Code Retard

Apparent Corporation, makers of the popular Intelliscanner barcode scanners, has announced that their new Doxie document scanner is in private beta-testing and on track for release to the public in November, 2009.
Doxie is a USB-powered 600-dpi photo, document, and receipt scanner designed to integrate with a number of undisclosed Web and Mac apps. While I’m personally disappointed that Apparent didn’t go with the pink and white Good & Plenty candy color scheme, the Doxie is heart-friendly and comes emblazoned with a number of pink hearts. The biggest heart is on the single scan button, which is just visible in the top right of the photo above. I was shocked to find a mistake in the press release, in which they said there were 9 hearts on the device. There are actually 10: one above the “i” in the logo, 8 after the logo, and one on the scan button.A cool thing about Doxie is that it will automatically know when you’re trying to scan a photo, clean up the photo (straighten it and trim if necessary), and then politely offer to put the photo into your iPhoto Library, Flickr pool, or other web apps. As an Apparent spokesperson noted, the company isn’t interested in coming out with yet another piece of software to store your receipts and documents. Instead, they want Doxie to work with as many existing Mac, Windows, and Web apps as possible. One comment from the developers that may point to some rather unique functionality is that they recommend using Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Doxie will retail for $129, and you can sign up for updates and early release information at the new website, which went live today.

A new search engine by the creators of Mathematica – "long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone…enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer." Give it a try at www.wolframalpha.com.

It can pull up data on any country if you type it in, or look up complete stock price histories and comparisons, as well as perform complex mathematical computations. If you need more info on how to use it, be sure to check out the examples. You will find that Wolfram|Alpha is simply just loaded with tons of information you will probably never care about.

Safari+ is not an iPhone app, it’s just a webpage. But it’s not just any webpage, it contains useful links that enhance your mobile Safari browsing experience by adding text search capability, display just images on any page, display just the links on any page, scroll to the end, and language translations. The concept is simple: simply bookmark in your iPhone the bookmarklet. From iPuhelin’s website, makers of what they call Safari+:

Bookmarklets are little pieces of
Javascript code that can be saved as
ordinary bookmarks in your web browser.
They enhance your browsing experience
by giving you super-instant access to
useful tools and special functionality.

Read more »

One long time criticism of iPhone’s mobile Safari web browser is the lack of an iPhone Flash plugin that enables Flash-based video playback and Flash-based effects. Though the Safari web browsing experience on the Apple iPhone is undoubtedly the best on a mobile phone, the lack of Flash support kills the joy about. But instead of waiting for Apple to figure something out, which they haven’t yet even as of the latest firmware version 2.2, you can actually do something about it yourself now. Enter the iMobileCinema iPhone Flash plugin for Safari. Using the steps below to install this plugin, you’ll soon be able to enjoy all browsing all the Flash enhanced sites you weren’t able to browse before.

Read more »

The numbers are in and Google came out the big winner this past August, marking its largest monthly gain the web search market in months. The gain came at the expense of rival Yahoo Inc, the distant runner-up player in the US web search space, as its share of the market actually dropped 0.9% to 19.6% from July. Meanwhile Microsoft, in third place, dropped 0.6% to 8.3% according to comScore Inc.

Image/Gayle Laakmann

The latest del.icio.us add-on for Firefox, version 2.0.95, has caused the favorite tags to stop working. I had been using this as my main bookmark manager and to see them stop functioning was a huge inconvenience for me. Luckily there is a workaround fix:

1. Log out of delicious.
2. Uninstall delicious addon 2.0.95.
3. Quit Firefox
4. For XP Users, delete: C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\.default\delicious.rdf (assuming you’re using .default profile, otherwise replace with your own)
5. For Vista Users, delete: C:\Users\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\.default\delicious.rdf (assuming you’re using .default profile, otherwise replace with your own)
6. Restart Firefox and install delicious add-on version 2.0.64

I upgraded to Firefox 3 today and after the switch I found out that I had lost my left and right navigation buttons. After floundering for a bit, I was able to restore them quite easily but at the expense of my current toolbar layout and settings.

If your problem isn’t as severe as mine, it might be as easy as right clicking on the toolbar and selecting “Customize…”

From there it’s as easy as dragging the left and right direction buttons back onto your toolbar. If that doesn’t work you could also try clicking on the “Restore Default Set” button boxed in red below. I must warn you that this will delete your layout and restore state it was at the very first day you ran Firefox.

In my case, neither method worked so I had to take a drastic measure. Read more »

How to connect to your Iphone file system:

Step 1.

Download Installer.app and or unlock your iphone:

Article on how to unlock iphone is here: http://www.coderetard.com/2008/05/23/unlock-iphone-steps-using-ziphone-with-pics/

Step 2.

Open the Installer
Read more »

Well, if you are like me, an early adaptor, you probably are already using Firefox 3 Beta. As many of you know, a lot of your Firefox plugins do not work or is not compatible with the new FF3.

Here’s a simple way to make it work:

1. Type About:config in your FF3 Browser address bar.
2. Right click->New->Boolean then, type in extensions.checkCompatibility, select false.
3. Right click->New->Boolean then, type in extensions.checkUpdateSecurity, select false.

This pretty much disables your compatibility and update security check for all the plugins. Now, some of your plugins may not work and you might not be able to re-start your browser.

Well, if this happens, it’s pretty easy to fix. (for PCs)

Go to G:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\bwso99u0.default\extensions where Administrator is your Windows username and bwso99u0.default can be different. (It will be something along the lines of xxxxxxx.default)

Note: Make sure to set your File browser to view “hidden files and folders” as the Application Data folder is actually hidden as default. Make sure that the folder you are in matches above, otherwise you are probably in the wrong folder

Once you are in your extensions directory, you can move any of the folders to a temporary folder until your Firefox 3 works. Or simply move all of them to a temporary folder then move them back to the extensions directory one by one until you get a handful of plugins that work.

I’ve also found out that Google Toolbar doesn’t work with Firefox 3 so, above steps will most likely be necessary in your hacking without completely disabling your precious foxy animal.

After upgrading my server with the latest patch, one of the problems was that my ASP.NET website properties was greyed out. I was unable to change 1.1 to 2.0.

The simple fix on sub directories is:

go into IIS -> Right Clicking on the sub-directory in question and selecting Properties -> clicking on the directory tab -> Clicking Create under the application settings section. You will then be able to change the ASP NET version on the sub-directory.

To ge the whole site into 2.0, i just recreated the site.