Welcome
to my blog.
There are other "Hal Blog's," but I guess this is
the only real one, given it's at halblog.com,
right? It's just my corner of the web where I can put up my
comments in my blog, get comments back from friends (or whoever
stumbles on this site) and where I can post photos I take or
images I create while I'm learning 3D animation. I'm not
here to make the best or biggest site, just one I can use to
communicate with friends. I have a number of wide ranging
topics on my blog, from learning 3D animation to learning to
repair a classic Mercedes convertible. I'm also interested
in open source software. This is not a place where I want
to bore you with as much drivel as possible about every mundane
detail of my life or "revenge stories" about the latest
person to irritate me. It's a place where I can share what
I think is worth sharing.
Oh, while I have halblog.com
as my domain, due to technical issues and the fact that I'd
rather spend my time writing or ballroom dancing, the blog is now
hosted by Wordpress. That way I can write and not deal with
upgrades and technical issues.
So, if you're
interested, here's
the main blog!
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FOSS
(Free/Open Source Software)
FOSS, or Free/Open Source
Software, is software that is developed openly so anyone who has
a copy of it can make changes to it. Often a programmer
will make changes to a FOSS program and send the improvements
back to the author so the new changes can be included for
everyone to use.
The other benefit, at least with the
FOSS programs I write, is that they are free to download. All
my open source programs that are on this site are free to
download and use. That means you can download them and use
them for free. If you're a programmer, you can download the
source code and make your own changes.
While the
software is free, I would deeply appreciate hearing from those
who download and use my software. I'm not going to pester
those who email me about the software, but after the work it
takes to write a program, it's nice to hear from people who find
it useful or fun.
Old Time
Radio Downloader: (This is outdated now, but it's
still here, with source, in case anyone can use the source code.)
There are at least ten thousand (maybe tens of thousands) old
time radio, or OTR, radio shows on the Internet
Archive. This includes episodes of great OTR shows like
The Shadow, X Minus 1, George Burns and Gracie
Allen, The Jack Benny Show, You are There, and
even historic broadcasts like the original "Panic Broadcast"
of War of the Worlds that made thousands think Earth was
being invaded by Martians. While these shows can be
downloaded with any web browser, I've written the Old
Time Radio Downloader, or OTRDownloader, that makes it easy
to download these shows in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or flac files.
HD
Radio Controller: This is more for the technically
oriented, since it's mainly just a library of routines for C++
programmers, but this will allow control of some HD and satellite
radios from Linux through the serial port. I've provided
the code to a Linux distro that's now defunct, LinuxICE (for In Car Entertainment),
so they can create an interface for it so it can be used as part
of a carputer to let the carputer control the radio. There's
also a simple command line program included for testing that can
be used to control a HD radio from the command line. I
don't have any compiled binaries included, just the source
code.
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Photo
Collections
A lot of the
photos are taken with my sister's digital camera. I'm used
to a 35mm SLR I inherited from my brother, so I have not gotten
used to "features" like auto-focus. Silly me. I
thought auto-focus would mean it would focus on the main object
in the picture. That doesn't mean everything is out of
focus, but it's interesting to see what the camera focused on in
some shots.
Click
here for
pictures of Hal's latest toy (a 1985 Mercedes 380SL).
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