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.

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!

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.

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.