Now don't get me wrong, I'm no eco-warrior, but a year or so ago I joined a group called 'Freecycle'. The idea being that goods you no longer require find a new home rather than being taken to the tip. You post a message describing something you want, or something you want to get rid of, and other people read the posts and respond. You arrange collection with the other party and everyone's a winner. I was hooked.

I loved the idea of my junk going to good use, I don't want money for it I just want someone else to be as excited to receive it as I did when I got it. I will say that I have given more than I've received, but I don't mind. It saves me a trip out and I get that warm fuzzy feeling - I'm doing a good deed.

One of my first donations was a baby seat for a car, second donation a glass TV/Hi-Fi stand. Pleasant emails arranging collection, knock at the door, a cheery "Freecycle? Come in...", genuine gratitude.

Of course, the spirit of the group was not just about expensive items. People would offer plant pots, seeds, a box of old books. Or post a 'wanted' for a picture frame or "that little rubber thing that goes on the back of your widget". I had romantic visions of old record players working again because someone had a box of old styluses.

Sadly there has been a decline of late, if I offer an item I will only get a response if it's something electronic or of value. I frequently see requests starting "I know this is a big ask, but does someone have a....", some of my favourites including a people-carrier car, LCD TV and gaming PC. Not really in the spirit of the group guys!

What also saddens me is the utter lack of manners when dealing with people over email. I object to one line responses to my posts "I'll have it". On the other hand, I am not a fan of reading pages of sob stories about your Great Uncle Peter who broke his leg in a freak knitting accident. Fact: I delivered a table to a single parent living in a house with not a stick of furniture, they didn't mention their situation in the emails - figuring they'd take their chance like everyone else.

Simple politeness will do, "I saw your post and would really appreciate your item if it is still available. I can collect any time after 3pm. Hope to hear from you soon"

What also is frustrating is you sending me an email 60 seconds after I post an offer - me offering the item to you - and me never hearing from you again. This has happened to me too many times for the excuses to wash, "Sorry, my car got stolen and a tiger ate my phone!". More like, reply to all the good stuff so I can pick and choose later what to sell at the boot-fair on Sunday.

My favourite of all was the Freegler who needed a digital video camera for a school project. I had one in the loft, I never used it, I'll give it away to someone who can get some use out of it. After the initial delight of being offered the camera I was subjected to seven days of missed collections and excuses. We lived a mile away. The last straw was when I was asked if I had a car and whether I could drop it around. I could do it, it would take me five minutes, but you want this camera so get up off your back-side and collect it. Why should I deliver it to you on a plate?

Last Saturday I posted three items including a box of piano books, a baby bottle steriliser and bottle warmer. Two responses within minutes and one more later that day. I offer the items to the three lucky people, one I never hear from again, and two arrange collection. Of the two that arrange collection one is a no-show and one turns up at 7pm after saying she'd collect at lunchtime.

Sorry fellow Freeglers, I've had enough. It's easier for me to take my things to the tip or be sure of a genuine cause at the charity shop than mess about trying to arrange to do you a favour!

Unsubscribe.

Labels: SOAPBOX

I have updated the DVB Stuff application - it now does the following: -

• Handles packet sizes other than 188bytes
• Can filter by multiple streams
• Quick option - limits output to 20mb, useful for testing
• Shows PIDs in hex

I hope you find it useful, you can download it here: -

dvbstuff v1.0(9kb)

Labels: DOWNLOADS, DVB

During my commute I thought it might be a good idea to brush up on my Windows Communication Foundation skills, so I wrote Ball. Picture your average office environment, many PCs all connected to the same network. Enter Ball, run it on a number of adjacent PCs, enter the hostname and hit 'Join'. Now you have two instances of Ball talking to each other over the network, when the Ball hits the edge of one screen it's going to disappear and reappear on the other PC's desktop.

You can keep connecting up new instances of Ball too, at time of going to press it had been successfully tested with three PCs. When you connect a third instance of Ball it will automatically discover any other instances connected to the connectee! :-)

Download the app and run the EXE, you will need .Net runtime installed. Do the same on another PC then on one of the instances enter the hostname of the other PC and click 'Join'. You can reorder the hosts in the listbox using the 'Up' and 'Down' buttons, get it how you want it and click 'Send'.

If you want ball to use a TCP/IP port other than 8000 then just pass the port number on the command line, but make sure your firewall allows traffic through on your selected port.

My advice is download the exe and have a play with it. If you want to see how it works, then take a look at the source code.

Ball (12kb)

Ball Source Code (28kb)

Labels: DOTNET, DOWNLOADS

Whilst browsing some sites talking about the Commodore 64, I started thinking about how things were much simpler in the old days of computing. Simpler to the extent that it probably wouldn't be too hard to put together a simple 6510 assembler. So here is ASM64, very much a proof of concept, a beta version and any other disclaimers you can think of.

ASM64 will let you write Commodore 64 assembly language programs, it supports all 6510 instructions and addressing modes and also lets you define labels in your code so you can loop and branch. To test it I wrote a few assembly language programs, assembled them with ASM64 and transferred the output onto a D64 image using c1541.exe (supplied with Vice C64 Emulator). Everything I've tried so far has worked.

That said, I'm not sure how much success you'll have with any existing C64 assembly language programs out there (if any), I'm sure it will choke if it encounters any attempts at comments or assembler directives. Included in the source and executable download are a couple of assembly scripts that worked when I tried.

Here are the command-line parameters: -

Labels: DOTNET, DOWNLOADS

I just picked up a Fortec Star FS-4400 satellite receiver for watching free-to-air channels and am enjoying being able to record programs down onto a USB memory stick.

The fun and games started when I tried to watch the recorded material on my PC. The file seems to be MPEG-TS format, but the 188 byte packets don't start until about 64k into the file which confuses the tools I've used so far to analyse and view the file (BBDMUX, Mpegtsutils, VLC and ProjectX to name a few)

So I started looking at the MPEG-TS format and wrote a command-line tool called 'dvbstuff' for joining and fixing files recorded by the FS-4400. This might be useful elsewhere, maybe with other receivers, so I thought I'd put it out there.

Here is the latest version: -

dvbstuff v0.2 (8kb)

Download the zip and extract dvbstuff.exe to somewhere useful. Type dvbstuff on command line and you'll see a summary of command line parameters. The only reliable ones at the moment are -pid, which shows a list of PIDs in the transport stream, and -fix which strips out garbage from the file and makes it MPEG-TS compliant.

This utility is an experiment and am publishing it because it might be useful to someone, so should be treated as a beta.

Labels: DOWNLOADS, DVB, HOME

It's been a long time coming, and here it is.. Nicetrack 2.0 - the version that uses RIL instead of the dodgy GSM hack. This should work on WM5 phones, it works on my MDA Vario 2 (HTC TTyn) but as usual am happy to hear from people about their experiences. I'm hoping that this version is going to be a little more stable and predictable.

Big thanks to Tom (http://mouselike.org) and Addy for your ideas, links and help. Some other people emailed me with ideas and links, I'm really sorry but I lost your emails so ping me a message and I'll update the credits!

Here are the latest downloads: -

Nicetrack v2.0 (100kb)

Nicetrack v2.0 C# Source code

If you have any questions then please feel free to email me on james@nicecuppa.net

UPDATE: You will need to install .Net Compact Framework 2.0 redistributable for this to work. Click here

Labels: DOWNLOADS, HOME, NICETRACK

Quick update for you all, I have managed to get a proof-of-concept version of Nicetrack working using RIL. Am hoping to have something up here soon

Thanks for all your emails and interest

Labels: HOME, NICETRACK

Have been doing a bit of digging around recently, and it's not good news. One kind reader pointed me in the direction of this site http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/39709/0/page/1 which has a good tutorial on how to use the RIL API.

Unfortunately, this isn't supported by my HTC TyTN; something to do with trusted applicaiton certificates, and so I haven't been able to progress with this.

Labels: HOME, NICETRACK