TomatoTomatoe – a lightweight pomodoro timer for Windows with worklog.

Posted on by pksan

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Today, a little utility for your productivity needs – TomatoTomatoe, a little pomodoro timer for Windows. Check out the pomodoro technique – it’s a nifty lifehack!

The program sits in your system tray and allows you to launch a 20 minute pomodoro, which will count down in a little always-on-top window. At the end, it’ll ask you to describe and rate your pomodoro and write your notes together with the date and start/end time to a csv in a location of your choice (it’ll save your choice). So after a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to import your data into Excel and run the most amazing stats.

Let me know your thoughts! — DOWNLOAD TomatoTomatoe

Control The Hype Machine website from the system tray (and download the current song)

Posted on by phikappa

I so happen to love the Hype Machine – a nifty website that aggregates music blogs – and happen to listen to it. A lot.

Of course, it’s a website. So to interact with it, you’ll have to bring the browser window to the front, pause/play/skip/love a song or whatever, and alt+tab back to whatever you were doing. Not good. Especially if you’re in the flow, working, writing, clicking cookies, whatever you do. There must be a better way…

So I fired up my trusty AutoIt and build a little tool that sits in the tray area of your task bar and waits for you to pause/play, ffw or rew or love the song. It even tells you the title! Yeah, I know. Just fire up hypem, navigate to the freshest tracks, your favorites or whatever, start playing and do what you need to do.

Caveat empor:

1) It works only with Chrome. And Windows. If you really really want it for another browser, comment.

2) You cannot minimize the hypem window or have it as an inactive tab in a Chrome window – so you basically open hypem.com in a new window and let it there, the window doesn’t need to be in focus or in the foreground though.

3) It works for me, but hasn’t been tested anywhere else. Let me know if you encounter issues.

— DOWNLOAD — (hypem_tb_stable.exe)

[Update] Working on a “Save this song as…” function with which you can download / save the current song playing. It’s still a bit wonky (in terms of identifying the mp3 file among all the chrome cache files), but if you empty your browser cache before using it it should work.

— DOWNLOAD (added features, but stuff might be broken) — (hypem_tb_latest.exe)

HOWTO Pair Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with Windows 7

Posted on by pksan

People on the internet (e.g. here and here) seem to have noticed that in Windows 7, pairing your Apple Bluetooth Keyboard is not an easy task.

If you find difficulties such as timeouts etc, there is a reason. Windows 7 wants to pair with the keyboard by giving you a code that you have to type on the keyboard, same procedure as in Mac OS X.

Now, the not-so-secret is: this does not work. After selecting the keyboard in the Add Bluetooth device wizard and clicking “forward”, you meet an eternally spinning waiting icon or some other error after a little while. Solution of the problem is to actually type a numeric code like “0000” or another one of your choice on the BT keyboard just after you clicked on “forward” and then hit enter (once or twice…). Windows 7 should ask you to confirm the key you just typed and voilá. If it does not work the first time, switch the keyboard on and off and give it another go.

Worked for me 🙂

Make keywurl 1.4 (beta 7) work with Safari 4.0.3 on Tiger

Posted on by pksan

Keywurl is great. Safari is great. Tiger too. Leopard, too. Etc.

For those of us who still use Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), Apple was nice enough to give us a version of the new Safari (Safari 4 or 4.0.3, to be precise).

Keywurl on the other hand is THE must-have extension to Safari. Now, keywurl 1.4 adds Safari 4.0.3 compatibility. But only on Leopard. Thus, when updating Safari to its version 4 on Tiger, the old version of keywurl you installed will not load anymore. The new keywurl version (as mentioned, 1.4 beta 7) is compatible with Safari 4.0.3 but when trying to install the 1.4 beta 7 Keywurl.bundle on Tiger it does not work. So far, no surprise.

I found a quick fix to make the 1.4 beta 7 Keywurl.bundle for Safari 4.0.3 work in Tiger. To do this, show the Keywurl.bundle’s package content, open the “Contents” folder and open the Info.plist with an appropriate text editor (may I suggest Smultron?). The part that needs fixing is:

<key>SIMBLTargetApplications</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>BundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.apple.Safari</string>
<key>MaxBundleVersion</key>
<string>5531.9</string>
<key>MinBundleVersion</key>
<string>5530</string>
</dict>
</array>

Simply substitute under MaxBundleVersion and MinBundleversion the first 5 for a 4, i.e. 4531.9 and 4530 instead of 5531.9 and 5530. Save, close/reopen Safari in case and voilá, Keywurl loads (and works).

Obviously, this is a quick hack with no guarantees, there are no problems on my machine besides the keywurl configuration pane in Safari’s preferences not working. But you can manually edit the /Library/Application Support/Keywurl preferences file (Keywords.plist) and in every case your previous configuration should still work.

Generating naturally-sounding electronic instruments

Posted on by pksan

As i was drifting off to sleep, my thoughts wandered to the topic of eletronically generated instrumental sounds. Think of a violin. Now, think of a soundwave that has (nearly) the same properties as a note played by that instrument. What sound will you “prefer”, i.e. what sound sounds more “natural”?

Do people tend to prefer real instruments over eletronically played versions? Why? What is the difference?

It could be that the subtle difference in the timbre (or the perception thereof) of the sound generated by the resonance of the body of the violin has a different shape than that generated by speakers. Or is the way the shape of the soundwave generated by the violin differs by small yet perceptible details from the eletronically generated one? Has the natural sound of a violin random influences such as the casual vibration of atoms that make up the string, influences that are beyond a trivial imitation by lines of program code and yet noticeable enought? Or is the difference only perceived when the listener know about the different origins of one same sound?

I will investigate this when i wake up.

Bloatware rebellion: JamFM.de again

Posted on by pksan

In the third instalment of my war on bloatware series, the first and only enemy of hassle-free streaming pleasure returns. After being defeated the first time around, JamFM.de has risen up again. As you probably won’t have noticed, jamfm.php on phikappa.eu has stopped working – it can’t extract the token anymore. Why? The reason is simple. The address where the flash player is located has changed. I replaced it in the script and everything in good order again. [Edit, one minute later] You’d think! But no, seems as JamFM’s own player cannot find the mp3 file anymore. Booo! We’ll switch to Windows Media, then.

(Outdated) Please find the new version where the old one was: http://phikappa.eu/jamfm.php (this does not work, but may at some point in the future

You can display an URL to paste to VLC or your mms:// capable player of choice here:

http://phikappa.eu/jamfm_asx.php

[Edit] Please find a script at http://phikappa.eu/jamfm/jamfm_wm.php that generates an .asx you can directly open with your Windows Media Audio-capable player of choice from the browser.

[Edit 2] Well, somebody already discovered the same “sikkrit” things on the nacamar server i did… so the next steps i’d have done just became redundant. Have fun with http://www.project-fx.de/tiscali/

Update: Circumventing bloatware – the jamfm.de web stream

Posted on by pksan

Here we are.

By going to http://phikappa.eu/jamfm.php you will be promted to save a *.pls file (or it will download automatically, depending on your browser settings).

You can open this pls file in your audio player of choice and it will start streaming the 96 kbps MP3 stream. 🙂

Even if you stop the playback and then get start it again, it should work – however, if you get an 401 error or a password request, just generate a new pls again.

Free the streams – against bloatware. 

Here’s the source code: jamfm.php code as a ZIP file.