It’s been a while since I’ve published or updated any of my Google Gadgets. But I have been sort of busy…

I’ve turned to the darkside!

What this means in slightly less dramatic terms is; I’ve stopped using Google Desktop and Google Gadgets and I’m using the built-in gadget system in Windows 7 (and Vista) called “Windows Sidebar Gadgets” or just Windows Gadgets. There are various (boring) reasons for this, but the upshot is I won’t be able to use all my lovely Google gadgets that I developed! It’s slightly heartbreaking to leave all that hard work behind, but I’m looking at this positively as an opportunity to re-write & improve them

The first one I couldn’t live without was my Squeezebox gadget. I listen to all my music at home via a couple of Logitech Squeezebox players, subsequently  I used my gadget for controlling all my music. Well it turns out that developing a gadget for the Windows Sidebar isn’t all that different from a Google Gadgets. Both are Javascript based using a sub-set of HTML for display, this meant I could re-use a fair bit of my code, and this is the result…

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I’ve knocked up a command for Ubiquity to integrate with Blippr

To install & use it, visit this page you should see a notification at the top of your browser, click the Accept button and follow the process to install it.

You will need Ubiquity installed for it to work, dhur.

Enjoy!

I wanted to show my Amazon wishlist on my blog, actually I have a custom ‘wishlist’ on Amazon, listing what I’m currently playing – it was that I really wanted to show.

So I thought Amazon will provide that as an RSS feed and I’ll embed it in, no problems. No. They don’t, no idea why this obvious and useful feature is not provided! Grrrrr

To cut a long story short I found nothing out there that would do this (and worked for the Amazon UK site) so I knocked up a quick WordPress plugin to do it. You can see it in use on my site.

Features:

• Show small/medium/large images for the items in your wishlist
• Links through to Amazon
• Include your Affiliate ID (If you have one)#
• Supports all Amazon locales (US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Japan)

Usage:

• Install as you would any other standard WordPress Plugin
• Go to: Design -> Widgets and add the widget to your sidebar
• Set the options as required, note the List ID is a required field

How to Find your Amazon wishlist ID:

• Logon to Amazon and click the “Gifts & Wishlists” link near the top
• Click Wishlist
• In the “Your Wishlists” section on the right click the relevant wishlist
• The ID will be in the URL of the page, e.g. /gp/registry/wishlist/2GMNFC0FKPU37/ref=cm_wl_rlist_go

Download – WordPress Amazon Wishlist Plugin v1.0

A new Google gadget! It’s been a while but I got the urge to put a new gadget togther.

So it’s a weather gadget, oh yawn! don’t we have a tonne of those already? Isn’t the official Google gadget for weather good enough? Well yes and no. I’ve been using the official Google weather gadget for ages but I’ve recently found that it no longer works with locations in the UK! So here’s my take on a weather gadget – it’s using the Google weather API (which is used on the iGoogle personalised site). To use it you simply enter your location as a city in the options – e.g. “London, UK” or “Cupertino”.

The weather icons come for a set on deviant art by JyriK I’m using them under the Creative Commons license

Download – New Weather Google Desktop Gadget v1.1.1

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I’ve been unhappy with the old Picasa WordPress widget for some time. I didn’t write it, I merely fixed some of the bugs. One of it’s failings (in my opinion) was that cached all the photos locally on your server, which required you to mess about with directory permissions and resulted in a copy of all the pictures sitting on your server.

I’ve come up with a new version, this fetches the photos dynamically from Picasa and has a few other new features. I use this widget myself on my blog, over on the left you can see it in action (Random Pics)

Feature Summary:

• Specify a list of albums to display photos from, no messing with RSS feeds, just enter the album names
• Choose your photos from your most recently uploaded
• Choose the thumbnail size
• Chose how many pictures to display

Download – WordPress Widget Plugin for Picasa Photos 1.0

If you are installing this plugin and you are not familiar with the process, please refer to the instructions over at WordPress.org. Also this plugin is designed to show photos from your Picsasa web albums, not the photos you have locally on your PC.

Another gadget for the Google Desktop, this one brings your Outlook tasks onto your desktop. You can interact with your tasks, add new ones and mark finished tasks as complete.

NOTE. Google are planning on removing the mechanism used by this gadget to communicate to Outlook. This means this gadget is no longer supported or updated by me. And in a future release of Google Desktop this gadget will stop working all together. Nothing I can do about this guys.

Download – Outlook Tasks Google Desktop Gadget v3.5.1 (more…)

This is a new Google Gadget. Bit of a cheeky one, as this is a clone of my Net Meter gadget, but with a different way of presenting the information. The gadget shows a pair of dials to indicate the upload and download speeds, and has a kinds shiny Vista Aero look to it. I could have made this a part of the my original Net Meter gadget as an alternative display mode or something, but in the end decided to make it a separate gadget.

Download – Net Meter Dial Edition – v1.8
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Yes another Google Gadget, a nice and simple one this time.

It’s a notepad/sticky note/post-it/jotter gadget, yes there are already several of these available but this one is different. It allows you to store several pages of notes all in one place. You simply pick the page you want to edit from the drop-down combo list.

Download – Multi Note v1.0
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I’ve been busy writing an application and database to store my collection of video games in. It’s finally at a stage where I consider it “complete”. I’ve put my application and my collection of games online here:

http://dev.bencoleman.co.uk/gamedb/

I wrote this for my own personal use, but figured that somebody else might want to make use of it, so I’m releasing it to the world. Note this is not for the non-techie and you’ll need to know a fair bit about PHP, MySQL and so forth to get it running. I’m providing this “as-is” with no support or help (other than the info below) and the code is covered by GPL. If you want to use this I’d be interested so please let me know (out of curiosity really!).
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I needed a little utility to stop the Windows screensaver from starting, I was working on some machines where the security policy had set the screensaver to kick-in after 5 minutes and it was password protected, and there was no way to change these settings (also due to the stupid security policy). So I wrote a little VBS script to simulate or fake key presses at set intervals; by default it presses the Shift key every 3 minutes. Just doubleclick the VBS file to start it, or if you want to see what it’s doing then run the CMD batch file. Optionally invoke it manually with CScript and you can change the interval and key to be pressed.

Download Key Faker Utility Thingy 1.0 – keyfaker.zip