Cheatsheets for everything!

cheatsheetheap.com

Another exciting development from the basement at PivotLabs! Cheatsheets, cheatsheets, cheatsheets. Boy I love cheatsheets. Now I can finally free up my brain and flush out all my rote learning!

One thing that has bugged me are that cheatsheets are commonly created with no easy way to update them and redistribute them. Most authors keep the source files and release only a fixed bitmap or postscript file along with a restrictive license. I wanted to change this.

Cheatsheetheap.com is a project I started to provide a central place to share and encourage user edits to cheatsheets. It’s a repository of cheatsheets built using open source tools such as Gimp, Inkscape and Open Office.

Runny Update Already!?

How cool would it be to call multiple custom runny commands with just one command? Cool enough to warrant an update to Runny that’s for sure!

Runny 0.2 adds a new custom command type “macro” that lets you string together multiple runny commands with or without parameters into one single command. Why you could even string together macros! And then string those to macros and on and on ad infinitum!

Check out the new download at the labs site… http://pivotlabs.com/opensource/runny

Runny – Smallest Footprint Launcher Ever!

Runny is a project of mine which is similar to the quick launch command programs such as Launchy and Gnome Do but uses the built in capabilities of windows instead of running background processes.

For about six years now I’ve used a kind of poor-man’s unix by running commands straight from my Window’s Run box. I would make shortcuts to commonly used programs rename them to something small and simple and put them into a directory that’s referenced in my environment PATH. It worked really well and I never really thought much about it.

It wasn’t until Launchy and Gnome Do (both are amazing) and others started getting big that I thought this might be a “thing”. So I cleaned up my scripts, added supporting functions for clipboard management, twitter posting and text clips and packaged them into an easy installer.

It’s definitely limited but gives complete control over what the commands are and what they do and can even be run side-by-side with other launchers.

Check it out at my labs site!

112 is Official!

Element 112 is being added to the Periodic Chart. Awesome! Now lets get to work on that “Island of Stability” guys!

Trailer for the new Team Ico game

Being a relatively new fan to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, I’m happy to find a trailer for their newest game. It looks interesting but I’m not sure about the whole Falcor thing. Chances are I’ll still buy it and love it though.

KitcheNET Beta 2 Download Available

I just posted the latest update to the KitcheNET software over at the PivotLabs open source site. You can see a list of all the changes under Change Log.

KitcheNET Development

KitcheNET 0.1 Beta 2 with Software Keyboard

Over the past week since my KitcheNET project got posted on LifeHacker, I’ve been busy tweaking the software adding new features and fixing bugs I’ve found in the process of testing it out.

Once I get it packaged up I’ll post the new version to download on our PivotLabs Open Source section.

Some new features include:

• Software keyboard for VERY simple textual input
• Added page buffering so dialing through configured web sites seems quicker
• Added right-click reset to automatically go back to home page when navigating away
• Added snazzy splash screen
• Switched from <browser> to <iframe> elements.
• Fixed links that would otherwise open in a new browser to open in current one
• Fixed up styles

The online response from readers has been very supportive and inspiring.

One reader, James Tandy, sent me a picture of an inspired setup sporting Windows Media Center and a wireless mouse.

Another reader pointed out another similar project on TechRepublic and others had great ideas for other methods of input such as the Wiimote.

I also learned about the Linux From Scratch project which might be my ticket to finally diving head first into the barebones mechanics of Linux instead of letting Ubuntu take care of everything for me.

Either way i definitely have a list of new ideas to take from this whole experience and plan to keep going with it.

New project finds use for old useless laptops

A laptop mounted to my cupboards, spiderman style.

Over the weekend I started working on a new project I dubbed KitcheNET (named after the browser software) aimed at reusing an old laptop and turning it into a kind of kitchen kiosk or Internet Appliance.

For the longest time I was trying to think of a neat way to at least listen to music while I cooked or did the dishes. The radio was out, however, since all of the music stations in my area are terrible. Wearing an MP3 player seemed cumbersome. Hooking up a whole networked desktop was overkill.

It wasn’t until i read this article on LifeHacker I even considered my laptop as a viable option.

This solved my music issue perfectly since I’ve spent countless hours teaching Pandora what i liked. And this gave me a good reason to develop a minimalistic linux distro and XUL-based internet browser (KitcheNET) to power the whole thing.

So far it’s running pretty well considering it’s a very hacked together prototype. I have it setup so i can see the local weather, local news, recipes tagged in my Delicious account, weekly Google calendar and a Picasa photo album that’s connected to my G1 phone.

I’m hoping to bag a couple more old cheap laptops to see how low processing-wise I can go with these.

Xootools 0.2 nearing completion

After much meticulous code combing and optimization, I think I’ve got a good portion of the redundent code out of Xootools as well as started on some pretty useful libraries and plugins. I also moved it out of my projects section and into my software section.

There’s a new Native in the plugins section named “Unit” when  takes the work out of dealing with standard units of measurement such as time, weight, mass, etc.

Got some nice Fs updates and other interesting ideas for dealing with 2-dimensional arrays and the elusive “Thread” in xul.

Stay tuned!

The Boxee/Hulu saga continues

Friday the folks at boxee announced an update to the their software which integrates video play into their rss reader allowing for the traversal and viewing of Hulu feeds.

Yay!

Less then a day later, it was reported Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing their site at all….

Now the first thing that popped into my head was, just spoof the user agent being sent in the browser. This would obviously work around Hulu’s block attempts. I realize boxee is trying to play fair by accessing the service in the same manner as a normal browser. However it’s apparent that that’s clearly not the problem in Hulu’s eyes.

The simple fact you’re watching Hulu on a TV is what is freaking everyone out.

However, short of blocking everything, Hulu can’t really do much to stop people from putting it on their TV. They’re just delaying the inevitable.