Whatever you do, don’t panic!
Archive for February, 2006
mail2RSS
Feb 28th
Today I discovered a service called mail2RSS which converts mails you send to a predefined adress to a RSS feed. Quite handy, I have to try if it also handles multiple newsletter subscriptions and splices them to one aggregated feed.
I guess that means I can ditch my attempts to program this particular functionality in PHP, especially since I failed miserably on decoding MIME attachements like for instance pictures. I wanted this because I needed a way to display the really funny nichtlustig.de comics (sorry only in german!) in my feedreader instead of getting them in my eMail box.
What I came up with was a PHP script that reads from a specified mailbox and then constructs a new RSS item with a link to the latest comic but I wasn’t able to get the image to display properly without just focusing on one particular message format.
Well, I’ll try mail2RSS and see if it can do everything I wanted in my app.
FeedMonsun
Feb 28th
PCjacking – actionism in the name of free software
Feb 28th
Manu Cornet, french Ubuntu developer and free software supporter, startet new ways of marketing recently called PCjacking. He wants to point people to different ways of using computers and tell them that there is more on the market than just Microsoft Windows.
He walks into computer stores and throws in Linux Live CDs like Knoppix or Ubuntu booting them up and hoping that the store employees won’t recognize it. He then leaves the computers running on Linux and watches how people approach this new experience.
I think thats a pretty neat idea, which we could all try out and see how it spreads 
In a recent interview with Pressetext Austria he said that he hopes many people will start to PCjack (of course without harming any computer). Manu Cornet added that he wrote an explanation on every CD so that the staff knows that they only need to reboot their computers to reset everything to the state it was before.
For everybody interested, there is even a little HOWTO on Cornet’s page.
» Wanna PCjack yourself?
