fourteenminutes.com

Picture Mover 1.1 released

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:09:38 +0000

A small update to Picture Mover which stops it from (embarrassingly) working when you have the Windows setting “hide extensions for known file types” enabled. You can download it from here.

Outlook2Evernote 1.3 released

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:16:49 +0000

A new version of Outlook2Evernote is now available that resolves a couple of issues relating to Outlook notes containing tabs, which would cause the import into Evernote to fail. Many thanks to Bart Epstein for his help in resolving these. You can download it from here.

Outlook2Evernote 1.2 released

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:57:00 +0000

I’ve issued an update to Outlook2Evernote which, hopefully, resolves the probably infamous MISSING_NOTE_TITLE error. This problem could have been fixed by removing a number of different characters from the title of the notes but I wanted something a little less “hacky” and, as a result, version 1.2 can now handle these characters and successfully import the resulting XML into Evernote. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this as I appreciate it has not been the fastest defect to get fixed. You can get it from here.

wmc-dedupe 1.1 released

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:28:41 +0000

A small update to wmc-dedupe which (rather boringly) fixes an error that is sometimes generated when the program cannot determine it’s own process ID.

However, something more interesting is that it can now identify two shows as being the same, even if one of them is (incorrectly) abusing characters with accents. For example, if the only difference between two shows is that one has in the description the word “fiancée” and the other has “fiancee” then they will both be treated as the same.

You can download it from here and updating should be as simple as overwriting the existing file with the new one.

AvantSlash 4.4 released

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:08:26 +0000

Another update to Avantslash by Han-Kwang which adds a tiny piece of new functionality that allows you to see extra thread and reply links for each comment. You can see these by clicking on the link at the very bottom of the page. As always, it is downloadable from the usual place.

wmc-dedupe 1.0 released

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:37:00 +0000

My HTPC setup consists of an Atom based nettop with two DVB-T tuners (for Freeview) running Windows 7 Media Center and I think it’s probably the best user experience I’ve seen (disclaimer: I’ve not seen the Tivo UI which may be better). However one thing that really dampens the experience is the poor EPG data provided by some of Microsoft’s third parties that causes the series link functionality to go berserk and attempt to record every single possible instance of a television show ever scheduled. If you’ve ever tried to record CSI here in the UK, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Given that complaints to Microsoft generally go unresolved, I’ve written my own program which temporarily “fixes” the problem by scanning all recorded shows on your hard-drive and deleting duplicate recordings to save you from drowning in repeats of a show. If you don’t want to delete them immediately, you can move them into a separate folder away from the “Recorded TV” section and the program can automatically delete them after they’ve been sitting in there a certain number of days.

It’s pretty easy to set up provided you’re comfortable with running command line applications and using the Windows Task Scheduler. More details can be found here.

AvantSlash 4.3 released

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:40:19 +0100

A small update to Avantslash by Han-Kwang which fixes a bug with the CSS cookies in later versions of Perl. In addition, he updated some icons and added an “Apply and return” button to the preferences page. You can download it from the usual place.

AvantSlash 4.2 released

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 22:44:21 +0100

Another mega update from Han-Kwang which provides a massive number of tweaks, updates and fixes (about 63 if you want to count) to what shall henceforth be known as AvantSlash 4.2. Watch out for better error handling, time zone translations and date formatting, new artwork, a better credits page, blocking of web robots, a demo mode (to be installed here shortly), black colour scheme for reading in the dark and better reading of truncated comments amongst the gems. You can download it from the usual place.

AvantSlash 4.1 released

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 13:08:28 +0100

Another update to AvantSlash from Han-Kwang (with a small amount of support from myself, for once!) which adds several new options on the way that comments are shown. In addition, many of the preferences have now moved from the config file into the “About/Preferences” page which means they can be different for each device that views the page. We’ve also squashed a few bugs, added support for book reviews, updated the credits page with more useful information and added some pretty icons (favicon and iOS shortcuts). As usual, you can download it from here and feedback is always welcome.

Website back to normal

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:54:00 +0000

There were a couple of issues the last 2 days that meant that the AvantSlash page showed the wrong version. This has now been corrected, sorry for any inconvenience caused.

AvantSlash v4.0 released

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:52:00 +0000

Following a massive amount of work by Han-Kwang Nienhuys (and, honestly, not that much from me), I’m pleased to announce the release of AvantSlash 4.0 which not only fixes the parsing problem caused by Slashdot’s most recent changes - but adds in a massive amount of new functionality including a new look and feel (courtesy of style-sheets) and better viewing of comments (thanks in part to the nifty new AJAX comment code). There are plenty more interesting things planned in the future but please try it out and let us know what you think in the comments.

Note: There is no “easy” way to upgrade from 3.x to 4.0. I would recommend renaming your existing folder (as a backup) and unpacking 4.0 into a new folder and configuring it from there. It should take less than 5 minutes to do and you probably won’t need to edit avantify.cgi at all - which is nice.

Outlook2Evernote 1.1 released

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:33:49 +0000

Following a reported bug (involving Outlook notes with no subject), I’ve released an updated version of Outlook2Evernote. In addition to that fix, I’ve changed the UI slightly so that when the export is finished, you get a pop-up window instead of having to press return or enter. You can get the latest version from here.

AvantSlash 3.20 released

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 19:50:50 +0000

Many thanks to Han-Kwang Nienhuys for this update of AvantSlash which fixes the parsing following the redesign of the Slashdot website. As there are plenty of issues with the Slashdot site, I expect more changes to happen which may break AvantSlash again. You can pick up the latest version here.

New Slashdot design and AvantSlash

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:49:00 +0000

Early this morning (UK time), Slashdot launched their third major re-design. According to the site owners this new theme represents “a serious gutting of the underlying HTML and CSS” which has obviously meant that AvantSlash no longer works. In the coming couple of days, I will be reviewing the new site and design (especially how it looks on mobile devices), determining whether or not AvantSlash is still needed and (if so) issuing an update once I work out what they’ve changed. If you have any thoughts or comments, please let me know.

Outlook2Evernote 1.0 released

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:42:45 +0000

Following my move from an iPhone to an HTC Desire HD, I’ve lost the ability to write and save notes so I thought I’d give Evernote a go and, gosh, it’s a slick service.

However, oddly, they seem to want to make it extremely difficult for you to get your data into the service (no, not out like Facebook, but into!). For example, there is no way to import notes from Outlook through their application and, instead, they point you to a website (a broken link too) and an app which does import, but in a rather convoluted way.

“Well,” I said, “I can do better than this” and here is Outlook2Evernote.

It’s simple. Just download, unzip, double-click on the program, follow instructions and in a matter of seconds (or minutes if you have lots of notes) you’ll have a nice file which you can import into Evernote.

Picture Mover 1.0 released

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:56:00 +0000

Over the Christmas holidays I had to help my mother update her digital picture frame as she was looking to change it from landscape to portrait. Although she had exported all the pictures ready for copying onto the USB stick, it was obvious that making sure that she only had portrait files was going to be a bit of a pain. If you aren’t sure what I mean, try explaining to someone who isn’t that confident with computers on how to add the “dimensions” header to explorer and then sort them before moving to another folder - it’s not the easiest or memorable of things.

As such, Picture Mover was born. It is a simple script which will analyse all the pictures in the same folder and move them into a sub-folder depending on whether or not they are portrait, landscape or square.

AvantSlash v3.19 released

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:50:00 +0000

Many thanks to Han-Kwang Nienhuys for this update of AvantSlash which fixes a couple of issues relating to comment thresholds not working as they should and hidden comments being truncated incorrectly. In addition, Han-Kwang has cleaned up the code in places and added a nifty piece of functionality to aid in debugging AvantSlash when it next breaks. You can pick up the latest version here.

iPhone 4.2 update on 3G still slow

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:27:45 +0000

I’ve just finished installing iOS 4.2 on my iPhone 3G and, sadly, it seems to be just as slow as the previous version. Notes take forever to load (nice new font though), maps is slow and unresponsive and messages still present me with a blank screen for a good 5-10 seconds before they display.

To be fair, the 3G is a pretty old phone now. However I’d rather Apple persuade me to upgrade by not giving me new features, rather than by giving me some of them and then slowing my device down to a crawl.

AvantSlash 3.18 released

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:56:35 +0100

After a year of inactivity, the Slashdot admin decided to have yet another fiddle with the HTML involving comments which meant that AvantSlash stopped displaying any comments at all. As such, I’ve released AvantSlash version 3.18. It’s only a minor fix but I still can’t help wondering what the point was as it doesn’t appear to have fixed or enhanced anything already there.

AvantSlash still relevant?

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:51:42 +0100

A recent post over at Slashdot indicates that the site renders reasonably well using the classic light settings and, therefore, negates the need to use AvantSlash any more. As such, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts - is there still a need for AvantSlash?