World disintermediation, one hack at a time
Very cool. Was just looking for a way of finding cover art for my ripped music collection, and came across this site:
This is part of the Jiboneus Amazon Web Services project, and lets you search for cover art and album details on Amazon via their web services interface. More kudos to Amazon for providing an open ecosystem for this kind of stuff to grow.
I've been messing with user stylesheets the last couple of days, almost getting what I want, but not quite.
I'm a happy little firefox user, but the stock firefox functionality in this area really isn't that useful. My gripes:
first, firefox/mozilla seems to only support a single global user stylesheet, which gets huge and unwieldy awfully fast. Opera does this much better than firefox, I hear.
because of this, to apply styles to a particular site you have to use
a magic @-moz-document domain style modifier, and this doesn't
seem to play nicely with @media modifiers, so afaict there doesn't seem
to be a way of specifying print styles for a particular site, say.
If I'm wrong about this, I'd be happy to hear about it.
user stylesheets are local files, which means they don't follow me around across the different machines I use, and I don't get any network effects from the work of others, as is available using a 'cloud' solution like greasemonkey
(more minor) I know it's to spec, but having to specify !important
everywhere to force user styles to stick gets old fast
As usual with firefox, there's an extension/add-on that does the job better though. The Stylish extension - "Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript" - does a pretty nice job of addressing (1) and some of (3) above (the network effects part), allowing you to import and manage multiple per-site stylesheets pretty nicely.
My other quibbles remain, though. In particular, there doesn't seem to be a nice way of setting up media-specific per-site styles, which is a must-have, I think. I'd also really love a solution that would follow me across browsers, especially given the number of sites you might want to tweak is typically much larger than the number of extensions you typically have installed.
Hmmmm.
From the quick-hack-department: I'm online for most of the day, and almost always have one or two instant messaging (IM) clients open - most often pidgin/gaim and gajim lately. I also use IM to follow twitter and to tweet.
Now graphical clients are very nice for lots of uses, but one thing they're often not good at is packing info into less space. Depending on how many people you're following, twitter in particular can get noisy fast, and I found myself really wanting a command-line xmpp client that I could just leave open in a term out of the way and use as a river-of-news style xmpp stream. Even read-only would be fine, since I could always pull up my graphical client to tweet (and I'm a twit, not a twerp).
Google turned up a few candidates, but nothing really had my use
case in mind. So a couple of hours later, the first version of
clix was born. It's a quick perl script using
Net::XMPP2,
and is available here:
It aggregates XMPP posts from any number of accounts into a single river-of-news style view, and is (currently at least) read-only i.e. there's no post capability.
Update: updated to version 0.001004 with Yoshizumi's fix from comments.
