Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Automagically put Engadget Distro Into EverNote

Yeraze — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 22:14:32 +0000

Lately I’ve begun to enjoy reading Engadget’s Distro magazine. It’s a (mostly) weekly PDF magazine they publish that does a good job summing up the latest gadgets and news into a flashy form factor, and I find it easier to read than trudging through their website. In particular, I love that they make it available via PDF so that I can pull issues down into Evernote for archival and reading in the plane or other non-wifi places. (Yes, I know they have an iPhone/iPad app, but I like just the simple PDF.

So, I’ve also recently been turned onto a service called “IFTTT” (If This, Then That). Using IFTTT, you can create simple 1-trigger, 1-action pairs to automate various services. I have it set to push my Foursquare and Facebook posts to evernote (for archive), notify me when it’s going to rain, and a few other things. However, I needed a bit more flexibility to get what I wanted. I finally found a way to get it to automagically pull Engadget’s Distro PDF and put it into my Evernote, using the following fascinating but convoluted process:

Step #1: A Yahoo Pipes filter to download & reprocess the Engadget RSS feed into a simpler format with only URL’s to the actual PDF file.
Step #2: An IFTTT Recipe to retrieve this RSS feed and download the PDF into a Dropbox folder.
Step #3: Configure WappWolf to monitor this folder and upload the resulting PDF’s into Evernote, and then delete them from DropBox.

So it’s a bit convoluted (Engadget RSS -> Yahoo Pipe -> IFTTT -> DropBox -> WappWolf -> EverNote), but it works. And it’s completely automatic. So far it’s already downloaded the last 3 issues (The way IFTTT works it will only get new entries, not the historical) without issue.

Hopefully someone else out there finds this as useful (and Fun!) as I did. Post in the comments if you use it!

Awesome Stuff

Yeraze — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:26:15 +0000

via blog.sirmitchell.com

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HBO and HBOGo

Yeraze — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 20:03:01 +0000

So this weekend I finally added HBO to our Comcast Cable Package. Laura’s fallen in love with “True Blood“, first reading the books and now watching the show. She managed to borrow Season 1 & 2 from a friend, but after that I figured just getting HBO would be worth it. So far it’s been great. Last night I watched “Scott Pilgrim vs The World“, and today the Kids & I watched Despicable Me and How To Train your Dragon.

Today I setup HBOGo, their online on-demand area, so that Laura can watch the episodes she missed of True Blood. They have an iPad app so I quickly set that up. However, I was very disappointed to find that HBO has actively disabled the display out on the iPad app. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it actually just outputs an HBO Logo when you attempt to use it. You get your show’s audio through your TV, but no video. I’ve tried with both the HDMI output and the VGA output, same result.

This is just stupid. I can hook up my Laptop and watch it, but I can’t hook up my iPad. Hopefully they’ll change their mind in an update soon, as this would be great for Travelling.

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“Doctor Who Shirt” T-Shirt Design by olechka | RedBubble

Yeraze — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:32:18 +0000

via redbubble.com

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xkcd: Permanence

Yeraze — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:28:48 +0000

via xkcd.com

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Virtual Shackles – “The Glass is,” by Classes

Yeraze — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:33:15 +0000

via virtualshackles.com

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Ethan Graduates K3

Yeraze — Fri, 27 May 2011 00:19:04 +0000

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HijiNKS ENSUE – A Geek Webcomic – 5 Days A Week – » Something Blue

Yeraze — Sun, 01 May 2011 16:18:00 +0000

via hijinksensue.com

Now _THIS_ would have made the royal wedding something to remember.

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JanRain & MyOpenID

Yeraze — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:43:13 +0000

I’ve been a long-time supporter of OpenID, specifically the Janrain MyOpenID service. A single sign-on service with 2-factor authentication (via Cell-Phone with CallVerifID), I’ve used it with Yeraze.com here for years with great results.

Recently, I’ve noticed a feature where you can load a special TLS certificate to use for login. Given my new desire for long 20+ character passwords (thank you 1Password), I thought I’ld

give it a shot. I logged in, went to the part of the site & clicked the “Create” button, and blammo “Error creating certificate”. hrm, I am use a custom-compiled Chromium here, maybe if I use something more “normal” like Internet Explorer 7. Same thing.. Well, maybe on my Mac with regular Chrome. No go. Safari? Same thing.. Ok, FireFox 4.

On FireFox 4 it actually popped up a window for “Generating Keys, please wait” before immediately returning the same generic error. Obviously, Janrain has a problem on their site.

After a bit of digging around, I was disheartened to find this post on the Janrain support site reporting the issue over 8 months ago, with regular additional complaints until recently. This is the official “Feedback” site of Janrain, and what do you find when you look on the main page? Spam posts about American Express and email phishing attempts.

Now, I’ve been a bit miffed with Janrain ever since I tried their ‘rpxnow’ service on VizWorld and found they issued a ‘new’ plugin for WordPress with fewer features and mangled my template. In frustration, I issued the following disheartened tweet:

I didn’t expect much of it, and began looking into stuff like Yubico and SimpleID. To my surprise, I got a DM back from Janrain a few hours later leading to this surprising exchange. (Straight off twitter, read bottom to top).

The image he links is this little blurb from the front page:

Now, I read that and think “This is a free service, so if you run into any problems then it’s really up to you to fix it”. Meant mainly for people interested in integration or development, it’s a lot like Twitter in that “If your tweets get lost, it’s not our problem”.

From their statements tho, it really seems like MyOpenID has fallen into the “sunset” phase of their products. Focusing more on their RPXNow product and paid services, it seems like MyOpenID is doomed to be forgotten.

This makes me a bit sad. I can’t fault them, I don’t think they ever made any money at it. Still, I wish they would at least put something a bit more prominent about it on their website. As I said above, being “unable to provide support” isn’t the same as “ignoring the product”, which seems to be what they’re doing now. The SSL certificate thing so proudly touted back in 2007 has been broken for nearly a year (maybe longer), and they still have all the links on the website talking about how great it is.

So… Anyone know another good OpenID provider? Thanks to the beautiful design of OpenID, I can simply change my delegate here to another site and it shouldn’t break anything.

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Great Tool: FastCopy

Yeraze — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:06:50 +0000

Coming from a Linux/Unix world, I find the amazing tool ‘rsync’ coming up almost daily. Whether I’m moving files and directories between systems, or just copying a source tree to a new directory, it’s a amazingly simple and fast way to transfer only the different bits, saving time and bandwidth. It’s also great when a massive recursive FTP fails (FileZilla here at work is incredibly unstable), and you don’t know exactly how much or what files you got. One quick rSync later and it picks up where it left off and runs.

However, if you’re in the Windows World, you’re kinda screwed. The only rsync options I’ve found fall into two categories:

Expensive – Repackaged bundles of RSync with other unnecessary features sold for $50+.
Complex – typically requiring entire cygwin installs.

I’ve finally found a great answer, tho, in a tool called “FastCopy“. I’ve been using it for a year or two just to copy giant files across my system (2GB Outlook PST’s, BluRay & DVD Iso files, etc) with blazing speed (compared to standard Drag-n-Drop in windows). I’ve just recently discovered it has the same kind of Sync features as rSync. It’s not smart enough to transfer only the different bits, but it can check file dates & sizes to sync directories across systems.

Completely free, incredibly tiny, and simple to use. You can even store it on a USB key for portable use! Just tell it a Source & Destination folder, and away it goes.

If you find yourself dealing with large collections of files in windows, I highly recommend it.