Archive - 2010
November 13th
Hard Cider Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/13/2010 - 13:46This morning we bottled our latest batch of hard cider. We now have a good supply stored away for the coming year. There is another batch brewing and we may get to more or two more batches this year.
The ciders that I’m making have been evolving and I’ve kept some of them from previous years. This afternoon, I’m going to have a cider tasting and open up several older bottles to see how they’ve aged. We’ve invited a bunch of friends over and the goal is to get all of them to share their impressions of the different ciders. I’ll then try to come up with a good summary of which ciders people liked best, what they liked about them and what I did to make them.
Various things that I’ll look at include the strength, color, clarity, sweetness, fizziness, tartness, bitterness, and any other descriptions I can come up with.
It is a beautiful day outside, so we will probably taste the cider around the picnic table in the front yard. We’ll probably have cheese to clear the palate and the dog running wildly around the guests. It should be fun.
If you have thoughts about what makes for a great hard cider, let me know.
November 12th
#ff @OneTrueFan @bpm140 @BlazingMinds @Ileane
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/12/2010 - 16:01Yesterday, I stumbled across Karen Woodham's (@BlazingMinds) blog post, Are You A One True Fan?. Being the innovator/early adopter type, I thought I would give it a try. Unfortunately, I’ve been having some computer difficulties and soon after I installed their Chromium extension, by computer crashed, taking several hours of work with it. It was pretty frustrating. To make things worse, for the next 24 hours, my computer crawled, and I could barely get anything done. I disabled the extension and things still crawled.
However, after a bit of cleaning up and time away from the computer, things are running smoothly again, so I’ve re-enabled the widget and started exploring.
As I started exploring, I noticed another name, Eric Marcoullier (@bpm140). I remember Eric from when he was co-founder and product guy of MyBlogLog, so it really caught my attention. Eric is CEO and Co-Founder of OneTrueFan, which he says “is one of several companies seeking to ‘gamify’ web sites.”
With the OneTrueFan extension loaded, you ‘check-in’, ala Foursquare, to each website you visit. You score points by sharing links. You earn badges, called patches in OneTrueFan, and there is a leaderboard. There is a way of setting up people that you are ‘following’, but I haven’t found any way to follow people or import who I’m following from Twitter or Facebook.
There are Twitter and Facebook connections, but I worry about the feedback loop and it being too spammy, so I’m not sharing a lot of links that way yet. In my normal blog surfing, I’ve already become the ‘OneTrueFan’ of nearly a dozen sites and have score over 1500 points.
@BlazingMinds points to @Ileane as the person that got her into OneTrueFan, so I figured I’d follow her and give her a shout out as well. It will be very interesting to watch how OneTrueFan evolves.
November 11th
Clearing the Cache - Veteran’s Day and Music
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/11/2010 - 13:06It is a beautiful sunny Veteran’s Day here in Connecticut. I’ve had so many things going on recently, that I thought I would take the day slowly and try to summarize some of what is going on and clear out some of the messages I’ve flagged in my inbox as deserving attention, but perhaps never seeing it.
Let me start off by highlighting the blog post I wrote on Monday about a phenomenal musician named Tony Mena. If you didn’t read that blog post, and more importantly, watch the video of one of his poems, please do so right now.
Tony and I have had some great emails back and forth, and I am hoping he will be a guest on Fiona’s Radio Show this coming Sunday.
The following Sunday, I am hoping to have John Tango Iversen on Fiona’s show. Also, Harpeth Rising may be in the Northeast in a month or so. If they have some gigs around Connecticut and time to call in to Fiona’s Radio Show, I hope to get them on.
We are also planning a special edition on World AIDS Day. Still in the planning stage.
The second part of Clearing The Cache was intended to be about education, but it seems like I’ve got more than to that topic for two blog posts, so, I’ll put this one up now and some education posts a little later.
November 10th
Updating to Kernel Power 44 on the #N900 - multiboot, nitdroid, fcam and blessn900
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/10/2010 - 22:29This evening, I went to update any programs on my N900 that had new versions. One of which was kernel power. Kernel Power is a wonderful package for the N900. The parts I like most are the battery usage statistics, IPv6 support, different file system support, and the ability to run mobile hotspot.
That said, I like to push the limits of my N900 so I’ve also got multiboot and nitdroid installed. So, I’m not surprised when things break when I do an upgrade, and things broke when I tried updating the kernel power package.
After poking around for a while, I found a fairly easy way to get things back. First, I tried using various things like pressing 0 when multiboot came up to get a stock kernel boot. That didn’t work. I booted into Nitdroid, and tried to edit the files from Nitdroid. No luck.
Finally, I ended up with this as the best procedure I could come up with.
First, I reflashed just the kernel. I still had my image around from upgrading to PR 1.3, so it was pretty easy:
sudo ./flasher-3.5 -F RX-51_2009SE_20.2010.36-2.002_PR_COMBINED_002_ARM.bin --flash-only=kernel -f -R
At this point, I rebooted, and still had multiboot and all my other applications running. I pressed 0, and this time I got to a stock kernel. I logged in, and uninstalled multiboot, and reinstalled it. I also installed multiboot-kernel-maemo and multiboot-kernel-power.
apt-get remove multiboot
apt-get install multiboot multiboot-kernel-maemo multiboot-kernel-power
I started testing and everything is back in order. Nitdroid is also still working. Now, I need to find out what the updated kernel power really does for me and start messing around a little bit more with Meego.
I also am using Blessn900 with the fcam drivers, and at this point, they appear to be working properly as well.
Next, I’ve reinstalled easy-chroot and easy-deb-chroot. I had these around a few reflashes ago and it is time to retry them. Next, I’ll see if I can get Qole’s easy-meego-chroot running.
Adding an RSS Feed Widget to Blogger
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/10/2010 - 11:33Today, I received a phone call from an old friend asking how to add a list of recent blog posts from another blog onto the side of his blog. What he was looking for is an RSS Feed Widget. He uses Blogger, so I thought I would dust off my old Blogger blog and try to find the easiest and cleanest way to do it.
However, first, I had a problem. My old Blogger blog hasn’t been updated in years and was still using classic templates. My guess was that the there might already be a gadget easily available for the new templates, so I thought I would start off by upgrading to the new templates.
This is where I ran into my first problem. You see, I set up the Blogger account a long time ago using my gmail id. Since then, I’ve started using a Google Account tied to my Orient Lodge domain. It can be confusing at times and I wish there were better ways of linking the accounts.
Anyway, when I went into my dashboard on Blogger, I found that I could create a post, and change a few minor settings, but I couldn’t change the template or design. After a while I finally figured out that I was logged in using my Orient Lodge userid which did not have administrative rights to the blog. I logged in using my gmail id and upgraded to the new template.
Then, I started looking around for a good predefined template that provides a nice RSS feed functionality. I didn’t find any, so I started looking for a more general approach. Finally, I settled on Widgetbox.
Here is what you should do:
Go to http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/rss. Put in the desired Feed URL. This is not the URL for the website itself, but for the feed. As an example, the Feed URL for Orient Lodge is http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/feed. Different blogs have different URLs for their feeds, so you’ll probably have to poke around a little bit.
Once you set the parameters you want, click on Get Widget, and then the Blogger button. It will then take you to a page where you can add the widget to your blog. After this, you may want to go to the Design page on your blogger dashboard and in the page elements section, move the widget to the place you want it on your blog.
It is worth noting that you can also add widgets this way to other blogging platforms. There are probably lots of other ways to do this, but this is one that I found that seems particularly easy. Do you add lists of other blog posts on your website?
