Cows and Chickens

Chrome for OS X is lack­ing a book­mark export fea­ture. I’m sure it will have one in the future, but it doesn’t have it yet. It will hap­pily import your moz­illa book­marks and let you get star­ted using the browser, but even­tu­ally you will notice that your book­marks are locked in. It only recently got a very rudi­ment­ary book­mark man­ager in the latest nightly builds, but there is still no export.

The Chrome book­mark file in OS X is a simple JSON data­base, so I whipped up a quick tool in Groovy to do the export. This was really a single-use pro­ject but I figured I would post the source and bin­ar­ies in case someone else needs it.

Usage: java -jar ChromeExport.jar > mybookmarks.html

By default it will find the cur­rent user’s “Default” Chrome pro­file. Since Chrome doesn’t seem to have any UI for man­aging pro­files, I don’t see why you’d have a dif­fer­ent one.

Require­ments to build/run:
* Groovy 1.6+
* Commons-Lang (for the StringEs­ca­peUt­ils)
* json-simple (for the JSON parser)

Here is a link to the source: ChromeExport.groovy
Here is a link to the fully bundled bin­ary (which prob­ably breaks somebody’s license agree­ment some­where, but com­pli­ance is not worth the annoy­ance): ChromeExport.jar

Enjoy! Let me know what you think, or if it works for you!

I’ve been tidy­ing up some things around the condo, mostly in the IT realm. I’m try­ing to reduce the num­ber of devices, cables, con­fig­ur­a­tions, and gen­eral annoy­ing­ness in my daily exist­ence. So far, this is what is new:

• AppleTV + 1.5TB USB Drive

And this is what I’ve eliminated:

• MediaPC Run­ning Myth­Buntu (a con­stant source of aggravation)
• Net­work Switch
• Soekris Net4501 Router
• Gamer PC Run­ning Windows
• Long ugly phone wire run­ning from bed­room to liv­ing room
• About six cat5 patch cables
• Four wall warts

So right now, my inter­net comes out of the wall and runs to the closet where the DSL modem and the Air­Port Express sit. The Air­Port is now my router, and the net seems faster. My Mac­Book and the AppleTV both con­nect wire­lessly (802.11n). The AppleTV sup­ports Air­Tunes and also gets a synced copy of my iTunes lib­rary, so my music is Just There. Same with my pho­tos. Much much easier. We’ll see how long it lasts.

The only prob­lems with the AppleTV so far: No remote volume con­trol when Quick­Time plays a video. And it doesn’t seem to be able to put my screen to sleep over HDMI… I have to use the power button.

Roomba and I have been get­ting along pretty well over the last few months. It has been clean­ing my floor reg­u­larly, and doing a good job at it. It gets dust bun­nies from places that I never did with the vacuum, and it usu­ally makes it home to its char­ging base.

I recently rebuilt its bat­tery pack… the bat­ter­ies have a finite lifespan, and liv­ing in a Roomba is a hard life. They get depleted and fully charged reg­u­larly, and the little robot uses a lot of current.

I bought a rebuild kit off of eBay, which included a pre­pared set of cells (already con­nec­ted together, with leads ready for the roomba) and the secur­ity screw­driver to open the pack. I’m not sure why they used secur­ity screws — the pack is also glued closed and required SIGNIFICANT effort to open. We’re talk­ing viol­ence here. But it did even­tu­ally yield to my screwdriver-and-mallet technique.

The new bat­tery is work­ing… run times are nice and long, the bat­tery charges prop­erly, and it hasn’t burst into flames yet.

A few weeks ago my mac­book stopped talk­ing to my Link­sys SD2008 gig­abit switch. No link at all. Other devices were still work­ing fine, so I tried dif­fer­ent cables, dif­fer­ent ports, etc, in what I thought was a sat­is­fact­ory dia­gnostic effort.

I booked a Genius Bar appoint­ment, took in my Mac, and embar­rass­ingly it worked fine when con­nec­ted to their switch. I also tried it at work, and it worked fine there. Hmm.

A Google search (that I should have done in the first place) revealed this thread which says a failed capa­citor in the switch is the root of the problem.

I opened my switch, and lo, the sus­pect capa­citor is indeed swollen. Time for a replace­ment! I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update (24 hours later): I replaced the bus­ted capa­citor and the switch talks to my mac again! Hor­ray! Total repair cost, $0.30 x 3 caps from Supremetronic/Honson/Home Hard­ware. I bought the extras in case I wrecked one. 470uF 25V, 105C.

This is a great pro­ject, and says good things about people:

http://www.tweenbots.com/

I’m cur­rently on VIA Train 78 from Lon­don to Toronto after a nice week­end vis­it­ing my par­ents. I wanted to give props to VIA Rail for being an excel­lent, com­fort­able way to get around Ontario.

VIA Rail seems to go out of their way to hire excel­lent, friendly staff. The ser­vice people on my cur­rent train are very polite, friendly, and pro­fes­sional. They seem to enjoy their job, which is very import­ant in my over­all per­cep­tion of the trip.

It’s easy to book the trip on VIA’s web­site, and you can just pick up your ticket right before you board the train, using an auto­mated kiosk at the train sta­tion. There’s no need to wait in line to check in, or even talk to another human. On a recent trip I made a mis­take and booked my return trip back­wards, Lon­don to Toronto to Lon­don. VIA Rail fixed my mis­take with no hassle or extra fees.

The train itself is quiet, has nice mel­low light­ing, good cof­fee and drinks, and gen­er­ally is fast and smooth. Of course there are occa­sional prob­lems due to the serial nature of train travel (trains can’t always pass each other), and some­times there are mech­an­ical prob­lems… but the trains usu­ally run on time.

Between driv­ing, fly­ing, or tak­ing the bus, I would cer­tainly choose VIA Rail for short distances.

I don’t usu­ally review res­taur­ants here, but I’ve had quite a few great meals at Free Times cafe recently and thought I would give them some props on my blog. I just had din­ner there, the shishta­wook plat­ter, fol­lowed by a very nice piece of apple crumble. And a great glass of freshly made lem­on­ade.
Excel­lent food, cheap prices, and nice atmo­sphere. I approve!

I got the oppor­tun­ity to trade a bottle of nice bour­bon for an under-utilized Roomba Dis­cov­ery. A friend of mine recently moved to a new house which wasn’t friendly to the little robotic floor cleaner, and he offered it to me ages ago. I finally decided to take him up on the offer.
The robot is the white Roomba Dis­cov­ery, and is a few years old. All of the sensors and bat­tery were in fine shape, but unfor­tu­nately, Roomba’s speaker was not work­ing. It couldn’t play its little songs, and thus had lots of pent-up emo­tion. I found a new speaker of sim­ilar size at Act­ive Sur­plus and installed it. While I had the Roomba to pieces, I also cleaned out quite a bit of cat hair and car­pet fuzz — the device isn’t as well sealed as it should be.
After a couple test runs to make sure Roomba didn’t find its way into trouble in my apart­ment, I let it run and left for work. When I got home, it was hap­pily sleep­ing at its dock­ing sta­tion, and the floor was very clean. It vacu­ums bet­ter than I do, and goes under the couch and bed with no trouble at all. My big green chair is a bit too low for the roomba to go under­neath, but it’s some­thing that I’ve been plan­ning to replace for a while. Min­imum ground clear­ance is now a fur­niture spe­cific­a­tion worth not­ing.
Run­ning speaker cables along the base­boards can make roomba sad, so I’ll have to get some race­way or other cable man­age­ment solu­tion. Thank­fully due to the small size of my apart­ment, it won’t be an expens­ive upgrade.
Once I’ve used the Roomba for a few months, I’ll make another post and let you know my thoughts, but so far, we’re get­ting along!

My friend Jonathan and I are start­ing up a new Java Users Group in Toronto. Our aims are con­sist­ency, rel­ev­ancy, and social­iz­a­tion. The other Toronto JUG rarely meets and tends to have advertorial con­tent in their meet­ings. Our JUG meets on the third Thursday of each month, and fea­tures short present­a­tions, show-and-tell, rob­ocode battles, and a social ses­sion at a nearby pub.

Come and check it out!

Get the details and join the mail­ing list at http://tjug.ca!