January 2009
The DTV Extension Should Not Pass
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 8:47pm
The House of Representatives are trying to push a bill, 111th Congress H.R. 681, to extend the digital transition date from February 17, 2009 to June 12, 2009. Instead of requiring analog signals to stop, they can continue to broadcast until June.
I do not support the main point of this bill, although I do support pieces of it.
First off, Americans have known about this transition date for at least a year. Is that not enough time to get things together? There are people now who are scrambling to get coupons for converter boxes but can't because they're either out of coupons or out of boxes.
Forcing broadcasts to be in digital format will free the airwaves; more channels and streams can be fit into less space, therefore taking up less of the airwaves.
More channels will be available to consumers. Imagine how many channels are available on digital cable, then imagine getting those for free. With more channel choices available to consumers, more content will be available for a broader group of people. This also opens up the door to having more channels similar to OnDemand, where you're interacting with your television to pick shows and subscribe to episodes, even record shows to watch later.
With more interactive televisions and more channels, advertisers will have (some) access to consumers favorite shows and trends. This means better targeted advertisements and better returns on advertisement investments.
Freeing up the airwaves will give room to more wireless technology. Imagine having free wireless internet provided to your entire city. This technology is already in place in some areas, but with the transition to digital there will be more room to broadcast and expand. Rural and poor areas will finally have fast, free internet access. With todays society moving things like newspapers and commerse online, it's important to extend internet access to as many people as possible.
I do see the other side. For those consumers who have analog televisions (the ones who don't use cable, but antennas) they will lose their tv signal unless they get a Digital to Analog converter. These converters are pretty expensive. The government was offering coupons to help make it less expensive. But their budget on the coupons has run dry and a lot of them have expired already, making them usless. The message that "hey you're going to lose your TV signal" was not really pushed hard until the start of this year. Some consumers still haven't received their boxes because they waited to get a coupon and now they're too late.
However, I think people have had enough time (as I said earlier) this has been in place for over a year. All of the benefits to moving over to digital should not be postponed because some people didn't choose to take the responsibility to get their boxes and coupons earlier. It's like waiting until 11:00 PM Sunday night to start a school project due on Monday morning.
I think that the date should not be moved. The transition date has been burned into our memory, and there was a lot of planning around this date for both consumers and broadcasters. I do, however, think that the expiration date for the coupons should be extended. Because of the shortage and everything with them, consumers should still have a chance to get their coupons. But let's not delay the innovation for the rest of us.
If you have an opinon on this issue, write your representatives.
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Programming for the Gameboy Advance
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 4:36pm
Recently I bought a Gameboy Advance SP (I was playing some of my old games and got tired of the screen being so hard to see.) Being the nerd I am, one thing I keep wondering is what the code looks like behind the games. I'd imagine it's not too different than any other assembly language.
I don't have the patience to learn everything about assembly, so I got looking into other programming languages for GBA. Come to find out there are a lot of people who use some libraries and compilers to write their games in C. So guess what I'll be doing for next few months? 
Working with things like Javascript and PHP all day, the syntax of C makes perfect sense but I'm a bit rusty on the actual code. So I'll be working on trying to brush up on my C and spit out a working game. Any ideas? I'm thinking of starting out small with little slot games or something and working my way up to an RPG.
The Pern Project - Full of tools and tutorials on Gameboy Advance programming.
Visual Boy Advance - A nice GBA emulator, useful for testing compiled code.
If anyone has a good tutorial on Gameboy or Gameboy Color programming, could you send me the link? I wanted to start out with a more simple system but I can't find any good tools and tutorials on it.
One thing I don't like is having to run Windows in virtualbox to run the development tools. If I find a good Linux development suit I'll post it.
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DIY Verizon Ringtones
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Tue, 01/20/2009 - 11:54pm
For those of you using cell phones, one of the more costly features is the ability to download custom ringtones. Some ringtones on Verizon Wireless can cost $8.00. That's almost half the price of a standard CD for a 30 second clip of one song.
Some carriers and phones let you choose an mp3 from your music player to use as a ringtone. Others are open enough to let you go online and (for a price usually) find a ringtone and get it sent to your phone. However, on Verizon Wireless you seem to be stuck. You either buy a ringtone through Verizon's Get It Now feature or you wait for a Free download to show up in Get It Now which rarely ever happens.
With some tinkering and exploration online and on other web sites, I've found a way to get your favorite ringtones onto your Verizon phone for free and using any operating system. You'll need the following:
- Your favorite mp3 file
- Audacity sound editor. You will also need to make sure you have the LAME MP3 Encoder so that you can export as an mp3 file.
- An E-mail address
- Pix messaging. If you don't have a texting plan, be careful as Verizon may charge you for downloading a text/pix message.
The first step is to open up your mp3 file in Audacity. Select about 30 seconds worth of the song that you want to use as your ringtone. Some phones support longer, but it keeps the file size down and therefore makes it faster to send. Also Verizon may reject your message if it's too large.
You can go up to Edit > Trim and this will crop your 30 seconds of music. Now go to File > Export and save your file as an MP3 file. The trick is to save it so that the file is an MP3, but its file extention is .midi. So tack on .midi onto the end of the file name.
save file with a .midi extention
Select yes in this dialog box
So what we have so far is a 30 second clip of a song saved as a mp3 file with a .midi file extention. Simple right?
Next, open up your email client. For the TO address, your email will be (tendigitnumber) @vzwpix.com. Example would be 5551230987@vzwpix.com. You need to make sure that you fill in a subject, so make it something like "ringtone" and fill in something for the body so make it something like "ringtone".
Attach your .midi mp3 file you made earlier, and send the email.
Make sure you fill in both a subject and body for the email!
You should get a pix message on your cell phone. After you open it, go to options and select Save as Ringtone.
You may need to play around with the settings on Audacity to get the best sounding ringtone. I'd suggest having it on mono instead of stereo, or raising the bitrate at which it encodes your mp3 file.
If you need help with anything, or you have any recommended settings post a comment or contact me.
Update:
This will not charge you for "data transfer" which can be expensive. This will only charge on your bill as a Pix-Flix message. If you have texting on your plan, you will not be charged at all. If you don't have a texting plan, it will only cost about 25 cents for receiving a pix-flix message.
Update on Image Mirror
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Thu, 01/15/2009 - 9:05pm
As some of you may know, I started a small web site called Image Mirror that lets users upload an image to multiple image-hosting services with one click. Although the web site still works, it's been in beta for about five months as a I really haven't been working on it much.
But now it's going to make a comeback. I'm starting to completely rewrite the backend code (the stuff that makes it work) to be cleaner, meaner, and easier to work with as new features are added and edited. I'm also working on a brand new design, image-editing tools, and the works.
Some nice features you will see in the new site are quite cool. First you will have the option to hook your Image Mirror account up to your favorite social networking and picture hosting web sites. When you upload an image to Image Mirror, it will be copied onto your Facebook, Bebo, Flickr, Photobucket, Imageshack account, Webshots, as well as places like Picoodle and Upload3r image hosts.
Second, each user will have the ability to upload images via their cellphones with a simple SMS picture message. This will make it so much easier to quickly share photos on the go, without needing to visit each web site or use each web site's sms picture message function individually.
This may take about a month or more. I'm not usually busy but just as I started getting back into Image Mirror, I have finals and other things happening. If anyone's interested in being a beta tester (when it's partially done) just comment this post or contact me.
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Beautiful Day 6.x Drupal Theme Released
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Fri, 01/09/2009 - 5:22pm
This is the first theme I've completed porting by Arcsin.se. It's called Beautiful Day. The theme looks very nice, it's simple and works well. There are five block regions, and is valid XHTML (my demo site may give an error due to node content, but this does not reflect the theme's XHTML.)
The theme is available on the Downloads section under Drupal Themes, or click here. There is also a link to a demo of the theme on the Downloads section, or click here.
Hopefully I will get it ported to 5.x and 7.x versions of Drupal. I'll also be working on other themes and modules so stay tuned.
Downloads and Activity Streams
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 12:04am
Just a quick update, I've redone the Downloads page so that it is integrated with noobbox instead of being its own system (thanks to the Views module.)
Update: I took the activity stream off because I didn't want them to appear in the search engine.
Porting Arcsin Templates to Drupal
Submitted by Thirtysixway on Sat, 01/03/2009 - 7:00pm
There are a lot of places online to get free website and wordpress templates. A really nice one I found was Arcsin's Website Templates. He has Website, Blogger, and Wordpress templates available for free download (as well as professional templates for sale.)
As I become more involved with creating themes and modules for Drupal, I have decided to make some of the templates from Arcsin available to use as Drupal themes. Due to licensing issues (Drupal being under GPL and these templates being released under Creative Commons) they can't be distributed from Drupal.org's theme section, so I will have a page dedicated to my Drupal themes, ports and modules here on noobbox.
I'm having some small issues making the menus appear how I want them (child-items being indented, etc) but overall the porting is going fine. I don't have a date when they'll be available, but if you subscribe to my RSS feed you'll know when they're released.
If you have an existing web design, or you've found one you want, and you want it ported to Drupal, I can help. Depending on the project size I may even do it for free. :)
Update: I'm writing these themes and modules for Drupal 6.x, but I will eventually write them for Drupal 5.x (because so many people still use it and it is still supported by Drupal.org) and for Drupal 7.x when it is released.
