I decided to test my bookmarklet skills once more and write a little script that could convert a black-on-white Flickr page into a white-on-black Flickr page. The reason for this is that some photos just look better on black.
There are some other solutions that do this but they require you to load the image in a different site, and I thought a bookmarklet could probably do the work faster as it doesn’t need to reload the photo. There was an issue that I bumped in though: quite a few elements on Flickr are white images, which can’t be changed to black.
So I decided on a different take: hide the Flickr GUI elements, append a new element, load the image in it on black, and show it to the user. This seems to work at the moment with the below bookmarklet.
Go to any Flickr photo page, and press the bookmarklet. It should load a black screen with the photo. Either pressing the “Back to Flickr” or the bookmarklet again would bring you back to Flickr in white.
There are two major issues at the moment, The one is critical and that is that somehow mouse overlays, menus, and other items in the Flickr GUI, don’t seem to work after use of this bookmarklet. I don’t know why at the moment so please let me know if you do.
Secondly I would love for the script to autoload a larger sized image for you, as that makes viewing even more pleasant.
MyMuesli.com - A web2.0 online muesli ordering company. You don't make it up.
Alexander Martinez - Artists Digital Edition Portfolio - I just found the site of the artist that does most of the murals in our neighbourhood. I hadn't realized home many of them were all his. HAve a look at his work.
I have only used Zemanta for a short time after it was launched, mainly because it makes stuff too easy. I noticed loads of people linking back to me as a “related” article produced by Zemanta and barely had any extra traffic or decent contextual link backs coming from it. It just shows me that the people that use Zemanta “just click” to be done with their post quickly.
The idea
It got me thinking though, what would be handy is a plugin that can get me contextual links and images and other data that are my images, links and data.
To give an example, Alper writes in this post about some “Street Photography” a friend made. He then posts some photos from that friend but he also links back to a photo from himself that is related to street photography. Why isn’t there a plugin that can automatically provide you links of your own Flickr photos for example that are “probably” related to your current post.
Another example, in the same post, Alper talks about the photos he took with his 120mm camera this weekend. He then links back to his trip on Dopplr of last weekend. A plugin that would do a Zemanta-like thing would know Alper’s Dopplr account, guess he either meant next or last weekend, and offer some links to those trips.
I wonder if an all-round plugin like this exists or if it is relatively easy to create one?
These days every mac has a remote control receiver and Apple has stopped shipping remotes with their machines because admittedly we all already have one by now. There are a few people though that have a Mac perfectly capable of running Front Row but can’t use the Apple Remote with their Mac because it is too old.
I am one of these, as I have an old Mac Mini G4 setup as a media center. I love it because it can play all my movies, even HD, without many problems, but unfortunately I had some remote-trouble recently. As a solution to my initial lack of remote I bought the Keyspan RF Remote, which did the trick of simulating an Apple Remote for a while until the Keyspan remote died. As Keyspan doesn’t sell these anymore and they go for quite a few buck on eBay, I started to look for a different solution.
This is when I found about the Mantra TR1 sold by Twisted Melon which is a simple IR receiver that can work with the standard Apple Remote. These guys at Twisted Melon normally write the remote control software Mira which can be used together with the Mantra TR1, which was in turn created to give those people without a build-in remote control receiver a cheap solution. The Mantra TR1 was just £14.38 including shipping from Australia, so it was a very good deal (better than the Keyspan RF Remote).
Software
I wouldn’t recommend buying the Mantra TR1 together with the Mira software though. The software hasn’t been maintained for a while and is buggy as hell, on both my Mac Mini and my Macbook. Instead I would advise you to go for SofaControl (£9) which is another application that can work with this receiver and does a way better job.
About the Mantra TR1
Finally I thought I’d share with you my opinion of the hardware. The photo on their site is pretty big although the receiver seems to be small. I thought it would therefore be quite bulky but it isn’t. It’s quite cute and small and weighs basically nothing. Reception is pretty good and basically works through my TV as I had it behind my TV for a while and it still worked.
It has a little red light that blinks when it receives a remote signal. This can be quite annoying if you want to keep the receiver in sight but as I said it works fine even out of sight. One of the interesting things though of seeing the light is that I noticed that sometimes it receives my command but doesn’t do anything. I don’t know if this is because of bad reception or not but it is very seldom and not that annoying.
All and all I know have a proper remote for my Mac Mini media center again and that for only £24.
I wanted to investigate the option of having a cheap and easy VPN solution so that I could secure my data when I am on public WiFi. Obviously the real die-hard techies can set up their own VPNs with industry grade tools, or setup a VPN using SSH tunneling, but I didn’t want to spend too much time figuring out all the details. So, I did a quick Google search and found ShareTool.
ShareTool is a very simple application that lets you connect to your home network and enjoy the Bonjour services there (like printing, network file sharing, etc). What they add as an extra is something called “secure browsing” which makes a secure tunnel to your home network and lets you then browse the internet encrypted over this connection. They use a special Firefox profile that they preload for you, and honestly this is really handy for people that just want to browse securely without releasing all their details in plaintext on the public WiFi.
I wanted to do more though than just browsing so I decided to look at how they did this tunneling. I discovered they set up a SOCKS proxy which I decided could be used to divert all traffic through, not just web traffic. So, I set it up and it works. I don’t want to write out all the details so why don’t I just show you (watch on Vimeo for High Definition quality video).
I hope this helped some people use open WiFi a bit more wisely.
Basing monetization on the fact we...
