Playing around with a webserver

If you haven't done it already, i strongly suggest playing around with some of the fun free webserver stuff out there. i've compiled a list of links to interesting places that might spark your interest in these things.

WAMP - A Website solution containing MySQL (community edition), PHP, Apache Webserver and lots more. No need to get gray hairs trying to get PHP to recognize the MySQL installation or to get both working in Apache, this solution does it for you.

phpBB - A quick and easily managed free Web Forum solution. Really neat, check out v3 with the sweet new prosilver theme.

MediaWiki.org - MediaWiki is the Wiki system that Wikipedia uses. Play around with your own Wiki and have lot's of fun.

There is no need to make a full blown serious website, just play around on your home LAN. Set up an internal web server for your house, family etc. Tons of potential and lots of fun playing around with.

Bringing the beauty of the stars to your desktop

Stellarium

I'm a sucker for good GPL applications, and this one really is one of a kind, Like many other programs out there (that costs a ton of hard earned cash) it is a live map of the sky. Some of the more interesting features is that you set your location in Longitude and Latitude (can be found either in Google Earth or with a handy GPS) then it will display how the sky looks at your location.

It has a ton of fun features with a good sized database of objects, you can zoom in and out (the graphics aren't as spectacular as the Sky Mode in Google Earth but good enough) lock onto a target (star, nebulae, planet, etc.) and have the system track it.

You can go back and forth in time (the algorithms are estimated to be accurate for at least a thousand years into the future) and see how the sky looked yesterday, or this time next year.

It has automatic constellation view, that lets you toggle the lines connecting the stars of the constellations, you can toggle the constellations themselves and if you feel like it toggle artistic interpretations of the constellations.

It also has several very exotic features, such as a special projector feature that allows you to create your own planetarium with a projector and a spherical mirror.
The ability to control up to 10 motorized Telescope mounts, (such as NextStar and LX200 mounts) yes control, meaning you select a star and the send the command through the program to a telescope server that in turn translates it into commands for the telescope to point at that star (forget the measly databases that comes with these kinds of mounts, Stellarium has over 600,000 objects in it's default intall database, this database can in turn, easily be extended A LOT further..)

Among all these features is a very easy and intuitive GUI that allows you to cruise the sky's and find your way among the stars.

Nexus Radio now with forced toolbars

In a previous post I wrote about the Nexus Radio application, as it turns out the developers have changed direction with the program and I must say I am sourly disappointed in the turn they have taken with it. These blasphemous toolbars we all have learned to hate and fear are now a requirement to even run the application.

Safe to say I have now uninstalled the spyw.. err. program.

And a small joke to lighten up the mood of this post:

Q: What does the net-experienced person hear when someone utter the word toolbar?
A: Spyware/malware/adware ofcourse..

Nexus Radio - My new favourite

Nexus Radio - Free Internet Radio

I was amazed at finding this pice of software, it's surprising that so few actually listen to the thousands of Webcasts out there. I strongly recommend you try this program out since it is not just one of the best ways of finding new Internet radio stations it also contains several very useful features such as:

• Recording either everything the station broadcasts or only certain songs or artists etc. (TiVo Style)
  
• A full database with several thousands of radio stations
  
• A neat little effects editor to trim away annoying starts and ends in the songs
• A very sweet little equalizer

I've been looking for a good companion when dealing with web radio, but Winamp, although a good player all in it self doesn't contain the features I wanted. Nexus contain all of them and several others.

So if you want to check it out, just click the link on top of this post, I seriously doubt you are going to be disappointed.

OpenOffice.org Base

If you haven't tried out the free officesuite http://www.OpenOffice.org I would strongly recomend you to do so. But is it capable of replacing the MS Office or Star Office suite? Short answer, No, not yet. Several things need to be adressed before it can be conciderd a serious contender in the office market.

One of the most recent additions to the OOo suite is extending the database of OOo and making it a standalone application called Base. This is what I'm going to discuss in this post. I've been a casual SQL student for a while now, trying my best to find uses for pure text based database front ends but never finding anything that would allow me to make much use of it. Thanks to my busy schedule i don't have the time it would take to learn a dynamic page language such as PHP to build fun applications with.

Well that all changed when I accidentally clicked the unknown Base icon in my OOo installation, Databases. Fun fun fun.


Base is a very recent addition to the OOo suite, and suffers from a great deal of problems (among other things smoothing out the integration with the other OOo components, general stability issues etc.) that needs to be adressed before it becomes a real alternative to the Access database. But besides that the whole thing is amazing to work with for somone who might not be a hardcore SQL hacker.

Everything is visual, more or less, you can hack the code if you want but for all the different ways of doing things there is bound to be a visual way of doing it as well.

Anyway I digress, because it is so new, there aren't much written about it, but I did find a good place with some decent tutorials for the Base application.

http://sheepdogguides.com/fdb/fdb1main.htm

This place is very simplistic in it's layout but it covers all the basics you need to know to start using Base to play with.

Due to the still unreliable nature of Base I would suggest not to make it the main database for your business just yet. It still has a lot of kinks and problems that needs to be smoothed out, but aside from that it is a great application for building your own databases over your home library, record collection etc.

Timbland - The Way I Are

Another really good song, Just love Keri Hilson's voice in this video.

Build your own Enigma Encryptor/Decryptor

Enigma-E

Found this site a while back, here you can order your very own Enigma building kit. Perfect for those who love a challenge and a look into how the actual machine worked.

Probarbly the best music video ever

Without a doubt the best music video ever made. I just love it...

Viewing video in an image?

• The Magic Color Out of space (shameless H.P.Lovecraft reference)

A while back there was a blog post about this but when I tried to search for it it turned up with broken images and for some reason the Author had put the color codes etc in the images so I had to back engineer the way he did it to get the contents of this post.. Anyway, I figured it would be a neat trick to be able to play video in the background of my text editors when I was working on something. (Don't ask me why, I just get these kinds of ideas sometimes.)



The principle behind it is that when playing a video in a player like VLC Media Player the hardware renders a one colored image that the video is then overlayed on, this is why problems occur when you try to make a Print screen screenshot of something in the video. The screenshot is of the overlayed one colored image instead of the video. There are ways around this but it isn't the topic of this post.



Now I was thinking, what if I could use this color to do some neat tricks.



Enter:

• The video everywhere mode

Now this color is a very simple color (at least in VLC Media Player, haven't tried it in other players). Its color coordinates are #000001 or Red 0 Green 0 Blue 1.

You can easily get this color by simply taking a print screen screenshot of video playing.



But how is this useful? Since I'm writing a lot (it's one of my main hobbies), I figured: If I could play a video in the background of the text editor and still be able to work with the text I could have some real fun with this.



Enter:

• The Text Editor Trick

Now since in editors like Notepad2 and SciTE you can define your own background color I figured I could have some real fun with it. (this also works in other programs where you can set your background color to a custom color. like IRC clients etc).



The basic idea, In either Notepad2 or SciTE is to change the background color to the color #000001 you can easily do this yourself (for a simple description  on how to change the background in SciTE check out my earlier post, and for Notepad2 I recommend switch to the second default color scheme and edit the background color)



Now that we have the background color set we can play around with VLC Media Player a bit. Since the Media player has a Wallpaper mode it already uses this technology so getting it to work is piece of cake. Just make sure you can play the video in Wallpaper mode and you should be all set.



Open the video in VLC Media Player and resize the window to fit your text editor window, then just minimize the media player and the video should still be visible.



If you have trouble with seeing the text over the video try changing your font color around a bit or got to Settings > Extended GUI in VLC Media Player and change the hue, saturation and contrast around a bit and you should be able to get a good clean image while still being able to see your video.

• How is this usefull?

I haven't got the faintest idea, it's a cool trick but it can be a bit distracting. But since we can have wallpapers at our desktops why not wallvideo as well. It's a fun trick and it demonstrates some of the fun you can have with the video technology that is available for free on the net.