JosephMcLaughlin.info

Ubuntu 8.10 is on it’s way!

josephmclaughlin — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 02:50:06 +0000

Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex - is being released on October 30th!

It’s has some really cool upgrades, such as sporting Gnome 2.24, X.Org 7.4, the ability to encrypt your home directory, a new guest session feature and a network manager with system-wide settings.

Organized - The Newest From iSlayer.com

josephmclaughlin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:20:29 +0000

iSlayer's "Organized" dashboard widget." rel="lightbox[organized]" href="http://blog.josephmclaughlin.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/organized-events1.png" rel="lightbox[143]">iSlayer’s newest widget - Organized - brings multiple widgets into one. In my mind, it takes the place of the official iCal widget, the iCal Events widget, the World Clock widget, and on top of that, adds a dashboard version of the iPhone Notes application.

The widget is freely available and can be downloaded from iSlayer’s site, or from Apple’s download center. Click the image to the left for several images of the widget in action.

And while we’re talking about iSlayer, if you don’t already have the iStat pro widget, check it out! It’s a great widget for monitoring all your system stats in the same convenient place: Your Dashboard.

iSlayer's "Organized" dashboard widget." rel="lightbox[organized]" href="http://blog.josephmclaughlin.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Organized-Notes.png" rel="lightbox[143]">iSlayer's "Organized" dashboard widget." rel="lightbox[organized]" href="http://blog.josephmclaughlin.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Organized-Clocks.png" rel="lightbox[143]">iSlayer's "Organized" dashboard widget." rel="lightbox[organized]" href="http://blog.josephmclaughlin.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Organized-ToDo.png" rel="lightbox[143]">iSlayer's "Organized" dashboard widget." rel="lightbox[organized]" href="http://blog.josephmclaughlin.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Organized-Preferences.png" rel="lightbox[143]">

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

josephmclaughlin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:46:28 +0000

Today, thanks to a mention on twitter by @JesseStay, I found Wordle. I think I’ll be using it quite a bit!

Wordle is basically a nice-looking tag cloud. The one to the right (click for full size) is a cloud based off of the words on this blog! You can enter a URL or put in a bunch of words in order to generate one. You can also choose weather you want all of the text horizontal, some horizontal, all vertical, or every which way.

What are your favorite dashboard widgets?

josephmclaughlin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:54:10 +0000

In preparation for Apple’s media event tomorrow (10/14/08) I added a web-clipping of twitlive.tv to my dashboard (in hopes that Leo will be allowed to do a live web-stream). I’m very excited for the event and I think there will be some pretty cool stuff revealed, but I want to know, what are your favorite Dashboard widgets? I’d love to hear your opinion, please post a comment (a link to an image would be great too) about your favorite dashboard widget. Hopefully this can be a great resource for everyone to find cool new widgets.

I’ll start, on my dashboard I have (left to right, top to bottom):

Safari Web Clipping
Calculator
A Digg.com widget I made in Dashcode
Weather
iCal
Stocks
World Clock
A countdown widget I made in Dashcode
Dictionary
Google
iStat Pro
The Harvest Dashboard Widget

Hope to hear from you soon!

WPTouch - WordPress Blogs Look Even Better on the iPhone

josephmclaughlin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:53:46 +0000

A few days ago Jesse Stay wrote about a WordPress plugin that generates an iPhone-esque version of your blog so that iPhone viewers will get an even richer viewing experience. I just wanted to echo Jesse’s post, adding my appreciation towards Dale Mugford & Duane Storey , the creators of the plugin.

You can install it just like any other WordPress plugin (move the contents of the plugin to blog-root/wp-content/plugins replacing blog-root with the directory you installed WordPress to), then you can edit the way you would like it to appear on the device. For the image to the right, I changed the colors to match my normal theme (for a consistent appearance).

You can download the plugin from this page.

If you want to know how to make a custom icon when you save a link to the home-screen of your iPhone/iPod Touch, see this post.

reCaptcha: stop spam. read books.

josephmclaughlin — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 05:41:13 +0000

The folks over at Carnegie Mellon University have got a really good thing goin’ with reCaptcha.

I recently installed it as a plugin to this site to stop spam and hide email links, but when I found out what the “read books” part of the tag-line referred to, I had to share…

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

Source: http://www.recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

So guys, what are we waiting for? Lets digitize the world while we de-spam our inboxes!

Transparent Icons for Hidden Applications

josephmclaughlin — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:29:31 +0000

This is a great tip for all mac users who rely on the Hide/Unhide Application feature on the mac. This tip allows you enable a hidden feature of the dock which shows hidden applications as semi-transparent, allowing you to quickly identify which applications are hidden and which are shown with a simple glance at the dock. Here’s a couple of screenshots to show you what it looks like (click for a larger image).

As you can see, this can be very useful when you have a lot of applications open at the same time. To set your dock to appear this way, open Terminal (~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and paste these two lines:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES killall Dock

If at any time you would like to revert to Apple’s default setting paste these two lines:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool NO killall Dock

I saw this great tip on MacTips.org (by AppleGazette.com). For this and other great Mac Tips, visit their site.

Caffeine (for Mac)

josephmclaughlin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:45:06 +0000

Recently, my Dad wrote about the Lighthead Software application Caffeine. This app allows you to prevent your Mac from going to sleep at the click of a button. It’s a very useful app if you are running a process that shouldn’t be stopped.

If you want to take this one step further and allow closing of your Mac’s screen while allowing it to continue working. To do this, you simply need to download an application developed by semaja2 called InsomniaX. This program can also come in handy if you want to use an external monitor as your only display but don’t want to leave your laptop open.

Please feel free to leave your comments on this or other posts.

Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us

josephmclaughlin — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:53:54 +0000

I’ve seen this clip several times but I think it means more to me now that I understand the concepts behind the Web 2.0 movement. Have a look, it’s under five minutes long and truly inspiring.

WPvideo 1.10

MacBook Injury

josephmclaughlin — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:43:28 +0000

Earlier today I dropped my MacBook out of my backpack. I took it out of the incase sleeve (hoping it would be alright) and discovered that one of the corners was badly bent from the fall. Here are some pictures:

Pretty intense huh? The entire machine (as far as I’ve tested) works. The power-port even works! It doesn’t look very pretty though. I’m going to contact AppleCare as soon as I’m done with school and will post updates on twitter about how they handle the situation.

**UPDATE** Apple was very gracious and replaced the top (keyboard and all) after they bent the underlying metal back into place. Thanks Apple! **UPDATE**