Thom Nichols

Thom

Technology is evolution outside the gene pool

Sept. 7, 2012

Changing Calendar Colors on Android

This one is almost silly, but since I haven't posted in a while...

Android doesn't let you change the account color for exchange calendars.  Instead it picks a color at random when the account is first created.  Awesome.  Well, it's not *too* hard to change without a dedicated app.  Let's get started...

First I need to open the android shell (adb shell) and find ...

June 26, 2012

Smoothing Sensor Data, Part 2

After a query from an older blog entry, I figured I should properly follow-up since there were a couple questions about how to use the low-pass filter I described to smooth sensor data from Android.

So the question was "shouldn't the algorithm be output[i] = output[i-1] + ALPHA * (input[i] - output[i]);"  Well, the answer is no, here's why:

So the wikipedia entry I referenced uses ...

June 3, 2012

Using Smack XMPP with JAXB

So it I've looked a few times in the past, trying to find a decent way to use JAXB with the Smack XMPP library for Java.  More to the point, I wanted to write a Smack provider to parse a custom IQ message, but use JAXB to unmarshal the IQ body.  Should be doable. 

Nobody on the Smack forums had seemed to figure out a way to ...

June 1, 2012

The Raspberry Pi has landed

Like a kid with a new toy, my Raspberry Pi was delivered yesterday. 

And once I got it home, this was the only HDMI monitor I had...

Can I say, thank goodness the Raspbian distro has sshd enabled by default!  I spent probably 20 minutes searching around the house for a keyboard.  I don't have a USB keyboard in my house because I haven't used a ...

Feb. 13, 2012

New App for Android: the MyTracks Social Plugin!

I've been cycling a lot, and I use the wonderful, free MyTracks Android app to record my trips. I have friends that use Nike+, and I see them frequently posting their track stats to Facebook and Twitter.  While MyTracks has the ability to "share" tracks, it's admittedly a bit tedious.  I wanted MyTracks to automatically post status updates whenever I save a new track.

Enter the ...