The folks of WiiHD, in honor of the recent Quake release for Wii homebrew, have put together an easy-to-follow guide for getting the Wii homebrew channel up and running on your little white console — plus a pre-packaged zip file with some ready-to-go ‘brew if that’s the way you like it. You’ve really got zero excuse to hold off on homebrew with as purtiful and straightforward all these fine hackers have made the process, but if you’re still unconvinced, check out the Quake video after the break.

Continue reading WiiHD’s homebrew guide: hacking doesn’t get much easier than this

1. From Windows install disk goto E:\I386 folder and open open (Double click) on the FP40EXT.CAB file. It should open.

(or – if you do not have the disk, find a working XP computer and go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\40\bin).

2. find fp4autl.dll in the list and copy it (ctrl-c)

3. go to c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin and paste it (ctrl-v)

4. Restart the 2007 office install

Viola! (thanks guys over at http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=627360)

Powered by ScribeFire.

• Date of last edit: April 2007 (A September backup is still in progress)
• Compressed size: 7.19 GB
• Number of files compressed: 9
• Number of files decompressed: millions
• Decompressed size: ~100 GB
• Time to download: 8 hours
• Time to decompress: 10 hours

Why on earth would you do this?

• The more versions of Wikipedia exist in the world, the less the chance it will get lost if something really depressing happens
• Having a local version means you can look things up offline
• Local versions can be used in corporate firewalls to give users access without granting full access to the web
• Local files can be parced by scripts to create reports and study the structure, trends, and patterns
• umm..its cool…do I really need a reason to want all the world’s collective knowledge on my laptop

Most people interested in this won’t have any problem downloading the compressed files. But few people have 100 GB free on their laptop. If you decompress the files to an external usb hard drive, it can take 30 hours per file (multiply times 9 files). Still, that is not too bad. You can buy 2.5″ laptop drives now that have 300gb and 3.5″ drives that are 1000 GB. The only problem is that decompressing the time it takes (10+ hours!)

Wikipedia is growing…fast.
Last year (Dec 2006) total compressed size of the English version was version only 5.8 GB. By April 2007 (just 4 months later) it was 7.2 GB (this is the version I downloaded). I am waiting to see what the September version will be. How fast is Wikipedia growing? It is hard to say. The last stats I found are for July 2006 but it was definitely on an exponential curve.

http://download.wikimedia.org/
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/December_2006/en/

Option 1) Spray paint the card a solid color. This works well. I spray painted it solid silver for a few days, then solid black. The black card was well received but I found out that many merchants need to know what kind of card it is. So I looked into other options. Note: you need to remove the spray paint with sand paper, but be careful around the numbers before you try the other options. Otherwise the card starts to get too thick with paint. For my wife’s I tried solid pink and stuck a visa sticker on it from option 3 below.

Option 2) Iron on transfer paper: This was what another site proposed. this did not work well for me. The theory is design your card in photoshop and print it onto Iron-On T-shirt Transfer Paper ($10 at your local hobby store). Cut out the design, use spray on poster board glue to secure the transfer to the card and iron on low heat. I did not like this. In all my attempts the card ended up too thick to use at swipe ATMs. Plus, the iron removed raised numbers from the back. Note, the numbers are not part of the card design – I added fake numbers to the picture just to illustrate – you want the raised original numbers to come through which is why this option sucks.

Option 3) Recommended. Buy some quality Inkjet sticker paper. Print your card design and stick it to the card. You can do front and back just on the back, do not cover the magnetic strip. The stripe WILL work through the sticker but having a stick on front and back makes it too thick (or so my wife says). Once the sticker is in place take a knife and lightly scratch back and forth across the numbers to make them come through and continue to press the sticker down around the numbers as they come through. Mine looks and works perfectly Again, the numbers are not part of the card design – I added fake numbers to the picture just to illustrate – you want the raised original numbers to come through. Here is the back:

I am still experimenting to try and give the card a good plastic look. At first it looked and felt a little to “papery” so I sprayed a coating of gloss on it.

Google trends has become an valuable tool for me in comparing the popularity of everything from HDTV sets, websites, software, and presidential candidates to vacation spots. I can’t wait to see what kind of mash-ups the web community creates.

• No scientific proof to confirm its effectiveness
• Very little information surrounding diet
• More theoretical than practical

The Negative Calorie diet – For:

• Little effort involved
• Promotes consumption of foods rich in vitamins and minerals
• Increases the body’s metabolism

Foods on the list – it seems like practically every fruit and vegetable can be found on one of the many lists.

• Celery
• Oranges, Tangerines, Grapefruit, Lemons
• Mangos
• Onions
• Lettuce
• Strawberries
• Carrots
• Apricots
• Lettuce
• Tomatoes
• Cucumbers
• Watermelon
• Cauliflower
• Apples
• Hot Chili Peppers
• Zucchini

Remote Executive Assistant

• Do you spend more time on routine administrative tasks instead of important business issues?
• Are you suffering from information overload?
• Are you finding less time to devote to your personal interests?
• Are you up against a deadline and need help with research on your project?
• Do you have an interesting idea but need help in creating a business plan?
• Do you need assistance for extensive internet research and database creation?
• Do you want to create/improve your website which gets you more customers?

Tasks they do:

• Formatting/beautifying any MS office files like word, excel, PowerPoint
• Quick mail mergers and sending mass mails in your name; Email & fax blast
• Internet search or any other sources that you provide them access to
• Designing customized greetings cards and sending them on your behalf
• Fine tuning your logo, business cards and other stationary including converting image to vector
• Data processing like data entry, OCR conversion; creating the PowerPoint presentation from the handwritten data;
• Updation, normalization & standardization of database;
• photo edits; b/w to color
• Shopping
  assistance like comparison of models & prices, listing of shops
  within a specific area with address, phone number & route map

Has anyone tried this?

The first thing you need to know is that in GMail, your chats are actually stored as normal emails with a tag "Chat". So all we need to do is convert the chats to email, upload them and tag them as "chat".  Below are the 5 steps to get them uploaded!

Step 1) Extract Yahoo IM chats to Text files
Yahoo saves your chats in an encoded format. Normally you can use the Archive reader that comes with Yahoo to read it, but in order to upload them, we need to convert them first. I downloaded and installed Dapyx Yahoo Messenger – it is free and does a good job of converting extracting the files from the Yahoo Archive and saving them as text files. Before you download it though – please be warned – It changes your IE homepage without asking and I did have a problem with the time zone. All the dates where correct but the times where 9 hours off…I sent an email to the Dapyx support and posted a bug to their forum but I have not heard back.

Step 2) Convert the text files to unix email format
Once you have the files converted as text the next step is to turn them in to email messages that Thunderbird can use. I wrote a simple vbscript that reformats the txt files into unix email format that Thunderbird can import. This script reads through all the text files in a given folder and turns them into one large output.txt file.

Instructions to use this file:

1. Download this file to your harddrive (note: never, ever run strange scripts on your computer unless you know what they do – right click the file and select and click edit to see what this what this one does – that said- lets run the script) – double click to get started
2. It will prompt you for some info – where are the exported text files from Dapyx, what is your name, and where do you want the output
3. It takes about 20-30 seconds to convert the chats to email
4. After the script is done, it will tell you its done. Open the output.txt to see the chats in email format the thunderbird can open.

Step 3) Import the email into thunderbird
Copy the output.txt file into a folder that Thunderbird reads and remove the .txt extension (unix email files have no extension) so it will just be output (with no .txt). Restart Thunderbird and you will see all you chat as emails with the first line as the subject and the date and time of the chat as well as who it was with.

Step 4) Upload to Gmail with IMAP
I already wrote about this earlier.

Step 5) Tag as chat – When you import them to gmail, make sure you have gmail tag auto tag the mail when it comes it – the word "chat" is not allowed so I used "yahoo chat", "aol chat" etc.

Your done! Enjoy!

1. Report 1: social network – How many people are in my social network? – Unique names are pulled from the To, From, CC, and BCC fields – the total counts for each  are shown. A tag cloud is created showing all the names. Overall, the names are evenly spaced out – but when 2 names appear in the same email, they are more related and grouped closer together. The more often names appear, the more larger and bolder they get. The cloud can be filtered to show only data from the to, from, cc, or bcc feilds or to show activity for a given period of time. Lines with arrows can be turned on to show the origin, destination and direction of email.
2. Report 2: A River of email – OK – so I know you are all familar with NameVoyager. No? Its a dynamic graph of Baby names (see screenshot below). Imagine the same thing for your email – years on the bottom, blue is received, pink is sent, you type a letter and the list is filtered (second screen)
   .
   (All Email – with count per year, per person – you can zoom in to see by month, or filter to see a given name)
   
   This activity over time (a graph showing the peaks and valleys of overall emails sent and received). It will be interesting to see email drop off at the holidays, peak when I’m on  projects with large teams, and drop off when I am working with small teams or not on a project)
3. Visual 3: Company wide graphs – Once I can do this, it is a small step to analyze not only mine, but a whole company’s email. This lets me build social networks. Who knows who? How well connected are they? Need to get introduced to someone – did you know your friend worked with him two years ago?
4. Visual 4: Integrate with your contacts – zoom out to see all your contact at once with a color indicating your activity with that person.  Or just be able to sort by most popular.
5. Visual 5: Build a tag cloud of words you use in all your messages (like manyeyes.com). Show topic popularity this way.
6. Visual 6: Building on the data from visual 5, build a tool like google trends that uses words as they appear in email. This would show the topic trends.
7. Visual 7: World map of email sources – using server source show the geographic location of people who have sent you mail.

Of course many other visuals are possible using other attributes over time (word count, attachment size, tags, etc).

Does anyone out there have something like this already? Working on it? What other plugins are needed? And most importantly, who wants to help

Here is my strategy…

First, ALL my documents go in the “My Documents” folder that windows provides. The first thing I do when I re-image my computer is right click on that My Documents folder and change the location to by my secondary hard drive. So the C: Drive in my laptop is for installed programs, and the D drive (I replaced my cd-rom with a second drive) is for all the files I care about. If I have to check my laptop at the airport (which I never, ever do – electronics are not covered by the airline policy) or leave it in a shady area – I pop out the D drive and put it in my pocket.

So, lets look at my D drive (My Documents folder):
As you can see, the one that is most out of place here is the “Camtasia Studio”. A lot of software when you install it, creates a folder in My Documents. The one I hate the most is Adobe, which creates a completely empty folder for NO APPARENT REASON. I delete it all the time. The other trouble maker is Mircosoft OneNote….a nice program, but…I use Google Notebook.

I also have divided my Projects at the root. Prior to this I had one projects folder with sub-folders. You have already seen the Email folder in my previous post, so lets get to the interesting one and look at Clients. This is by far the elephant in the room with 8.19 GB, 6,197 sub folders, and 91,743 files.

Inside the Project (Clients) folder, I have organized things by year, and client name (sorry – I thought I better blur out the client names – that’s not important here anyway we are talking about the structure itself). Alright now, stop trying to read it! If you want to know where I’ve worked just ask me, I’m not ashamed.

Before this I did not have the year as part of the title, which was good because I often go back to work for the same clients over and over and all their projects grouped together, it also allowed me to press the first letter of the client to jump to that folder. So why add the year, because it adds consistency with how I organize my other folders such as Photos and helps with Back-up.

Next lets look inside one of the client folders.

Reference Folder Structure
In 2002 I started to notice a growing problem, although my projects have similarities, I was difficult to back and find files from old projects because I was not following a naming convention. To be honest, since I don’t work with the same team from project to project, naming conventions are hard to follow. I come with mine, others come with theirs and we end up compromising – taking the best of each and doing what is right for the project and the client.

The idea was to start each project with a set of empty folders that map roughly to a pattern that had been established on many projects. I then retro-fitted the structure to old projects.
Here it is (you can also download a zip file that creates this empty structure)

It is still a good structure, but it has a price – first of all, when you start a project, all the folders are empty, so you spend time clicking through them, looking for files that don’t exist. So you get annoyed and delete the empty folders. At this point, you start creating folders on demand again. This would be solved if windows had a better file management system using tags or at least showing file count at the folder level.

As for Music, I let itunes orgainize it, I don’t like how it does it, and I hate how when I reinstall itunes I loss at lot of info like playlists and rankings.

What else? If you have a question, our found this useful, tell me in the comments.

So, I am here to tell you, that as of right, now, there is no way to:

• Add yahoo or google users to you Sametime list at work
• Add sametime users to you home google talk of yahoo IM.

Why no one is saying this is a product of the uncertainty caused by being unable to confirm a negative. It’s not just me either, there were at least 2o questions about this in Yahoo Answers. Including the one I added.

So here is my promise – if someone says it can be done, I will document it, and update this post. Also, if you can tell me it can not be done, because IBM has not set it up yet, that is good to. It is the uncertainty that kills us.