Category: social-hardware

Blojsom events

Ever since David announced the blojsom event notification and listener API, I've been thinking about 100's of ways to use it. But before I explore the possibilites I need to at least upgrade to 2.18. And alot of you will be glad to hear that I will be sorting out my feed links which are still relative rather than absolute.

I still need to run tests on blojsom, My aim is to get blojsom to output SSI's for use with the BBC blogs. Talking of which, got some really interesting news about the BBC but I cant tell quite yet. Once I can, I will post it here first before anywhere else.

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My top Firefox extensions

Get Firefox

I've now got Firefox on three different machines which I use everyday. But my problem is that each one is slighly different because I dont have the same extensions and themes on them. Of course I still use Opera, but with my GNU/Linux setup at home now, I've decided to not install any Open/Free software on it. Which was a problem at first but I've pretty much made Firefox work like Opera now.

First up the ones which make Firefox like Opera for me
Nuke Anything 0.2 – Adds a Remove this object entry to the right-click context menu, which will remove an object from a webpage temporarily. The effects can be undone by reloading the page.

Paste and Go 0.3.1 – Lets you paste an URL from the clipboard and directly load it.

Mouse Gestures 0.9.20040902 – Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard. You can also use “rocker” gestures.

MiniT (drag+indicator) 0.3 – Adds tab dragging with drop place indicator.

Image-Show-Hide 0.1.3.2 – Adds an icon to toolbar. By clicking this button (Or “Shift+B” shortcut) you can simply turn on|off images on all web-pages and (optional) autoreload current page!

QuickNote 0.5.9.2 – A note taking extension with advanced features.

ReloadEvery 0.3.2 – Reloads webpages every so many seconds or minutes

User Agent Switcher 0.6 – Adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser.

Sage 1.2.2 – A lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator.

Single Window 1.4 – A simple extension that allows Mozilla to fully utilize the built-in tabbed browsing behavior, compatible with Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox. Singlewindow has only two options: * Single Window Mode — Traps links that would normally open in a new window

And ones I just love
EditCSS 0.2.2 – Stylesheet modifier in the Sidebar.

BBCode 0.3.2 – Adds BBCode/HTML/XHTML formating to the context menu for forums like Mozillazine. Based on Cussers pastequote extension.

Delicious Delicacies 0.1 – Restores our favorite cookie placeholder text.

Wikalong 0.9.5 – A roaming wiki embeded in the sidebar of your browser, indexed off the URL of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the Internet.

FoxyTunes 0.5 – Control any media player from Firefox and more… [Windows/Linux]

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Dodge it mail

I was flicking through some of my feeds today and came across Kevin rose's Dark tips. Thought I'd check out a few of the sites while I was waiting for something else to be done . DodgeIT – free email with no login caught my eye, and I thought this is going to be some rip off mailinator service. But to my great suprise – this one offers RSS as well! Damm, how good is that? I love mailinator but this is so barebones and quick and the rss is the final knife in the heart.

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Freecycle.org

Freecycle is basiclly made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns.

It sounds great but doesnt pull it off in the same way as for example meetup.com does. or maybe I was thinking of meetup.com but crossed with the concept of giving away stuff. Oh well maybe it will mature (saying that there's already 300 people signed up in London alone). I certainly dont want to be joining up to any more yahoo groups thank you.

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Aggregation overload

Very recently i've noticed a serious drop in performance on my feeds (aggregation). And I know exactly what it is, i've too many rss feeds! I need to sort it out this weekend, as its not good in its current state. I'm going to go through all my feeds and make sure they all still exist and put them into thought out categories, rather than the adhoc method i've been doing up till now. I'm also hoping I will sort out about 40 rss feeds which do full text syndication for my personal pocketpc news reader. The ones i've currently got are a mixed bag of crap.

Flock is my aggregator and seriously nothings happened to the project for ages. It still doesn't support rss2 feeds let alone atom. So tempted to knock up my own in cocoon sometime soon, but then again Blojsom 2.7 will also have a aggregation plugin to go with the import plugin.

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RSS to Jabber

Smartphone with Agile messager running

Last night just before bed, I dropped past the jabber site because I wanted to get a new jabber client for my pocketpc. Saw that myjabber guys had released there own pocketpc version. But I couldnt find it so thought I'd see what else is out there.

Anyway I saw a news story about getting realtime rss feeds in jabber. And it pointed to the jabber.at site. Basicly in the vein of smthingme and other bots like smarterchild and myownbuddy, you can talk to it via set commands and tell it to subscribe you to different rss feeds. Which it will deliver to you every 30 or so minutes.

And I must not forget to mention I'm now using the excellent Agile on my pocketpc and smartphone. I actually think its better than imov, topicim and myjabber. Plus its free, and supports almost every single mobile platform out there.
Interesting links to check out later – http://edgar.netflint.net | http://www.pmbrowser.info/thinkbot.htm | http://www.niemueller.de/software/eggdrop/jabberbot/ | http://www.google.com/search?q=jabber+bots&sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

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Blojsom and Jabber make it into OSX 10.4 Server

So I woke up this morning and looked at my email before rushing off to work, and Miles had sent me a email pointing out that Blojsom and Jabber will come as standard in OSX 10.4 server, which is going to ship end of 2004 or start of 2005. Article here then during mytrain journey to the BBC via Cannon street, I see a link to Blojsom in a slashdot arcticle.

I'm so loving all this, but I'm sure David and Mark are laughing there arse's off. Good one guys looking forward to the Jabber version of Somethingme very soon?

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testing somethingme im to blog service


Somethingme logo?


So I can finally let out the big secret of the blojsom team. They've been working on a IM to blog service and this is my first blog using the service.
They've been working hard on this service since the days of Blojsim which only worked with blojsom 1.x. Mark always promised to get it working for all blogs not just blojsom, now they've done the job. Excellent work. I'm looking forward to using this on my ipaq to drop down quick thoughts into my bookmarks. And I'm rubbing my hands with glee about SMS and even MMS to blog. Allowing me to blog from my SPV as well as a GPRS connection. Tell the truth that will really open blogging up to a whole new generation of bloggers. Very cool, very cool.

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What is EBS?

Mark calls it impromptu while David calls it EBS? What ever it is, it seems to allow blogging via xmlrpc and a instant messager client. I'm left wondering if its blojsim sorted out for blojsom 2.x or something alot more. Oh my I never saw your last post Mark, yes would love to do any experiements possible with cocoon and smack if you like. Anyway I hope to know more soon, now I've made my interests public. – by the way how the hell do trackbacks work?

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More calendaring

I tried to install PHPiCalendar today, but I took one look at it the Tarball and thought forget this. I'm not installing PHP on top of a perfectly fine Java server or run Apache side by side with IIS (webdav) and Resin (everything else). Then I saw dot net cal which is a dot net written ical server. Its not open or GNUed, but it is legally free to groups of less than 10 and to non-profit/educational sectors which isnt bad. I've been spending sometime on there developers blog which highlights some clever thinking and actually decent thoughts on the process of calendaring. On the way I also found these things. iCalendar .net parser, now if someone could write one as a cocoon generator. I'm also interesting in changing ical's ics to xcals so I can actually run some decent xsl transforming on it. I could do it on the ics files but trust me it would be awarked.

I also found windates which is a Windows based ical client in the same vain as Apples iCal. Also found some really nice information about iCalendars under the Mozilla community. I saw the url http://javangelist.snipsnap.org/space/iCalendar – and got a little excited but then read it and realised it was of little use to me. However what on earth is this http://www.scheduleworld.com/index.html? I'm impressed and configuring outlook 2003 to send icals might be one way of keeping my ipaq in sync with my icals?

A java iCalendar parser? Humm will need to try this out for sure… Interesting project using cocoon and icals. Also seen a lot of links going to towards Jetspeed? Which I may try out today sometime as its only a war file. Also saw theres a proposed extention to the webdav standard just for icals, maybe this is what the difference is between webdav server and a ical server? At long last someone doing something about syncing icals directly with the pocketpc database. Linux only I think…

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The RSS-ification of television news

It started this morning with someone sending in this http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/03.html. I replied and pointed out there are many projects on the net to do just that. Then pointed out that rather RSS in a news reader, why not send it straight into peoples calendars using ical? I fingered xmltv and project24.info

On the side Kosso sent me this http://www.kosso.com/2004/05/god-i-love-internet.html. Where he's also found pretty much the same things as I have but I wasnt prepared for this http://bleb.org/tv/data/listings/. Now I'm blown away… Thinking of using cocoon like I did with RSS Bit torrents, collect them all together (aggregater) and stick them together using xsl into one massive file for the day. Its then just a matter of finding a client to read the huge xml file. But this will be extreamely easily if I convert it to xmltv format, which the xml files almost seem to be already.

Shame Kosso is so in love with flash by the way… but with the lack of java on the ipaq and not wanting to learn compact .net framework, flash may be the only alternativity right now. Saying all that using wifi also in my house, I could buddle all the logic off to the server and just serve up static xhtml pages…

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Calendaring with ical + webdav

Finally dumped Outlook at home all together, cant dump it at work. Me and my wife are now using Mozilla calendar on our laptops.
Some nice things I've seen while searching for tools to help the transision. outport and project24. Glad to say me and sarah finally have our mozilla ical's syncing using a webdav server (internal for now). Worked out that the private attribute doesnt do nothing and its possible to edit each others calendars if you want to. So the quest now is finding more interesting calendars to share with. Hence the link http://www.project24.info and of course http://www.icalshare.com.

The hardest thing now is working out how my pocketpc and smartphone fits into the circle using icals? As far as I can see there is no ical calendar client for the pocketpc or smartphone. I'm just trying out pocket informant which i thought might support more than the standard calendar and tasks applications. But on 15mins observation it looks like it doesnt. So my other options are to find a another one which does or convert the icals via outlook before they sync with the windows mobile devices. Now this sucks because i would have to use windows with outlook 2003 or some converter like outport on 2002/xp. The other thing which I'm going to test soon is using something like Novell/Ximian Evolution or even KOrganizer with a linux equal to activesync. Which hopefully should allow syncing of icals with Evolution and convert them to a format windows mobile devices can understand. Anyone tried this? And also raises the question can you do activesync type connections with Linux? Its a real shame Mozilla dont have time to support any other device besides the Palm.

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