Author: Daniel Mettler

unlike google, feedster doesn’t care about robots.txt policy files at all (i’ve forbidden indexing of /news, yet it did). netiquette doesn’t seem to count anymore.

the question that arises is whether this is

a) the result of missing (oldschool) experts in feedster’s dev team(?) or
b) intention

i am close to stop blogging under such conditions. notification of central changelogs such as blo.gs is ok (it happens knowingly and actively), but i don’t want my random thoughts be spilled all over the net.

I wonder how long it takes until “web shortcuts”, a genuine [Update: probably not genuine, see the comments below] feature of Konqueror [1], are imitated by any of the other browsers (i.e. Mozilla Firebird, IE, Opera etc.).

Here’s how Konqueror’s web shortcuts work:

To search the web using Google, simply type “gg:” followed by any Google search term(s) in Konqueror’s location bar (that’s where URLs are entered).
To look up a term in Dictionary.com, it’s “dic:” followed by the term. For Freshmeat it’s “fm:”, for Foldoc it’s “fd:” or “foldoc:”, for IETF RFCs it’s “rfc:”, for OpenPGP keys its “pgp:” etc. you get it ;) (BTW: You can even search MSDN using the obvious web shortcut! ;)

Predefined web shortcuts can be edited/deleted, customized shortcuts can be added/defined (among others I’ve added some shortcuts for Leo, Linguadict, Gentoo’s Bugzilla)

For my daily use, Konqueror’s web shortcuts concept is superior (more convenient and faster) to any other web shortcut concept I know of (e.g. Bookmarklets [IE, Mozilla], Sidebar [Mozilla], Hotlist [Opera], having separate entry fields for each shortcut [Galeon]. The latter being particularly.. err.. “special” IYKWIM ;). If I’ve missed a concept, please notify me. [Update: Mozilla has a similar (hidden) feature too! Thx to Asa for the hint]

You might call browsers a “non-issue”. I don’t. “Web shortcuts” is only one feature picked out of many other features that still differ between browsers. Some of these differences are details only, but they can make a big difference when it comes to usability.

So, why hesitate imitating as long as it’s legal?

[1] Note that web shortcuts have been part of Konqueror since at least 2001-08-15! (Sorry, can’t find the first check-in of “web shortcuts” code in CVS)

btw. i’ve slightly updated the ‘gotmail’ script. now it features coloured output which makes it better suitable for console usage. if you pipe its output to a text-to-speech processor you might need to disable the color codes. the most recent version of the script can be found here:

https://news.numlock.ch/docs/gotmail

as an addendum to “Make your server play music and talk..” you should modify the crontab entry the following way to prevent cron from sending mail messages (this can be achieved by piping any stdout/stderr output to /dev/null):

e.g.
/etc/crontab:

# mettlerd: make hal read aloud my new mail every 10 minutes
*/10 * * * * mettlerd /usr/local/bin/gotmail|festival --tts >/dev/null 2>&1

[Update 20031101: minor fix to make gotmail display mailinglist digests correctly: use egrep’s “-m 1” option to prevent multiple listings of from and subject lines]

rather coincidentally (*) i’ve noticed that donncha has commented on my recent question about b2, recommending b2++ instead of b2. well, b2++ certainly looks promising :) so if i will evaluate alternative blogger soft (it’s a matter of time only) i will probably evaluate at least b2++ and wordpress (the “official” successor of b2). both will be superior to mt for sure.. e.g. mt’s need for “rebuilding” the static pages after every tiny bit of site editing is pretty annoying imho.

(*) actually i’ve enabled mail-notification in mt and my smtp setup just works perfectly. nevertheless i haven’t received any notification messages so far. i suppose something must be wrong with either mt itself or my mt setup..

Now my graphics card (an old Geforce 2 GTS) is fanless too ;) Basically, I just removed its annoyingly noisy fan, leaving the passive cooler block only. I wonder how long it will withstand the heat :> Uhm.. actually this shouldn’t be a problem as there are similar, even higher clocked chips which are sold fanless today.. (AFAIK my Geforce is clocked at 250 MHz)

Finally, my main workstation is “silent” :)

Currently I am ripping some of my CDs. The problem: It takes too much time. Fortunately there’s a very good CD ripper for Linux, unspectacularly called abcde.

With abcde, ripping your CDs and encoding the wav files to mp3 files can be reduced to the following two tasks:

1) Insert a CD into your CDROM drive
2) execute “abcde -o mp3” (on the console)

That simple. abcde rips the tracks, encodes them to mp3 format (with adequate settings like 128 kbit/s data rate) and even automatically tags the whole stuff correctly, using CDDB. I’ve already tried some commercial rippers/encoders for Windows, but “abcde” beats them all in ease of use, speed and quality of the output. Amazing..

Ripping CDs still isn’t a pleasure. But if you do it, do it right.