If you're a del.icio.us power user and you use Windows Mobile, you've probably missed the del.icio.us plugin that's available in desktop browsers like IE and Firefox. Dale Lane took this problem as a challenge and coded a nice little Pocket IE plugin that adds a del.icio.us submittal form to the browser's menu.

This is not as trivial as I expected - it took hundreds and hundreds of lines of code just to get a new entry in the Internet Explorer's menu that gets me access to the web browser object as an IWebBrowser2. And (perhaps especially so for someone who has been getting a little lazy with Java and C#! ), some of it is a little intricate and complex.

Still, once done I could use my access to the browser to launch my "post to del.icio.us" form and prefill it with the URL and page name of PIE's current page. From there, the form uses the public del.icio.us API to send all the info off to my del.icio.us list.

It's written in C++ and he's zipped up the full Visual Studio project. Based on the difficulty and lack of great documentation for doing something like this, this is actually a pretty solid find. If you want to make a PIE plugin, this would be a good place to start.

A del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile (or C++ is a pain)
Pocket IE del.icio.us plugin and source

With reCAPTCHA, the user is given two words, one known by the system and one from a book that previously failed character recognition. When the user enters both words, the sytem verifies the known word, proving human-ness, and submits the second word to a central database, which helps digitze books from the Internet Archive. With 60 million CAPTCHAs being solved every day, this could be a huge assist for portions of text that can't be handled by optical character regognition techniques. [via] Link

Related:
Negative CAPTCHA

There's a new "Listen" link in the O'Reilly Network weblogs. It speaks the contents of an article, and sounds pretty nice. Dave Battino went on a search for some rhythmic posts, and made a fun remix out of it:

O'Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the "listen" link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher's recent blog about the Game Developers Conference

Rod McFarland's Wordpress Themes -Link.
Download the CLI Theme -Link.
Download the Commodore Theme -Link.

Bre @ Makezine writes:

Some people are obsessed with twitter these days. We're not endorsing it, but if you're a twitterer and you want to stay up to date with the makezine blog, the craftzine blog, and the hackszine blog, then you can follow them on twitter and get updates about posts while mobile or on im. Whenever a new post goes up, it'll get twittered with the title of the article and the url of the post.

Unless you have unlimited text messages, you'll want to set it up with im or the internet. Twitter can generate a lot of text messages if you set up that option in the settings.

Big thanks to Kosso, rss wizard, who helped put this together.

Makezine on Twitter - Link
Craftzine on Twitter - Link
Hackszine on Twitter - Link

Smart Home Hacks author Gordon Meyer has been experimenting with using Twitter for automated notifications and has hacked it to monitor his home. Check out how he gets a Twitter alert to let him know someone's at his front door.

Related:

• Smart Home Hacks

Over at the SmileOnMyMac Blog, Gordon Meyer (author of Smart Home Hacks) offers a great tip for speeding up tedious blogging tasks with TextExpander (Mac only):

Here's a great tip for bloggers and the like. I use TextExpander to create a handy macro for creating Amazon Affiliate links. It's much easier than using Amazon's web interface.

Related:

• Merlin Mann's TextExpander video tutorial for MacBreak

Via the Hacks Authors' Blogs feed, we find Jim Bumgardner's Pipes Picayune & Daily Tube mashup news ticker:

Headlines from a BBC RSS feed are fed, via Y! Pipes, to my news ticker, which is implemented in Flash. Click on the spinning newspaper to read the story in full on the original website. This widget can work with any RSS feed, but I'm using the BBC because they tend to write short pithy headlines which fit my faux newspapers better.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jim points out that he's now added an easy-to-use form for generating custom RSS tickers. Check out this feed of Hackszine:

Powered by Yahoo! Pipes

Related:

• Yahoo! Hacks
• Mix and Match the Web with Yahoo! Pipes
• Make Family Feeds as Yahoo! Pipe

Ed note: In this guest post, veteran Hacks series author Paul Bausch takes on a challenge that's been on my todo list for a while, providing a solution that should be of immediate interest to all readers of this site and just might serve as a seed for future hacking around here.

I have a shelf full of O'Reilly Hacks books across a wide range of subjects. I contributed a couple in the Web Applications category, but I also have Hacks books about digital photography, hardware, scripting languages, gaming, and operating systems. The series has introduced me to a number of authors who are doing unusual things with technology in their particular area of expertise. I thought it would be interesting to follow each of these authors outside of the Hacks series by subscribing to their blogs, collectively. I figured it would be a good way to keep up with areas of technology that I'm not necessarily tuned into. I have a collection of blogs that I read to keep up with what's happening in Web Applications, but I don't have a sense of what's going on with gaming, for example.

So I went on a mission to gather the Hacks authors' blogs using the tools I know best: Web Applications. I started with an Amazon power query for books by O'Reilly with "Hacks" in the title via the Amazon API, and ended up with a list of 80 authors' full names. I plugged each name into Google by hand, adding the word "blog" (or if that didn't turn anything up, "hacks"). Then I visited the blog to make sure it was the Hacks author I was looking for, clicked the orange feed button in the Firefox address field to get the feed URL, and copied the URL to a text file. I ended up with a list of 40 feeds. (A 50% blogging rate among an arbitrary group isn't too shabby.)

I plugged the feeds into Google Reader, and renamed each feed the author's full name. Here's what the final list looks like (click for larger view):

Here's the list of feeds as OPML if you'd like to try it: Hacks Authors.

I've only been tuning into this list for a few days, but I'm already getting to know these authors in a new way. And I was right—I am finding out about developments in tech areas I don't normally tune into. I especially found Brian K. Jones's recent post about Fighting Specialization appropriate, something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Related:

• Google Hacks, 3E
• Amazon Hacks

Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you're interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.

Twingly Screensaver Beta - [via] Link.

To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue. The Firefox extension lets you download all the files with a certain extension from the current page, so it's a good way to download all the images from the previous listing.

Related:

• Automate Your Backups

IMified and Stikkit seem to have heard my request. You can now post to Stikkit via IM.

Inspired by our post about personalizing your Flickr replies, the ever-resourceful and reader-focused Gina Trapani just whipped up her own code to add similar functionality to Lifehacker comments. Her Lifehacker Reply with Commenter Name Greasemonkey script adds a "[reply by name]" link to each comment on Lifehacker.com and inserts the commenter's name (prepended with an @ in v 0.2) into your response when you click that link.

Taking it one step further (thanks to the GNU Public License assigned to Gina's original code), Lifehacker reader Ali Karbassi modified the script to include links to the actual comment boxes you're replying to.

Nice work all around. It adds a nice personal touch to the comments thread, and it's great to see community improvements to the site's innovation. I know it makes my reader experience more enjoyable, both functionally and emotionally.

Links to Lifehacker Greasemonkey Scripts:

• Lifehacker post about the script
• Gina's Lifehacker Reply with Commenter Name
• Ali Karbassi's modified script

Thanks to Lifehacker for tipping us off to IMified:

an instant messenger buddy that works accross all major IM networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified helps you get things done faster.

I can confirm that it works seamlessly and easily with WordPress (though I couldn't get it to work with Blogger). Setup was easy and I composed and posted this test message in just a minute or so entirely through iChat:

This is kind of a meta hack, since it's one I use for every post to this blog, but it also serves as a quick and easy way to resize images for a number of other purposes.

Like many blogs, this one has a posting width of 500 pixels, which we try to fill with an image of that exact width whenever possible. But I don't want to go through the hassle of opening an image-editing program to crop every picture I post to those precise dimensions. The easiest way I've found is to use Flickr to resize my images for me.

Take, for example, the source for the image at the beginning of this post: Figure 1-22 in Flickr Hacks. Taken from Hack #4: "Resize Photos for Flickr," it shows how to reduce the size of an original image before uploading to Flickr (to keep your monthly download allotment down, something that is less necessary now that Flickr increased their upload limits for free users). Since I have a Pro account, upload limits don't really pertain to me, so this figure lives at its original dimensions in my Flickr photostream.

Once uploaded, though, Flickr offers a number of options for downloading that same image. Just click the "All Sizes" button over the picture to reveal the screen shown in the screenshot at the top of this post:

The "Medium size" width of any original (Landscape orientation) image over 500 pixels wide will be exactly 500 pixels. Just download the image, or use the handy HTML Flickr provides to embed directly in your post:

The other standard sizes Flickr makes available are also handy. "Square" is always a nice 75X75 square (useful for avatars and such), "Thumbnail" is always 100 pixels for its longest dimension (useful for, er, thumbnails), "Small" is 240 at its widest/tallest, and "Large" (when available--note that the "Original" size for the image in this post is smaller than Flickr's "Large" size) is always 1024 pixels at most.

Related:

• Flickr Hacks