Category Archives: Geek

New Compaq laptop and OfficeMax

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compaq laptop

On December 30, I bought a Compaq Presario F732NR laptop from Officemax for $549. My desktop had died a few months ago and I was tired of using my work laptop at home (it SUCKS). 3 days ago, I saw that it was now on sale at OfficeMax for $499. I took my receipt to OfficeMax on the 14th day after I bought it and they happily refunded $50 to me. I was amazed. No trouble, no problem. Just $50 back. (It’s $679.99 now) Thanks, OfficeMax!

So far, I am happy with the laptop, I just need to get rid of Vista…. I have found other people that successfully installed XP on it. I’ll probably make it a dual boot XP and linux machine.

[tags]Officemax, Compaq, customer service[/tags]

Using seeqpod to download MP3s

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UPDATE: I found an even better way to download music from Seeqpod – use sadsteve.com – it has the ability to download built into the site. I use it all the time and never use Seeqpod any more. Give it a try.

So, there’s this site called SeeqPod that allows you to play just about any song you can think of but doesn’t allow you (easily) to download them. So, I fired up Firefox and used the LiveHTTPHeaders addon to see what was going on. Sure enough, the URL to the file is there, but it’s somewhat of a pain to get to and download the file. So, I saw another URL go by with /api/ in it. I poked around and figured out a pretty easy way to use it to download songs. Here’s how:

First, you’ll want to have the linkification plugin installed in Firefox. One of the things it does is make URLs in XML clickable. We need that functionality. Once you have it installed, do this:

Bookmark this link in Firefox (don’t click it, just bookmark it – there is nothing interesting there yet). Now edit the bookmark and change the CHANGETHIS to %s and put in something for the keyword. I used sp for seeqpod.

Now, suppose I want Weird Al’s White and Nerdy song…. I just type
sp white nerdy
in Firefox and I get an XML document with links to the song. With the linkification plugin, I can just double click on the URL and it will download the song for me.

This trick will work in IE, you just have to do some of this by hand (the initial search, copy paste the MP3 URL, etc). It’s just much easier with Firefox.

If this news gets out, I expect Seeqpod to change the way they do things pretty quick so enjoy it while you can – not sure why I’m even sharing this. if someone were really motivated, you could write a plugin that gives you a webpage full of links or download the first hit automatically or something – again though, they will probably close this loop soon now. If you liked this article, check out the original article I did that discussed most of these techniques:
How to find and download hidden music from websites.

[tags]mp3, mp3s, freemusic, seeqpod, download, downloads[/tags]

Automation Gone Wrong

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This story was sent to me by a friend from work. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

In my county (Wake, NC) you can request library books online and an automated telephone system calls you when the books arrive. Every time the system calls, it asks for my wife, referring to her as “Suzanne the 1000th Farnsworth”. WTF, we think… there must be 999 other Suzanne Farnsworths in Wake County. This has gone on for years and has simply been an inside joke for us.

Last week, after a nine year hiatus, I actually stepped foot in the library. Suzanne the 1000th Farnsworth had forgotten to return some books and the automated system was calling daily, counting down the days until it was going to send out the automated goons to collect.

While returning the late books and paying my $8 fine, I asked the librarian why the automated telephone system referred to my wife as Suzanne The 1000th Farnsworth. She looks at the entry in her database and everything looks fine:
Name: Suzanne M. Farnsworth

Now if you look at that for a minute, you will see the reason for one of the most absurd software bugs I have ever encountered. Yes, “M” (her middle name is Marie) is 1000 in Roman numerals. I guess if my name were “Pope John Paul IV”, then I would want the system to interpret Roman numerals. Of course interpreting Roman numerals in the person’s middle name or something on the order of “M”, is just plain stupid.

I guess all those poor saps out there whose middle initial are I, V, L, X, C, D or M have their own inside jokes too.

True story.

[tags]geek, software, automation, bug, bugs, library, voice, robot[/tags]