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…

Squeezebox Gadget for Windows

I finished work on this a few months ago and I wanted to try it myself for a while before publishing to the world. It seems perfectly stable and does everything I need, so it’s ready for release! Here are a few screenshots of it running.

Feature summary:

• Standard controls; Play, Pause, Stop, Skip track forward/back
• Volume
• Skip to any point in the track (click on the time progress bar)
• Switch player on/off
• Play a random mix
• Show details of the current playlist
• Show large album artwork and further details on the playing track (pop-out side window)
• Search directly from the gadget
• Change shuffle & repeat modes
• Tweet what is playing directly to Twitter
• Look-up track on Last.fm
• Support for password secured Squeeze Servers
• And more…

Requirements

You need to be running Windows Vista or Windows 7 in order to use this gadget. You will also need a Logitech Squeezebox of some description, and also be running a Squeezebox Server (aka. Squeezecenter) on your network. I have tested this with versions 7.3 and 7.4 of the server software.

Download

Squeezebox Gadget – v1.2.1

Change Log

V1.2.1 – 30th Jan 2010 – Bug fix for server port being set to 9000 on every gadget start

V1.2.0 – 30th Jan 2010 – New optional mini mode, makes the gadget much smaller & take up less screen

V1.1.0 – 22nd Jan 2010 – Added options for secured Squeeze Server (username & password)

V1.0.0 – 21th Jan 2010 – Initial release

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!

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

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

Features

• Weather for any city in the world
• Show the forecast 3 days in the future
• User selectable colour
• User selectable transparency/opacity
• Configurable update interval
• Notification of weather condition changes via the Google Desktop alert

Support

Nothing at this stage

License

This software is released under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License

Change Log

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.

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

Features

• Lists all your tasks (including completed tasks) can also shows flagged emails
• Mark tasks as complete
• Add and delete tasks (including multiple delete)
• Set the priority (High/Low)
• Double click the task to open it in Outlook
• Scroll bars if the number of items exceeds the height of the gadget
• Sorting options, choose the order the tasks are displayed
• User selectable task folder, filter tasks
• Show addition details for each task or todo, such as Category or Due Date
• Delay connecting to Outlook, until user clicks button. Prevents Outlook loading at startup along with Google Desktop which can thrash your system

Support

Note. There is an existing Outlook Tasks gadget however it doesn’t work and it hangs your Desktop meaning you have to reinstall the whole of Google Desktop, so please don’t confuse it with my gadget and I suggest you avoid it!

Change Log

Download – Net Meter Dial Edition – v1.8

Features

• Realtime view of your data upload & download speeds
• Auto adjust to the maximum speed your connection is capable of
• Supports kilobits and kilobytes (Kbps and KB/s)
• Keeps track of the total download and upload volumes

Support

Note: This requires Google Desktop to be installed, and it will only work on Windows XP or later as it uses some newer WMI classes to get the information. Gadget has been tested on XP & Vista.
Note. v1.8 supports Linux, this has been kindly added by Xavion, I’ve not personally tested this version

If you are running XP or Vista and you still see an error about “Win32_PerfFormattedData_Tcpip_NetworkInterface” when starting the gadget then please run the following command “wmiadap /f” and remove & re-add the gadget.

Change Log

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

Features

• Create, rename & delete note pages
• All notes are stored as text files (behind the scenes)
• Change the background note colour
• Change the font size and font face
• Secret feature; press the F12 key to cycle through the pages

Support

This requires Google Desktop to be installed, and it will only work on Windows systems.

Change Log

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!).

• Download it here – GameDB_App.zip. Once downloaded, unzip and place the gamedb folder in your Apache document root (normally htdocs). Note it doesn’t have to be called gamedb
• The application was written using CakePHP 1.2 (beta). I’m not including this in my download for licensing reasons, but it can be obtained from here http://www.cakephp.org/ Both PHP & MySQL are pre-reqs to using Cake, I used the following versions:
  • Apache 2.2
  • MySQL 5.0.x
  • PHP 5.2.x
• Download & unzip CakePHP, take the cake sub-folder from the main Cake distro and place the contents into the gamedb cake folder (gamedb\cake)
• The app uses some PHP libraries that might not be available by default, these are:
  • GD (see your PHP docs for enabling GD)
  • PEAR HTTP_Client
• MySQL database, create an empty database then use the included SQL script (create_db.sql) to create the tables in it. Edit gamedb\app\config\database.php to point at this DB (host, port, username, password, etc.)
• The system comes with one admin user by default, only this user can add/delete/edit games. Everyone else (anonymous users) can view the system. The username and password of this user is ‘admin’ (no quotes). To change the password create a MD5 hash string of the new password using http://gtools.org/tool/md5-hash-generator/ and replace the value in the users table. I was too lazy to write a proper use admin system seeing as I’d be the only user!
• Using the system should be fairly self explanatory, however special note should be made of the “Wikipedia” button. When adding or editing a game, clicking this button will do a “behind the scenes” AJAX lookup on Wikipedia for the game name, if a match is found the article is scraped for the cover image and the blurb (meta-data), cool eh?
• Images are fetched and stored in the DB, so you enter the URL of the image you want as the game cover, this image URL is fetched only once (assuming the URL is not changed) when the game is saved. This prevents any hot-linking and stealing peoples bandwidth.

Good luck!

Download Key Faker Utility Thingy 1.0 – keyfaker.zip