Archive for February, 2010

Word of the Day: Fremdschämen

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Fremdschämen is a German word which means vicarious embarrassment on behalf of others. For examples, refer to almost anything that Ricky Gervais has made.

Photo Journal: Dempster Highway to the Arctic

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Dempster Highway to the Arctic, Vancouver to Inuvik is an interesting photo journal by David Cambon.

MicroSD Card Sleuthing

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I just read a fascinating story about investigating a bad batch of Kingston MicroSD cards. Some of the things I learned: Toshiba and Sandisk co-own the same fabrication facility. Samsung does not sell their own cards retail, only through resellers who re-brand them. Kingston does not appear to manufacture their own memory ...

IME Functions Fail From Separate Process

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I wanted to change the behavior of the Microsoft IME bar using AutoHotkeys, a utility which can be used to create macros, remap keys, or do any of a variety of other related tasks. This led me to ime_func.ahk, which appears to be an AutoHotkeys script which uses DllCall to access ...

Publishing GPG Public Key in DNS Records

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Dan Mahoney wrote an excellent guide on publishing PGP keys in DNS TXT records. This guide to GoDaddy DNS record configuration made it relatively easy to modify my TXT record.

GnuPG Not Working Under Cygwin

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I was having trouble using the GnuPG plugin for vim under Cygwin. The GnuPG plugin allows seamlessly integrated decryption, editing, and re-encryption of GPG-encrypted content within vim. However, on my Windows 7 box, it just showed gibberish. Attempting to edit my encrypted password file resulted in a ...

Converting MP3 to AAC

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Here is a script I wrote to convert MP3 files to AAC for my Softbank 821SC phone. The script uses FFmpeg, which I downloaded from here. @echo off REM --------------------------------------------------------------------------- REM Set the following variable to the ffmpeg.exe path on your system. REM --------------------------------------------------------------------------- set FFMPEG_PATH="c:\tools\FFmpeg\ffmpeg.exe" REM make sure the user provided an argument. if ...