Microsoft to Pay Search Users

Microsoft is getting desperate and willing to pay users who find items and buy them using their search engine. Hmmm, I wonder if I can stack this with Fat Wallet rebates?? :)

The Nokia 770 is still stuck in repair. I emailed Nokia and this is what the rep said:

"...our repair center is currently awaiting the parts necessary to complete the repair of your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. We sincerely regret any inconvenience that this may cause and appreciate your patience in this matter."

It's been almost a month. Why don't they just send me an 800 to replace the 770? I fired off another email to them asking will they honor the warranty on my 2nd unit (when it goes out of warranty) if it ends up with the same, well known hardware problem as the first. We'll see what happens.

Yesterday, I rebuilt an old Sempron 2800+ system. It had a dead mobo and I got a refurb board to replace it. I still need a new cpu cooler as one of the blades broke off the fan while the dead mobo was buried in a pile of scrap. So the system's sitting around til I get a new cooler and find a hard drive to stuff in it.

A Couple New Cameras

I installed a couple new cameras around the house to watch Cody when we're not around. Like all our other cameras, these are modulated and we can view them using the built in tuner of our Slingbox Pro.

The dead N770 is still in repair with no update of status. It's been 2.5 weeks already and a month since it died.

Introducing Our New Assistant

It has been a few months since our kJ passed away, and although we've adjusted to not having him around, we still missed having a dog. Three weeks ago, we brought home a rambunctious red-tri Australian Shepherd puppy. It's been a lot of work having a pup, and although the kids tire him out easily, I still haven't had much time to do much automation work. Most of my free time is spent puppy proofing, cleaning up after him and training him (automating him in a way ;) ). Without further adieu, introducing Cody...

Free WiFi @ Starbucks

AT&T recently announced that iPhones can now get free WiFi at their hotspots, which are located at Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, etc. Apparently, you can do the same with your laptop. Just change the user agent of your browser to that of the iPhone browser.

On a side note, my N770 is still being repaired. I sent it out 4/21 and the Nokia repair center has had it for a week:

Repair History:
Status Date Status
04/24/2008 Repair in Progress
04/24/2008 Received
04/14/2008 Pending Receipt by the Repair Center

Nokia 770 White Screen of Death

Sadly, one of my N770s has died with the dreaded white screen of death (WSOD). Fortunately, it's within the warranty period. I've got it almost packed to ship to repair. I didn't it for a week, and when I tried the battery was dead. So I charged it up and got the white screen when I turned it on the next day. I don't understand how they Nokia can continue to sell these knowing about this fault (clearly documented all over the Internet). I bought a pair of these brand new 9 months ago. Are they going to fix it so it doesn't get the WSOD again? What happens if my other unit gets the WSOD and I'm out of warranty? Will they fix it free of charge since this is a known problem with their hardware?

xPLHALi 0.4 Released

I guess I've done enough testing with the new gCal and SlimServer support. Grab it.

xPLHALi Now Controls SlimServer

Now you can use HAL to play music through SlimServer. I'm still testing it out, but it's working pretty well. It extracts all this info out of the SlimServer database and creates the voice commands that allow you to queue up music by artist, album or playlist. Click the screen cap below for a video of it in action.



Even cooler is it can be extended to support other media servers through the scripting engine. There's an option to just pass to the scripting engine the zone, category (album, artist, or playlist) and selection that were chosen. This way the scripting engine can issue a command to launch another player. Granted you'll need to have SlimServer installed but not use it for other than its database.

This works for us since we use SlimServer for our SliMP3s and Squeezeboxes and MediaNet for our Rio Receivers. So for MediaNet zones, xPLHALi will pass parameters that the scripting engine can use to issue xPL commands queueing up the desired music to those non-Slim zones.

Google Calendar Sync Arrives! (Finally!)

You can finally sync GCal to Outlook. We gave up syncing our phones to Outlook a long time ago and moved over to GCal. It's so much easier to sync whenever we want with Oggsync than having to remember when we get home to sync with Outlook. But for those who still use Outlook, this is a great tool.

AT&T U-Turns on U-Verse

This may help explain why AT&T is bumping up DSL rates. Their latest broadband initiative, "U-Verse", is costing more and going to reach less people. Brings back memories of living in a broadband black hole in the late 90s and early 2000s. AT&T or whatever they were called back then, promised to reach our house with "Project Pronto," which turned out to be "Project NoGo" as they never reached us. "Project Lightspeed," which followed, never reached us either leaving us with "Project DialupSpeed" until Comcast came to save the day. AT&T still has not reached us while Comcast started us off at 1 Mbps then bumped us to 2, 4, 6 and currently 8Mbps. Given AT&T's past successes, this latest effort should be dubbed "Project U-Turn" as they scale back their deployment goals again.

No Difference Between Coat Hangers and Monster Cable

Haha. Audiophiles think coat hangers sound just as good as Monster Cable. With the right packaging and marketing you can sell people anything at a premium, like water in a bottle!

Another xPLHALi Feature

I have just added support for Google Calendar events. Now you can ask HAL "What do I have scheduled for today?" and it will read your schedule for the day. With the scripting engine, you can set up VR phrases to ask it "What do I have scheduled for tomorrow?" or "What do I have scheduled for Saturday?" Again, the scripting engine makes it so easy to do things that were formerly complex or impossible to do in HAL. Scripting engine code below:

function gCal0(eventDate) 
  ' the url below is the google 'magic cookie'
  gCal0=misc.gCalEvents( _ 
    "http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/userID/private-magicCookie/full", _
    eventDate)
end function

sub SpeechNotify(e)
  select case UCase(e.sSpeech)
    case "WHAT DO I HAVE SCHEDULED FOR TODAY"
      xPLHALi.TTS.Speak "your calendar has the following items., " _
        & gCal0(Date)
    case "WHAT DO I HAVE SCHEDULED FOR TOMORROW"
      xPLHALi.TTS.Speak "your calendar has the following items., " _
        & gCal0(DateAdd("d",1,Date))
  end select
end sub

I'm not ready to release it. I have a few more things to try out before I do.

Added Serial Ports to xPLHALi

Now serving up version 0.3.5. I have added a popular feature - COM port support. You can now connect to serial devices not supported by HAL. All this can be done in the scripting engine. Sample code is included in script.vbs in the zip file to connect to a Cheapertronics RFID reader and track cars, people, etc. There is also sample code to connect to the W800 RF receiver. The app supports up to 2 serial connections. I will change the name of the app at some point since this is much more than just xPL now.