Year: 2013

MySpace Loader – a free and easy to use myspace.com downloader

Posted by Raffael on Posted in Downloads Tagged , , , , , , ,

Proudly I like to present to you the MySpace Loader. With the MySpace Loader you can, as the name implies, download music from MySpace. The program allows you to download multiple songs at once, is able to convert them into different formats and optionally equip them with ID3 tags. The whole thing is, as well as the Cloud Downloader, free. (Nevertheless I’m happy about every donation from you.) The download link can be found below the YouTube video in this article.
Features:

Downloads every song
Converts music to .mp3, .aac, .wma or .ogg
It’s totally free (not even ads!)
Quick, easy and clear structured

  
  

How to build a low-cost GSM door opener

Posted by Raffael on Posted in Tutorials Tagged , , , , , , , ,

In the last days I once again tinkered a bit. Certainly more bad than good, but where are no professional tools, there won’t be high quality. But the ultimately goal was not a professional product, but rather a simple and cheap solution. But what is it all about?
The product of my tinkering is a low-cost GSM door opener. That is simplified a small device, that opens your door when you call it and may bring the costs next to nothing. And now a little about the implementation …
Anyone who wants to get an overview about the project, can view the following video, which I made from the final product.

To build a similiar application you need the following components:

Nokia 6230i
12V relay (a 5V relay would be better, but I had none)
Connector strips
A few wires

First I disassembled the phone and removed the vibration motor. To the now vacant contacts on the phone board […]

How to solve representation/encoding errors in C# Winforms applications

Posted by Raffael on Posted in C#.Net, Tutorials Tagged , , , , , , ,

I know the title of this post hurts, but I wasn’t able to describe the problem with fewer words. But let us get to the point. As part of the development of my cloud downloader I encountered (among much others) the following problem. Korean characters were displayed as blank boxes, even though they were shown in the source code editor correctly. Those of you, who wonder now,  from where you can get the Korean characters on your keyboard, should just stop by Google Translate. (The screenshot below illustrates the problem once again. Please click to enlarge the image.)
Koreanische Zeichen falsche Darstellung
On the Internet I found only very few solutions. And almost all were, in my opinion, rather suboptimal. In most cases the following solution was proposed:
It is recommended that you call the SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault() method with the parameter true. In […]

How to make simple syntax hightlighter in PHP

Posted by Raffael on Posted in PHP Tagged , , , ,

PHP SyntaxhighlighterIn the following article I will show you how you can write your own syntax highlighter with a few lines of PHP. By use of the following PHP snippet you can easily display PHP code on your homepage.
The whole thing is much more easily than you think. Most of the work is done by an internal PHP function named highlight_file. This function reads a file and formats the source code in color. We then merely have to count the lines of the file and output the line numbers, as well as preformat the font.
Since the snippet is not that long, I think the comments in the snippet itself are sufficient. If you still have any questions, just write a comment.

<?php
function highlight_sourcecode($file)
{
//Count the lines of the input file
$amount_of_lines = count(file($file));

//Create a list with all line numbers
$list_linenumbers = range(1, $amount_of_lines);

//Format […]