat spam as a serious email. It’s happened once before, but I never got a reponse (just a server error). This time, the results were different:
Original Email:

Good Morning Sales,
          I will like to Introduce my Self to You.I’m Smith Allan and also the Owner of Smith & Sons Co. Ltd.I will [...]

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Treo 750 + Windows Mobile 6

Posted in August 6th, 2007
Published in General

It all started this morning, when I awoke and checked my phone for messages/email/etc. The first thing I noticed was the carrier name had changed–sadly–from “Cingular” to “ATT.“  I saw that, and laughed to myself. See, the underlined T in ATT is caused by the phone trying to interpret a normal programming procedure.
Think back to a [...]

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