SBSettings for jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch

After buying my iPod Touch and playing a little with it, I realised that battery life was a problem, with the WiFi always on. Thus, I was always bringing up Settins-WiFi and turning on and off. There was no easy and quick way to do it... Until I jailbroke it. I installed SBSettings, and its first use was that. Swipe the upper status bar, and the menu shown above appears. One tap and I can kill the WiFi, turn on or off ssh acces, keep the WiFi up when the Touch is sleeping, and more.

Google project hosting

A few days ago I opened up a new "project" in Google Code, to host my (open source) code with a subversion repository. I also managed to add an ad from AdSense to the main page (it is not as easy as Google should be doing it!).

For the moment being, I have just added a pair of files I use to generate PPM images, in almost all my image-related software (fractals, mostly).

Image processing history: Lena

Lena Söderberg

I am working in my free time in an image processing related program, and this made me remember when I was taking a course in Signal Processing. One of the standard test images was the one above. Where does it come from?

Turns out it is a standard folklore image, dating back to the seventies, when a bunch of electrical engineers needed an image satisfying certain "signal problems" (it is, indeed, an image with a lot of significative details, when compressing, denoising or whatever). And they found that month's Playboy, and scanned the picture. And it remains one of the usual test images, nowadays.

Snickerdoodles

Maybe the best coffee time cookies?
Picture courtesy of Shanidar

These are probably the best coffee time cookies I have eaten, and also one of the simplest cookie recipes to do.

Abstract triangles in LISP

A LISP random triangle generator. Also a C version.

C code "Juicer"

As I said in a previous post, I am looking for some way to detect copied code. I have now a working prototype of a "code juicer". From a C file it creates a set of PostScript files (well, almost, as they need postprocessing) which are later processed and selected to print. As an example, here is the output applied to a Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg 4-5.

iHold

Right: middle line, left top line

In this post I will explain how to recycle an old credit card to build a stand for your iPod touch / iPhone. You can choose from 3 designs, depending on your preferred inclination.

More #SongsInCode

Last Friday, 20, all SongsInCode'rs were asked to try to get #songsincode trending again to commemorate the 3 months anniversary of the idea. I submitted 3 songs (far less than my first outburst)... and almost no-one else tried to overwhelm twitter with his songs (a few did, and with great ideas ;)

KISS - know="you cry";know++="Walk street beside her"; PassBy(); everybody: puts("Looks good"); you: puts("Strutter"); goto everybody;

Duran Duran - if(!cry(&Yesterday)){find(OrdinaryWorld);}

3 Doors Down - See(Face);days=0;do{days++;}while(days<100)older(me);dream: Dream(); you=1; here: you=0; goto dream;

Here you can find my previous post with my own songsincode, and also check the great ideas in #songsincode.

Retro on iPod Touch (1): Mini vMac

A few days ago I jailbroke my iPod touch. Just for the geek factor, first, as I thought I could get a C compiler on it. I can't yet, so I just have it jailbreaken for a few applications. I'll start my review for a long time loved application in Linux and Mac: Mini vMac. Mini vMac is a hardware emulator, which emulates a whole Mac Plus from the eighties. You just need a real Mac ROM, from a Mac you or someone you know owns. There is a port for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and you can find the installation instructions and videos and whatever at the port developer page. I can say it works like a charm, is reasonably quick and allows for a lot of bizarreness. 

mg & Zile: quick emacs in the command line

From The Design of the Emacs Logo

I guess you may already know I love the emacs text editor, and use it as often as I can to do almost everything I can with it. But there is a small niche where it was a pain: quick editing a file from the command line. Those times when you just want to open one file, change a line, save and close.