ReeleySoft.com

I am impressed with the sheer volume of pictures from all over the world that get sent to twitpic.com. I use them and so do many Twitter applications.  My only complaint with twitpic is that they don’t let you grab random photo’s out of the API.  Not even your own; you have to specify which photo you want to get and it will return that.  I was interested in the idea of a screen saver of sorts that pull random photos straight from twitpic, so I sat down and whipped this together.  This little Perl script grabs the first twitpic from the Public Timeline page and returns the web address to that picture and Read the rest of this entry »

I hacked bit.ly url shortening into my Sociable WordPress Plugin.  Here is a diff of the two files if you want to add it to yours too (the .bak is the original file and the sociable.php is the one with the bit.ly features in it): Read the rest of this entry »

I have been hearing a lot about an Open Source Firewall/Router/VPN software package based on FreeBSD from @buraglio called pfSense.  The more and more I heard about it the more interested I became.  Some other guys I worked with have deployed pfSense boxes for other uses and seemed pleased, so 2 weeks ago I took the plunge.

I knew that I didn’t want to run a full-tower system with multiple NIC cards… I have done it and am over it; call it being fugal, saving space, “going green” or what ever you want… I knew I was going to use a single board computer.  I was recommended Read the rest of this entry »

I was playing around with an .mkv video file and wanted to stream it to my playstation 3 and wasn’t really sure where to start.  I already have Mediatomb setup on my Fedora 11 box and it works great for avi, mpeg, mpeg2, mpeg4, divx, etc… but it didn’t natively have anything for mkv.  I found a couple sites that talked about how I could have mediatomb transcode the mkv down to mpeg2 or mpeg4, but I couldn’t get it to work quite right.  The best I was able to do was get it to Read the rest of this entry »

I found this great article written by Mark Harris on about.com that breaks down the steps to create your own iPhone Ringtones for free.  It only takes a couple of minutes and it really works.  I just made one for my iPhone 3GS using iTunes 8.2 (23). Check the article out here.

Since I always have to look this up I thought that I would post it here.

This was pulled from this apple website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1533

Use the find command to search from the root directory “/” have it look for files “-type f” that are world writeable “-perm -2″ and print them to the screen “-print”.  I choose to suppress any permission errors “2> /dev/null” and I also decided to put the output into a file “> worldwrite.txt”.

find / -perm -2 -type f -print 2> /dev/null > worldwrite.txt

Hope this helps!

Awhile ago my wife and I decided that we shouldn’t be paying $100 a month for our cable TV and internet service, $1200 a year could go a long way.  We first wanted to see if we could handle only having the basic TV channels, so we scaled back our service.  At first it was hard not having the discovery channel and TLC but we got over it.  Making the change to basic got our monthly bill down to about $65 (cable and internet) where $50 of that was our internet service package.  We have since switched to DSL and do miss the speed but only have to pay about $30 a month for internet service.  An interesting side effect of scaling back our TV service was that we now watch less TV.  We are starting to enjoy some of the PBS show and now tend to get a lot more done around the house.  After evaluating what channels we had been watching I decided to save ourselves the monthly fee and switch to over the air TV service. Read the rest of this entry »

I have had my reeleysoft.com website for about 3 years now and I finally decided to make this easier on myself and convert it all over to wordpress.  I have proven to myself that I can do it if I need to and have taken the time to learn more about web developement.

I hope to talk a little bit about things that I like or dislike and not so much about myself.  I am into tinkering and setting up projects.  I hope to be able to document some of the challenges that I run into and talk about how I was able to overcome those.  I envision this blog to contain things from home repair/improvement,  to computer programming, maybe some photography and my take on things in the news.

I would like to, every once and awhile, do a how-to so look for those as well.  Let’s see if I can turn this rather stale website into something useful and current.  I would love to hear your feedback and hope that you enjoy yourself.