Ben Laughlin

Just setup a page on paper.li which builds a customised daily paper from your twitter feed. A bit like Flipboard except for the web.

My paper is here.

4th August 2011

Free dad from his saggy jocks this Father’s Day

Aussie blokes can finally say goodbye to saggy jocks and holey socks, with the introduction of Australia’s first automated underwear store stocking the brands they love, freshundies.net.

Launched in time for Father’s Day, in just one visit blokes can have their favourite socks and jocks and how often they’d like to receive each to their home or workplace and then sit back and enjoy an automated supply of underwear.

freshundies.net is the brainchild of suburban dad Ben Laughlin who ran out of socks and jocks when his wife struggled to find room and cancelled the bulging supply he’d been receiving from his mum each Christmas for 35 years.

All was well until the supply ran out and Mr Laughlin found himself struggling with sagging undies and patchy socks, and absolutely no desire to waste his time trawling department store underwear aisles.

“Blokes hate shopping at the best of times and have a bad habit of wearing socks and jocks until they fade away to dust.  freshundies.net makes sure they’ve always got something respectable in the drawer,” Mr Laughlin said.

Of course there’s a smart woman behind the scenes, www.freshundies.net Marketing and Distribution Manager, Angela Laughlin:

“We wanted to provide Aussie guys with a price competitive and easy going service so there’s free delivery on orders over $20, no sneaky contract and they can stop the service at anytime,” Mrs Laughlin said.

“Guys can choose from popular colours and brands as well as the freshundies Tradies Pack and Suits Pack each featuring a Chesty Bonds Singlet, pair of socks and jocks.

“And best of all the woman in their lives can also order for them and then look forward to their fella strutting his stuff in freshundies.”

freshundies.net was recently launched and is a secure Australian site offering popular payment options.

ENDS

For further information contact: Angela Laughlin
Marketing and Distribution Manager

I often wanted to leave my computer on when I go to bed but don’t want it running all night – when downloading a torrent for example.

Here is a quick Automator script to use on your mac to do so.

I have used Growl for a couple of notifications. If you don’t have Growl installed you can just delete these actions.

The script is basic in that it doesn’t have any sort of validation of the user entered values.

Run the script and it will ask you to enter a sleep time in minutes. Hit enter and it will then wait to that time before it puts your mac to sleep. Simple eh?

Just open this up with Automator to check it out. It is easy to understand.

SleepInTime

I’ve found Eclipse (3.5) runs really slow on Mac in recent releases.

These settings seem to help somewhat. Add/Update them in the eclipse.ini file which can be found in the eclipse package on your mac.

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-Xms512m
-Xmx512m

The ‘Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion’ property (set to 1.5 by default), make sure Java 1.6 is used. The other settings set the memory allocation – make these more if Eclipse is still running slow.

Embed Google Wave posts with the new google tool at: http://www.google.com/webelements/wave/

example below:

Ever thought it handy to be able to take a picture of whoever is using your computer?  Great for security, particularly if your laptop gets flogged.

Well I’ve just uncovered a neat solution for my MacBookPro and Mac Air using DropBox (which incidentally I am in love with!), the built-in iSight Cam and a little command line app called iSightCapture.

iSightCapture is simply called from the command line to take a snapshot photo using the iSight cam and saves the image as a file.  This makes automation easy.  I did the following (assuming you are a DropBox user, if you are not you should be!):

1. Download iSightCapture and stick it in the folder in /sbin.

2.  Create a basic perl script to call the iSightCapture app (see below).

3.  Create a launchd plist to call this script at login time, plus at 4 hour intervals thereafter (see below).

I chose perl for no reason other than I had another script that I could quickly modify to suit – you can use anything, obviously.

The perl script does two main things.

1.  Creates a file name for the image using the current date and time, so it is unique (unique enough anyway).

2.  Specifies the path that the image will be saved.  In my case a DropBox photos folder.

The great thing about DropBox is it automatically copies any new/modified files in it’s patch up to the cloud, almost instantly.  This is perfect for this application.

The two scripts are as follows:

Perl (save as iSightSnapshot.pl):

#!/usr/bin/env perl
 
# get date/time
my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,
$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime();
 
# tweek the date/time
my $month = $mon + 1;	#Jan = 0 for $mon
my $fullyear = $year + 1900; #year offset by 1900
if ($month < 10) { $month = "0$month"; }
if ($mday < 10) { $mday = "0$mday"; }
 
# generate the command including the image filename and path, customise the path to suit your system
$command = 'isightcapture /Users/ben/Dropbox/Photos/Snaps/mbp/snaps_'.$fullyear.$month.$mday.'_'.$hour.$min.$sec.'.jpg';
 
#run backup command
system ("$command");

Launchd:

(saved in /Library/LaunchAgents and customise the path to your perl script)

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>ShapshotAtStart</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Users/ben/Documents/iSightSnapshot.pl</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
	<key>StartInterval</key>
	<integer>14400</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

So there you have it, a very quick and easy way to add some security to your system.