Author Archives: TC

Yahoo stock to RSS converter

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NO LONGER RUNNING!

Update June 2010: I haven’t used this for a while and as you probably have noticed it’s no longer working. It did it’s thing, while there was not such service, but now at least Google financial provides some of the same services. Anyway, the source is still here, if you want to run it…

Inspired by Xanadb’ RSS Stock Ticker (which in turn was inspired by the now defunct Yahoo Finance RSS), I decided to try to make my own. I wanted to add a few things, mainly the ability to calculate loss/win for each stock and a total loss/win for all stocks.

The data for the feed is gotten from finance.yahoo.com

and you need the stock symbols that they use to build up a URL string that you can feed to your RSS program. But here’s an example:

http://tc.dk/stock.php?symbols=msft:100:20+csco:200:20.9

This will give you two rss items with the current stock price of Microsoft (msft) and Cisco (csco). The total value of a 100 Microsoft stocks is calculated and the win/loss if you paid 20us$ for them is calculated. The same is done for 200 Cisco stocks brought at 20.90us$.
Here’s an example of how Thunderbird will show the data:
stock rss view
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Backgammon games for PocketPC

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I’ve been playing backgammon for a long time. Never seriously on tournament level, but I’ve played a lot of games.
The first game I looked for when I got a new PDA was a good backgammon. This is the result of my search. But first;
please note that these comparisons mainly concentrate on usability and not that much on the game play it self.
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Dell Axim x50v – part 1

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I’ve been a Palm man for a long time. I got a PalmPilot around 1997 and I’ve worked my way through a Palm Vx to my current Palm Tungsten T3. I’ve been happy with all of them. But two weeks ago my T3 died. So I send it of the the shop, and got back a message saying that it would be about four weeks until I would get it back. So I went out and got a Pocket PC – a Microsoft Windows Mobile based machine from Dell – the x50v, which is pretty much top of the line among PDAs. It’s sports Wifi, bluetooth, vga screen, CF and SD card slots, so it sounds cool, but of cause even the coolest hardware is useless if the software sucks.

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Mike’s Madness

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I found these old (from around 1990) texts called Mike’s Madness. They are in my humble opinion some of the funnies things ever written. Crude and far from political correct, but lots of fun. If jokes about Australians, Italians, Germans, Star Trek, Apple Computersm, nazies, beer and about smoking to much pot is your thing, or you think that they may be, take a look a this.

Clarkes third law is Rubbish

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I’ve been thinking about Clarke’s third law – Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -, lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s wrong or at least badly worded. I propose this instead:

For any sufficiently high level of ignorance, technology will be indistinguishable from magic

(henceforth know at TC first law 😉

The thing is that Clarke viewed technology from the point of view of the educated man who takes an interest in technology (a.k.a. himself) and he kind of forgets that other kind of people exists, when he formulates his third law. But even so I think that it may be rubbish.

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Model Toby

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The German Science magazine: Morgenwelt has used a couple of my pictures for their web-magazine.

They’ve used a picture of my son, Tobias, for one article and one of an old lady, for another article. Kind of cool if I have to say it my self.

The pictures where published using a Creative Commons license, saying that the pictures on my gallery can be used by anybody as long as it’s non-commercial and that they give attribution to me. So I’m not making any money of this, but the simple fact that something I created, was useful for somebody else, simply warms my heart.

Nikon Coolpix 8800

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I went at got my self one of these babies yesterday.

I haven’t really had the time yet, to play much with it.

The short days, here makes it kind of hard to get of from work, while there’s still a bit of light left. But I’ve managed to take a couple of pictures. Absolutely nothing special, just testing.

But I do think that this picture came out quite nice. I’ll have to test a lot of stuff on it in the near future to get a good
feel for it. Needs to find the noise level of the ISO setting, the usefulness of the Noise Reduction system and the Vibration Reduction system.

When the counting is done

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Just want to congratulate our American brothers on their election. Not that I agree on your choice, but, hey, it’s not my country and it’s your choice.

But I’ve surfing around and reading here, and there and there seems to be general idea amongst the winners to blow their horn and claim that winning means, that they where right. And that the democrats where wrong. Sorry, fellows, but that’s not what it means. It means that a majority voted on your guy. It’s says nothing about being wrong or right, just something about popularity. What’s how democracy works. Right or wrong doesn’t enter the question.

You also have to look at the numbers and think really hard about them. Nearly half the country voted for the other guy! Bush W may have won, but nearly half the county put out a message saying “we want something else”. You can of course ignore them, but it makes for divided country and that’s never good.

Well, it’s good for the rest of the world, but if America wants to be strong, it should really try to unite. God knows, you got problems already …. Have you taken a look at your budget lately?

Back to work

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I’ve had the previous week off from work to enroll my kid, in a new kindergarten.
It went really well. He loves the people there and the fact that there’s a lot more space and light then in the old one. At the moment, there aren’t that many kid there (it’s a brand new institution), which could part of as the adult to kid ration is something like 1:1. He loves attention. Hopefully he will be able to keep up the good spirit, even as more kid arrive.
We had like 35 people over on Saturday for an open-house combined housewarming and birthday party (mine) this Saturday and that went really good as well. Toby loved a the attention and it was really nice to get to meet people that I haven’t seen for to long. We took the easy road and had Sushi and food brought from Hings, which does Sushi and really good Chinese food. A hundred pieces of Sushi looks rather impressive 🙂

Things may not be what they seem…

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Greg’s Digital Portfolio has a great collection of images that Greg “Photoshopped”. Which basically means that he change, more or less, real images into something more selling. Often the results are stunning, but also a but boring.

Take a look at this image if you are wondering how come girls in magazines look so good. No wonder girls have a problem with reality and their looks…