It’s called OSOLCaptcha and is a captcha plugin for the user registration, login, reset password, contact us and remind username forms. You only need to install and then publish the plugin for it to work and you can download it for free from here.

The default theme is fine for my needs and since installing it and doing the initial configuration I haven’t needed to touch it for months. The plugin page is here but you can also click on ‘Add New’ from the Dashboard Plugins menu and install it from there. I’d highly recommend using it if your blog is on WordPress.

I’m now looking into a similar plugin which works with Joomla for some other websites I’m currently working on. It’s called Mobile Joomla and looks pretty good as well.

Here’s my first app, it’s fairly simple and uses the TinyDB and the OrientationSensor objects which were fun to play with.

Ever had an argument about which direction North is? You haven’t? Just me? Well, if you had, you could have solved it on the spot with “Where’s North?!?”. Two players try to point the phone North. The closest player wins…

You can’t upload AppInventor apps to the market yet so you’ll need to download here or scan the barcode below. Make sure you have Settings->Applications->Unknown Sources ticked otherwise you won’t be able to install it.

I spent quite a while trying to get ADB setup using the Android SDK but it refused to recognise the adb drivers as compatible with the device. Unfortunately there’s not that much out there in the way of step by step Android Screencasts for Dummies, but, after much googling and hair pulling I managed to tease a solution from the internet (I’m using Windows XP for this, not my usual Ubuntu).

1. First, you need to enable debugging mode: Hit Menu->Settings->Applications->Development and check “USB debugging”.
2. The Android SDK adb drivers don’t work so you need to install HTCSync. Apparently some people have the file on the CD/SDCard from HTC, I couldn’t find it so downloaded it from here (kudos to James Giang for this solution).
3. Plug in HTC Desire, Windows will do some installing, after which you need to restart.
4. There is a nice project over on googlecode called AndroidScreencast. Make sure you have JRE v5+ installed and run this file from their project.

Hopefully you should be able to see a window displaying your phone monitor (see screenshot). Yay!

The first events of the year that I organised for Notts/Derby BCS group went well and I’m hoping that this continues with the events over the next couple of months.

They are all held at the Long Eaton Novotel and are free to non-BCS members. If you want to come along please register first on our website so we have an idea of numbers. The next few meetings are:

• 15th March: Safe Disposal of IT equipment
• 19th April: Speed Networking!
• 17th May: Game-based learning
• 21st June: The Art of Productive Laziness

All meetings start at 18:30 and are at: Novotel, Bostock Lane, Long Eaton, NOTTINGHAM NG10 4EP (map)

convert file.pdf file.jpg

Unfortunately the resolution was messed up in the output files so had to do some digging on google to find this forum post which sorted the problem with:

convert -density 400 in.pdf -scale 2000x out.jpgtext

Works a treat. I had figured out the -scale part but the -density bit I had missed. I’ve also been using another ImageMagick command quite a lot recently to prepare folders of photos for Facebook upload. This one changes the source images so best make a copy of the pictures first.

mogrify -resize 800x *.jpg

Off course, these are linux commands so might not work on Windows.