The EeePC is such a sweet little laptop, and it’s really handy when you are on the road, in a meeting or on the train - however being sans network can be pretty limiting. Now, I’ve got a Nokia N95 8Gb on Three, so I have a delicious 1Gb of traffic to burn each month. If only I could connect one to another…
I first tried with Bluetooth, but no dice - besides the obvious issue of the EeePC not having bluetooth, even with a dongle I couldn’t get a network connection. They chatted, but they couldn’t connect on that meta level that can push 1’s and 0’s around. Besides, bluetooth is slow, I could probably only get 50% of my mobile broadband speed. FAIL.
Next I tried a USB cable. After installing 3egprs, and ith a minor tweak to a chat script, it actually worked, and at full speed! Having a cable hanging off kind of sucks though. PARTIAL CREDIT.
I downloaded JoikuSpot when I got my phone. It’s a cool little app that turns your phone into a mobile hotspot - the only caveat at the moment is the beta edition only supports HTTP, HTTPS and SSH (via tunnelling and only with version 1.2). NATing of more protocols are planned apparently, and I wait with baited breath. When I got my EeePC, I tried to connect, as this would be the ultimate solution, but no dice. After some Googling, I found a few suggestions, and success stories, but no full instructions - so here they are:
Install JoikuSpot
Start it up
Find the Access Point on the EeePC
Stop JoikuSpot, and close it
Open “Configure Network Connections” on the EeePC, select the AP and hit Properties
Click the “Wireless” tab.
Set Mode to “Adhoc”
Set Channel to “Auto”
Select the “TCP/IP” tab. Select “Static” from the drop down
IP Address: 192.168.2.2
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.2.1
Select the “DNS” tab
Enter 192.168.2.1 as the primary server
Hit the “OK” button
Connect to the AP (Make sure JoikuSpot ISN’T running. Yes I said ISN’T) it should connect
Start up JoikuSpot and connect to the net
Browse somewhere on the EeePC - you should see the JoikuSpot splash screen
What is a developer to do with all of that spare time between 1am and 3am? Write a JavaScript platform game of course! I’ve been sitting on this for the last couple of months, waiting for a good time to release it, but as this guy just released his (freaking awesome) canvas element version, I didn’t want to be out done. So as a proof of concept of how far you can push semantic HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I present to you: JavaScript Mario Brothers!
The level is built using plain old HTML and CSS. Using absolute positioning and class names give each sprite a location and look (Yes, I know it should be in a separate CSS file - it was just easier for debugging at the time), so no cheating with the canvas element
Sprite actions are determined by class names - so all divs with the class name koopa-sprite instantly start acting like koopas.
The collision engine and animation is all done via un-obtrusive JavaScript (Except for a few bits that I couldn’t get running after window.onload for various reasons).
The JavaScript is based on the Prototype JS library, and the level is a complete write from scratch (which is why it isn’t quite correct), but as a proof of concept in both game development and pushing the limits of JS, I think it’s pretty cool.
Hey Myles! Your site’s broken! Au contraire my good friend! Today is CSS naked day - a day to celebrate standards based web. Best practice says that a site should still be usable without all of the eye-candy, so today is the day to put you money where your mouth is (I hope you know where it’s been) and show your site in all of it’s nekkid glory.
The Port80 mini-talks have been really successful - there are lots of people that get very upset when we don’t have them. Unfortunately, it has been a bit difficult to find two speakers each month, so we are introducing a new component: Show us your Stuff (SUYS).
It is an opportunity to get up and show us something cool - maybe a new discovery or a new website for live feedback. You don’t need slides, or even any preparation - it’s basically a geek open-mic. We’ll try to keep it capped at 10 minutes.
We will still try to find one 10-minute formal talk each month, but if we can’t get one, there is just more time to show us your stuff!
Ok, I REALLY have to stop coming up with hare-brained ideas, and then listening to others when they convince me to implement them.
Spurred on my @cybner’s new avatar, I thought it would be cool if you could slime people in Twitter if the say “I don’t know”.
So after a couple of hours of ruby hacking, I came up with: You can’t do that on twitter. Eveytime someone says the magic words, you should see their avatar get slimed! You can even try the public timeline or your own timeline (Click here and and change madpilot in the url to your username). Note though, that because this isn’t authenticated, your timeline will need to be public for it to work.
Work out what page is requested (uses apache mod_rewrite for this)
Build the twitter URL, and request it using Mechanize
Parse the HTML using Hpricot
Append a new JavaScript file, which inserts the slime image based on an inserted class name
Iterate through the tweets, grepping for the term “I don’t know”. If it finds it, it inserts the “slime” class
On window.load, the inserted JavaScript file finds all images with that class and dynamically inserts the slime.png image above it. Using the twitter prototype instance, it gets placed over the avatar image.
I started off using Mechanize, then realised I didn’t really need it, but left it in there as it does do the HTTP request thing quite well. Download the source. Enjoy!
Update: Some good old You can’t do that on television sliming:
