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New Year, New Theme

Submitted by Xenoveritas on

It's a new year, which means its time for a new theme! I'm sure there are some bugs left to work out, but this new theme is CSS3 up the wazoo, with a ton of neat new features like some effort put into implementing a "responsive design" that changes with page sizes.

I've only tried the new theme in Firefox 17 and Internet Explorer 10 for now. I'm pleased to say that everything just works in IE10. All the CSS3 things that I'm doing in Firefox worked exactly the same in IE10. Nice!

Fixing my Windows 8 Start Screen

Submitted by Xenoveritas on

When I open my Windows 8 Start screen, right click, and select All Apps, the shell crashes. (I get a few entries in the Application Event Log, including "[t]he shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted.") Note that the "shell" includes the Start screen, all open File Explorer windows, and the desktop itself. Kind of annoying, especially because it meant I couldn't access everything installed on my computer.

My brother clued me in that the problem was probably caused by existing entries in the Start Menu.

He was right.

Oh, right, the CherryPy remote control thing Xenoveritas
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Oh, right, I did say I was going to try and create a CherryPy-based webapp front end. So here is a very quick and dirty implementation that provides some very basic control over the TV. Specifically, basic volume control (up and down), and the various input controls. Which is what I wanted out of it.

Playing Around With Python and My TV

Submitted by Xenoveritas on
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I recently noticed that my Sharp AQUOS TV had a section in the owner's manual describing "IP Control." Now you might think that this would be something about DRM, but it actually describes commands you can send the TV via TCP/IP in order to remote control it. Nifty!

The manual seems to suggest using telnet to do this, but I've found that it doesn't work. But sending the commands via Python does work.

So let's get to some basic code!

iOS 5 Mini Review

Submitted by Xenoveritas on

I've only been playing around with iOS 5 for a few hours, since the update took forever thanks to the infamous "Error 3200," so this is just some first impressions.

What I Like

Android's Notification Center

Notifications now appear at the top of the phone, and you can swipe down to view them (and various widgets) at any time. So that's nice. And exactly the same way it works in Android.

Heh Xenoveritas

I know I'm not the only one this is happening to, but it's still amusing:

Apple's website returning a HTTP 403 Forbidden error

Update: Just to be clear, this happened immediately after the iPhone 4S was announced (October 4th, 2011), but before Steve Jobs's death (October 5th, 2011). Note the time stamp.