I just stumbled over an announcement about OLPC Germany. Last Tuesday was my first chance to play with an OLPC laptop. Everything but the keyboard feels incredibly solid and well made. The only thing I didn’t like was the user interface. I found it quite non-intuitive but perhaps this gets better if I spend a little more time with it. And if not: I can always put Ubuntu on it.

One thing is for sure: as soon as these laptops become available in Germany, I will buy one.

I was thinking about buying a NAS (network attached storage) server for some time and looked at different products. My requirements are low power consuption, RAID support, and disk encryption.

My current favorite is the TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS. It has:

• low power consuption (ok, sleep mode: 18.8W; in operation: 44.6W)
• RAID support (way more features than I would ever need: Single disk, RAID 0 (Disk Stripping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring), RAID 5, RAID 5+ Hot spare, RAID 6, and JBOD (Linear Disk Volume))
• no encryption

But I couldn’t find any other NAS server with a good price (less than 500€) and this combination of features so I guess I have to live without encrypted disks. If you have any experience with this box or know about another box which has all these features, please leave a comment.

According to an article by wired Apple added a special feature to their sexy metallic keyboards: accidental touches won’t activate caps lock. It’s the first step in a process to remove this useless and annoying key from all keyboards.

I’ve remove my caps-lock key from a couple of keyboards already. But I did not know that a campaign called anticAPSLOCK existed which tries to ban caps-lock from future keyboards. Nice idea!

Thanks to Sonja I found out, that bloglines launched the new beta for their feed reader under beta.bloglines.com.

It looks very similar to the old app with a lot of added AJAX. But they fixed at least one major annoyance: if you open a feed with a lot of unread messages only the ones you have actually seen are marked as read. Nice, very nice… And bonus points for calling it “βloglines”

Update 6.9.2007:
As far as I could tell βloglines has all the original features but one: the “keep new” checkbox. I use this very feature quite often to mark important posts and was thinking about switching back to the old version but my prayers were answered today:

What happened to “Keep As New”?
We have renamed “Keep As New” to “Pinned”. It can be toggled by clicking on the pin icon in the lower left of an article (or using the “n” hotkey). Your previous “Keep As New” articles should all be transparently available in the Beta as “Pinned” articles.

The video demonstrates a new way of resizing images invented by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan.

More information can be found here. I tried to download the paper mentioned in the video, but with 1.18K/s the 20M would take 5h and I don’t want to wait that long.

I guess others are downloading the paper, too

Am I the first person who would like to add a bcc to all outgoing mails in GMail? I just spent some time searching through the settings and looking for a Greasemonkey scripts or firefox plugins which might do the trick. But I found nothing. Not a single tool.

Update 17.9.07:
Thanks to “themaniac” I installed this Greasemonkey script which works perfectly. I was a little bit vexed because I couldn’t find a way to configure the address where the bcc should be sent to. The simple solution: a popup asks for the address the first time a mail is sent

There is no bcc header but the address I use to receive the bcc’ed mails appears in the received header, so I added these lines to my sieve script to move these mails into the Sent folder.

# bcc'ed mail from gmail
if address :contains "Received" "xxx@yyy.de" {
  fileinto "INBOX.Sent";
  stop;
}

I grew bored with the default look of kopete and installed a few new themes. It’s really simple:

1. Settings->Configure
2. Appearance
3. Chat Window

Now you have reached the screen where you can choose the theme you would like to use with a preview showing how the new theme will look.
Read the rest of this entry »

I started reading “Learning the bash Shell” again because I suck at shell scripting. But before I reached the shell scripting part, I was playing around with bind because I wanted to move a few of the Esc-… key bindings to more ergonomic combinations. While looking for examples I found exactly what I was looking for on a site by Petar Marinov:


# ctrl+left/right arrows:
bind '"\e\x5b\x31\x3b\x35\x44"':backward-word
bind '"\e\x5b\x31\x3b\x35\x43"':forward-word
# alt+backspace:
bind '"\xff"':backward-kill-word
# alt+'.':
bind '"\xae"':yank-last-arg


Ok, and now back to shell scripting

Related entries:

• Bash shell goodies

Some time ago I was writing about my idea of powerful rss filters to control my flood of incoming posts. I wrote a small prototype with very limited functionality. It was good enough for me but I always dreamed about releasing it to the public. But configuration via text configfile is nothing for the general public. OK, back to the subject.

editing a filter to combine all my feeds

Last week Julian told me about pipes.yahoo.com. It is everything I wanted plus a lot of other features. Processing starts with “sources” with output that can be piped into “operators”.

Sources

Right now, there are 5 types of sources available: Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, Fetch, Google Base, Flickr. For my purpose “Fetch” was already sufficient. Given an URL it returns the feed content for further processing.

Operators

• Union: combines two feeds
• Sort: sorts items by a number of different criteria
• Filter: blocks items matching certain rules

Example

Within a few minutes of playing around I build an RSS feed for all my blogs combined into a single feed.

Feature requests

I don’t know I anybody from the pipes team reads this post (if they do: great tool! please keep improving it!). Pipes is already very powerful, but a few things could be even better:

• Union operators with any number of inputs. As you can see from my screen-shot, just combining 6 feeds is already messy
• Debug the debug view. When I was playing around, the debug view was frequently missing items.
• Shrink the boxes. My screen is 1600×1200 and was barely big enough to show my configuration
• Friendly URLs: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/8F_X3gO52xGCN6i7HxeTaQ/run?_render=rss is ugly

I bought The Ruby Way a few weeks ago and thought it would be nice to write a short review about it. But I won’t, because there are already many reviews about it. The excecutive summary: it’s good, really good.