Read the rest of this entry »I wanted to keep track of fuel consumption (L/100km) for our two vehicles. I wanted to be able to send email to enter data, or use a simple web interface. The email part was important, because I don’t have a data plan on my cellphone, so being able to compose and queue an email at the pump, to have it sent automatically when I was later within reach of a known Wifi network, was a very nice to have.
Implemented in PHP, the result is not that pretty, but it’s nice enough, and the ease of use allows me to keep it updated without too much hassle.
Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category
Fuel Consumption Tracker
Monday, June 14th, 2010Hacking Crome extensions – How I added keyboard shortcuts to 1Password in Chrome
Friday, May 14th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »I love 1Password. It looks good, it’s safe, it has a web-accessible UI, it has an iPhone/iPad application…
What I didn’t like about it was it’s Chrome extension, which required me to use the mouse to click the 1Password icon in the toolbar each time I wanted to auto-fill a form with login details!! That was so annoying.
So annoying in fact that I took upon myself to implement keyboard shortcuts in the 1Password extensions.
Videos5 – A web application to stream videos to your iPad (and all)
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »The iPad is now very popular in the house.
I seldom can use it as a recipe book to cook something, as it was intended… It’s either in my oldest’s hands, playing Labyrinth 2 HD, either on my wife’s lap, browsing her Facebook & reading her emails.But still, sometimes, it’s nice to use it for other things.
One such other thing would be to stream videos from the Amahi home server sitting in a closet upstairs.
One can watch a recorded TV show in bed, or hand the iPad to the big kid to let him watch Cars or Nemo while we’re watching the news, or something non kid-friendly.Being of the DIY kind, I made my own web-app to achieve this, using the new HTML5 videos tag.
Greyhole: How cool is that?
Saturday, March 27th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »Not long ago, a 1 TB hard drive that was part of my storage pool died (my fault really, handling it while it was powered up). Greyhole handled this beautifully, re-creating duplicate copies of the files that were stored on that drive to continue protecting all my data. But I didn’t have enough free space on the other drives to allow all the duplicates I want to be created.
Perfect timing to test a very nice feature of Greyhole: inclusion of remote hard drives in the storage pool.
Mac Widget: Vidéotron Internet Usage Monitor
Saturday, January 30th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »Having received earlier this week a letter from Vidéotron, my ISP, about my account getting capped at 100GB monthly in the upcoming months, I decided I needed an easy way to monitor my monthly bandwidth usage. A Dashboard widget was a good fit.
Greyhole – Easily expandable & redundant storage pool using Samba
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they’re connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.
How I plan to implement my own WHS Drive Extender-like system [UPDATED]
Sunday, November 29th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »I do like Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology. It allows oneself to aggregate a bunch of various-sized hard disks into one big storage pool. You can then define a number of shares that will share (!) that storage pool dynamically. And you can define which shares you want duplicated, which basically mean that DE (Drive Extender) will make sure that all the files on there are on two different physical hard drives, to safeguard those files against hardware failures.
I’ve been searching for quite a while to find a similar system that would fit my needs, and never found one. Then yesterday, I had an idea on how I could implement such a system myself.
TV Forecast widget not working? Here’s how to fix it.
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »TV Forecast is a nice widget that Matt Comi created. You tell it what TV shows you watch, and it will keep track of the upcoming episodes for those shows.
The only down side to that widget is that it data-scrape TV.com to get its data.
Not only is this illegal, but it also tends to break the widget every time TV.com change their layout in any way.Getting tired of that, I decided to open the widget’s code, and change the data source to something more stable: TheTVDB.com
Facebook application: Import Gallery pictures into Facebook
Friday, June 22nd, 2007Read the rest of this entry »The result is now a nice Facebook application which seems to work just fine for most people who tried it:
Gallery Import application on FacebookNow when I want to import Gallery pictures into Facebook, I’m just a few clicks away!
GobbleRSS – PDA-friendly web-based RSS reader
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007Read the rest of this entry »After I finished reading my latest book, which is what I usually do during my daily commuting to and from work, I started looking for a way to read my RSS feeds on a Palm device during that time. First, a friend of mine lent me his Palm Zire 31 (thanks!). Next, I started looking for a way to get unread RSS items from Google Reader into the Palm device. I was pretty happy with Google Reader itself, since I could read news at home, or at work (and soon enough, between the two) and not have to deal with duplicates etc. Using a desktop client would have been much more complicated, especially since I use a Mac at home, and a Windows PC at work. So, after looking for a while for a Google Reader API, or some other ways to download unread RSS items from Google Reader, I gave up.
I then started to implement my own Google Reader, which I dubbed GRC – Google Reader Clone.
