Technospeak

to make posting comments a little bit more rewarding i implemented gravatars on this blog.

two days ago i commented on an entry over at urs’ blog and some fancy image turned up next to my comment. i’ve seen that already turning up on different blogs (e.g. moblg.uk and blog.ch ).

the code with which i implemented it is shown below for your abuse and modification.

<$MTCommentBody$>

i just returned from the matt blogg+birthday meet which was really nice and interesting. it was really nice connecting the faces to the bits and bites, talking about tagging vs. keywords, map orientations and stuff like that.

i actually suspected to stay around an hour or so, but in the end i turned out to be home around ten at night.

guys and gals, it was really interesting to meet all of you, and i’m surely gonna add some more feeds to my news-reader.

yesterday i went to prolong my contract with my mobile phone provider, so i was able to cheaply get a new mobile phone. after looking at the different mobiles compatible with isync i decided (mostly for monetary reasons) to get the Sony Ericsson K700i .

after trying to sync it with my computer i nearly gave up, because isync always crashed on me in the middle of the syncing process. after countless tries, deleting preference files, rewriting some preinstalled bundles and stuff like that isync notified me of a “duplication warning” with one contact i have in my address-book: the godfather of my sister is in my address book as: Renner Prename & Prename Wife.

you might have seen that flickr photoset which was linked from boingboing last week. a guy implanted a rfid chip in his hand to do different stuff with it, like opening a door lock, or starting his car. sounds crazy? it is, but it’s that kind of stuff i like. just imagine how cool it would be to touch the handlebar of your bike and it’s unlocked in that very same moment. no fiddling with keys and anything.

i’ve added a new badge to the collection on the lower left:

if you click on the badge, your browser is taken to the geourl -page, where you can see all my neighbors in meatspace (i just love that expression!).

hello b. , hello urs , hello guido not hello fsp !

update: i stumbled over the link on the bottom of arnis blog (which seems to be dead), that’s how i noticed that geourl relaunched, it’s more a coincidence than investigative bloggin…

the newest revision of apples powerbooks features an accelerometer, that detects if you drop the powerbook and parks the hard disc heads (a thing already found on older ibm-machines). now a guy figured out how to tap into the accelerometer and use it to display all kind of funky stuff (e.g. a window is fixed in space, while the powerbook rotates). this led another guy to program a python script whith which you can control itunes. just give your powerbook a mild slap on the head and it switches to the next song. i see some really funky stuff coming up for those powerbooks….

seems like this document over at apple was pretty good. after i’ve moved 15gb of data everything seems to work… this is posted from my new computer….

the powerbook blog linked to a nice hint on macosxhints.ch (features german translations of osxhints.com , but also original german hints). you might have seen that you can click on any label in a contacts detail (e.g. work address, telephone, etc) to get a nice menu to do things with the data (get it in huge letters all over your screen, look for the map, print label, etc.). since the release of panther coders can add to these menus with little apple-script-effort. the script mentioned in the hints adds an european map search, but i wanted to alter it to use the excellent map.search.ch . after downloading the nice applescript i changed it to this point:

because something was f[beep] up with the way kung-tunes posted the trackinfo from my itunes to the sidebar, here’s the roundup on how i did it (adding to this post ):

• go to mt’s control panel.
• make a new blog (itunes).
• make a new category (nowplaying).
• hit “edit category attributes”, toggle “accept incoming trackback pings” to yes.
• jot down the trackback url.
• add that url to kung-tunes preferences.
• make the format of kungtunes notification:

• add three files to the sub-blog (here: itunes), now_playing.html and lastfive.html and last30.html .
• for each of the three above files add something along these lines to the code: (MTAmazon optional for album cover)

by <a href=“itms:// phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=<$MTPingBlogName encode_url=“1”$>” title=“Search at the iTunes Music Store”><$MTPingBlogName$>

for those appleheads which heavily rely on rss-feeds apples new rss-feeds-page is something long awaited come true.

[via apples newsletter ]