My friend up in Seattle just had a great idea as I was complaining about all the comment spam I was deleting from my blog that MT-Blacklist didn’t catch…why don’t we use a CAPTCHA challenge for commentors?
Archive for the ‘Idea’ Category
CAPTCHA for Moveable Type
Posted in Idea, Technology on September 5, 2004| 3 Comments »
Drag’n’drop PDF Creation
Posted in Idea, Technology on May 18, 2004| 4 Comments »
A useful tool for OSX would be a simple little app which you could drag a file on to (Word, Powerpoint, Graffle), and it would automatically print that file to a PDF. Since PDF creation and viewing capabilities are very well supported in OSX natively, I really don’t want to spend the $99 or so for Adobe’s Acrobat Standard (which is usually much slower and buggier than Apple’s implementation).
I searched Google for an scripts or apps to do this and mostly found things that could merge multiple PDFs or automatically convert only Postscript files. Anyone have any pointers?
Heated Keyboard
Posted in Idea, Technology on January 21, 2004| 8 Comments »
So I’ve been getting up too damn early lately and working the late night shift in the cold dark. Unfortunately my office isn’t directly heated, so it gets a little cold. I can bundle up most of my body just fine, but my hands get pretty damn cold (shocking surprise for Alexis when I do get back in bed).
Someone should make a heated keyboard, and maybe a warm mouse. Something that would radiate a little warmth to keep the digits pink would be really useful. I guess I could just work directly on my PowerBook, as it vents heat directly through the keyboard, plus that would have the benefit of warming my lap at the same time!
SSO for “Personal Portals”
Posted in Idea, Technology on May 15, 2003| Leave a Comment »
Now that I’ve got Gallery and Moveable Type installed for personal publication, as well as SquirrelMail for email, I’m really wishing for some type of Single Sign-On solution for these excellent tools. And not just for me, here’s why.
For every picture or article that I put online there are at least two or three that are locked behind password-protected doors meant only for viewing by friends, family, or just me. While web publication is great and I hope that some of the ideas and pointers I put up here are of intrest to the general public (and I’ve had a suprising number of people link to my photos), I don’t want my entire life open for everyone to see. Additionally, I’d like to allow access to a much larger portion of these items to people I actually know; but who wants to remember another password, and who wants to have to explain logging in to 5 different systems to your Grandma?
That’s why we need to work on some type of centralized SSO system and integrate it into each of these great web tools so that, for example, my sister can log on with one username/password and get access to all the family pictures and specific information (plus log in to her email which I host here as well).
pubcookie might be a good start. It would be sweet if there was some centralized registry for this information though.
(Note that I’ve turned comments back on, so hit me with them!)
Rand Wacker 