Welcome to Vacuum for Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Best viewed as OPML for full supergopher goodness.
In this issue:
How to...
I'm looking for a way to...
Steal this idea!
Notes on the OPML Editor platform
How to!
del.icio.us/tag/howto
LED Throwies: Make a sandwich out of a LED, a battery, and a strong magnet. Throw the resulting device at your favorite urban structure. From Graffiti Research Lab and Instructables.
I'm looking for a way to...
del.icio.us/tag/lazyweb
Apply some smarts to the sort order of contacts in Adium. I think, but I'm not sure, that I'd like to have the people I talk the most to sorted to the top of the screen, and the rare and unusual connections closer to the bottom. Alphabetical sort is wrong. Some heuristic should be able to move something useful to the top of the screen, useful beyond manually managed hierarchical groupings. Chatrank? I don't know of any system that does things really right.
Run multiple virtual desktops on my Mac OS X iBook G4. My laptop screen is too small, and there's a lot of distractions when I want to focus. I'm slicing up the screen right now to handle the problem (left/middle/right), but I think I could do better by pegging some contexts to their own screens. On the other hand, maybe I just need a huge screen.
Generate Amazon Mechanical Turk queries in quantity, driving the process from a database or a spreadsheet and hiding the REST or SOAP interface layer entirely from the process. Properly constructed, you should be able to ask and get answers to thousands or tens of thousands of questions easily, without needing to manage individual transactions on at a time.
NY Times Select Greasemonkey: Rewrite the NY Times Select pages so that above the pay link there is a link to your local library's already paid-for online archive of the Times. Ideally make it one-click to get the article for free, but failing that at least get to the right search page without having to look it up in your library's web site. For Superpatron.
Google Book Search Greasemonkey: Fix the AADL version of the script so that it shows availability results for every book on the search pages, in addition to the single result on the book detail page. For Superpatron.
Amazon Library Lookup: Fix all versions of this script so that they show availability for all books in a wish list or in any other list on Amazon, again not just on the individual book lookup page. For Superpatron.
Steal this idea!
del.icio.us/tag/stealthisidea
Retroreflective clothing: embed high-visibility light up at night pinstripes into the cloth used to make fancy suits, so that you can be a sharp dresser as well as safe at night. Via halfbakery.
Notes on the OPML Editor platform
del.icio.us/tag/opmleditor
I'm finding myself wanting to illustrate a couple of these with little pictures, and not finding it really easy to toss in an image link and have it render. As it is things seem a little bland in the editor view (not bad bland, just texty and not imagey).
There's a MindJet OPML Editor for Windows (only), which has ways of moving back and forth between MindJet's Mindmanager maps and OPML outlines. Included in the package are some XSLT transforms that move between the two formats. Not tested.
Last modified: Friday, February 17, 2006 at 5:44 PM.
