Significant Times of the Day

Important times to watch out for

For those who cannot see images:

Significant times of the day

4:04 – Time is not found.
5:00 – Time is Broken.
4:03 – The forbidden time.
3:03 – The time for seeing others.
4:09 – Time of Confrontation
4:10 – Time of Disappearance
3:02 – Time of Finding
2:02 – Time of Willful Procrastination

Don’t quite get it? Read up on HTTP error codes.

Significant Times of the Day printable PDF

Significant Times of the Day source SVG (The fonts used are available on Font Squirrel.)

Zombinanza 2 now in progress

It was mentioned that a sequel to Zombinanza has long been missing, and as a consequence Zombinanza 2 shall be attempted to be started to be made. Harass me if it doesn’t.

PHP: Get zipcode for an Address

I needed a small php function that could take an address (which lacked a zip code) and fetch a best guess postal code for it. I had a database full of addresses with city and state, but no zip code. Thankfully, if you have enough information in your address to locate it with the Google maps geocoding service, you have enough information to get the zip code. If not the correct zip code, it should pull one that’s relatively close assuming you’ve specified the correct city and state in your address.

This is possible because the geocoding service will return matches with full address data available. If we assume that the first match is most likely the correct match, we can just extract it’s postal code. I’ve only tested this with US addresses, but it may work in other countries where Google can geocode an address.

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I feel cryptastic

Looking for a quick and easy to use encryption class for PHP?  I stumbled upon Cryptastic in my searches for example code to use with mcrypt for a personal project.  I must say it’s quite handy. It implements a message integrity check and handles the initialization vector stuff for you making encrypting data as easy as a single call.

Get the Bounding Box of an SVG Path

There may be times you need to find the bounding box of an SVG path. One way to find it would be to parse the path and then apply any group transformation on it to find the range of X and Y coordinates the object occupies. However that’s a bit of code, and I’m quite a bit lazy, so I decided to try another approach: rasterize the path object by itself and find where in the image it was drawn.
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CherryPad America

I got my CherryPad America toward the end of October.  It’s a low-end tablet, comparable to the ones you can now find at WalMart and KMart.  I bought mine primarily to function as an e-reader, and quickly found that it had impressive video codec support and could do more than I was expecting out of such a cheap device.  (When I bought it, it was one of the cheapest on the market.)

I was order number 58, so some things are probably different now.  I believe the factory language is now English instead of Chinese for instance.

Some initial thoughts:

  • Good codec support (Too bad the Android video player doesn’t support internal mkv subtitles.  You need third party software from the market for that.)
  • Root access!
  • Android Market is a pain to get (and keep) working.
  • Resistive Screen takes some getting used to
  • Speakers are less than impressive, but sounds pretty decent with headphones or externally attached speakers.
  • Fits in one hand, good for reading.
  • Gah, why is JavaScript not on by default?
  • I like the aluminum case.
  • Uses my iPod’s docking cable.
  • A little slow sometimes, depends on the task.

Getting the Android Marketplace to function well has been an uphill battle, and honestly, the biggest problem I’ve run into.  It will work for a bit and then stop working entirely.  Actually, hasn’t worked for a week for me now. *sigh* I think I’ll email and ask about that.

If you’re looking for a simple music-playing, video-playing tablet, that you can use for reading and browsing the Internet.  It’s perfectly capable of all that.  I even use it to order parts off NewEgg and such.  Once you get it set up to your liking and get used to the resistive screen, it’s nice, if a little slow.  Verdict is that I like it, but am hesitant to recommend buying it because of the issues I’ve had with the Android Market.