Quiproquo: easily misunderstood

Making Android vibrate (because silence is overrated)

Phill — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:27:24 +0000

I bought the excellent Tasker app a while ago, and did a few cool things with it, like setting it up to automatically go into vibrate-only mode in all my lectures.

I’ve been having more of a play with it over Christmas and now my phone announces SMSs from starred contacts and pops up battery charged notifications both on my device and via android-notifier on my desktop (which is always nice).

Something I have been having trouble with is changing the behaviour of the “Sound Off” switch on the lock screen and when you long-press the hang-up button. I’ve never used a completely silent mode on any phone I have ever owned, and on the occasion I accidentally did while I was in the library, I came out to missed calls and texts – oops. Thinking that it must be possible to solve this, I fired up Tasker.

I created a new profile called Always Vibrate.
I added a “Variable Value” state context. %SILENT Doesn’t Match off
Then I added an entry task which put the phone into Vibrate mode (Audio->Silent Mode) and an exit task which switched off silent mode and restored the Notification Volume to 4. The reason for the exit task being that if you use Peter Baldwin’s really useful Phone Silencer app, which asks you how long you want to silence your phone for when you put it into silent or vibrate mode, it defaults back to 100% volume – far too loud!

I couldn’t find a tutorial for how to do this, so perhaps this will help someone else! A word of warning: If you set the Variable variable to %SILENT Matches on, you end up in a pickle because the phone switches between silent and vibrate ad infinitum – massively unhelpful!

(Sort of) Solving Pidgin’s omega.contacts.msn.com problem

Phill — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:25:17 +0000

Thanks to the fix in the comments at diarizing.com, if Pidgin won’t connect because of a certificate error, then:

Delete all msn/live/hotmail certificates in the folder ~.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers
Go to https://omega.contacts.msn.com using firefox
Right click > view page INFO > Security Tab > View Certificate Button > Details Tab > Export Button
Save file to ~.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers/omega.contacts.msn.com
Reconnect

Snowhere like home

Phill — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:03:16 +0000

I survived. I thought you might like to know that. I managed to escape the channel tunnel before all hell broke loose and five consecutive trains broke down due to the situation climatique. I feel for the people behind me, and the people I know who’re still stuck on the continent. As for being here I’ve been ripped off by Tesco (more than £3 for the cheapest bottle of red plonk…?), drunk mulled wine and scoffed mince pies. So what else is there to do here? Eat curry! I had a rather nice one on Friday night, with a peshwari naan – I know how to have a good time. Time rumbles on and Christmas is approaching, though I feel quite organised!

Cinq jours pour m’installer

Phill — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:23:43 +0000

I arrived Monday lunchtime. Having met the famous Yvette, who is much more helpful in real life than via email (which Isabella – my voisine – believes is because they distrust it, it’s not the minitel you know), and been introduced to the sanitaryware in my bathroom, I was left to my own devices. Now ordinarily you potter about deciding where to put your collection of oddly-shaped cornflakes and sorting your books into height order, but I was in luck! Amy came and whisked me into Strasbourg with her mum and we had tarte flambée, which is creamy onion-y goodness and a diabolo (a concoction of lemonade and grenadine – délicieux).

The city itself is awe-striking, it’s so definitely French, but has a Germanic feeling and a friendliness you don’t always find in the French. That’s not to say everyone is the same. I have had some fairly poor service that in any job I’ve had would have lead to immediate dismissal. The woman in the post office shouted at me about her children (I wanted to know which counter to go to for La banque postale) and Didier at Crédit Mutuel told me that he was not interested in my custom because he wasn’t going to make any money out of me. I told him that I didn’t like French banks because free banking is the norm in England and I didn’t see why you had to pay for something so basic! Perhaps it gave him a Radio 4-esque thought for the day. It’s probably a good thing that I’m incapable of slagging people off in French.

The food is odd. I had pâtes alasciennes (Alsatian pasta) yesterday, which was a new experience, but not unpleasant. I have enjoyed everything I’ve eaten, but I don’t think it would be what I chose to eat myself necessarily.

I’ve been to IKEA more often than is needed this week, but I do have all the things I need, and it was all their basics – 0,50€ plates, mugs, glasses. I got a rug to brighten the place up, but everything seems to get quite dusty. Isabella has a vacuum on her end of the balcony, so I might ask her where that came from… I invested in a kettle, it’s very sad that Sainsbury’s basics don’t exist here, but I’m quite impressed by the one I have, it’s pretty quick to say it cost under 10€! Talking of electricals, I’m thinking about cheap inkjets. I might go find a Maison de Presse and pick up a PC mag of some description. I have nothing better to do en ce moment!

I think we’re planning a CAF party tomorrow and I’m providing brie and tomato sandwiches. We’re filling out our housing benefit forms, there’s nothing like scrounging from a foreign government, essentially we just get our tax back. I need to find out about registering with a doctor too… à plus!

En train (d’arriver)

Phill — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:53:30 +0000

So, this is France. Jack said, before I left, of France: “Nice country, shame about the people!” I’m not entirely certain that I agree with this sentiment, although since 4am this morning (thank you for the wake-up call maman) I have yet to have an actual conversation with anyone short of “I bought my ticket in the UK does it need the stamp from the yellow box?” and “A pain au chocolat and a large white coffee”. Incidentally, it would appear that a UK large has gone the way of an American large and is rather erm large, whereas France has not had the pleasure of caffeine addiction and still does things, as we say, by halves. Well, this is hardly the greatest problem. To experience that, you need a laptop and a power cable. Usually you would think: I have power, let’s rock; but (and this is a sizeable but) neither the Eurostar, or the considerably snazzier looking TGV has a socket into which you can plug your « prise » – quel horreur! So, praying that my battery will hold out (2h10, it currently reckons), I should have enough time to type a little and exercise my tetris fingers, or watch an episode of the west wing. The choice!

So, my thoughts on the Eurostar. NXEC’s trains were nicer, but I was sat further from a toilet, so swings and roundabouts, I feel. The parisienne next to me slept throughout and snored daintily in a way so typically French. I snoozed and doubtless snored like a northern miner. Gorgeous. For future reference, if you are going on the métro, do think twice about how heavy your luggage is, because whatever they fought for in the revolution, it was certainly not lifts or escalators (c’est quoi, technologie americaine? – horreur!).

Conductors don’t want to see your ticket, they just bid you good day. See. I knew there was a good reason to be in France, although I do feel I’m missing out on fifty-something-year-olds on push scooters (intertextual reference FTW)…

Notes from a small suitcase

Phill — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:20:47 +0000

This is a blatant lie. My suitcase is not small, the problem is probably the amount of rubbish I’m trying to pack into it. In fact I don’t believe I can get one an awful lot larger than I have… I’m leaving on Sunday and my general unpreparedness is worrying. I do have somewhere to live, and as Ford Prefect urges I have a towel. Two actually, bath sheets the pair of them. Taking a leap into the unknown is a worrying thing to do, but I do feel sometimes like a mountain is being made out of a mole-hill, albeit a reasonably sized mole-hill.

Everything happened, as usual, at the last moment. The bank have been unhelpful, the tax man more so. Sometimes I feel quite glad to be leaving Britain behind, but it’s more than just unhelpful functionaries. Saying that my French and German friends are, by and large, already in abroad, which means I’m a long way behind them, some have even been issued with their chalk and set to getting dusty teaching.

And so, I shall now go and stamp on my suitcase and bully the contents into submission. Huzzah!

A confusing problem

Phill — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:42:42 +0000

I do not know what I did wrong, but my copy of Firefox 3.5 is still branded with its codename “Shiretoko”, so some websites didn’t think it was a real web browser and told me to switch to Firefox (or Internet Explorer, but there’s more chance of hell freezing over). Temporarily you can use the user agent switcher extension which will temporarily sort out the problem, but it’s hardly an elegant solution and you have to remember to change it every time you want to visit whatever sites hate you. I have, however found the answer! Visit about:config and change the value of general.useragent.extra.firefox to Firefox/3.5.1 (the whole point is to switch Shiretoko with Firefox, the version number is relatively unimportant, but probably won’t auto update if they push an update via apt). Problem solved!

La France

Phill — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:04:38 +0000

So I found out where I’ll be teaching next year. I’ve been posted to a place an hour north of Strasbourg, with a pathetic train service. I’ve thought about getting a car, but that doesn’t solve getting from the Eurostar/Airport to wherever it may be that I end up living. It’s certainly an interesting predicament, but saying that I still haven’t introduced myself to the school yet, which is something I should probably do sooner rather than later. As I feel just a little bit ill from too much alcool yesterday I suspect I ought to put this off until tomorrow. I’m told no-one will be reading it until la rentrée in September, but it’s probably better to organise things sooner rather than later in the vain hope that someone will reply. I’m quite excited about the whole thing really, but strangely not as worried and anxious as I might expect. I’m sure they will come in time.

32-bit Skype on 64-bit Ubuntu

Phill — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:16:42 +0000

“It’s not possible”, they cry! Well, get off your soap boxes dear heretics, it is in fact entirely possible. (If you don’t have problems with pulseaudio, that is)

So, step one. Download the official Skype client for linux to your desktop from their website, you want the .deb for Ubuntu (ignore the version numbers, it’s fine).

Step two. Install libqt4-gui and libqt4-core, either through synaptic or in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-core

Step three. Let’s play dressing up, we have to convince the package manager to install Skype against its will. That happens to be quite easy. Open a terminal window, and run this command:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture ~/Desktop/skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

What it does is talks directly to the package manager and asks to install the file we downloaded, but doesn’t check the type of system it’s supposed to run on against the type of system you have.

Easy peasy!

Find messed up references in Writer

Phill — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:20:42 +0000

I’m anal about essays, beautiful essays are important, nobody wants to read ugly text for any long period of time.
References always have to have a space between the (p)p. and the page number(s). This regular expression finds the ones your tired eyes missed:

\.[:digit:]{1,}

Handy, ey?