How I met your mother, watch it. It’s awesome! Watch it, it has that guy from Dr. Horrible and Starship Troupers. Also I keep getting spammed to death it isn’t fun.
Suit -wait for it- up!
August 26th, 2008Rock, Paper, Scissors: A Hackers Guide
August 18th, 2008“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”
July 21st, 2008Just watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Brilliant. Watch it. I hear it’s on itunes but if your a bit naughty you’ll probably find it in the usual place. It’s kind of a musical and part vlog part tv series, about a super villain. Sounds stupid but deffo worth watching.
It’s by that guy who did firefly, starring that guy from Starship Troopers and that other guy from firefly and some girl I’ve never seen before.
In my life
July 18th, 2008
But of all these friends and lovers, there is no one who compares with you. -John Lennon
Fishing for Facebook?
July 12th, 2008Right so came across this which is a way of “fishing” about your browser history, using css and javascript. Tested it out myself. I’m trying to think of applications for it, could have it log visitors’ lists of visited pages and make a nice ‘how many people use which sites’ graph. It could also be used for targeting content and specific users, ie links to my twitter account for twitter users.
PidginTwitterPy
July 9th, 2008If I had a radio advert it’d go something like this.
Hey you! Yeah you! I messaged you on msn and you never got back to me for like 40 minutes. Oh you were away, <sarcasm>that makes it ok then!</sarcasm>.
Never heard of pidgintwitter? no? NO? What is it? Well I’ll tell you, it’s a program written in python which listens to messages coming in on pidgin, when your away, and forwards them to a twitter account. Using a second twitter account you can receive updates on your mobile phone.
Maybe a little too much detail :/
So I’ve give it a name. Latest (and final) version is done. Now includes a ban list of people who’ll only be know by their email address and a daily limit for messages. Get it here. Read about it here.
Easy Snax
June 20th, 2008
Finger licking good.
IM to SMS Part II
June 19th, 2008Since the previous post on this subject I came across twitter which allows users to be updated by their friends “tweets”, essentially short blog posts of less that 140 characters. The interesting feature is that you can submit and receive updates from your mobile at normal text messaging rates.
The model goes that if account ‘A’ is updated then mobile on account ‘B’ gets a text message. What’s really great is developing applications to work with it is made easy by the open api.
My previous solution only allowed for very short truncated messages in amongst text formatted as a reminder. Twitter however would allow me to send messages up to 140 characters and it would be much quicker than setting up a google reminder to go off in one minute.
So after a little messing with python, dbus and pidgin I give you version 01a. As of yet it hasn’t got a name so drop a comment and help me name my program!
The only downside so far is being in the UK limits me to only 250 messages a month from tweeter, but I’ll just switch plugins to the gSMS based one if I run out. At the moment it’s command line so don’t expect a GUI. Usage is simple run it and your prompted for your twitter username and password. Once it’s running all messages will be forwarded to your mobile when your status isn’t set to ‘available’.
Naming suggestions so far:
TwitterPy
SMS-PidginPy
tweetymcpigeonsnake
IM alerts to my mobile for free!
June 16th, 2008Right so I was looking for a solution to divert my IM’s to my phone and I came across gSMS. It’s a plugin for pidgin (previously GAIM) which is my client of preference. The clever bit is gSMS uses google calendar’s alerting system to send texts to your mobile notifying you if you have received messages. You need a google calendar and texts alerting enabled, which is free to set up and free to receive.
It works by setting an event to occur in 6 minutes time with an alarm 5 minutes before the event. The message is then set as the title of the event. Unfortunately this means the messages can only be reasonably short in length (so no sending me War and Peace) and you also receive a load of tripe about a reminder and the time.
Perfect! I thought, the problem was that is only tells you that you have new messages and who they are from not what they were. So I grabbed the source and messed with it a little and tada! Now my messages, when my status is set to away, get sent to my phone! Get in touch by email (email@tomhodson.com) or leave a comment if you want it released and I’ll inquire with the original author.
In the field
June 13th, 2008
Another Friday another photo.