Trim the fat from Gmail

minimal gmail

Google's Gmail is a highly viable option for email. With numerous features and options like widgets, a task list, labels, and chat, Gmail has a slight tendency to get overwhelming and might force us to loose focus on what it is really all about: email. What can make Gmail better? For starters, how about no ads; they are cluttering and distracting. What about getting rid of the widgets and … [Read more...]

WiFi theremin

The fine folks at Midnight Research Labs have put together a new toy for you to play with. It's a Python script that makes your WiFi hardware behave more like a theremin. Based on the pyaudio library it monitors the signal strength of the AP you're connected to and changes the tone accordingly. There's a sample embedded above (direct link). If you have a second interface, you can use it to … [Read more...]

25C3: Solar-powering your gear

solar

The 25th Chaos Communication Congress is underway in Berlin. One of the first talks we dropped in on was [script]'s Solar-powering your Geek Gear. While there are quite a few portable solar products on the market, we haven't seen much in the way of real world experience until now. … [Read more...]

Removing fisheye distortion

fisheye

Reader [alex] had a commercial plugin for fisheye lens correction and wondered exactly what kind of magic was behind it. Was it actually doing line detection? He dropped in a square grid to see what it spit out. The warped result indicated that the transformation was completely independent of the photo's content. Using this result as a guide he was able to create a similar transform using Warp and … [Read more...]

Python 3000 officially released

python3k

Python 3000 has officially been released. The final bug, Issue2306, "Update What's new in 3.0" has been closed. Python 3000, py3k, Python 3.0, is a major release for the community. [Jeremy Hylton] pegs the earliest mention of the beast to January 2000. The new release has grown from PEP 3000, opened April 2006. Py3k breaks backwards compatibility with previous releases in order to reduce … [Read more...]

Data manipulation with Sprog

Linux Journal's [Mike Diehl] pointed out an interesting tool for manipulating data: Sprog. Sprog lets you assemble machines to complete specific data processing tasks. You snap together gears that read input data, process the data in different ways, and then output the results. The input could be a file, URL, database query results, or even MIDI notes. For processing you could be matching … [Read more...]