Some More Bytes

THIS was the definitive gadget!

Recently a coworker called my attention to a great device, the Emotiv EPOC.

The device itself, including the developer license or the research license is a bit expensive, but wouldn´t be great to develop some software using this device?? I think possibilities are endless…

I can see a couple of problems that are making me having second thoughts about the project… I can assume that the headset itself is not a toy, and measures correctly all the stuff it is supposed to measure. The real value however relies in the software API bundled with it. Emotiv seems to have translated successfully all the indicators associated with thoughts like “up”, “down”, or “push” into something detectable by their model.

However, let´s imagine for a minute that it just does not work. How do you prove it? How do you tell apart a software failure and a wrong “way of thinking”. It´s a delicate matter.

I´ll definitely keep an eye on it though!

For some reason, I haven’t come across this classic until now.
The Tao Of Programming is a great funny book about programming from Geoffrey James.

If you have some spare time, it is quite fast to read. It made my day!

I always hated how visual studio likes to hide the tabs that can’t fit on the small available space for it. I found a plugin which works beautifully: Tab studio.

I’ve been using it for a week now, and I can’t live with it. I am still using the trial version, but I’ll buy it for sure when it ends. A personal license costs 39$, but it’s nothing compared to the power of the plugin: themes, customization, several useful options, regular expressions engine to match and group tabs, etc…. Just great!. A shame it is not open source:D

I just uploaded the 1.01 version of the Powermizer Manager.

It corrects a rare bug using the alternate identification string sometimes triggered on *some* laptops like the asus V1S and some macbooks.

More details and downloads HERE.

Running away from my old host, which probably was the worst host EVER, I landed in this new server.

Let see if they can cope with a single blog!!.

I just released a new version of Powermizer Manager.

More details and downloads HERE.

Now that I am using a Windows Mobile based device, it is really annoying that the media player does not have a sleep timer included.  I noticed that many years ago in an iPaq PDA, and I see that nothing has changed.

When I go to sleep, I start the Windows Media Player usually with a large playlist, or even the loop function activated. I do not want, however, the device playing all night long wasting my battery… Well, it’s the very definition of Sleep Timer, ain’t it?

I put together a couple of lines of code, and made this **extremely basic** sleep timer. I did something similar many years ago for the iPaq, and now I’ve don it again. I spent more time trying to make the cab installer that the code itself:D. The code is almost worthless to put here, but I’ll do it just in case someone wants to modify it to start a different process other than the Media Player.

The “Suspend the device” function, calls the SetSystemPowerState API which according to the MSDN its effect may vary on each device, as it relies on some OEM power management implementation. It will not be necessary in most of modern devices, but I included it just in case.

Sleep Timer Source Code

GM750

My iPhone recently died due to a sudden deceleration against the floor.

Needing another phone while I decide which will be my next acquisition, I borrowed from my girlfriend a LG GM750 phone that she had lying around. This is a Windows Mobile 6.5 terminal and comes with the (sometimes annoying) S-Class interface from LG. It is not a super modern, super advance terminal, but it has the features I need: 3G which means web and mail, GPS and a nice battery. Add to this a couple of useful apps, and a GPS offline navigator and now you’re talking.And the best part, it was free!!.

Unfortunately there are not stable alternative roms for this model yet, so I had to change manually a couple of things that were making me unconfortable.

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Well, actually this is not a post about how to update your netbook. It’s more about how to recover from a reboot when you shouldn’t have rebooted.

Instructions to update  are pretty clear in this post. However, avoid a reboot is not so simple as it seems. Every tutorial to update to 10.6.4 starts saying “Install 10.6.4 update, an before reboot…”. My problem is that I did it through the software updates, and it installed the actual update WHILE rebooting, so once installed and automatically rebooted, you’re sold. Probably with the combo update you are more lucky.

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