bobpeers -> blog

For some bizarre reason HTC disabled voice input on the Desire, fortunately the open nature of Android means it’s not that hard to install (once some very clever people have done the hard work :-) )

First install the Voice app from this site, http://nimbu.amorvi.com/2010/04/add-voice-search-to-htc-phones/.

Next install the high resolution keyboard from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=624416 and follow the instructions.

It’s really simple to install, doesn’t require rooting of the phone and can be removed if you like. It’s great to see that it’s so simple to update a key component of Android without getting permission from Google or HTC first ;-). That’s one thing I love about Android, after all it’s my phone and I should be able to do what I like with it.

You can read the full story on Engadget or the Google page, but here’s a few screen shots taken from my HTC Desire.

If you don’t have the Android navigation app installed just download it from the market.

I’ve recently had this error when trying to update the AVD within Eclipse.

Failed to fetch URL http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml, reason: Server redirected too many times (20)

There’s also a bug report with the same issue, http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5944.

It turns out that AVD was caching my proxy settings from when I connected from work, the only way I could see to remove them was to open the file called androidtool.cfg which on Windows XP is located at C:\Documents and Settings\USER\.android\.

Simply edit the lines referring to proxy settings to remove the port and server address.

After finally getting the Fedora 13 Beta release installed on Virtualbox (the Fedora 13 Alpha wouldn’t install due to problems with X) I was disappointed to see that gnome-applet-netspeed is no longer available.

Here’s the list of removed packages but the good news is that gnome-applet-netspeed may be saved.

I’ve just bought a new Samsung LED TV (actually my first flatscreen) but immediately noticed that some of the channels had a strange diagonal interference pattern across them. I get my TV via cable which runs through the VCR into the TV.

After reading up about the problem I decided to try turning the VCR off and sure enough the interference immediately disappeared .

Maybe I’ll invest in a hard disk recorder now so i can get rid of the old VCR.

It’s a quote that’s been discussed over and over in the last few weeks since the launch of the iPad.

Being a geek I understand that Flash is not good for the web and I’ll be more than happy if there can be agreement on a video codec (maybe Googles own VP8) to use in the HTML5 specification. I’d much rather that video ran natively in the browser rather than relying on a plugin.

But just because I understand all these things doesn’t mean my girlfriend cares the same way I do.

We recently talked about the iPad (she’s not normally into ‘tech’ stuff but the iPad has been so heavily promoted that it’s hard to miss) and we talked about how such a device would be ideal for her.

She doesn’t have laptop and her computer is in our daughters bedroom so we can’t use it after she has gone to bed. Her requirements are also very minimal, email, web and that’s about it….oh except for those online Flash games.

And there’s the crunch. The iPad may be a great piece of hardware but she doesn’t want to know why Flash won’t work on the iPad, she just wants it to work. Usually Apple get this.

So for this reason alone I’ll never buy an iPad. Maybe I’ll buy her a Google tablet instead.

I recently came across a free, open source wireless network scanner. It available from the MetaGeek website and is called inSSIDer.

It’s very simple to use, just select the wireless adapter and start scanning. The graph displays all the wireless networks with their signal strengths and shows both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

I ran the scan from my flat and found 52 access points, but fortunately mine was the only one running on the 5GHz band :-)

I forgot to mention in my previous post that when using Virtuemart and Shadowbox you end up with double popups if you enable the lightbox option in Virtuemart.

It’s easy to fix just following the instructions on the Virtuemart formum

To summarise you just locate the file administrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes/htmlTools.class.php and find this line at line 899.

$link = vmCommonHTML::hyperLink( $image_link, $text, '', $title, 'rel="lightbox'.$image_group.'"' );

Replace it with this instead.

$link = vmCommonHTML::hyperLink( $image_link, $text, '', $title, 'rel="shadowbox'.$image_group.'"' );

I’ve never really looked at Joomla before, mainly because I had no need and am using WordPress as my blogging platform.

However a work colleague recently asked me to help migrate a Jooma 1.0 site to Joomla 1.5. Their site was a small online shop using the Virtuemart shopping cart.

In the end someone else did the work but it got me looking at Joomla in more detail.

It took me a while to work out the sections and categories as well as all the modules but after the rather steep learning curve I can see that Joomla is a very powerful CMS.

I made a test install using WampServer and had the site up and runnig in just a few minutes. The install instructions are very easy to follow and the install went very smoothly.

After that I installed Virtuecart, Joom!Fish and Ninja shadowbox.

JoomFish makes adding translations extremely easy (I live in Denmark so many sites are in Danish and English) and getting a basic site working was a pleasure.

Card Processing Fees

Looking at Joomla got me thinking about on-line shops so I investigated the cost of processing card payments in Denmark. Most people here use Dankort (a debit card) but to use this you have to sign up with PBS to get a merchant ID. Looking at their costs made me realise that a problem is the cost of traditional card processing companies.

PBS charges are shown here. For an account that only accepts Danish cards you pay DKK300 per month for 100 transaction (that’s about US $54) which seems a ridiculously large amount for a completely automated system.

If you want to accept VISA/Mastercard etc. then the prices is US $145 per month for 500 transactions.

I’ve read quite a few articles on companies trying to break this monopoly, most recently this one in Wired.

Hopefully these start-ups can change the balance of power and really open up micro payments and on-line shops to the masses.

I recently read about using rgba values for the background CSS property, it’s very easy to apply using JQuery, for example.

$("#element").css("background","rgba(255,63,73,0.5)")

The last value of 0.5 is just the opacity. Of course this doesn’t work in IE so you need to use.

$("#marker").css("filter","alpha(opacity=50)")

Finally to get the RGB values from the hex colour codes you can use these functions I found here.

function HexToR(col) {return parseInt((cutHex(col)).substring(0,2),16)}
function HexToG(col) {return parseInt((cutHex(col)).substring(2,4),16)}
function HexToB(col) {return parseInt((cutHex(col)).substring(4,6),16)}
function cutHex(col) {return (col.charAt(0)=="#") ? col.substring(1,7):col}