*hint*
· 2008-02-23 12:12 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
I’m about to buy a new digital camera…
Cool browser plugin: PicLens
· 2008-02-22 21:23 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
Just a few minutes ago I downloaded PicLens, a neat image-browser plugin for Firefox (IE and Safari are also supported). This plugin enables you to browse through (online) images galleries with a really smooth interface. All pictures are place on a virtual "wall" and by clicking them you can enlarge them. It’s almost like watching paintings in a museum (although less boring for most of us). The plugin loads quickly and navigation is extremely natural. We have seen this kind of navigation before in the Microsoft SeaDragon demos, but this time you can try it on your own system. Although not as advanced as SeaDragon, PicLens is a "finished" & working product… And it’s free too.
If you thought that the TabEffect plugin was cool, you’ll be amazed what this does, I promise!
The way PicLens works: the browser plugin picks up a RSS feed generated by the site and retrieves the images from there. Most popular image sites are supported like Flickr, Picasa, Live Images and Google Image search.
To help promote this plugin, there’s also a flash-based version called PicLens-Lite, which does also generate a nice gallery (although the plugin itself is much better).
After you’ve installed PicLens you can go to my Flickr page, press the blue "arrow" icon on any of the images to browse them.
The Hanselman Effect
· 2008-02-06 20:33 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
The last two days have been the busiest days ever on my little website!
It all started with a small email to attend Scott Hanselman on the existence of the Cosmos project . He dedicated his Weekly Sourcecode #15 to the project, and linked back to my site in his posting.
As a result of this the traffic to my site has quadrupled!
I know the number of visitors I get is really tiny, but I’m proud of it anyway. The postings I do here are for fun mostly, but sometimes they answer questions I couldn’t answer for by some quick Googling. (Like the cases with the Vodafone BSOD , the Virtual Earth on ASP.NET thing and those ATI mobility drivers )
The most popular article until now was the Silverlight RSS feed displayer which I wrote using Visual Studio Orcas. If I can find the sourcecode again (ahem, deleting a VPC is way too easy…) then I’ll rebuild it again with Visual Studio 2008 and the latest Silverlight release.
And according to Feedburner I also gained some new RSS feed subscribers: A big welcome to you all! I’ll try as hard as I can to entertain you with nice stuff.
Server-Quest
· 2008-02-02 12:33 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
Maybe you have played King’s Quest , Police Quest or Space Quest back in “the good old days”: when 64k was enough for everyone.
Nowadays we’re used to playing full-motion games on HD-tv’s, powered by multi-core consoles…
Anyway, now there’s another quest for you to solve:
Server-Quest : Can you help Matt the IT-Guy in keeping things running smoothly? Can you help him find the love of his life?
See if you can: Play Server-Quest
(ps. I’m not responsible for you wasting your time on this game)
Site under attack!
· 2008-02-02 11:46 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
Just a moment ago my website was under attack! But I’m happy to tell you that everything is fine again now. It doesn’t look like any permanent damage was done.
Vodafone mobile connect - BSOD
· 2007-06-30 10:23 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
Yesterday I tried plugging in a Vodafone Mobile Connect card into my Dell Latitude D810 laptop . I did it as described in the manual (yeah I know, who reads a manual anyway), but as soon as I plugged the card in my mouse stopped working and I got a Blue-Screen of Death.
I tried upgrading to the latest Vodafone Dashboard sofware, but it didn’t help.
So it was google-time again.
The card we’re talking about is a Novatel Wireless Merlin U630 card.
And after a lot of searching I found this forum thread where someone had a similar problem.
The solution is simple: You need to disable the “Texas Instruments PCI GemCore based SmartCard controller”.
Of course you can’t use any smartcards with your notebook any more after this, but you can re-enable the device any time you need it, just not while using the PCMCIA UMTS datacard.
Googleing on the smartcard controller I also found this faq which describes the exact same issue. Too bad I couldn’t find that earlier…