CherryPad America Factory Reset

Posted by & filed under Uncategorized.

The CherryPad America is a tablet running Android I plan to write up a review for later, however a quick note for anyone who might be searching: Yes, if you do a factory restore, the default language will be Chinese.

You can change it to English by pressing the change-language button in the lower-right hand corner of the initial start screen where you are asked to press on the android. (But you can’t read that since it’s in Chinese. 😛 )  Then you can pick English and be good to go for your initial boot.

Using Python to create command line tools

Posted by & filed under Programming.

Was directed to a nifty tutorial regarding Python’s optparse, and how to use it to quickly create handy command-line utilities.   Saves you the trouble of ever having to parse the command line.  Check it out on IBM’s website: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-pythocli/

Summary taken from the article:

Summary: If you work in IT, as a UNIX® Sysadmin, a software developer, or even a manager, there a few skills that will set you apart from the crowd. Do you fully understand the OSI model? Are you comfortable with subnetting? Do you understand UNIX permissions? Let me add to this list the humble command line tool. By the end of this article, anyone involved in IT at any capacity should be able to create at least a simple command line tool.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

Posted by & filed under Games.

Heh, this Saturday I spent nearly 7 hours playing Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale and I have to say that I love it.  Beyond a fairly enjoyable cast of characters you can choose just about every aspect of your shop from what is stocked to the wallpaper, flooring and carpeting used.  As for inventory, you can work the town markets or go out adventuring to rustle up some sales from whatever you skin off monsters.  I love these types of games, and having such a cute protagonist certainly doesn’t hurt.

Drop by their website and check it out.

Resize and Crop to a specific width x height with a crop suggestion point.

Posted by & filed under php.

I really don’t have a shorter description for this.  I was working on a personal project the other day and realized that this might be a nifty function.  Basically, you know all those snippets to make cropped thumbnails (squares and the like), and how most of them either center or crop to the top of an image.  I wanted a new function that would crop to most any size I desired and any position on the image I desired without the need to change any code, only parameters.  And thus img_resize_crop was born.

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Rythmbox Sync to USB Device

Posted by & filed under linux.

I have a sizable collection of music, so sizable in fact that I can’t store the full collection on any portal media.  Since I only use Windows to play video games, I use Rhythmbox to manage my music and found myself in need of a way to sync to a USB thumbdrive.  Now, the issue with this is that, by default, Rhythmbox doesn’t treat just any USB mass-storage device as an audio player, so I stumbled upon a post titled “Rhythmbox and USB mass storage sync” dealing with a similar problem.

All you need to do is create a file called “.is_audio_player” and add some content to it that’s something like this:

audio_folders=music/
folder_depth=1

…and then scan removable media.  (Should be in the file menu)  One caveat you should be aware of is that I’m not sure if Rhythmbox will do any audio file conversion for you during the sync to your device.  But for moving a play list from one computer to another, this is plenty fine for me.