Tag: Wishlist

Firefox feature wishlist : tab groups

I wish Firefox (or any web browser for that matter) had a nice and easy way to group tabs together. If I could just move or copy tabs between groups, color them differently together or one by one, collapse and expand groups, search for tab, link tabs together (close one and linked one close together, move one and others will follow), etc.  Considering the amount of time it took for tabs to go mainstream, I am not sure I’ll live long enough to see a solution for grouping…

P.S.: Yes, I am aware of

  • grouping related tabs in several browser windows,
  • ColorfulTabs plugin for Firefox,
  • using bookmark groups to save tabs and open them later with one click,

but these aren’t solving my problems.  Not as they are now at least.

Looking for a notebook

I’ve never particularly liked notebooks. They are clumsy, uncomfortable, hot, slow, weird, and hard to fix or upgrade. And expensive, of course.

But circumstances are changing now in such a way that I’ll need to have a notebook pretty soon. We can’t manage on a single computer nomore, and there is no place to put a second one. Plus I am way too often moving around.

I am not in a hurry yet, but I can’t delay the purchase for another six month. Tha gives me enough to time to study the options and compare the prices.

So far I haven’t done any research what-so-ever. And with this knowledge I am looking for the following:

  • IBM ThinkPad T41 notebook (I’ve heard lots of positive comments about this particular line of products, and it supports Linux pretty good too.)
  • Fast CPU is not an issue. Even 1 GHz will be enough.
  • RAM is good, so I’ll need more. 1 GByte is pretty close to perfect.
  • I don’t want an elephant in the bag, but I want something bigger than my mobile, so the ideal size of the screen is 15″.
  • Well-supported video card – NVidia MX-series or something similar.
  • CD/DVD/DVD-RW is a must.
  • USB is a must.
  • WiFi card, supported by Fedora Linux 4 or later is a must.
  • 10/100 (or maybe even 10/100/1000) Mbit Ethernet adapter is a must.
  • Soundcard with line-in (read: Skype) is a must.
  • Battery life is not essential – if it can live and work for 2-4 hours, then it’s good enough. Usually, I am pretty close to power lines.

That’s pretty much what I have thought of at this moment. Any suggestions, ideas, or pointers are very welcome.

P.S.: The system will be running Fedora Linux and Fedora Linux only. No dualboots to Windows or anything crazy like that.

P.P.S.: Notebook can even be second-hand, if in good condition.

Long time no order

With me not buying anything off the web for a long time now and holiday season approaching, I decided to make myself a present. The top of my wishlist is occupied by photographic equipment – all sorts of expensive lenses and a flash unit. I reviewed my wants, needs, and the financial status and decided to readjust things a bit. It will be some time until I will be able to buy expensive Canon lenses, but I have gaps in the coverage of focal length spectrum, so I thought I should do something about it.

After some Googling, I made a choice to buy Tamron Zoom Wide Angle-Telephoto AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di LD Aspherical (IF) Autofocus Lens for Canon EOS (is it the longest lens name or what?). This lense has a good range of 27-75mm, which covers my needs pretty good. It is a rather fast one with f/2.8 aperture at all focal lengthes. The price of approximately $360 USD is affordable. And it has excellent reviews on the web. What else can I ask for? Well, I can ask for a lot of things actually, but that is irrelevant now.

And since I was already ordering something, it was a good thing to add a few smaller items, like a 128 MByte memory stick duo for my mobile (finally!) and few other small items.

I wonder if the package will make it here before Christmas.

Generating ultimate movie wishlist with Perl and IMDB

One of the things that will go into history with the year 2005 is the number of bad movies produced by Hollywood. IMDB says:

Hollywood is mired in its biggest box-office slump in over 20 years.

With all those bad movies around, finding something worth the time and effort becomes increasing difficult. Luckily, there are these two things that can make our lives easier – IMDB and Perl.

Combining the two all sorts of interesting things can be achieved. Particularly, an ultimate movie wishlist can be generated.

If you are here just for the script, than here is the movie_wishlist.pl. If you want just the result, than here is wishlist.html. Otherwise read on for the explanations on how it works and how you can make it better.

Continue reading Generating ultimate movie wishlist with Perl and IMDB

Bloglines feature a few updates

The other day I noticed a few updates, but not all of them. Bloglines announced all the recent changes in this news article and it turns out that I noticed only the small subset.

The biggest and most welcome change – keyboard navigation. Now, instead of scrolling feeds with a lot of items and switching between feeds while moving the mouse all over the screen, one can use keyboard shortcuts. ‘j‘ and ‘s‘ are my two favourites. By pressing ‘j‘ it is no possible to jump to the next item in the feed. No scrolling. No mouse. Simply go there. By pressing ‘s‘ it is trivial to go to the next feed with unread items. Again, no mouse involved. Just these two keyboard shortcuts speed up reading a lot. And I needed the whole two seconds to get used to them. Amazing!

Continue reading Bloglines feature a few updates