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.

Quick Update to xPL HALi

I've added a couple new features, updated the example vbs script and updated the app to 0.3.1. Download link stays the same as in the previous post as I'm too lazy to update it.

I added a couple features for scripting: upon startup, the subroutine "Init" from your script file will execute. On shutdown of the app, the sub "Cleanup" will run. If you do a script reload, "Cleanup" will run followed by "Init".

The script.vbs file now has examples of Init and Cleanup. It shows how you can create a VR phrase in your script and has sample code showing how to handle the response to those phrases.

Another cool feature of the scripting engine is the ability to integrate all sorts of ActiveX objects. In the script.vbs sample, I've included commented out code to update an Excel spreadsheet every time a flag changes.

xPL HALi 0.3 Released

I have released the latest version of xPL HALi. It features full scripting support for VBScript, JScript, Python and Perl. I have moved 99% of my logic out of HAL (which wasn't a lot to begin with) into the scripting engine. Code executes faster, is easier to edit and is a lot more flexible. There are previous posts in my blog with more information on the app (xPL and VR features).

In the zip file you'll find a directory called 'samples' that contains sample scripts in all 4 languages. In the main directory is 'script.vbs' that is a more thorough example and shows all the events of HALi that I have chosen to expose to the scripting engine. Note also, the call to print a message to the lower debug screen, which may be helpful debugging scripts. Since I use very few aspects of HAL, a majority of the events are not tested so good luck with those.

The lower debug screen will also print out standard error messages related to scripting either at load or runtime. If you have a script problem, you can edit it and click the reload button to re-initialize the scripting engine. No need to restart the app.

To run this app, you'll need .NET 2 and .NET 3.5 and obviously a version of HAL that supports HALi.

updated link to point to 0.3.5 version

HAL's New Scripting Engine - xPL HALi

I just finished adding a scripting engine into xPL HALi. Now, there's no reason at all to create any IF/THEN logic inside HAL. No more painful point and click to create logic. Now, it's possible and easy to create very complex logic. The engine currently uses only VBScript but it seems pretty easy to make it support JScript, Python and Perl. I uploaded a short video of it in action.

Windsurfer WiFi Antenna Booster

I just made one of these in about 10 minutes with a piece of aluminum foil, some glue and a printout of the template. I did a quick test and the signal strength went from about 80% to 100%. Not bad. Here are some YouTube videos about the antenna.

This is a picture of it on one of our wireless routers: