Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad sponsored or based on a rather hefty framework like AIR (which by now, I guess, has been silently installed on my computer anyhow). Update: This project is now deprecated and Twitter has removed basic authentication. Custom apps have major implications for usability so I decided to roll my own....
Via Bill de hÓra. Run this from the command line: 1 history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head I get: 1 108 ls 78 cd 53 sudo 29 python 13 cap 9 django-admin.py 9 ruby 8 vim 6 easy_install 3 bzr 1 ex 1 python2.5 1 ln 1 mksir 1 cat 1 cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc In short: I have trouble with my default python installation. I am trying Django for small project....
Thanks to Johnny Chung Lee, everyone and their mom seem to be setting up their own Wiimote whiteboards these days. I tried it too but disliked the pen-based interaction. So, I built a simple glove that allows you to pinch an object to drag and drop it somewhere. Here is what you need: IR LED in the 920 nm range (a bag of 20 cost me ) 1.5V AA battery a glove battery holder (with optional velcro to fit it to the glove) some wires a Wiimote software (I tried Uwe Schmidt’s java based Mac version)....
When people started making applications available in the browser a number of interaction challenges appeared. How do you launch a web app compared to a desktop app? How do you prevent people from navigating away from your app? The Mozilla people have been hard t work with Prism - basically a customized version of Firefox, which lets you create desktop apps pre-configured to load a certain URL at startup. The desktop app is launched like any other application....
I often install apps to try if they work the way I like. Some stay, some I delete almost immediately. Some of them have built in functionality that alerts you when there is an update available. I find that very annoying. If you have many apps these little reminders tend to pop up all the time. So, I was looking for something to keep tiny apps up to date and found AppFresh....
Mark Pilgrim writes about the benefits of the easy-to-use package manager in Ubuntu and then feels sorry for his Mac OS-using friends. “But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. " I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier....
Update: As many readers now noticed, as of 10.5.2 there is now a preferences setting for the menubar transparency. For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…). Someone created a software hack to remove the transparency....
This was going to be my summer project, but after getting the parts I couldn’t stop myself from putting it together straight away. About a year ago I read an article about a guy who put together a synthesizer controller using laser pointers, a bowl of water, a solar panel and MAX/MSP. I can’t find the link anymore but it doesn’t matter when you want to roll your own! This is what you need:...
(Please note that this post is from 2007 and things have become much better). When you are on parental leave you have to register which days you are away fro work with the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. To access the online services of an agency you have to have an electronic ID. In Sweden this is a locally installed certificate issued by your bank or large telecom provider. In my case my identity is checked by my bank and then I am forwarded to Telia, which handles the process of generating the ceritificate and installing the appropriate software on my computer....
The combination of parental leave, a Sony A100 10 Mpix camera and the 80 Gb HD of my Mac mini server has resulted in a lot of zeroes and ones needing a place to live. I have realized that a lof of valuable photos are only stored on the HD. Should it fail the family will be really disappointed. Hence, the need for a backup solution. I was planning to get a small RAID solution for the home network, but they are fairly expensive, need electricity and space....