Monthly Archive for October, 2004

ImageGrabber

I know there are lots of utilities out there for nicking images from web sites, but I thought I’d have a go at writing my own.

This is really even simpler than TypeScript, and so I had a go at doing it in JavaScript first. (TypeScript could have easily been done in JavaScript too, thinking about it…)

Here’s my first attempt - this really is mind-bogglingly simple. It doesn’t gather images from web pages, but only works on web sites where they give their images sequential numbers - amazingly quite a lot of sites seem to do this.

The advantage this system has over site-mining programs, is that this can find images that never made it onto a finished web page.

So copy and paste the HTML below into a text document, save it locally and open it in your web-broswer (I’m not daft enough to host this on my own web space!)

You need to enter the image path - try something like
http://www.maxim-magazine.co.uk/picture_library/dir_9/maxim_pic_
- then the first image number (say 4500) and the last (4999 if you like), the image suffix (.jpg) and off you go…

————-

<html>
<head>
<title>image grabber</title>
</head>

<body>

<script language=”javascript”>

imagepath = prompt(”Enter image path”, “http://”);

start = prompt(”Enter 1st image number”, “1″);

stop = prompt(”Enter last image number”, “23″);

suffix = prompt(”Enter image suffix”, “.jpg”);

for (i=start; i<=stop; i++)
{
document.write (”<img src=”+imagepath+i+suffix+”><br />image “+i+”<hr>”)
}

</script>

</body>
</html>

Got Skype?

Bogdan burst into our office yesterday and asked if we’d got Skype yet.

It’s VoIP telephony, but Jon and I were dismissive, mainly because we thought it was a Windows-only thing. (Bogdan was a Mac user years ago, but strayed from the true path…)

Later, much later, that night I was watching Newsnight, and guess what - they did a whole bit on Skype. So I had a peek at their web site, and was pleased to see that they do their software for Mac OS X, Linux and Pocket PC. It offers free peer-to-peer voice calls to other Skype-users, and cheap (depending on where you are and where you’re calling) calls to real, ordinary telephones.

So, I downloaded Skype for OS X - er, then, who do I call?

I managed to find someone that looked like it might be Bogdan, and called. No answer.

Then half an hour later, I was upstairs - an unfamiliar phone rang! Or rather, my laptop rang. It was Bogdan, a perfectly audible, clear voice call on my iBook over WiFi just using the built-in mic and speakers.

Jon’s resisting Skype though - even though we can’t get iChatAV to do voice calls between us, although that might be due to latency in his rather amazing wireless set-up. Jon prefers to type (Skype does instant messaging too , you know), but it’s got me thinking it might almost be worth getting a Pocket PC to use as a phone…

In other news… Cringely thinks Kerry’s in with a chance. I’d like to think he’s right, but I refuse to misunderstimate Bush’s people’s ability to lie and cheat their way to victory. Four years ago, Gore got more votes than Bush and he still lost.

A Very Stupid Question…

I found myself thinking about James Morgan, former economics correspondent for the BBC World Service.

A highly amusing and idiosyncratic individual, he gave me and my wife a large meat cleaver as a wedding present. Knives are supposed to be bad luck as wedding presents, but the marriage and the cleaver are still going strong. Sadly James died a couple of years ago, but rarely does a crushed clove of garlic go by without thinking of him.

He was once preparing for a live interview, and the presenter asked him if he could think of any good questions. James duly fed him one, and when he asked it, live, on air, James said “Well, that’s a particularly naive question, if you don’t mind me saying…”

Damn Small Linux

I’ve been thinking about Cringley booting into Linux off his USB keyring (okay, it’s a watch) and a quick Google brought DSL (Damn Small Linux) to my attention.

I haven’t got my (badly designed) USB keyring bootable yet, but I will, I will. DSL is only 50 megs, and I quickly made a bootable CD, and in no time I had an arthritic old Windows PC playing Pac-man and all manner of timewasting widgets and doo-dads were at my fingers… ahhh!

Canadian discovers just how much TV is enough

The Man They Call Robert X has an exciting column this week (Jon says ‘Exciting? It’s almost a manifesto!’)… all about a very savvy Canadian and what he’s managed to do with a bit of WiFi, some broadband internet access, a satellite dish and a serious Linux server. “…one PDA doing the job of two desktop PCs, a notebook PC, and three telephones.”
I read this and thought “this is the future”.
And then “some big vested interests are going to put a stop to this!”

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Sgt Pepper It Ain’t
In a moment of boredom I stuck an old bit of Windows wallpaper I used to use at work on the OtherMachines front page.
Have a look at here and see how many people you can spot - I don’t expect anyone to guess my wife Catherine, and my sons William and Henry, but there are at least eight other (semi) famous people in there!

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It just occured to me that there’s no link anywhere on my sites to TypeStick - development of which is, er, stalled for now
It’s a little program I wrote for MacOS X and Windows to help you write HTML to put text in web pages, where the characters of the text are made up of individual images.
Hard concept to explain, visit http://www.othermachines.org/typestick for more info and to download it - it’s free!

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Apple’s sucky mouse.
I hate to admit it, but the Microsoft optical USB mouse is much better than Apple’s.
I know I sound ungrateful - my wife rang me from the Washington DC Apple Store to ask me if there was anything I wanted. I really wanted a new battery for my iBook, but they didn’t have any. So she got me an Apple optical mouse and a spare power supply for my iBook - the latter was very welcome (much lighter than the hockey puck which has since died anyway), but the mouse… sucks. Really sucks. I’ve used it once and it’s been in a drawer ever since. It freaks out on the wooden desk I work at - and it’s not polished at all, let alone ‘highly polished’. And I really miss the scroll wheel I have on my Microsoft mouse at work…

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Bad industrial design. Insanely bad industrial design…
Just got a Kingston USB keyring flash drive - very useful, very fashionable. Keep lots of data with you at all times. Cringely can even boot Linux from his and get back up and running if his house in Charleston is destroyed.
Just one snag - instead of putting the keyring on the unit itself, they put the keyring on the cap that goes over the USB plug - so if the cap falls off, instead of just losing the cap… you lose all your data.
Doh!