Mail from Far East – Accessories for the Samsung Galaxy S2 at a bargain price

Posted by Raffael on 01/18/2013 Posted in News & Apps, Personal stuff

Airmail Hong Kong Today I received the long-awaited package – but but let’s take one thing at a time…
For some time, I am the proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy S2. And so my beloved smartphone even longer remains such beatiful, I bought a whole bunch of accessories on Ebay some weeks ago. Actually I just wanted a case, but I’m a penny pincher and therefore I ordered the following package. (For the case, that the link doesn’t work any longer, I have even made you a screenshot.) The package contained the following items:

3x protective foils
1x car charger
1x USB connection cable
1x car mount (with suction cup)
2x styluses (of course for capacitive screens)
4x silicone soft cases
1x silicone case with built-in stand
1x rubber case
1x flipcase (a “cover with lid”)
1x wristband with pocket (e.g. for sports)
2x batterys
1x battery-pack charger (including […]

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

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 01/15/2013 Posted in Tutorials Tagged diy, diy door opener, diy gsm door opener, door opener, howto, low-cost, low-cost door opener, nokia 6230, remote door opener

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 01/14/2013 Posted in C#.Net, Tutorials Tagged Arial Unicode MS, C#, C# encoding, c# representation error, c# unicode characters, setcompatibletextrenderingdefault, setcompatibletextrenderingdefault c#, test

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 01/13/2013 Posted in PHP Tagged how to, how to create a simple syntax highlighter in php, how to make a syntax highlighter in php, PHP, syntax highlighter

In 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 […]