Tag Archives: opera

Delicious Opera

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve recently been reinstalling everything on a new hard disk which, as Sarah predicted, has meant restoring a whole bunch of home comforts. One of which were a few tweaks to my preferred web browser, Opera. I’ve added a few buttons to make it easy to tag pages on delicious and IBM’s internal dogear service. Here’s a quick guide to adding a delicious button… and a reminder for me the next time I reinstall everything!

I like to keep the amount of toolbars down to the minimum, so I’m going to add the button next to the recycling (closed tabs) buttons shown here:

First you’ll need to create the button. A bit of searching should give you some examples. Unfortunately WordPress isn’t going to cooperate and let me include a link for the delicious button, but it looks something like this:
opera:/button/Go%20to%20page,%22javascript:(function(){f='http://delicious.com/save?url='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&v=5&';a=function(){if(!window.open(f+'noui=1&jump=doclose','deliciousuiv5','location=yes,links=no,scrollbars=no,toolbar=no,width=550,height=550'))location.href=f+'jump=yes'};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent)){setTimeout(a,0)}else{a()}})()%22,,%22Tag%22,%22Tag%20on%20Delicious%22

I think something is getting messed up if you try and copy and paste that, but in theory it should add a button:

Which you can find under Menu > Settings > Toolbars > Customize… to drag where ever you like:

I dropped it just to the right of the recycle button, but that just gets you a basic, and quite difficult to read in my case, text button:

To display something a little nicer, I’ve created a custom skin. The first time I did this, I customised an existing skin as described in example 2 of the “Getting started with Opera skinning” article. It works, but it gradually got more and more out of date with each new version on Opera. Plan B was to create a very thin skin that only includes images for my custom buttons. The skin.ini file falls back to the full Opera skin for everything else, so I haven’t needed to update it again. Fallbacks are described in the “Opera Skinning part 1: Introduction” article.

The end result is a very handy tagging button withing easy stabbing distance (just to the right of the millions of tabs which I really shouldn’t leave open all the time!):

Now I just need to add back the other buttons I used to have.

Advertisement

Too busy to blog

Posted on by
Reply

I seem to have been far too busy to get any time for blogging lately. Actually, it’s the finishing off posts that I’ve been having trouble finding time for; I do still keep adding to the number of unpublished posts, with this selection boosting the number of drafts to 38:

  • Master Information Hub: Social Bookmark Search Transaction
  • My first Joggler app
  • Election results!
  • Icelandic Economy Bill
  • dub dub dub dot fail
  • Parking charge

Instead of finishing any of those off I’ve been…

…ordering a canvas for one of our wedding photos.

We’ve been married almost a year so it seemed like it would be a good idea to finally do something with some of our favourite photos!

The canvas has arrived, and looks great, but it’s still sealed in a back to keep all the dust off from…

…decorating the porch.

We have two front doors; one on the outside and one on the inside. I added the outer door not long after moving in to create small enclosed entrance hall/porch, which has been great for shoes, coats, assorted junk, and getting rid of anyone trying to sell something without letting out all the heat in the process. The old front door has needed a coat of paint ever since, but because I never look at the outside much I only painted the inside, until now. As a result, most of the house is currently covered in dust from all the sanding!

…playing with a new toy.

A bit of an impulse buy, but after gradually increasing the number of boxes I have plugged in all the time (ironic since it all started with the Current Cost meter!), I’ve cut down a few with a FRITZ!Box. Pretty happy with it so far: it’s a neat combination of ADSL wireless router, file/media server and DECT base station. Plus, thanks to a tip off from Jee Labs, @jthouse will soon be following @andy_house‘s lead and sending me an SMS if I miss any calls.

…not hacking the Joggler.

Apart from being in German, the FRITZ!Box media server works very well with the Joggler, so I’m still really happy to keep using the default Joggler software. For now that is: the Joggler appears to have been discontinued, and my question to O2 about creating Joggler apps seems to have vanished as well. I didn’t have much/any luck using Flash Develop, which is a shame because it seems to be a decent IDE, but Nick has been getting on pretty well on Linux. His Joggler music app looks very promising.

I have been keeping an eye on various Joggler hacks and the first one to have me seriously tempted, is Opera mobile running on the Joggler. I did briefly boot Ubuntu off a USB stick, but I don’t think it’s worth it just yet. On the other hand, Jolicloud does look like it might be ideally suited to running on the Joggler, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work. I’m still hopeful that someone will get Jolicloud booting on the Joggler though; any ideas?

Actually, I think Sony have got a much better idea of how devices like the Joggler should work with the Dash. Getting something like that running on the Joggler would be awesome.

…thinking about home automation.

@lauracowen sparked off some great discussions on the Homecamp group, and I definitely like some of the ideas in Ian’s blog post. I had a chat to Laura on Friday, and the idea of a ‘boost’ is probably a good starting point. I’m sure that would help lower my gas bill, although I’m wondering whether an even lower tech solution might work with my existing heating controls. We often turn on the hot water to top it up, but forget to turn it off again. So, since there is currently no boost button, I’m tempted to just get a basic timer to sit next to the controller to set a reminder to come back and turn off the hot water after a short period. Or I guess I could even use the kitchen timer that’s already in the microwave.

…visiting London.

We spent yesterday in London, mainly to see The Woman in Black, which was excellent. It was hard to work out which of the blood-curdling screams were from the audience and which were part of the production! We also had some time to visit the National Gallery, which brought back a few memories of art lessons.

See how much things have changed since I ruined Turner’s Ulysses deriding Polyphemus with an oil rig?!

…watching Inception.

Really enjoyed Inception although, now I think about it, it’s riddled with plot holes that I never noticed at the time. Guess that’s pretty normal for dreams!

…blogging.

I’ve also been posting on the MDM Workbench blog, so there’ll be fewer work related posts on here now. (Still figuring out how to decide which blog to pick for MDM posts.)

Google plating

Posted on by
6

This post is brought to you from the new Google Chrome browser.

I’m sure there will be some in depth and deeply technical reviews about Chrome before long, if there aren’t already that is, but here are my first few thoughts:

  1. First thought
  2. Second thought
  3. Third thought

So far Chrome looks reasonably solid- solid enough to risk writing a blog post on even! I certainly like the sound of tabs in separate processes, given the number of times a website has taken out all my tabs. I usually have far too many tabs open I admit… but I’ve not yet caused the entire internet to crash as a result!

Playing with the about:memory page was interesting as well, especially with other browsers listed with Chrome. Interestingly Opera 9.5 was using less memory despite having more tabs open. Both Opera and Chrome have gone for a cut down interface, which I prefer, although there does seem to be a fairly random split of menu items between Chrome’s “Control the current page” and “Customise and control Google Chrome” menus. I imagine a lot of time was spent deciding what should go in each… oh well.

It’s great to have another browser to spice things up, and I love the new tab page- Chrome will most definitely be staying installed, along with Opera, Firefox and IE!

Update: Some thoughts from other people:

Extra, extra! A roundup and review of the media hype on The Register: