I recently rewarded my self with a USB headphone amplifier to use at work together with my Beyerdynamicheadphones. Initially the choice was between:

FiiO E7 USB DAC and Portable Headphone Amplifier (Black)

and

NuForce Icon uDAC-2 (Red) Headphone Amp and USB DAC (24bit/96kHz)

The FiiO is not available in Sweden, but I have found it in Europe so I thought I would be able to get it without any extra value added tax.

After reading some of the uDAC-2 drama I got cold feet and started searching for external soundcards instead of headphone amplifiers.

This got me on to this little gem
Behringer UCA202 Audio Interface

It’s way cheaper than my previous alternatives and Behringer is in it self a cheap brand, I was told by a musician friend. Evens so it made wonders to the sound of my old laptop. The sound is more controlled both in the low and high frequencies. The high pitched nails in my ears are totally gone. It’s not like it’s filtering ’cause I can still hear the artifacts of a bad mp3 compression.

Many caches can be found by looking at maps and satellite images, but the best is to have a GPS so that you can enter the coordinates of a cache and follow the GPS there.
I use the GPS and the included OVI maps on my Nokia E72.

One thing I really like about satellite view in the E72 is that it is possible to zoom in to a resolution of a few meters. It is very helpful when the GPS is not quite keeping up, especially in a city environment.

The default settings for the coordinate system in the phone is not the one used on geocaching.com so change it to: GGG MM.MMMM. Otherwise it is a pain if you are looking for a cache where the coordinates are the result of a quest or a math problem.

To get the cache coordinates to the phone I use a program called GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) and Dropbox.
In GSAK, I use a macro called Nokia (without version number). There is one known as Nokia xxx, where xxx is a version number, but I did not get it to work. The  Nokia macro exports all the caches that are currently visible in GSAK to an LMX file. LMX is the file format that Nokia uses to store locations on the map.

When I export LMX file I make it go to the folder called Public in my Dropbox directory. Right-clicking on the file when it is the gives you a public URL (Web address). I use the same file name for each export.
The public URL to my LMX file is saved as a bookmark in my phone. Then I can quickly import new locations to the phone when I export them with GSAK.

It looks pretty complicated, but takes less than half an hour to set up. It is time you save up quite fast because you do not have to convert the coordinates and enter them manually into the phone.

Other search terms:

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I fixed one bug that manifested itself when restarting a service and one that popped some warning dialogs when stopping a group of services.

When restarting a service it failed to stop it first, it was text-book-stupid. I forgot to negate a condition when checking the service status.

The other one failed when one service in a group was already stopped. It reported all services as already stopped even though it stopped them.

There is a new installer so please uninstall your previous version before trying this one. To get the .Net Framework go to smallestdotnet.

Now that you’re all excited about it go get it here.

Other search terms:

• logview4net

What disturbs more is that the state apparatus in the countries that we like to call democratic act like five year olds as soon as it affects them.

It’s one thing to confiscate domain names , strangle internet access and access to money , but when high-ranking politicians in the” democratic “states are talking about execution and assassination of an informant those states are not one bit better than China or Iran.

I think the first three assaults are clearly not democratic, but to publicly speak of assassination should make the most level-headed people worried.

In some ways, I think Eric Schmidt actually is right; If you have nothing to hide you have no need to worry.

I can understand that the states get upset if their military secrets are revealed, but the latest round of documents appears to be mostly revelations that falls back as embarrassment of public figures.

That’s probably the reason why governments starts to behave like this. The problem is not that Wikileaks leaks dangerous information, the problem is that the public finds out how bad their elected representatives behave. It has nothing with military security to do.

I do know about Google Reader but I’ve never grown fond of it.

I did find FeedShow so I guess I’ll have to give that a try.

Update 12/9: Found this list of feed aggregators: http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators

If you know of any other online feed reader please let me know. I might even consider hosting it by myself if I find an open source one that is nice to use.

Other search terms:

• bloglines alternative

In a weak moment I promised someone at work to write ‘Hello World’ with Microsoft’s various methods of data access so I was quite happy to hear this.

A quick Google session didn’t give me the code so I emailed Chris and asked it it is available online.
He responded fairly quickly and told me that the code is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ff707264.aspx

It is not that I want to quit my day job ’cause I actually like my job. I really want to help all the tenant-owner’s associations to have better boards of directors. The best part is that I am the secretary of the board where I live so I have some insight to board work in these organizations.

The strenuous part is that  there are not that many articles I could write with essential key words in to get some attention to the application. Apart from that my prejudice tells me I have to convince a lot of non computer savvy people to change the ways the do what they have always done.

It’s a nice challenge.

I guess it is a narrow path to walk. To cater to both those who don’t know about the power of Twitter, Facebook et al. and those that already know who @garyvee is.

It was a really nice successor to David Allens Getting Things Done that I read last week and Good To Great that I’ve listened to during my commute the last couple of days.

The lessons learned are the obvious: Get your sh*t together, stop procrastinating and start pushing that flywheel where YOU want it to go.

All three books have already had some impact on my life in getting me to step up the effort with my latest project that I’ll write about in my next post.

Not considering the lack of coordination and development environments, they definitively would have been better off using version control.