zen.org Communal Weblog

Ed Vielmetti points out an easy way to tag your Mac OS X Address Book entries, which is adding a custom field for things like “friend”, etc. Which can then be searchable. I think I’m going to do that for things like Christmas cards, birthdays in certain months, etc.

I just found out aboutSTICKAM, but I’m still learning about it. Anyone else join it? Wanna try with me? 🙂 You can put real time streaming video of your webcam on your blog or webpage. It’s neat. I’d like to get it working with LJ, but it does work now with Blogger, apparently.

Step 1: With a Finder window open, click on the Library folder that’s in your home directory.

Step 2: Drag it onto your desktop.

Step 3: Make it log off or reboot the iBook in question.

The end result: all of your preferences, your keychain of logins, your Safari bookmarks, your entire world has vanished.

The fix: put Library back in your home directory, not on your desktop, after you’ve logged off to make sure already-opened files don’t make you actually lose everything. We accomplished this by making an SSH connection from another computer. Another fix could be logging in as another user and opening up an Applications->Utilities->Terminal window and doing it manually.

I don’t know if there’s an elegant way to recover from this startlingly crippling little step.

Oh, I forgot: Step 0: Do all of these steps as a four year-old boy. Patrick Kehoe, über-hacker.

It’s an incredible freebie Firefox 1.5 Extension called, Hyperwords™ that makes browsing the Web easier and faster than ever!

All you have to do is select (highlight) any text on a page and a menu automatically appears; click on what you want to do with that text – use it to find more info with search engines, check reference sites [eg., Wikipedia, IMDB, Share Prices, etc.], get its definition from a dictionary or translate into another language; if you’ve selected a product name or type, go shopping for it and/or do a raft of other things.

Hyperwords runs on the Mac, Windows and Linux versions of Firefox, and also works with Flock; one for Microsoft Explorer is anticipated sometime by this coming summer.

I’ve only had it for a short while but am already addicted. Do give it a whirl; it’s simply brilliant! 🙂

Google, but everything is backwards—meaning, do your search backwards too.

What an awesome hack.

Visit my webcam at:

http://www.zen.org/~sven/webcam.html

When posting this it’s pointing at very interesting location, my back yard, and currently updates every 60 seconds. The camera is hooked up to my laptop which has a wireless connection, so long there is a plug around I can put it anyplace within range. Don’t expect it to be up 24 hours a day.

My question is, what should I point it at? Please post any ideas you have, no matter how silly. Some of my ideas include:

• Where the cat often naps.
• The cat door, see if he brings any critters in.
• Main Street, where speeders often get pulled over.
• The stove: “What’s Sven cooking?”
• The TV. Would that be legal?

I don’t expect anybody but me to watch it in the long-term. I just thought somebody might think of something clever.

Have you ever writting some horrible code that works you. Then stare and stare at it for a way to make it cleaner and nothing comes to mind? I think I’ll keep it and think of it as grotesque, like gargoyles.

I did it. I decided. I went with the Nokia 6230i, mainly cause I liked the interface. Even if it didn’t use iSync with my iBook, I found (and bought) a program called Phone Director, which allows the Nokia 6230, 6230i, 7280, 7380, 8800 all to connect to the Mac, with more info and easier use than iSync. Loving this. I’ve tricked out the phone with my Serenity wallpaper, ringtones, message tones, and I’m working on getting the “No power in the ‘verse” as my startup sound :-).

Mucho thanks to Marie at the Tullamore Carphone Warehouse for dealing with dummy me who didn’t think things through about half the stuff we did!!

I should have the same number (for those of you who have it) once the porting from Vodafone to Meteor is done.

[tags]mobile, nokia, serenity, vodafone, meteor, marie, irishblog[/tags]

Test 1: A few years ago I got a Logitech USB camera for “free” when I signed up for Verison DSL. This morning I finally got it working, and I made the enclosed movie.

Test 2: I have also never used the enclosure feature of this Blog thing Brendan set up.

Update: I guess Test 2 didn’t work. Try http://www.zen.org/~sven/webcam-2006-01-18.mpg

Damien is looking for corporate sponsorship of categories for the Irish Blog Awards. If you are with a company that would be interested in sponsoring, please contact him.

irishblogs, damien, categories, sponsorship