Musings on computers, music, travel and other such things.
I installed Google Chrome on my windows PC at work today). So far I think it’s ok, not anywhere near as useful as Firefox, but certainly has some interesting ideas. The buzz surrounding it suggests that we are likely to see a lot more of it in the next year or so, so watch this space.
What amuses me most though, is that by lunchtime over half our office were using Chrome. I think we’re just all early adopters at heart.
sudo apt-get install gwibber
It basically gives a running feed of status updates on both Twitter and Facebook. Good for when (like me) you have almost totally different people on each one.
I’ve been experimenting with Mozilla’s new (very much still in development) Ubiquity tool, which does a lot of what Quicksilver and Gnome-do can do, but is also expandable to an almost unlimited degree.
I was going to write a tutorial on how to use Ubiquity to post to Twitter, but it’s really as simple as starting Ubiquity and typing one line as seen below:
twitter Type your status here
Hit enter, and your post appears on Twitter. It’s really that simple.
I’m experimenting with using Empathy for all forms on online communication. The following instructions show how to set up Empathy to access the #camuk channel on DarkMyst’s servers.
Firstly, you’ll need to download and install Empathy and the relevant libraries for irc connection:
sudo apt-get install empathy telepathy-idle
Start Empathy (it should be in the internet menu), and then press F4. Fill in the resulting box as follows:
If you enter a password it will automatically /msg NicKServ each time you connect to authenticate you.
To join a chat room, go to Room and Join New. You should get something like this:
Select the account you set up earlier (mine was called irc-darkmyst because I use more than one irc server). Add the room you want to join, and click on Connect. You should then be able to chat on irc as normal.
http://teknostatik.co.uk/jamendo.php
I’ll update this as and when I find new things.
It’s a very quickly thrown together MySQL database with a PHP front end.
This weekend has been very busy with wedding preparations and socialising. However, I’ve still found time to install the latest version of WordPress on this blog, set up some backup scripts for all my home and work computers, and also to install KDE4 on my laptop.
I’m still not sold on KDE4, but I think it has potential. I may try and use it for a few days to see if it actually does what I need it to.
As people may know, I’m a big fan of many of the so-called Web 2.0 technologies (although less of a fan of the term itself). I’ve been blogging since 2001, and like to at least create an account on anything new that comes along, just to see if it can add anything to my online life.
I’ve been exploring Twitter today, and while it seems fun, I’m not sure it does that much that existing things I use can’t do. That said, it did give me the chance to interact with two services that don’t seem that well know as yet (to the point where I have my first name as a username on both) , but which I find very useful.
Firstly there is onXiam which simply creates a profile page detailing all the various online services I use, and what my username is in case people want to add me (or in case I forget what I’ve signed up to).
And then there is Mugshot, which is a Red Hat devised social networking site which I generally use to spice together RSS feeds from LJ, Facebook, LastFM and about 20 news based websites. I don’t use it for social activities, but it does act as an intelligent feed aggregator and a way of keeping up with the news.
In theory, this blog post should aggregate to Mugshot, which should then in turn feed through to Facebook, thus informing pretty much everyone I interact with online that I have something of vague interest to say. Of course, this wouldn’t be required if I’d made any effort to add everyone I know to every site I use and not just one or two, but until I get organised I think this is the best form of “mass broadcast” available.