Adam Franco.com

Adam Franco February 20th, 2008

With the latest OS X Leopard update (10.5.2) Apple finally added an option to turn off menu bar translucency. I much prefer an opaque menu bar as I find it much more legible. There is only one problem with this fix: Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided to hide this option on computers that “don’t support transparency” due to having lower-end graphics hardware. After upgrading to 10.5.2 my MacBookPro laptop has the option to turn of menu bar transparency, but my newer and more powerful MacPro Desktop does not. After much searching and forum-reading I found that most of the people with this problem (menu bar is translucent, but the option to make it opaque is missing) had MacPro desktops with multiple monitors and video cards.

The problem it turns out, is that while one of my video cards (that drives my two primary monitors ) is a high-end ATI Radeon X1900XT that supports transparent menu bars, the second (that drives my two outer monitors used mostly for notes and email) is a cheaper NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT. The presence of the lower-end card in the system was causing the “Translucent Menu Bar” option to be hidden, even though it was supported by my other card.

Steps to fix:

1. Turn off computer
2. Remove low-end video card
3. Start computer
4. Go to System Preferences –> Desktop & Screen Saver and un-check the “Translucent Menu Bar” option
5. Turn off computer
6. Replace low-end video card
7. Start computer

It is a pain in the butt, but it works to get the damn translucency turned off.

• Apple , Computers and Technology
• Comments(0)

Adam Franco February 10th, 2008

This version is a re-release of version 1.2 which had a corrupted archive missing some necessary files.

The RiverLevels widget provides an easy way to monitor the amount of water flowing in your favorite streams and rivers right from your Dashboard. The RiverLevels widget is of particular interest to whitewater kayakers and canoeists.

Once any United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream-gauge station is selected, it is automatically refreshed to always provide you with the latest graph of the water-level. As of version 1.2 you can choose between two graph styles: discharge in cubic feet per second (CFS) and water-height in feet.

This widget is Free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later.

• Download

• More Info
• Apple’s Download page for RiverLevels.wdgt
• Bug Tracker

Requirements:

• OS X - 10.4 “Tiger” or later

Change Log:

1.2.1 (2008-02-10)

• New zip archive includes the ‘library’ directory missing in the 1.2 release.

1.2 (2008-02-06)

• Fixed Leopard (10.5) compatability bug.
• Added the ability to choose Gauge Height (ft) in addition to discharge (CFS).

1.1 (2007-01-08)

• Fixed graphs extending off bottom of widget
• Fixed invisibility of front refresh icon

• Apple , Computers and Technology , Software
• Comments(5)

Adam Franco February 7th, 2008

Update: A new version is available that fixes a corrupted archive in version 1.2.

The RiverLevels widget provides an easy way to monitor the amount of water flowing in your favorite streams and rivers right from your Dashboard. The RiverLevels widget is of particular interest to whitewater kayakers and canoeists.

Once any United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream-gauge station is selected, it is automatically refreshed to always provide you with the latest graph of the water-level. As of version 1.2 you can choose between two graph styles: discharge in cubic feet per second (CFS) and water-height in feet.

This widget is Free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later.

• Download

• More Info
• Apple’s Download page for RiverLevels.wdgt
• Bug Tracker

Requirements:

• OS X - 10.4 “Tiger” or later

Change Log:

1.2 (2008-02-06)

• Fixed Leopard (10.5) compatability bug.
• Added the ability to choose Gauge Height (ft) in addition to discharge (CFS).

1.1 (2007-01-08)

• Fixed graphs extending off bottom of widget
• Fixed invisibility of front refresh icon

Update: A new version is available that fixes a corrupted archive in version 1.2.

• Apple , Computers and Technology , Software
• Comments(7)

Adam Franco January 31st, 2008

After upgrading my laptop to Apple’s latest operating system, OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’, I ran into a few issues here and there but for the most part I thought everything worked. After about a month using Leopard though, I noticed that my meetings were not syncing properly to my in-phone calendar. Several hours of frustration later my events are finally getting into my phone. The problem: the ‘Birthdays’ calendar generated from the Address Book application breaks the sync process. I’m glad that once I found the issue the fix was easy (disabling the Birthdays calendar), but holy dog-poo that was hard to find.

If you think you may have this error, open the Console application while running iSync. If you will see an error appear that contains the text

ISyncInvalidRecordException you referenced the following records (in a relationship) but did not actually push them

and then another message mentioning ‘birthdays’, disable the Birthdays calendar (iCal –> Preferences –> ‘Show Birthdays Calendar’) and try syncing again.

• Apple , Computers and Technology
• Comments(1)

Adam Franco December 3rd, 2007

Just over the hill from me are two new development projects in Middlebury, the “Lodge at Otter Creek” retirement community and the other is an upscale residential neighborhood.

For those who are interested in the extent of the development, I’ve biked the new roads and recorded their positions via GPS:

View Larger Map

Middle Road KML

• GIS/GPS , KML , Musings , News
• Comments(0)

Adam Franco September 6th, 2007

I’ve recently developed a small PHP script, the WPEnclosureAdder (source | try) that goes through each item in an RSS feed, looks for links to YouTube videos or GoogleVideo videos, and then adds an enclosure tags for the videos. If multiple videos are found embedded in a post, then that post is duplicated in the feed for each additional URL to provide compatibility with the many RSS readers/video-podcast viewers that expect a single enclosure per post.

I wrote this script because I have been recently making heavy use of Miro (formerly known as “The Democracy Player“) to download videos from YouTube in order to watch them off-line. Miro also provides a nice UI for aggregating videos and remembers my spot when I go back to watching later (nice for long documentaries). Miro however, expects links to videos in RSS enclosure tags, something that Wordpress (and probably other blogging software) doesn’t do for embeded videos.

Throw Away Your Telescreen is a video blog done by one of my favorite geo-political bloggers, Dave on Fire, and a few others. In it they link out to the most interesting “documentaries, lectures, and interviews that follow a different editorial line” from the corporate press. I highly recommend all of the videos on it that I have seen.

Throw Away Your Telescreen has all the makings of an indie-news channel, perfect for Miro which was developed to encourage participatory media and culture. The only thing missing was to get the videos embedded in Throw Away Your Telescreen’s posts in such a way that Miro can find them. With the WPEnclosureAdder, this has now been done. Use this feed to view Throw Away Your Telescreen in Miro.

• View the source-code of the latest version. (save-as to download)
• License: GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later
• Requirements (for hosting it yourself): PHP version 5.2 or later
• Git Repository: http://www2.adamfranco.com/WPEnclosureAdder.git

I wrote this script with Throw Away Your Telescreen in mind, but it should work with any other Wordpress blog, and probably with RSS feeds generated from other blogging tools. To point it at another blog’s RSS feed, enter the feed url in the form below:

Using my version will use my default search strings for YouTube and GoogleVideo videos. If you would like to change what is being searched for, please download the script, change the configuration, and host it on your own website. I have licensed the WPEnclosureAdder under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later, so you are free to copy and modify this script as per the terms of that license.

• Computers and Technology , PHP , Software
• Comments(1)

Adam Franco August 29th, 2007

As of a few days ago, I am now able to generate KML versions of Flickr photosets for viewing in Google Earth/Maps. With that taken care of, I also want to easily combine these KML documents of images together with other KML files that show additional information, such as paths traveled, points of interest, etc.

To accomplish this task, I have written a new script, the KML Joiner that will combine any KML documents on the web together into a single (referenced) KML document. (try it out)

More Detail: for those interested in KML
The resulting document is a collection of network links, each of which points to one of the KML URLs specified. Doing this rather than combining their text together into a static KML document prevents style collisions as well as allows changes in the source data to propagate to the combined document.

Refresh intervals can optionally be specified for every source document allowing for a server-friendly combination of static data with rapidly changing data. By default, no refresh interval is specified, making the linked documents load only once when first accessed.

Example:

View the KML Joiner with fields filled in that generates the map below.

View Larger Map

The map above is of the trip mentioned in a previous blog post, but this time the data sources (1. a static KML file with the path and house placemark, 2. a dynamic KML document generated with my Photo set to KML script) joined together with the KML Joiner script instead of manually put together with a text editor.

Usage:
You are welcome to use this script hosted on my site, or you can download it and run it on your own computer/webserver.

This script is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later. (Source Code)

Please post any suggestions for fixes or changes. Thanks!

• Computers and Technology , GIS/GPS , KML , PHP , Software
• Comments(0)

Adam Franco August 28th, 2007

Sarah and I took a 6-mile canoe trip down the Conodoguinet Creek near my parents’ house on a beautiful August afternoon.

View Larger Map

The map above was generated with a GPS track of our path (the blue line) and the photo output from my new photosetToKML.php script

• GIS/GPS , Musings , Outdoors
• Comments(0)

Adam Franco August 23rd, 2007

One of the things I (and others) have found lacking when working with geotagged images on Flickr, is the inability to retrieve a “photo set” (Flickr’s take on a slideshow) as a KML document that can then be displayed in GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, or other geo-browsers. Flickr provides some KML links and GeoRSS feeds, but these are either limited to 20 items or can only be pointed at tags or users’ photo-streams, not a particular photo set.

To fill this niche, I present a small script I wrote to generate a KML file from the geotagged photos in a set:

Features:

• Generate a KML file from a Flickr photo set
• Directly open the KML file in Google Maps
• Choose what size image to include in the placemark description for each photo.
• Optionaly draw a path (line) from photo to photo ordered in one of several ways: by date taken, by date uploaded, by set order. Useful for making a quick and dirty map of a trip.

Examples:

• KML / GoogleMaps - A nice set of graphitti in Toronto.
  
  View Larger Map
   
• KML / GoogleMaps - A set of photos from a trip I took around Turkey, with lines drawn chronologically. Since this is a large set that causes GoogleMaps to time-out, I’ve downloaded the KML file and then re-uploaded it to my website. This is the method I recommend for large photo sets.
  
  View Larger Map
   

You are welcome to use this script hosted on my site, or you can download it and run it on your own computer/webserver. If you would like to run it yourself, please be aware of the following…

System Requirements:

• PHP 5.2 or greater.
• The PEAR Flickr API

This script is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later. (Source Code)

Updates::

• 2007-08-27
  • Now uses htmlspecialchars() to clean titles instead of htmlentities(), the latter of which was causing excessive translation of German characters. Thanks Stefan Geens, for pointing this out.
  • Form now generates valid XHTML 1.0 strict.
  • Now can use image thumbnails instead of camera icons. Thanks for the idea Nicolas Hoizey.
• 2007-08-24
  • Now escapes ampersands in titles and descriptions. Thanks Jesse for pointing this out.

  Future Improvement Ideas::

  • Add an option for icon size.
  • Add options for custom icon/path styles. I’m not sure whether to give several options, or just provide a field for a block of arbitrary KML style-markup.
  • Computers and Technology , GIS/GPS , KML , PHP , Photography , Software
  • Comments(26)

Adam Franco May 16th, 2007

Quite a few of my friends and relatives make use of Blogger/Blogspot for their weblogs. While Blogger seems to be a great service and very easy to use, what annoys me is that RSS feeds are often disabled on Blogger weblogs. Maybe people are setting this on purpose, maybe they are turning off RSS feeds unintentionally, or maybe that is the default. Either way, I read all of my news and blogs in an RSS reader. Friends & family blogs and photo-streams make up about 25 of the 100+ feeds I subscribe to. If a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed for me to subscribe to, I’m never going to remember to read it.

So, my work-around for Blogger was to write a screen-scraping RSS generator that creates an RSS feed from a Blogger weblog. BlogspotRSS is a simple PHP5 script that makes use of XPATH queries to turn the Blogger weblog into an RSS document. If you have a web server with PHP5, please download BlogspotRSS and run it on your own web server to save my bandwidth.

The BlogspotRSS script is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Notes:

• It seems that some of the Blogger themes change the HTML quite a bit. I’ll have to fix up the RSS generator to make it work with a few more themes than the ones I tested it on…

• Computers and Technology , PHP , Software
• Comments(0)