ctrl.altered.mind

I needed to take a few screenshots while running Linux, and thought I’d mention the process since I thought this was much more beautiful and nicer than doing the same on Windows, and even OS X. If you’re running KDE, run ksnapshot by pressing Alt+F2, which brings up the Run Application dialog window. On Gnome, a similar program is invoked by the PrtSc (Print Screen) key. However, I found Ksnapshot to be much more smooth (I guess I’ll always choose KDE over Gnome).

One of the most valuable features of the Firefox browser is the ability to add custom keywords to search boxes within any website in the world. Its as easy as right-clicking on a search box and adding a custom keyword for that search. Once this is done, a search can be performed by entering the keyword in the location bar of the browser, followed by the search terms. This is an incredibly fast way of searching for information, even faster than the search box embedded in the browser window (which uses a drop-down menu where you can add more search engines as well). Firefox includes a few by default, such as ‘dict’ followed by a search term, searches Dictionary.com for the definition of the search term. I’ve added a few for myself, such as ‘wiki’ to search Wikipedia.org, ‘thes’ to search Thesaurus.com and ‘olga’ for the Online Guitar Archive at Olga.net.

The holidays are here, and its the end of yet another semester - a very satisfying one in terms of the work I got done and the way I went about doing it. Well, so the holidays are here. Did I mention that already? As if you didn’t know. If you’ve visited my home page lately, you must have noticed the little snowman. It was nice to get back to dabbling with Flash once again, a once-favorite pastime that I had neglected for quite some time. A nice way of keeping myself in the game would be to design small logos, Google style, for my home page - with themes to reflect events. If you want to try the snow effect yourself, there are good tutorials online, such as this one by kirupa, which let you design snow effects which look a lot better than mine.

Konfabulator has always been one of the nicest Windows applications I have used, with really useful widgets such as Weather (you need this for sure if you’re in Boulder, CO) amongst others. Since its acquisition by Yahoo in July, 2005, Konfabulator has been offered gratis, and now has been rechristened as Yahoo! Widgets with the new version release (3.0). Yahoo now makes its presence felt, with widgets that connect directly to Yahoo! Mail, Calendar, Photos, Flickr and more. I recommend uninstalling the older version of Konfabulator first since this is a whole new release (but your old widgets will work without problems). ‘Bigger and better’ widgets can be downloaded from the Yahoo! Widgets Gallery.

This is fresh news - Google Base is a new service being tested by Google that ‘helps the world to find your content’. The premise is that Google hosts all your stuff thats worth sharing with the world - such as coupons, jobs, classified ads, and even comic books. At first glance, with its primary ability to seamlessly integrate with other Google services, the service seems to take a bite out of online services such as those offered by Craigslist and Half.com (both owned by Ebay). Google Base goes a step further in consolidating a wider range of sources, and even offers better results for engineering resources. Google Base is not yet listed on the Google Labs page.

There is only one place I ever need to head to for information on any topic - Wikipedia. For those unfamiliar with the name, Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wales (with others) in 2001 as a free content encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone.

I thought of finding a good open source implementation of a wiki project that I could place on my website as well, that would serve as a freely editable section for visitors to my pages. I thought PmWiki, an open source PHP implementation by Patrick Michaud, to be the easiest to set up (even for administrators with restricted privileges). For now, I can only think of using it as a place for visitors to write scraps or add some ‘graffiti to the wall’ (did you know the singular form of graffiti is graffito?) Well, if you have some suggestions for a better use, you know where to head to!
My Wiki

This is old news if you read Om Malik’s GigaOm blog, but I thought I’d relay this piece of information to my own clique as well, just in case. If you are a Mac user or are using a machine without Google Talk, head to Gtalkr.com - an online service that allows you to ‘Go anywhere, to any computer, and have access to your Google Talk account via Gtalkr’. Yes, it is totally Flash-based. No, it is not owned by Google (yet?). Yes, it does have the sweet sweet UI that resembles something that would come out of Google Labs. Except that Google would go the Javascript way.

The add-ons that Gtalkr allows are simply amazing, and amazingly simple - like creating a list or adding buddy logon notification (through a separate Gtalkr notifier). Gtalkr also allows you to star a Gtalk conversation and lets you have your own gtalk inbox (note that this resides on a non-google server). The simplicity and design just might make you choose Gtalkr over Google Talk itself!

The GigaOm blog post and comments page