Category: Making things work my way

The Firefox Add-on “ContextSearch” lets you highlight text in a web page and then use search tools of your choice to search on the term. I have it set up with Google, Wikipedia (choose English or German), Google Maps and some other tools that came with it.
Goodreads is a website that lets users review books. It and wikipedia are usually my first stops when looking up a book.

Today it occurred to me that it would be nice to also use it to look up books on Goodreads.

I set up a new search engine option using the URL
     https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=
I got that URL by searching for a book on the site, then taking the URL
     https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=small+angry+planet&search_type=books&search%5Bfield%5D=on
and stripping off everything after the “search?”.

The fact that this works makes me think it might work for other search tools as well.

URL for Winnipeg Public Library paper books:
https://winca.ent.sirsidynix.net/client/en_US/default/search/results?q=

URL for Winnipeg Public Library ebooks:
https://winnipeg.overdrive.com/search?query=

I have been searching for new shin pads for soccer for a while. Most that are on the shelves here are thick and and awkward. I finally got some anyway (Nike Mercurial Lite), but hated them because they were way too wide in the bottom.
Then someone mentioned that hers were intended to be heat molded. I figured the chances of mine being a thermoplastic were pretty good. So, I put them into a pot of boiling water for about a minute and pushed them into shape over a pair of socks. They molded quite easily. Wrapped a velcro strap around them while they cooled down, and they now seem to hold their shape nicely.
The finish that used to be shiny on the outside is now a bit wrinkly; this may actually be a good thing, maybe it will make them less slippery.
Will have to see if they last and keep their shape.

An organization I am involved with does its internal communication and broadcasts exclusively through Slack. In my mind, Slack is “evil” because it lets communication in but doesn’t seem to provide tools to let communication out. For example, they don’t provide RSS feeds. I do most of my daily surfing through RSS feeds.

Today I figured I should look into this further and posted the question on the Slack Reddit.  Someone suggested I could do this through Zapier. I had never heard about them: they provide integration between different web apps. Sure enough, 15 minutes of tinkering later I now have an RSS feed from that Slack channel.

Update: It turned out very quickly that Zapier will only let you do so many updates for free. It doesn’t even reset over time. So, unless you are willing to pay for this, don’t bother with them.

Things should not be so complicated, but when they are, it is good to have a tool like that!

I use use my Blackberry to record audio in meetings and such. It records as m4a.  I use Audacity to edit audio files.

Audacity doesn’t do M4A natively, and the error it gives just says that it can’t read the file.

Turns out they almost have it built in. I didn’t research the exact IP reason that forces them to do it, but the instructions how to finish setting up Audacity to be able to read your Blackberry sound recordings is here:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html#ffdown

Winnipeg Transit’s Navigo generally won’t let you enter a destination unless you first enter a “from”. I wanted to be able to add a link to a web site that says “if  you want to come here, you can take the bus, click here”, like this link  which will open the Navigo page with Assentworks pre-populated as an address.

Asked 311/transit, and they explained:

The user needs to include the destination information in the link. The best way to do this is to plan a trip using the desired address as the destination, it can be any trip (random origin and time). From the results page, click ‘Modify Request’ in the sidebar. This takes you back to the trip planning page with pre-filled information. Copy the URL from this page, it will look something like:

http://winnipegtransit.com/en/navigo/submit_destination?authenticity_token=****************************&destinationKey=13&destinationName=Forks+Market+%281+Forks+Market+Road%29&destinationType=monument&method=post&originKey=3911&originName=MTS+Centre+%28300+Portage+Avenue%29&originType=monument&tripDate=0

Delete all the unwanted information from the URL (keep all parameters related to destination [destinationKey, destinationName, destinationType]). Then it will look like:

http://winnipegtransit.com/en/navigo/submit_destination?destinationKey=13&destinationName=Forks+Market+%281+Forks+Market+Road%29&destinationType=monument

Use this URL to link to Navigo.

I bought a HackRF One SDR recently. The first thing I wanted to do is to try WSPR, which checks for other WSPR beacons to help monitor propagation paths.

I set this up using the free SDR software SDR# and another software virtual audio cable to connect the two.

That much was easy enough, but I have not had a single connection, running it for a bit over a week. WSPR frequenctly says it’s decoding, but nothing pans out. I am using the antenna that comes with the HackRF, which isn’t great but I hear others have had success with it.

I probably have something set up wrong still. I think I need to use CW mode in SDR# for WSPR but have not actually found confirmation for this anywhere. Since it’s not working it’s likely wrong :-)