links for 2007-06-21

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  Geek to Live: Create your master feed with Yahoo! Pipes - Lifehacker
  
  
  (tags: rss yahoo lifehacker pipes howto)
  
  

Crystal Weather Station

This is a cool looking weather station.  The Crystal Weather Station has laser engraved 3D icons in crystal.  One of the coolest things about this clock is that you can switch between temperature and clock mode by waving you hand over the clock.

[via Engadget]

autoHideStatusbar

autoHideStatusbar is a pretty simple Firefox extension, that... automatically hides the status bar.  This is an easy way to squeeze a little screen area for your browser window. 

You can configure it to automatically show the status bar when you hover the mouse over the the status bar area, or over a link (to see the destination url).

[via Lifehacker]

Mac Media Center

I really like the Mac Mini and FrontRow as a way to play media.  The interface is great.  The one part of this solution that I am getting frustrated with is how to copy tracks to it.  Since FrontRow uses iTunes to play audio tracks, they need to be copied to the iTunes library.

I wrote this AppleScript to copy newly added tracks to the hard drive on the Mac mini and then add them to the iTunes library.  This works fine, if you want to keep the content on the computer itself.  I now want to keep my content on my Network Attached Storage. 

Copying content to the NAS works perfectly for video content, as FrontRow will make videos available that are on a remove file system, when you add an alias to the remote directory on the local hard drive.  This doesn't work for audio, as you not only want to make the content playable, but you want to have it indexed by the meta data.

Eclipse Area Shot GPS

As I have written before (1, 2, 3, 4) , I am would like to get a single-DIN GPS head unit that is able to control an iPod, satellite radio tuner and can be used for hands free phone calls.  Yesterday, I was just browsing around and I found The Eclipse CD5100.

This head unit has some pretty cool features:

1. HD radio ready (with an external tuner)


2. iPod control capable (with iPod adapter cable)


3. Satellite radio ready (with an external tuner)


4. USB port, to allow playback of WMA and MP3 files.

The one feature that I wasn't sure of is called Area Shot GPS.  After looking into it, I know that I wouldn't want this head unit.

links for 2007-06-17

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  20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches - Dumb Little Man
  
  
  (tags: google search tips howto tricks)
  
  

links for 2007-06-12

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  Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Cure that crooked picture frame with rubber feet
  
  
  Handy tip for quickly ensuring that a picture frame hangs straight
  
  
  (tags: pictureframe hang level tips howto)