The Tech Nut

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Posts Tagged Software

Sandman : The Ultimate Sleep Manager

Mar 26

Posted by The Nut in Journal, Tech | 19 Comments

Ever wondered why it is that despite all that processing power in your PC/laptop, it can never beat a simple old alarm clock? Simple stuff like waking you up in the morning? Well, there is now a solution – Sandman. Yes, I’ve had to make up a word or two to describe this software. What it does is simple – sing you lullabies or rudely awaken you at the appropriate time. And it does this with music. And the best part is, I made it! :-P

Using this program you can create a playlist of alarm songs, set the time you want to wake up, set a snooze timer (optional), leave your PC on, and go to sleep. Rest assured, if you’ve set the volume right, you’ll be wide awake by that time.

The program is designed to present you with a series of simple (?) maths problem at the time you’ve set. At this point, all the controls will be locked, and you have no option but to answer the problems to shut off the music i.e. you’ll be wide awake in no time. If you enabled the snooze timer, the snooze button will be enabled, which will tone down the volume, only to present you with another question after the snooze timer goes off. You need to answer 3 correct questions to switch off the alarm.

There is also an optional sleep timer, which means you can create a playlist of songs, set a sleep timer, and go to bed, knowing that the music will stop. You have the option of letting Windows shutdown after the sleep timer, or leaving it on, for the alarm to wake you up.

I’m working on a module which will allow the PC to go into standby/hibernation and switch itself on at the appropriate time to wake you up. This bit will take some time to develop, but till then, this is a relatively stable release I have here.

To download, click on the icon below.

Sandman

Sandman v1.0

Just unzip the files, and run setup.exe.

This program was written using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, in VisualBasic. Also, you need to have Windows Media Player installed, otherwise the player won’t work. It uses .NET Framework v4, which most of you might not have installed. Don’t worry, the setup will automatically download the stuff for you. It’s a bit large, so you might have to wait a while, if you have a slow internet connection. But please, please do try out the program.

For developers: I used the AxWMP library to reference Windows Media Player i.e. create an instance of a WMP ActiveX control. Apart from that, all of it is pretty much my own work. There are still some niggles to be sorted out, but I hope that you guys can point out the more glaring errors. Thanks.

I’d really appreciate some feedback on this application.

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Ovi Suite 2 : Not quite there yet…

Feb 20

Posted by The Nut in Tech | 5 Comments

Since I got my new phone, I naturally decided to get the lastest Ovi Suite from Nokia for my PC. The blurb on this piece of software is quite interesting. Apparently, they’ve thrown PC Suite out of the Window, and started from scratch for Ovi Suite.

First, a little background info. Ovi is the new service launched by Nokia, to keep your contacts, photos, mail etc. in one place. Sort of like the hub between the PC and your mobile phone. It’s not exactly 100% original (ref. MobileMe from Apple), but it’s the gesture that counts… In the new Ovi Store, you can buy applications and music for your phone as well.

One small point, from your PC, you can browse around in the Ovi Store, but to download anything, you’ll have to do it from your device. This is pretty crappy, mainly because, without a dedicated data plan on your connection, it will cost you an arm and a leg to download anything at all.

I’ve been using PC Suite for a while, with my old mobile, and it’s been great. It was relatively light weight, and syncing contacts, messages and the calendar didn’t take anytime at all. The inbuilt music manager was a bit weak, but it was soon replaced with Ovi Music (not to be confused with Ovi Suite). One thing I liked about PC Suite, was that it was fast, and it looked clean.

Ovi Music is good, but it’s extremely resource hungry, takes ages to start up, and worst of all, doesn’t read IDv3 ratings from the files. This is very important for me, because I keep all my songs rated, and create auto playlists to manage syncing to my iPod and mobile. So, I don’t use Ovi Player much. Plus, there’s no way to transfer ratings from any other player to Ovi Player, so there was no way I was going to be using that software on a daily basis.

So, let me get back to Ovi Suite, the software. First thing’s first, it’s kinda huge. 93MB huge to be precise. On the home page, you’re presented with 4 things – Contact, Photos (and Videos), Messaging and Music. All of them are really self-explanatory. Once you hook up your phone, it takes a while for it to recognise it.

One really irritating thing is that each time you connect your phone, it will go through the entire process of identifying and syncing. And it is terribly slow, when it comes to syncing contacts. I mean, all the contacts put together will be well under an MB, but it still takes a couple of minutes to sync them. Then it starts syncing photos and videos. Listen Nokia, if I move my files after syncing them from my mobile, does not mean I want another copy in the folder YOU choose. Geddit?

And the absolute worst thing about is is that it’s hellbent on syncing stuff when you connect your mobile, even after you uncheck all of the auto-sync options. Couple that with the fact that you could erode a mountain by the time it syncs contacts, and that it will not let you copy anything into or out of the mobile before the sync is over, means that it’s very frustrating working on this application.

Plus, once you install it, it still looks user friendly but it is not resource friendly at all. The bloody thing idles at 200 MB! Plus, it is extremely sluggish, when you change tabs. The map loader is a good thing, but now a separate app is available for that, so it’s kind of pointless.

On a whole, I’m extremely disappointed with Ovi Suite, will recommend that they cut their own legs off before installing it. I for one, am sticking to good ol’ PC Suite.

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Akismet : The Saviour

Jan 18

Posted by The Nut in Tech | No Comments

Well, before my active return to the blogosphere, I had occasionally opened the Admin panel on my blog from time to time to check my stats and for new comments. Thing is, I have the One Click Updater installed, which is a great little plugin for WordPress which notifies you about updates for your plugins and also installs them for you.

Also, WordPress can now update itself, a feature which was missing some releases back. All I need to do, is click the Update button. So, the point is that on one of my occasional forays into the Admin panel, I upgraded both WordPress and Akismet.

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin, which checks all comments before allowing them to be displayed. It checks for stuff like a suspiciously large number of links in the text, repeating text patters etc. But that’s besides the point. The fact is that Akismet blocks a good amount of spam. To get the actual statistics, you should head over to their website, and check the upper-right corner.

So, the problem was that all this updating shenanigans, coupled with the fact that I wasn’t particular about which order I did it in, meant that Akismet was not enabled for a period of about two weeks. So, when I bothered to check up the comments yesterday, you can imagine my worry when I saw 20,000 comments in the list.

In the Approved list.

Now this is really bad news, because even if they had been awaiting moderation, I could’ve just re-enabled Akismet, and asked it to recheck the moderation queue for spam. But the fact that all the spam was approved, meant that I’d have to manually to add it to the moderation queue and then recheck.

This was problem was compounded by the fact that for some reason, only one comment was showing up in the Comments page in the Admin panel. Later, I found out it was because of my theme. If you encounter a similar problem, I suggest you switch to Kubrick till the problem is sorted, or your last working theme.

Once I did that, I could see more comments. But the thing is, even 20 per page with 20,000 comments means a hell lot of pages to unapprove. So, I had to increase the comments per page to something like 250. Any more than that, and I would get errors like URI Too Long, or a server memory limit warning. So, even with 250 per page, it took me a very, very long time to get all the comments on the moderation queue.

The spam was pretty much standard : Viagra, Cialis, sex and some other meds I had never heard about…

Anyway, with a 256kbps connection, it was still agonizingly slow, loading up all the comments, and I finished it all by 4AM! And this just goes on to show exactly how valuable Akismet is for bloggers around the world. Even a single day without can mean hell.

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Google Chrome : For the impatient ones (with loads of RAM)

Aug 22

Posted by The Nut in Tech | 4 Comments

A gentle reminder that Google Chrome may be fast, on the surface, but it’s equally fast at gobbling up RAM. Guess that till that hole if plugged, I’m back to good old Firefox. I guess I’ll just have to bear with the loading times. :-( Or I might try Opera, and see if that’s any better…not Safari, because that isn’t so good with security…

I believe the term is ‘eating one’s own words’. They weren’t very tasty…

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Google Chrome : For the impatient ones

Aug 21

Posted by The Nut in Tech | 3 Comments

Yes, I consider myself among them. I mean, I’m the kind of guy who gets annoyed when Windows takes more than 30-40 seconds to boot up. In all other aspects of life, I’m very patient, but when it comes to stuff like this, I must have stuff done quick.

Enter Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Well, once I headed over to the download site, I was handed the thing I hate the most, from the core of my heart. A web downloader. Now I’m the kind of guy who prefers his setups to be standalones. I should be able to use a USB drive to transfer the setups to a friend’s PC without an internet connection (yeah, I know what you’re thinking…a web browser for a PC without internet…intriguing…if so, leave that chain of thought, cuz this is purely hypothetical). Anyway, I should be able to install the software without any problems. In fact, most of Google’s software uses Google Updater, which is a downright pain in the arse.

Anyway, back to the browser. It takes a very short time to download, and sets itself up with no hassles. This is another thing I don’t like about Google software. At no point does it ask you where to install itself. It isn’t a problem for me because I’ve set my Program File folder to E: drive, but there are other poor souls out there who would appreciate this tiny gesture.

The browser is refreshingly open and simple. This is one browser which realises that a user doesn’t want to see toolbars and loading bars, or borders or anything of that sort. It’s very very minimalistic. Yet, I felt completely at home, immediately. I instinctively knew where all the buttons would be.

The homepage when you start a new tab is pretty useful. It’s like Opera’s Speed Dial, with the exception that there aren’t any keyboard shortcuts to launch these sites. Chrome takes some time to understand your browsing patterns and accordingly displays the sites in the 3×3 grid.

Importing settings was a very simple job, and in a jiffy, my bookmarks and history from Firefox was transferred to Chrome. I couldn’t import all my saved passwords though. And this is a small problem with Chrome – it doesn’t encrypt my passwords like Firefox used to. Firefox had a Master Password with which I could unlock my passwords. Chrome doesn’t have anything of that sort, which means that unless my user in Windows has a password, anyone can access my mail. :(

The Options page is pretty sparse, with very few settings you can tweak. There’s nothing like Firefox’s about:config, which I can use to tweak with the more inner settings. However, it is all excessively simple.

Google Chrome has an internal Task Manager which I think is a very good addition. This allows a user to kill off a pesky tab, without bringing the entire browser crashing down. This is actually because of the fact that for every tab you open, Chrome creates a new thread, which can be individually closed.

Incognito Mode of course is a very widely publicised feature of Google Chrome, for reasons both you and I know very well. It basically makes your actions untraceable on your PC. However keep in mind that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or the server you contact may be logging your activity, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Incognito ensures that no history is maintained for that period and that cookies are deleted after the Incognito session is over, apart from other things.

Chrome lacks in the ability to create multiple profiles, like I did in Firefox. I used to keep one for General use, and one for my Quizzing, where I had ~1500 Wikipedia articles open, and all of them loading from the offline cache.

But I seem to be forgetting one very major detail. Actually, it has a lot to do with the title of the post – For the impatient ones. Compared to all the other browsers I’ve used, Google Chrome stands out for one very important reason. Assuming that you’re PC is idling, and you double-click on the Chrome icon, you’re very likely to see the homepage within a second or two, which is quite an achievement in my opinion.

Internet Explorer gets close, but I don’t trust that browser. Even though it recently beat all the others in a malicious software test, I still can’t come myself to believe that it offers impenetrable security. Firefox is the only other major contender, and it takes ages to load into my PCs memory. And in case any other CPU intensive task is taking place, I can literally go make myself a cup of coffee before Firefox comes to life. And yes, I’ve tried the Safe Mode with no add-ons, but it doesn’t really help all that much. I will still be using Firefox for certain tasks, like, for example, quizzing, but I have to admit that I’m addicted to the speeds that Chrome offers when starting up. And it’s not as if it’s a slouch when rendering pages. I can’t give you exact figures, but I’ve never for a moment felt that it was slow.

In conclusion, it’s a pretty good browser. It’s officially my primary browser now, till it crashes bigtime or something along the lines of that…

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