Command-Tab

Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 11:36 PM

IBM has an cool article detailing some techniques you can use to quickly build robots with common materials. Wireless robotics: Fast robot prototyping shows you how to use foam core, plexiglass, Erector set parts, and cardboard to put together a robot platform to build upon without breaking the bank on a design that’s likely to change. Neat stuff — I wasn’t even aware IBM published articles like this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 3:23 AM

Tristan Pemble has posted some cool iTunes Music Store hacks, which include one tool that can grab the full size album artwork from any given album. All you have to do is find the album on iTMS, right click the title, choose Copy iTunes Music Store URL, and paste it into the field. It’s great for filling in missing artwork on ripped/downloaded music. Other cool hacks include a music video and movie trailer tool, and also one to view the raw XML response from iTunes’ servers (for debugging or general poking around).

9/14/04 Update
This method no longer works, but try my new PHP script here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 3:23 am and is filed under Hacks, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 6:11 AM

In working on the caching back end for my SpotlightSiteSearch capabilities, I found it necessary to store a searchable copy of all the relevant photo data that Flickr has. Since the possibility exists that the photo database may be searched many times a day, often with several hits in quick succession, it would be much better to put the load on my own database server rather than bother Flickr over and over. To that end, I wrote up a small script that asks Flickr for a list of all photos* and inserts the relevant data into a MySQL database. Much like MySQLicious, Duplicatr mirrors your Flickr photo information to a given database. While the original images still reside at Flickr, you’ll have fast local access to your photo information, thus simultaneously lightening the load on Flickr’s servers and speeding up your search queries.

Right now, the information stored about each photo includes the photo ID, server, secret, title, description, public flag, date taken and date posted, tags (space separated), comment count, and a link to the general photo page. More may be added in the future by request.

Requirements:
- PHP 4.3.0 or greater (built with 4.3.11)
- MySQL (built with 4.0.21)
- A Flickr account

(To map the photo information to a full URL, see Flickr’s short but sweet URL documentation)
* For the moment, you’re limited to 500 photos. See the TODO section ;-)

Download (or view) the code.

Installation:
1) Create a MySQL database or use an existing one (PHPMyAdmin will do just fine).
2) The default table name is ‘flickr’. This can be tweaked in the code quite easily.
3) Run the CREATE TABLE statement (found near the top of the script) in PHPMyAdmin to build the table scructure.
4) Fill in your Flickr User ID or email address so the script knows whose photos to grab.
5) Fill in your MySQL details (host, MySQL username/password, etc.)
6) Access the script via a web browser and let it run!

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are all welcome in this post as well as in the eerily quiet forums.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 6:11 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 12:11 AM

I’ve got a few more iPod hacks planned if I can come up with the hardware. So, I’m on the hunt for more dead or “injured” iPods, preferably 3rd or 4th Gen…although 2nd might do. If anyone has an iPod with a dead hard drive they’re willing to part with, send me an email using the link on the right :-) I’ll also happily do iPod battery installations, if anyone’s in need of a quick repair.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under Hacks, iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.