Fairly Useless…

It is finally here! What I always wanted in a PDA. I am a gadget guy, but not a business type, so I had PDA’s but never used them. My biggest compliant was the lack of power and storage. It seemed silly to me that if you had a company database with 10,000 records and you wanted that info while on the road, you would have first download it to your PDA. Plus, to do a search took a long time with the tiny processor. Or email, why mess with syncing and downloading, when you would have to do the same when you got back home.

My thought is to have a “window” to your desktop. All the power and storage of a desktop, without syncing. Mobile VNC would be perfect, but the interface would be a problem. The iPhone has made it possible with a little help from the app store and Mocha VNC Lite

I have always wanted to have my desktop be my calendar. There was an old System 7, 8 or 9 app called Expresso Calendar, that did the same thing. So I wrote an automator action plus applescript to do the job. Then make action a ical plugin and have it run the first day of the month.

If you find a good place that creates standard size scren calendars and is consistent with the naming let me know. That’s the toughest part. I found a flickr group that had some, but could not get the dates to match up.

Here is the site that I have been getting them from…

http://www.kriegsnet.com/gallery/desktop-wallpaper-2008.php

The action has this url hard coded into it.

Feel free to improve.

Desktop Calendar Action

Automator
Automator now has a “record” feature, which will be nice to get a quick workflow together. But the best news is the variable support feature for storing values to use in a workflow. Hopefully that can sneak in conditional support before October.

Hopefully buying a shirt from the Mozilla Foundation helps support Firefox and Thunderbird. I just got mine today. Everyone wanted to now where I got it.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather “Get free software, and pay for shirts.” then to “Get free shirts, for buying software.“

Well, thanks to TUAW a saw a lot of web traffic. I hoped it helped some the software developers. I did receive a thank you from David Kocher alá Cyberduck. I hope some of the people from over 6,000 unique visits donated $5 to one of the developers on the list.

Here is a list of FREE software that I use everyday, or at least once a week. This year for Christmas I decided to donate some of my gift money to the mac software that I did not have to buy or that was open source. These authors or groups of these applications give their time and energy to make great software for all of us.

Now is a good time to thank them will a small donation. Can you imagine how much of a difference it would make to the developers if just 1% of users gave $5? It would only set you back $50 (or more if you can) for these ten applications.

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I was just talking to a co-worker yesterday about “glance” applications. We were talking about the future of information design and I mentioned I was playing around with Quartz and trying to build a glance screensaver. I was playing around with the idea of a aquarium scene with the number of blue fish for hours and the number of air bubbles in minutes with sea grasses for the days of the month and so on. Ambient has already created a number of cool “information pr0n” display gadgets.

The newest one grabs your google calendar/schedule and maps to the clock face meetings encircle the time period while dots lead up to the event estimating the travel time based on google maps. Add a bit of color for warnings and you have a cool glance information device.

AmbientClock

Add one part RSS feed from tarot.com, and a pinch of zodialogical clip-art. And presto! A Horoscope mod. Just edit the description in the xml for your sign and it will grab the correct feed.

I do not believe in astrology, I just can’t get over the fact that other people born the same week that I was are going to get the same advice, like… “Get good news from a friend” or “Now is a good time to ask for a raise”. A friend of mine told the reason that I did not believe in it was because I was a virgo. What? Oh, nevermind.
I have had a sudden burst of module development recently. I won’t have a new ones in while, too busy with the holidays.

PocketMod – standalone flash player

Daily Horoscope – PocketMod module

Mac only. YEP is a mac app for organizing your “paperless office”. A friend of mine asked me a few months ago about the very same thing and I had suggested using gallery to scan papers and receipts and upload them to the web application. Gallery allows for keywords and descriptions, and was a better solution than iPhoto, because it was online.

YEP has built in support for scanners and has tagging. YEP is free for now, but the developers will be charging for the next version.

teleport is a simple utility to let you use one single mouse and keyboard to control several of your Macs. Simply reach the edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your other Mac! The pasteboard can be synchronized, and you can even drag & drop files between your Macs.

more info