myTrevor.com » Technology

Phonetic Translator

Trevor — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:02:37 +0000

Many times I need to give people exact spellings of text, such as complex passwords, over the phone. I don’t have the NATO phonetic alphabet memorized, so I thought it’d be great if I have a utility to help me.

For example, if the text I wanted to spell out was “My$up3RP@ssword,” I would read this as “capital mike, yankee, dollar sign, uniform, papa, three, capital romeo, capital pap, at sign, sierra, sierra, whiskey, oscar, romeo, delta.”

Doing that all in your head (at least for me) is exhausting! A program would be much more effective!

I ended up writing a program that does just this with minimal effort. You can install it through a ClickOnce deployment here: http://www.visionarytech.net/software/phonetic/

Dead Pixel? Nope.

Trevor — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:04:36 +0000

So I had this blury looking dead pixel on my laptop LCD and I tried the “massage” technique without any success. I thought it was weird because it was blury, and usually dead pixels are very sharp and exactly one pixel. Anyways, I decided to try slapping my screen from behind and boom, the “dead pixel” moved down about an 1/16th of an inch. Well, I kept tapping the back of the screen until the spot went out of site. I guess some dust got behind the screen or between the LCD and the back light causing the dark spot. Weird, huh?

Bigger Screen It Is!

Trevor — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 17:22:31 +0000

Seems like you can now justify that purchase of that big monitor… or monitors. A recent study finds that those that have larger monitors (more screen real estate), are 10 – 45% more productive on tasks.

Read: Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times

Imagine what productivity 3 24″ LCDs could bring you…

Longhorn Beta 1 Released

Trevor — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 20:16:57 +0000

So as predicted, Microsoft released the Beta 1 for Windows Vista (formerly code-named Windows “Longhorn”) today. It is rumored that Microsoft is holding a large meeting with stakeholders Thursday and wanted to be able to have something to talk about to show their progress. The DVD ISO is 2.49 GB and available for download on MSDN.

It took me between and hour and half to two hours to download (I was downstairs working) and installing on VPC is not fast. Unlike previous releases, install boots up into a full GUI which asks where you want to install (with an option to upgrade, if applicable). It then takes you to step 2, the crawl of the green turtle, err.. progress bar. At least Microsoft has learned not to even attempt in estimating how much time they expect it to take .

Hopefully with the RTM version they’ll have the cutsy advertising (You should buy Vista because… oh wait, you already have) during install.

Windows Vista

Trevor — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 20:54:37 +0000

Microsoft released their name for Longhorn, Windows Vista. I’m not terribly impressed with the name, but neither was I with ‘XP’ when it was first announced. And Beta 1 will be released August 3rd, for those of you who care to download it.

UI Patterns & Techniques

Trevor — Thu, 26 May 2005 17:32:50 +0000

I started reading this and thought I’d share it with my INFO friends http://time-tripper.com/uipatterns/Introduction seems to be a really nice reference for different design elements, when/why you’d want to use them and when/why not to.

Another toy (VOIP)

Trevor — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:35:03 +0000

So it seems this week I’m sharing a bunch of technical things, well here’s another.

I decided to sign up with Vonage VOIP service. I’m sure you’ve seen their bright orange advertisements on the metro buses lately — guess it worked for me. If you’ve ever come to by apartment, you know that there’s a big blackout spot hoving over my place and really limits any cell reception. I decided now that I couldn’t put up with it anymore and looked around for pricing plans — VOIP seemed to be the way to go for features/price. I signed up right now for the 500 outgoing minutes a month for $14.99. This is pretty sweet, it comes with a bunch of neat features that land-lines just can’t offer right now as well as national long distance and free incoming calls. If I really like it, I may move up to the Unlimited for $24.99. I’ll review the service in about a week as soon as I replace my crappy phone!

Oh yeah. And if you’re interested in joining, I can hook you up with like a month or two of free service. Happy Easter too!

CherryOS Works… sorta

Trevor — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 17:23:30 +0000

So I decided to try it out and install OS X on my PC… yeah yeah, I’m ready for your giving me shit. I had problems at first with setting up a disk that was expandable (OS X said the disk wasn’t bootable), so I decided to try a static size disk, seemed to do the trick.
Anyways, I got the install to work:

And even to boot up!

But I’m not able to get the network up and running! It seems that Windows doesn’t like to allow you to share connections if you’re already running a private network and CherryOS is stupid and requires you to go through Windows for your Networking. But I just wanted to show ya’ll that it works!
(Pictures are for you, Jamie)

Good PHP 5 Book

Trevor — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:29:44 +0000

So I’ve been looking around for a good PHP 5 book that covers some advanced items. Well, I found one, it’s called: PHP 5 Unleased published through SAMS. Unfortunately, I bought it down at Barnes & Noble at retail price, however, I’ve included a link here to Amazon.com for those that want to check it out:

It covers some “advanced” items such as PEAR, XML/XSLT, Optimizing, Authentication, Encryption, OOP, Error Handling, Tidy, MIME Email, SOAP, File System, Network I/O, OS Access, Graphics, PDFs, and Regular Expressions.

Anyways. I haven’t of course read it all the way through, but today glancing at it, I’m glad a pushed out the $50 for it, however, I recommend getting it from Amazon the $32.99 price (or whoever else has it cheaper)!

Oh yeah, just FYI, I also bought FreeBSD Unleashed.

I just feel I don’t know enough about how to properly setup all the Linux/UNIX stuff and thought now that I’m graduated, what better time? I’ll let you know how it is.

Come on bloggers…

Trevor — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 20:00:23 +0000

So this is ridiculous. I’ve been reading a lot about Google’s new toolbar (featuring AutoLink) and the new changes in doing look ups. It pisses me off that hundreds of bloggers (The End of Google?) regurgitate what they’ve read without any investigation. I love how some even say “I haven’t used it because I use Firefox, but it’s so evil” – how can you criticize something you haven’t even looked at!?!

Google does not autochange your content. It is an opt-in feature. A user must actually click a button to “auto-link” recognized content (addresses, ISBNs, etc.). It then notifies the user of the changes by highlighting the newly created links on the page. Next, a user can click on the button again to re-highlight or select to remove AutoLinks.

There is no behind-the-scenes auto-changing of web content. It is basically what any other plugin for a browser does! It’s the same crap people were giving Google for the G-Mail links claiming that they were reading everyone’s email to generate their ads. So please people, stop bitching about new technologies just because you think it makes you look cool and geeked out for doing so.