List of blog entries

Never miss a phone call again with Tasker (Android) and KDialog (KDE)

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:15:12 +0200

Since a little while I use headphones at home, so my housemates are not bothered by my music and I'm less distracted by other noises in my surroundings. However, I realized that I often miss phone calls this way. Sometimes I put my phone out of sight (while charging), or I simply don't see the display light up even when it's on my desk. I could call them back all the time, or wait until they call back, but both are not really desirable solutions. So instead I implemented a solution, which most of you would consider over-the-top.

Backup online services with Backupify

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:56:23 +0200

The Cloud. Personally I hate the word, yet I'm using it every hour of the day (when I'm not asleep). Especially my Android device helps me appreciating cloud services, to have all my emails, calendars, tasks and notes available within a few seconds. These cloud services often provide decent search capabilities and I assume they take care of making backups at a regular basis. Previously, a hardware failure could end up being disastrous without a decent backup policy, nowadays it has become merely an inconvenience. The degree of inconvenience depends on the cost of a hardware replacement.

Backup your brain with Evernote

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:49:03 +0100

Two months ago, I wrote about Remember The Milk, which keeps track of all things I should do. I also started to use Evernote, where I can put all things I should remember. By making that distinction, these two services are perfectly capable of complementing each other.

Remember The Milk: Selectively show tasks in Google Calendar

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:23:32 +0100

Remember The Milk offers several methods to integrate your task list in Google Calendar. One of the methods is to put a task gadget in the sidebar (it's the same gadget you can embed in GMail as well). Another method is to add a special calendar, which results in checkmarks at each day. When you click those, a popup appears with all tasks due for that day. The final method which is relatively easy to find is in the Info tab of the Settings page. There you'll find a link pointing to an iCalendar resource, containing all your tasks (possibly represented as events).

Android keyboards: an overview

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 02:59:17 +0100

The Qwerty keyboard originates from the 19th century and is still widely used. As far as my knowledge goes, the touch screen was not yet invented at that time, there were only massive type writers with hammers which could occasionally clash. In fact, the Qwerty layout was designed to be as tedious as possible, to minimize the chance that two hammers would collide. These days Qwerty is obsolete, almost no one has an old style type writer. Still it's used for convenience, while more ergonomic alternatives are available. Dvorak, for instance, is the most well-known alternative layout, which is supported by almost every major operating system.

Get organized with Remember The Milk

Bram Schoenmakers — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:12:10 +0100

To keep sane in a life with study, work and personal stuff, one should remain organized. There are several ways to do so; the most effortless way would be to keep all things in memory. While not everyone is gifted with random access memory in their heads, other tools should be used instead. Think of post-its, a notebook or a calendar. A less common way is to create empty files on your Windows desktop, with a filename describing a task. To keep track of all my tasks I use digital task lists. To be more precise, for almost two years I use Remember The Milk (RTM) and since then I barely forgot about doing something.

Review: Beejive for Android

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:47:14 +0100

Yesterday I bought the Beejive instant messenger from the Market and gave it a spin.

My progress with the Dvorak keyboard layout

Bram Schoenmakers — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:40:28 +0100

About two weeks ago I decided to stop using the Qwerty layout and learn Dvorak instead (look at Wikipedia for more info, I'm not going to repeat the alleged advantages here). Right now I'm at the stage that I'm not fluent yet with the new layout, but already starting to forget Qwerty. In Qwerty mode I have to actually look at the keyboard to find the characters, just like normal computer users.

Simultaneous Search with the Evernote Chrome extension: a privacy hazard

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:09:40 +0200

Evernote is an online service which stores notes for you. There are various ways to create and sync your notes across machines: there's a web-interface, a reasonable Windows client and an Android client. Quite convenient to quickly jot down something.

There's also a Chrome extension providing Evernote functionality from the browser. This makes it possible to 'clip' pages (store their full content or just a URL). Since a little while the extension also provides Simultaneous Search: when you enter a search query in Google it will also show your notes containing your keyword:

Struts in the awesome window manager

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 22:26:15 +0200

Awesome is a tiling window manager for X11, which automatically tiles windows nicely on your screen as soon as you open or close them. It's highly configurable: the configuration is written in the Lua language. So in fact, you're programming your own window manager to your liking.

This post explains how to use struts, since this is one of the blind spots in the documentation and anywhere else on the net.

Debian: how not to automatically install recommended packages

Bram Schoenmakers — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 22:00:48 +0200

I wanted to install dnsmasq on a Debian (lenny) system, but got a bit scared of its dependencies:

HTC Desire review

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:06:52 +0200

Drie maanden geleden voelde ik dat het tijd was voor een nieuwe telefoon. Ik gebruikte internet meer en meer op m'n Sony Ericsson C902, een nette telefoon maar een te klein schermpje om fatsoenlijk mee online te gaan. Mijn volgende telefoon is de HTC Desire geworden. Ik ben niet het type blijo dat op kieskeurig.nl onder de vermelding "een paar dagen in bezit" gaat lopen pochen hoe geweldig dit toestel wel niet is. Ik doe dat drie maanden later op m'n eigen site

Code duplication between Amarok versions

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:01:05 +0200

For a student assignment we had to analyze code duplication between releases of an application. It gives insight in how much code remained the same with relation to other versions.
Together with Remco Blewanus, I chose to analyze the best audio player out there: Amarok. This has a couple of reasons, besides being familiar with Amarok already.

Javascript-widgets schrijven voor KDE Plasma

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:56:06 +0100

Tot voor kort heb ik Javascript nooit echt serieus genomen. Die perceptie kwam voornamelijk door slechte programmeurs die hun beste beentje voorzetten op websites en allerlei plaatjes over het scherm lieten vliegen. Ook het inline definiëren van functies resulteert al snel in een brei ongestructureerde code. Voor mij leek het gewoon onmogelijk om enigssinds object-geörienteerd te werken met deze taal.

Toch ben ik er sinds een tijd wel wat serieuzer mee bezig en is Javascript niet zo slecht als ik dacht. Er zitten wel een aantal verschrikkingen in deze taal, waaronder de dynamische scoping, waardoor je door wat brandende hoepels moet springen om toch bij de juiste objecten te kunnen (var that = this voor de insiders). Wat ik wel goed vind aan deze taal is het feit dat functies gewoon eerste-klas objecten zijn. En dat het dus wel degelijk mogelijk is om object-geörienteerd programmeren te benaderen.

So long, identi.ca

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:27:32 +0100

About 1 year ago, I switched to identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service. Most of the open source folks moved from Twitter to identi.ca, it had (and still has) a quite some advantages over Twitter. See this article for a comparison among these two services. There was not much to lose, I could still forward my tweets to Twitter. But after one year I've pretty much had it with this service. There are quite some nice people out there, but the service was getting on my nerves. What follows here is a rant, you've been warned.

Google Agenda met je telefoon synchroniseren

Bram Schoenmakers — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:00:55 +0100

Sinds een maand of twee gebruik ik Google Agenda (Google Calendar), en was sindsdien op zoek naar een goede manier om mijn online agenda te synchroniseren met m'n mobiele telefoon. Dit is een betrekkelijk eenvoudig toestel, een Sony Ericsson C902. Een normale telefoon met Java en een ingebouwde agenda, niets bijzonders. Ik heb verschillende oplossingen geprobeerd, maar het was lastig om iets fatsoenlijks te vinden.

Synchronize Google Calendar with your mobile phone

Bram Schoenmakers — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:00:26 +0100

Since two months I'm using Google Calendar, and I've been looking around for a nice way to synchronize my online calendar with my mobile phone. This is a fairly simple device, a Sony Ericsson C902. It's just a Java enabled phone with a simple built-in calendar tool, nothing special. I have tried different solutions, but it was a bit tough to get it right.

These were the solutions I have tried, the last one is the most satisfactory solution which I'm using at this moment.

Sneller browsen met Chromium

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:31:08 +0200

Na jaren Konqueror gebruikt te hebben ben ik ongeveer een half jaar geleden overgestapt naar Firefox. In Firefox worden de websites vaak wel goed gerenderd en is er een berg van extensies die het online leven aangenamer moeten maken. Vooral voor webontwikkeling is Firefox (lees: Firebug) onmisbaar.

In diezelfde tijd dat ik aan de slag ging met Firefox was er een nieuwe browser hard aan de weg aan het timmeren op het Linux-platform: Chromium. Een hele tijd later na de aankondiging heb ik 't er toch eens op gewaagd, en ik moet zeggen dat ik erg onder de indruk ben van deze browser.

Differences between Twitter and identi.ca

Bram Schoenmakers — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:23:46 +0100

I did a little comparison between Twitter and identi.ca, two micro-blogging sites available today. The list is pretty random and may contain errors, or may miss some items. And both sites are introducing and ditching features which could invalidate the list below. But feel free to let me know if something needs to be changed (I'm @bram85 on identi.ca and Twitter), or use the comment section below.

	Twitter	identi.ca
Open source
Groups
Tags
OpenID
Jabber (XMPP)*
Notices to SMS**
Autosubscribe followers
@Replies filtering
Update protection
Theming
Mobile interface
Non-english interface***
RSS feeds
ATOM feeds
FOAF feeds

* Regarding Jabber support, Twitter used to have this, but silently ditched it.
** Differs from country to country. It appears that the range of Twitter is more limited than identi.ca's.
*** Twitter offers only one additional language besides English, Japanese. Identi.ca offers a wide range of languages.

Flickr On Plasma 0.3 released

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:00:26 +0100

Flickr On Plasma 0.3 has been released.

Visit the Flickr On Plasma page here.

Changelog

Ability to choose different photo streams. Choices are:
- Interesting photos (which versions 0.1 and 0.2 were basically doing)
- Your favorite photos
- Based on a tag. Enter a tag, and then choose a cluster. For instance, if you type jaguar, you have to choose if you mean the car or the animal.
Delay cleaning the cache (and do it periodically with long uptimes).

Offline kaarten op uw mobiel met MGMaps

Bram Schoenmakers — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:33:42 +0100

Voor een kleine vakantie naar Zuid-Duitsland dacht ik dat het wel handig zou zijn om wat kaarten van de te bezoeken steden op m'n telefoon te hebben. Natuurlijk heb ik Google Maps wel geïnstalleerd, maar dat wordt een duur grapje als ik dat in het buitenland ga gebruiken. Na een beetje onderzoek ben ik er in geslaagd om offline enkele kaarten beschikbaar te hebben.

Dit zijn slechts wat aantekeningen voor mezelf, en het gaat er van uit dat u een werkende J2ME-telefoon hebt, een PC met Linux (of een ander Unix-achtig beest) en een werkende verbinding tussen PC en de telefoon (USB of Bluetooth).

Offline maps on your mobile with MGMaps

Bram Schoenmakers — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:24:14 +0100

For a little holiday to south-Germany I thought it would be handy to have some maps on my phone of the to-be-visited cities. Of course, I have Google Maps installed, but I'd rather not use it abroad due to the insane fees for data roaming. So after a little investigation I was able to have offline maps on my phone.

These are merely notes to myself, and it assumes you have a working J2ME enabled phone, a Linux PC (any other Unix like OS would do) and a working connection between PC and phone (USB, Bluetooth).

Flickr On Plasma 0.2 released

Bram Schoenmakers — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:54:54 +0100

Just a quick entry notifying you that Flickr On Plasma 0.2 has been released.

Visit the Flickr On Plasma page here.

Changelog

Separated the code in an applet section and engine section.
Ability to authenticate with Flickr.com.
Features which require authentication will be possible in the future.
Mark photos as Favorite from the context menu (authentication required).
Added menu entries to visit the Flickr pages of photos and authors.

Fixing Plasma performance with the open source Radeon driver

Bram Schoenmakers — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:45:16 +0100

So I've finally switched from KDE 3.5.9 to 4.1.2. I tried to do a similar move in the past, but I got really disappointed in Plasma's performance back then. I decided it was my debug enabled build and fled back to where I came from and waited a little bit more.

Review of Opera Mini 4.1 beta

Bram Schoenmakers — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:34:31 +0200

About 2 weeks ago a new beta of Opera Mini hit the internet: 4.1 beta. With this new version, Opera claims that the browser would be about 50% faster than 4.0. Of course I get skeptical with such numbers, so I had to check that out.

But gosh... they really did it. That browser is noticeably faster than 4.0, pages load seconds faster. They did some magic at the server side which improved things quite a lot.

Update on Opera Mini review

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:34:41 +0100

A little while ago I wrote about the new Opera Mini betas. Meanwhile, version 4 has gone stable so it's time to update some things.

My first complaint was that it didn't update my booksmarks. But that was a void point, because my phone does not share data between different applications. And applications are distinguished by their names. Since the final release it has the same name as the old version 3, it shares the data and all bookmarks were imported just fine.

Review of Opera Mini 4 beta 2

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:20:11 +0200

Last week, at the T-DOSE event, someone told me there's a new version of the Opera browser for my mobile phone. Something with zooming.

Yesterday I downloaded the beta of Opera Mini 4. Strange enough I couldn't download it with my laptop, because there was no link to the beta *.jar. But pointing my old Opera Mini to mini.opera.com/beta showed me a link to get my hands on the latest beta.

KDE 3.5 theme for Sony Ericsson K700i

Bram Schoenmakers — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 14:07:00 +0100

Based on the excellent Plastik theme by Mattias Wetzka, I created a KDE 3.5 theme for my Sony Ericsson K700i.

I don't know if other Sony Ericsson phones will dig this theme, but feel free to try (and eventually let me know). The images are optimized for the K700i screen size, and may be too big or too small for other devices.

The screenshots look a bit crappier than the real display, but they give a good indication.