• talk about robots
• talk about phlogiston
• be happy to be alive
• write about the successes and failures of American representative government
• rationalize trivial personal quirks
• declare what I would like to do today! (how meta)
• read webcomics about dinosaurs
• ask why I have arms in the first place
• be sitting by a quiet mountain river in good company watching the rain fall
• review different foodstuffs that I have tried

Googling for phrases is fun! Thanks to dinosaur comics for the fodder :)

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PageFeed is a simple web service to help you organise the pages you’d like to read, but just don’t have the time (or desire) to read through right now.

If you’ve ever used Instapaper, or the newer Read It Later, Pagefeed will feel pretty familiar. The idea is that when you come across an interesting page that you don’t have time to read right now, you just save it to PageFeed via a handy bookmarklet. You can close the page, and PageFeed will remember all the pages you’ve saved for reading later.

Instapaper and Read It Later both have their own iPhone apps for reading stuff offline. Which is great, but it seems a little unnecessary - and it makes for yet another app you have to remember to open and sync every day. And you know what? There’s already a super robust way to subscribe to a stream of HTML items - it’s called RSS. PageFeed puts the HTML contents of your saved pages into your own private RSS feed. You can then use your favourite online / offline feed reader - you can take the content wherever you like and use it on whatever platform you fancy. You can also use the PageFeed home page for managing your list of saved pages away from your RSS reader.

PageFeed isn’t perfect; it can’t put HTML contents in a feed if it can’t parse the HTML page properly. And if there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s malformed HTML. But it does pretty well, and if it can’t save the page contents then it will still keep the URL around for you to visit later.

PageFeed runs on AppEngine and uses google accounts, so chances are you already have an account.

The newest version (0.8) of GRiS (the RSS reader I wrote for the iPhone) has support for PageFeed - when you click a link in an article’s contents, you can opt for it to be saved to PageFeed instead of opened in MobileSafari. If you’d like to offer similar functionality in your RSS (or other) application, get in touch!

OSX has this great feature where if you hold down SHIFT at the same time as using your mouse scroll wheel, it’ll scroll horizontally instead of vertically. If you don’t have a laptop, this is an immensely useful trick. Sadly, I couldn’t find any way to get this to happen on linux.

But now, thanks to some direction from stackoverflow, I finally figured out how to do it myself. The world of X11 input hackery is somewhat twisted and full of projects either abandoned or in disrepair, but I finally stumbled across the right set of tools.

If you’d like to get this (rather excellent) feature in linux, you will need the following:

• Install the packages xbindkeys and xautomation: sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xautomation

• Save the following file as ~/.xbindkeysrc.scm :

    ; bind shift + vertical scroll to horizontal scroll events
    (xbindkey '(shift "b:4") "xte 'mouseclick 6'")
    (xbindkey '(shift "b:5") "xte 'mouseclick 7'")
  

• Use your favourite mechanism to ensure that the xbindkeys command is run at the beginning of your xsession (I added it to ubuntu’s “startup items” preference, but you can surely use init.d if you’re comfortable with that).

FPS disease is a terrible affliction (via b3ta)

music video pieced together from many webcams

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Those who are admins may want to take a gander at Kon-Boot in case someone with ulterior motives and physical access to vital computers happens to stumble across this tool. Those who have ulterior motives, enjoy.

• OSNews (kon-boot is a tool to bypass windows and linux administrator passwords)