LugRadio episode 8, the “too tired to talk” issue, is out. This episode is drier with more technical content than episode 7, but I was pleased with the recording nonetheless. Now I just have to listen to it to see what it was actually like after Jono’s ministrations!
Why can’t I buy a Canesta projection keyboard for my Zaurus? This is such cool technology, and there’s no actual on-sale product based on it!
Moreover, could you put a data projector in a laptop? That way, the “screen” would just be a white thing that folded up, rather than a solid LCD block.
I’ve got this dream of a laptop which is the size of a pack of cigarettes: you unfold a little flat white “screen” from the back of it that a data projector in the “laptop” projects your screen onto, and you project a keyboard from it onto a flat surface in front of it (or another unfoldable “screen“) using Canesta’s technology. You couldn’t put a DVD drive in it, but you could put a load of USB ports on it to plug a USB DVD drive into. And you could stick wireless networking, a network port, and Bluetooth into it. It’d be brilliant. Is it even remotely possible? Can you make data projectors that small if they don’t have to project very far? Can you project onto a screen that isn’t directly in front of you? If the projector was at the bottom of the screen, then the picture would be weirdly elongated when projected, but the video drivers could correct for that by projecteing a distorted image which looked OK on the “screen“, no? Like those adverts you get on cricket fields and Grand Prix circuits that look like they’re standing upright on the telly; if you actually see one at ground level, they’re oddly stretched and wrong. That sort of principle.
Problem is, even if this was theoretically possible, I couldn’t build it; I can hardly make a hardware platform in my study! Suppose I could set up a company to do it :-)
Well, Steve over at slayeroffice has updated his Document Tree Chart, after both he and I put together a solution to Molly Holtzshlag’s thoughts on producing a DOM tree from an active document. We’ve gone beyond that stage now, though, I think; Steve’s latest iteration has many cool extra features, like highlighting, colour coding, and transparency (since, unlike mine, he creates it in the window containing the document you’re examining).
And then he finishes up by throwing down the gauntlet to me to leapfrog him again, which is very unfair indeed given that I have to be at work in, like, six hours.
New features:
It probably only works in Mozilla. If it works in anything else consider it a bonus. Let me know if there are bugs, but, unlike Steve, I do not promise at all to fix them…
Steve: bring it on. ;-)
Given my recent preference for free software (you can blame Lugradio for this), I would turn away from MT anyway.
That’s actually really good to hear. We’re doing something right :-)
My God, this is fantastic. I’ve been worrying recently about what to do with mail and news, and came to the conclusion that I’d do without news entirely because setting up a news server was too hard, and so was feeding news into IMAP. Predictably, therefore, the internet reacts by creating the perfect solution, newsgroups as Atom feeds from Google. That’s the coolest thing I have seen ever. Watch me read loads again!
Not sure how this solves posting, although it’d be bloody cool if they implemented the CommentAPI to let you post from your aggregator, wouldn’t it?
Episode seven of Lugradio is out. I’m really pleased with this one!
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Over at 0xDECAFBAD: I’d love to pay a monthly fee to have shows by Joss Whedon stream on down do my file-server with BitTorrent. I’d love to subscribe to favorite indie bands’ releases and have them show up in the music folder. I’m cheap, so I’d like the price to be low, but I’ll still pay for what I like. And I’d love to do all this, still being able to tinker, still seeing that people producing things I like get paid, without going to jail or letting them empty my wallet with a wet/dry vac.
I mean, we already know this. This is all preaching to the converted for most of the readers of this weblog. But every now and again someone describes all this stuff—download-on-demand, TiVo-like functions—in such a way that I’m forcefully reminded, again, why it is that I want the world to be like that, over the howling protests of corporate lawyers looking to keep us away from what we’ve bought and paid for.
The Moz developers have fixed the phishing scam by escaping usernames and passwords in URLs, so you can see them more easily as being usernames and passwords. This is considerably cleverer than just disabling them like IE did, causing us problems at work. (via Ian)
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I have mused in the past on the subject of my mail setup. I hav enow pretty much come to a decision: I’ll be using IMAP, with a GUI mail client at the console and SquirrelMail remotely. Yes, I know I hate SquirrelMail. I still will hate it; webmail is a lame interface. However, the benefits of using a decent GUI mail client are not lost on me. I can still use mutt with IMAP if I want, it’s just that it’s very slow. So I will have to make do with SqMail, although I may just VNC to my home desktop from work and use the GUI client.
I’ll also be reading my mailing lists in the GUI client, too. Whither Usenet in this scenario? Well, nowhere. I don’t actually read any newsgroups at all at the moment, and I haven’t done so for a year or so. The hell with it. I haven’t really got time anyway.
So, I need to decide on a GUI mail client and an IMAP server. I’m open to suggestions on these points: I posted to the Wolves LUG mailing list with a list of criteria, reproduced below so my other set of readers may make suggestions if they like.
It must fulfil the following:
And the following are nice-to-haves, so as many as possible:
I’m also not sure which IMAP server to use. Is there any reason why I should care about the distinctions between them? I’ll likely be using Exim as the MTA, since it’s the Debian default, and I don’t understand any MTAs at all. If there’s a very simple MTA then I’m happy to switch to it.
Over at SlayerOffice, there’s a new
Tree Chart Favelet, based around a request from Eric Meyer to have
something that can show a nicely laid out DOM tree for a given page.
Sadly, though, I don’t like it very much, so I’ve written a different
one. It’s fairly nice; displays a tree (or a reasonable approximation)
as Eric requested, and you can hover over the red text node boxes to see
what’s in that text node (you can see the first four characters in the
chart itself, to give you a clue). Tested in Mozilla, and doesn’t seem
to work in IE for reasons that are beyond me. It doesn’t work in Safari either,
I’m told (which is Safari’s fault for getting the CSS wrong). Let me know what you think:
There were some useful resources I tapped for this: