Archive 9/2005

Two days ago Rollyo has come out of private beta and now offers everyone who wants it customizable and topic oriented search facilites. How does it work? I'll try to explain it with an example:

If you're using the german keymap of Xorg/XFree86 you've perhaps noticed that you can't write french accents. On the other hand, if you enable the nodeadkeys option you will have to hit ~ twice to get one tilde. After some googling I found this great article by Markus Kuhn that explains the problematic in detail (I confess, I've only read the solution part ).

Since Opera comes with a builtin greasemonkey-like system I decided to play around with it a little bit and started to fixing one of the annoyances I came across on the Gamespot forums: When you try to access the last reply to a topic, the forum will only give you the page this post was made on and won't send you down to it. Fixing this was actually not a really a problem that's why I also grant this little script to the public domain

Thansk to the support team on searchfox.com I now finally also have an account of this new RSS aggregator service around the web Since I'm currently quite into Opera (let's see for how long *g*) I will esp. try to find out, what's working on it and what not also motivated by this statement in the compatibility list of searchfox:

SearchFox has been successfully tested on Explorer 6.0 Windows, Firefox 1.0 Windows/Mac and Safari 1.3 Mac SearchFox

For thos of you who haven't heard of SearchFox yet, I'd recommend that you read its profile on TechCrunch. There you will also learn about the "personalization" I'll mention in this article

Note: SearchFox is still in beta so this is just a current-state article of this service. If I find something wrong with the service, I'm quite confident that this is just because of the SID-status This article was written only an hour or so after I've received my invitation so this is also just a first impression

Is perhaps Opera Software having some problems with their community servers? Since a few hours half of my requests result in white pages or return code 500 error messages or simple nice messages like this:

For the last couple of days there were rumors about a drastic change for Opera. Now it seems to be final: The Opera browser is free , but now also in the sense of ad-free Opera software today also releases version 8.50 which removes the banners, the registration open and some security problems. It also now comes with the Browser Javascript feature which makes it possible for Opera software to "fix" websites for the user by altering it using Javascript. It's as far as I can tell the "official way" of UserJS

Konami now announced, that they want to release a "Best of Konami" edition of the round based strategy game "Metal Gear Acid" this November in Japan. This step marks the introduction of budget games on the handheld market and will hopefully also lead to Sony making a Platinum series for the PSP.

If you're into games you've probably already heard about this new controller thing by Nintendo for their upcoming console codenamed "Revolution". For those of you who haven't: Here's the gamespot article about it.

Google has now opened the doors for a beta version of their Blog search engine. It definitely looks like Google and is fast like Google but (according to the Blog Herald) they only have around 9 million sites weblogs indexed which is IMO quite disappointing. For me personally the only advantage that the new google blog search has is its speed. If Technorati wasn't so damn slow, there would be absolutely no need for alternatives (apart from information monopolism ).

Since Yahoo! announced that the old Flickr accounts will be merged with Yahoo! IDs somewhen in 2006 many people started thinking about moving away from Flickr to some true community alteratives. I'm still very happy with Flickr but I also started looking around the net for alternatives and found 23hq.com which on the first sight looks like a Flickr lite clone. It has:

• Tags
• A short registration form
• A simple privacy policy ("No spam")
• A calendar
• Albums
• Private and public photos
• Subscribing to other people's photo sets