Tag Archives: irishblogs

My Favourite Android timer app: Chef’s Kitchen Timer

Timing things is something you might not think much about but when you have to make the dinner and various dishes take different times to cook then juggling the time in your head can be a pain.

That’s where a smartphone timer app comes in handy.

For the longest time my wife and I used Kitchen Timer and it works great but it has one drawback. The screen has to be unlocked to reset the alarm. There’s nothing more annoying than a loud beeping noise and you’re waiting for the screen to unlock and hit the off button.

I’ve looked for alternatives in the past but couldn’t find any until last week when I found Chef’s Kitchen Timer. It’s an app that does much the same but also shows the timer controls on the lockscreen. The UI is radically different and I never bother changing the timer names but it works a treat.

C64: Wanted Dead or Alive

Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” as played on a real Commodore 64. The song was digitized on an Amiga, downsampled to 4 bit audio and copied onto a 3.5″ inch disk that the Commodore 1581 drive could read from. The song data was streamed in realtime from the drive to the tiny 64Kb of memory in the computer and fed to the SID chip for our aural delight. I presume the screen has been blanked to save processing power, or the data for the sample gets dumped into screen memory.

This did require an Amiga with the Perfect Sound digitizer. I hooked up the CD player to the digitizer and then using a custom routine on the Amiga, my brother would convert the data to a 4 bit sample. Then we used a null modem? cable and Novaterm with a cartridge port adapter to transfer the data to a 1581 floppy. Quite a bit of work went into this.

20 years ago I recorded my own voice onto a cassette saying the word “Ozone” (the name of my demogroup) and I figured out how to sample my voice using the Commodore cassette deck hooked up to the C64. I can’t remember now what memory register it used, I’ll have to search my disk images or examine a C64 memory map one of these days. The quality was terrible but if you knew what was being said you could make it out. It had to be kept short because I’d ran out of memory! I think I used it in the last part of my demo “Awareness of Reality”. (via)

Do you remember the show where …

Years ago, I would guess almost 20 years ago, there was a late night show on TV that has stuck in my brain ever since.

This show had a Twilight Zone vibe about it. It was set in a diner/restaurant where time stood still. I’m pretty sure there were multiple episodes but I only remember one.

In the opening scene a waitress is wiping down a table when a shot rings out outside. A man staggers in clutching his chest. He’s been shot and has only moments to live. Time has stopped in the diner so he tells his story and resolves the troubles in his life.

By the end of the show he knows he has to leave, the waitress tells him time will start again. He knows he will die. He walks out the door and the show ends.

Does that ring a bell for anyone? I’ve looked online but it’s hard to find information about an obscure show from so long ago.

Ogre Battle

Spotify opened it’s doors to the Irish public today (well, to those who hadn’t used a proxy or some other means to pay for the UK service that is) so I gave it a go and of course looked for Queen music. The usual suspects are there and some material I hadn’t heard before like B-sides and “work in progress” versions of some songs. Great!

Then I found Deep Cuts, the first in a series of album compilations of more “obscure” stuff. I saw some favourites on there so I tried Ogre Battle first.


What the hell? Almost 30 seconds of near silence building up to an annoying wail! Argh! This wasn’t the Ogre Battle I remembered. It’s the version from their second album, Queen II.


The version of the song from “Queen at the BBC” is so much better, but that one isn’t on Spotify. I won’t be throwing out my MP3 or CD collection any time soon. Humph.

Chrome 23 and Flash missing sound for you too?

The latest version of Google’s Chrome browser in Windows reintroduced an old bug where Flash videos were missing all sound. It doesn’t happen to everyone but if you set your speaker configuration to Stereo you should hear sound again.

Click on the Windows Start button > Control Panel > Sound > select the speaker/playback device and click the Configure button > in the Speaker Setup dialog that appears, if you have multiple audio channels listed, please test the Stereo configuration, and let us know what happens.

I already had it set to stereo using the on-board Realtek sound chip in my PC but going through the motions of setting it to stereo and restarting the browser seems to have worked.

There’s a lengthy thread here, there’s a bug open about the issue and it has been fixed. The next stable release will include the fix. Yay!

Tie-Tanic

Disney bought LucasFilm did they? They’ll ruin Star Wars will they? Doubt that. Even fans consider the prequels a low point and I’ve never been a fan of the series myself so this Star Wars Titanic parody made me chuckle.

SMBC posted this on the facebook page: “Worrying that Disney will ruin Star Wars is like worrying that a second iceberg will dive down to hit the Titanic.”

Star Trek all the way. Fight! (via)

Love the new Android 4.2 Keyboard

I’m a big fan of Swype, an Android keyboard that allows you to swype your finger across the screen to type so when I read on Android Police that Android 4.2 would have a similar feature, and you could install it on a pre-4.2 phone I jumped at the chance.

It’s very similar to Swype, picking a word is better and worse. It’s better because it doesn’t block the text window like Swype would on long messages, but it’s not as good at spacing or even guessing the right word sometimes. That latter complaint may improve with time if it learns how I type.

It works fine on my Samsung Galaxy S 2 and didn’t need root access to install. There are download links and instructions on the post above.

While on the subject of Android bits and bobs, go look for SwipePad too. It runs in the background and if you swype your finger in from a designated corner or edge of the screen a menu pops up allowing you to run a new app or widget. Hat tip to the commenters on this post.

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