As some of you know, I’ve been messing with Fire Eagle for some time now already (I was lucky enough to get an invitation) and yesterday I noticed the site went public. That means you, yeah you, can sign up now too.

But what is and does Fire Eagle? Not a whole lot to be frank. It’s basically a broker for your geo-data. It can share your position on earth with a number of other services, like wikinear (see previous post).

I do applaud the initiative of Fire Eagle though. It’s a Yahoo! application and for a change, they didn’t simply buy a company. Nope, they’ve created this themselves! I’m happy to see this and hope the other big players will do the same: be creative, invent new stuff (knol is not innovative at all, to me).

Since the launch of Fire Eagle, quite a few websites have joined the effort and use the API provided. That includes Pownce. The application gallery is growing and I’m really interested to see what other websites will join and be created, inspired by this functionality.

function rm () {
if [[ ${1} =~ -(rf|fr) ]] && [[ ${2} =~ ${HOME} ]]; then
read -p “Hold it, are you sure you want this? [y|N]” I;
if [[ ${I} =~ (y|Y) ]]; then
sleep 5;
$(which rm) $•;
fi;
else
sleep 1;
$(which rm) $•;
fi
}

Before you start using it, make sure that the function is sourced (hint: type rm). I am not responsible if you loose data if you decide to use this function.

But what if you want to build something similar yourself? You’d have to download all your RSS feeds, combine them and most likely filter and sort them. Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy!

Yahoo! Pipes can do all the dirty work in aggregating the feeds for you and more importantly, it’s rather fun to use. So let’s get started. Say you want to use your Twitter, Last.fm, Flickr, Del.icio.us and blog feeds. First we’ll create a new pipe and simply fetch the feeds we need.

Tada! your feeds are now all combined and working together, but wait, I also want my blog’s posts in there, but only my posts (and in this case, not the ones by Bok and Joffie!). Ok, let’s just fetch the feed of this blog and only permit entries where I am listed as author.

Not too hard, right? But you probably also want to sort it by date, and limit it to, say, three days? First we’ll drop all the “old” entries (older than three days).

Ok, only sort the entries by date, and we’re done!

Now we have one big feed of all your information, which you can publish somewhere (and probably format nice). The feed can be downloaded in RSS, JSON or PHP (serialized) format, so you can start from there.

Yahoo! Pipes now downloads and parses/handles the feeds for you, so you won’t have to do that. Very cool, very cool indeed. And of course the interface is a lot of fun and pleasing to the eye.

Of course I had to give it a go on my Nokia N95 8GB and I must say I’m quite impressed! The application works well. The interface is slick and the videos of the news are streaming without many problems. The NOS claims they will also stream the Olympic Games and see no reason why the great uitzendinggemist.nl couldn’t be streamed through the application as well. Wow!

So far, I’m quite happy to watch the morning news in the train, see the traffic jams I skip (by using the train) and browse Teletext.

Some screenshots:

NOS, well done!

<table>
<tr>

<td class=”col1″>some data</td>

<td class=”col2″>some more data</td>

</tr>

</table>

And then to specify the layout of the td classes col1 and col2 from a stylesheet.

This week I discovered that there is better way to accomplish the same, using colgroup and col. Never knew that there was already a way to do this the “right way”. So my next tables will look like:

<table>
<colgroup>

<col class=”col1″>

<col class=”col2″>

</colgroup>

<tr>

<td>some data</td>

<td>some more data</td>

</tr>

</table>

It might not look too different in this small example, but I sure I will find some use for it.

Recently I’ve visited Switzerland and Germany and used FireEagle and in both places, I’ve used the awesome new website called wikinear. First, find yourself an open WiFi network and update your location. I use twibble and FireBot. The latter is a twitter bot and the twibble application makes it really easy to post your GPS coordinates to that bot.

After you’ve updated your location, go to wikinear.com and click a few times to get logged in. After that, wikinear will show you a little map (Google Maps) with some pointers of “interesting things” around you. The information is taken from Wikipedia (hence the name wikinear). This is of course very useful and fun!

Great, simple website!

A few weeks ago my father came with a box of hardware that he did no longer use. One of the hardware things was a D-LINE CPL-85 of Dinh-Telecom. It was just a case of plugging in both devices in the power outlet and the connection between my server and the network was there.

This is of course nice, but I wanted to know a little more about the devices. It is coming with windows software that offers it the ability to set things like encryption. As I personally don’t use windows I wondered whether there was Linux software that would do the same. On freshmeat I was unable to find any and a apt-cache search did not give any relevant hits either. The problem was that I did not know what to search for! So I decided to do some more testing. I installed the windows software on my girlfriends laptop, connected it to my wired network and the software recognized one of the CPL-85’s right away. As it sees it via my Linksys switch, it must be “seeing” it via some kind of IP connection.

$ sudo ./plconfig -r eth0
- Parameters and Statistics response from 00:14:5c:80:9f:20
Tx ACK Counter: 37550
Tx NACK Counter: 33180
Tx FAIL Counter: 0
Tx Contention Loss Counter: 10774
Tx Collision Counter: 7034
Tx CA3 Latency Counter: 10841
Tx CA2 Latency Counter: 21900
Tx CA1 Latency Counter: 55379
Tx CA0 Latency Counter: 0
Rx Cumul. Bytes per 40-symbol Packet Counter: 77395170

net_pcap.cpp:29:20: fel: global.h: Filen eller katalogen finns inte make: *** [net_pcap.o] Fel 1

add_mac start, mac : “00:14:5c:80:9f:20″ add_mac end
MID = 24 (response)
plc_send_mm : Get Channel capacities for transmit
dest: “ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff”
src : “00:18:DE:4C:15:8F”
From 00:14:5c:80:9f:1f : 0×2
Vendor Specific Parameters
MID = 24 (response)
received channel capacities response mme for TX
1 TX station(s)
Station 0
MAC 00:14:5c:80:9f:20
TxBytesPerBlock = 2565
TxBytesRate = 7 MBytes/s
TxBitRate = 61 MBits/s

As shown, the connection speed is quite good. Not the 85 MBits/s that should be possible, but 61 MBits/s is not too far below that specs either.

So I did check it out and had no clue what to expect. The sign up was easy enough and after a few seconds, I was looking at my online “notebook” hosted by Evernote.

I’ve seen such dump sites before and they never really seemed to interest me for more than a minute. I know Joffie has his own wiki at home for dumping notes, and I have CVS and SVN software installed on my home machine(s) so I don’t really need this either. But then I found out it also offers text recognition within images. Now that’s something my `grep` can’t do, so this might be nice! Time to explore the service after all.

Evernote allows you to email stuff to a special email address. The contents of the email will be added to your notebook. So let’s find out how good their text recognition really is.

Oh well, I’m still fairly impressed with this. Too bad it’ll probably won’t beat my wiki (yeah, just like Joffie, but I barely use it) and my svn repositories. Besides the text recognition, there’s nothing that really stands out here and I’m simply too paranoid to trust all my personal notes to a company (especially if they’re US-based, like Evernote).

If you need an invitation, just drop me a note. I still have 10 left and I’m fairly sure BOK has some catching dust too

Nonetheless this looks very cool and extremely useful. Will this be the new way to search for information? Search 3.0, or not, I’ve made a little screencast of how it works. In the example, I search for “scummvm”.

For too long, I have ran around with cellphones that weren’t considered hip or cool. Only once before did I have a camera on my phone, but without an USB cable or bluetooth, transferring the horrible quality pictures were a no-go area. Time to change that! And so I did. I got a nice Nokia N95 8GB and am loving it every day (note: I have no experience with cool phones, so anything would probably be awesome to me).

The thing I like best is the WiFi adapter in there. Followed by the equally aweome GPS receiver. A new world opened, for there are so many nice things online that mobile users could use. In the few days I have been the owner of this device, I found the following great apps:

• ZoneTag
• FireEagle
• Fring
• Yahoo! Go.

ZoneTag let’s you upload your photos to Flickr, while geo-tagging them staight away. Woohoo!

FireEagle can record and share your physical location (which can be set by the previously mentioned ZoneTag). It’s fairly new and open by invitation only (if I am not mistaken). Since it’s so new, there’s not a whole lot to see yet, but imagine the possibilities for a programmer. No doubt this will expand fast and really cool applications will be build around it.

Fring is a nice messenger. If you’re online, why not have the ability to chat (and/or update your twitter account)?

Yahoo! Go, again a Yahoo! product, is as they say “everything you need, all that you love”. You can browse Flickr, send emails etc. etc.

Of course I’m biased and appreciate Yahoo! applications, but seriously, what companies beside Yahoo! really focus on the mobile market?

What other mobile applications are there? While waiting for comments, I’ll go play Monkey Island again, for ScummVM also works on the Nokia N95