Congratulations to my cousin Erica and her husband Paul who have just had their first child: Elijah Hawk Bergman. He arrived at 9:45am on Wednesday. Weighing in at 6lbs 15oz.
I don’t have any more photos (or a link to more) because as far as I can tell they are all on Facebook (I stole this one using Amber’s account). If I find some I’ll add a link.
I wrote back on October 5th of last year about how we watch most of our TV on Hulu. This is still true. In fact one of the things that makes watching TV on Hulu so great, if I do say so myself, is a little program I wrote to mute the computer during commercials.
To pull off this trick I used AutoHotKey (AHK). AHK is a great, in my opinion indispensible, program that lets you automate a huge number of tasks in Windows. In their own words AHK can “Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks.” I use it at home and work. If you can do it while sitting at your computer (click, drag, open, delete, move, close, type text, fill forms, etc) you can program AHK to do it for you. I highly recommend you check it out. You can even build a GUI in no time to speed tasks like data entry or to create a control panel of sorts.
My program, HuluLauncher, does a couple of things. First it sets your computer to presentation mode so your monitor won’t sleep even if there is no keyboard or mouse input. Then it launches the TV page of Hulu.com in your default browser. The real magic is the muting of the commercial. It works by checking the color of a single pixel on the screen. When Hulu goes to commercial that pixel goes from black to grey. When that happens, the computer gets muted. When it goes back to black the volume comes back on. For the volume control to work you need to be watching in full screen mode. When you press Ctrl+X the program exits setting the computer back to normal.
I’ve made the executable and the source code available for download on this page. If you have AHK installed you only need the .ahk file. The .exe file will run on almost any version of Windows without any install needed.
AHK is flexible enough that it wouldn’t be too hard to make the muting work for viewing at less than full screen. If you would find that useful let me know and I’ll take a crack at it. Or download the source and change it yourself. If you do, let me know where I can download your code updates in the comments.
Download:
HuluLauncher.exe (376) (200kb) — Stand alone, no install needed. Just download and run it.
HuluLauncher.ahk (447) (1.5kb) — You’ll need AutoHotKey installed on your pc to run this one.
Tags: AutoHotKey
A few days ago I wrote about our trip to the Tokyo Steak House. Apparently Wesley was more taken than I realized. Since that day he has been reenacting many portions of that dinner around our house. He is doing things like: Moving bowls around the counter using a spatula. Mimicing the way we were served our fried rice. And his favorite thing is to toss frozen corn (his preferred variety) at us so we can catch it in our mouth. At the restaurant the chef tossed up first broccolli (which I refused) and then shrimp after shrimp after shrimp (which Amber refused). At least the corn is less messy.
Tags: Wesley
Jillian has been turning into quite the nifty critter over the last few months. People are constantly amazed by her and I see more of myself in her than I care to admit. Here are a few recent things of note:
- She continues to be quite small, but sturdy. She is roughly the size of a one year old.
- She talks up a storm. The girl knows a ton of words and can speak in four word sentences. I work with a few people who can barely manage that. Her favorite long phrase of late is Where are you ___? You can insert anything she is looking for in that blank: Mama, Dada, Wesley, Book, Boots, Food, Candy, Duck, whatever.
- She sings. She sings Moon, Moon, Moon by Laurie Berkner. Not verbatim mind you, but good for the sub-two year old class: “Moon, Moon, Moon … Night, night, night.” She sings it especially when she is ready to go to sleep. She uses a sweet sing-songy voice and tends to sway while she does it.
- She is clearly in charge and cranky as all hell when she doesn’t get her way. She storms around yelling “Mama! Mama! Mama!” when she wants attention. Plus she grunts, yells, screams, and pushes when Wesley is giving her a hard time.
- She is currently into ducks. Books about ducks, toy ducks, and of course her duck chopsticks. She will currently only use a bib that has a duck on it.
- She is cutting her last four teeth. Three have done the hard part and that last one should be done soon. Thank goodness. I think she officially has more teeth than I do now.
- She is a cute little mirror image of Wesley. When eating if Wesley takes a drink, Jillian takes a drink. If Wesley drinks the milk from his cereal, Jillian puts down her spoon and picks up her bowl to drink too.
- She has turned into quite the reader. Time was she didn’t like to read books. Now she loves them and loves to be read to.
- She made it to 20lbs the other day. So we now have her in a forward facing car seat! It seems like a small victory, but it is so nice now that she can see out the window, look forward, get less sun in her eyes and we can see her and hand her things. I think it will make car rides better in general. She was testing out her new found leg room today by bouncing her feet and didn’t want to get out of the car when we got home.
- She has not lost her love affair with all things spicy: BBQ sauce, Salsa, etc. Just like her dad.
- She gets all puffy around her eyes and her face turns all splotchy when she cries. And they stay that way for quite a while after she stops. Again, just like me.
- She continues to be cute as a button. What can I say? Just like me.
Tags: Jillian