A few weeks ago we (me & Konst & Teknik) finally released the long taking new version of CopyPasteCharacter.com — a website to help people find and copy symbols and characters that are not very easily accessible from the keyboard.

The main new thing, featurewise, is that we included many more characters than the previous version had. More characters has been the top #1 feature request the past three years the site has been online. To make the site easy to use with all new characters, we have divided everything into different sets/collections such as “Numerals”, “Symbols” and “Graphic shapes”.
We also made it possible to create your own set with characters and some smaller things like sharing sets and decide what set that should be the start set on CopyPasteCharacter.com.

www.copypastecharacter.com

This project started as an idea to see how a “real world” filter for photos (like the popular Histamatic and Instagram apps) would work, except our filter is actually real and not digitally applied.

When I joined the project, Ruben Broman and Erik Wåhlström were more or less already done connecting all the hardware and had the screen working as a regular external screen connected to his old laptop. The same night I hacked together a funny looking Ruby script that fetched images from a ftp server, downloaded them and showed them in fullscren on the old CRT display while a Canon 7D took the photo. We managed to get it up and running the same night and even had time to throw together a quick iPhone application that uploads the photos to the ftp server. This early version of the project used the Ruby script, Image Capture (built into OS X) and QuickTime 7 to display the photo in fullscreen on the little display. The day after I added a Tumblr uploader so the photos get published on the blog.

This worked but was very instable so all code was rewritten within the first week it was up and running, mostly for stability but also seperated into different smaller scripts to they could run asyncronysly. We replaced QuickTime with a Quartz Composer project that allowed images to be displayed in fullscreen while not beeing the forground application, and replaced Image Capture with the command line tool GPhoto. Everything was still controlled by Ruby scripts but, as written above, seperated into three smaller classes/files so they could work in parallel, with a main deamon file using Forever The ftp server was replaced with a smarter REST based server to handle the uploading, downloading and archiving of the images.

The iPhone app was also rewritten from scratch to be cleaner and smarter. As of today, about 30 people have the beta (distributed using awesome Testflight).

Except for some smaller tweaks, the current version of the project has been up and running for about a month without restart nor crash so I would say it’s pretty stable now. We haven’t really decided exactly what to do with the project right now. We might release the app to the public and keep it going for as long as it’s possible, or just see InstaCRT as a fun hack.

SNMBL is a manifestation against the constant increasing prices in public transportation in Stockholm. The first event took place on September, 18 at Slussen, Stockholm.

Daniel Eskils, together with a bunch of other people documented everything and made a movie from the event (here with English subtitles):

Peter and I did the website for the project and the manifestation. To make it easier to find out where the buses were all the time, I built an iPhone app that tracked the current location of the iPhone and sent it to the server. Then a map on the web page reads the latest reported location and show the bus’s location on the map with all the stops.

Read more about the project on www.medborgarbussen.se — mostly in Swedish though.

The TwitterFax is a small project done together with Konst & Teknik. It will watch a given Twitter username for mentions and then print it, together with any twitpics or yimg images attached to it.

The code is pretty simple and uses the Twitter gem for communicating with Twitter and Prawn to genereate the PDF’s. I’ve set it up to run every 15 minute using a Cron job.

Check out the full source code. You’ll need to change what typeface to use or get LucidFaxEFRom.ttf from somewhere else.

So go ahead and mention @konst_teknik to try it out!

We’ve been working on a new service on and off for a few months, called Linkli.st. The service was first launched in May but the last week we added some new (and awesome!) features so you should check it out.

Linklist is based around the very simple concept of creating, sharing and browse lists with links. It can be used for basically everything but I’ve found it very useful for things like:

• Ask for and find travel tips
• As an inbox for dumping links, videos etc I don’t want to deal with right now
• Reading lists

We’re adding new features and working on it all the time so be sure to follow our Twitter feed (@linkli_st) for updates.

Everything you need to know is in the README on GitHub so if you’re interested in this, check it out.

Pluxemburg.com is the website for Swedish technotronica band Pluxus and the record label Pluxemburg they run together with Jonas Sevenius and us (Martin Str�m and Peter Str�m).

Pluxemburg has since its launch in 2000 gone from a small independent label with only one artist “Pluxus” to bigger with several artists (and grammy awards!) and then back to again being a quite small label. The 2009 version of Pluxemburg focuses mainly on Pluxus and Pluxus related projects.

A small record label needs to not only work on the websites of their artists and the label itself, but also constantly make sure that the info on the many online forums and communities are up to date and accurate. There needs to be Facebook and Myspace pages, last.fm events, discogs.com entries and so on. Updating these websites as soon as something happens (gigs, releases, parties, videos, etc) is time consuming and unfortunatley often ends up in a copy paste manner (spamming) rather than using the different forums for their different purposes.

When thinking about these conditions in connection to building a new Pluxemburg website, we realized that instead of constantly keeping the Pluxemburg and Pluxus websites updated, we should make a website that mirrors the contents of each community and instead spend our time keeping these communities updated. The information for each part of the new Pluxemburg.com is therefor spread out on the community where it “belongs”� the best. The discography is mirrored from Discogs, the events from Last.fm, videos from YouTube, information from Wikipedia, links from Delicious and sounds from SoundCloud. We use the popular tumblelog Tumblr for the newsfeed, adding not only a tool for keeping our website updated but a small community in itself too. All colors used on Pluxemburg.com are based on the “corporate”� colors of each community, making also the design a mirror of each community. There is even a Twitter-feed that mirrors everything that goes on on Pluxemburg.com, somehow making the site into a complete loop.

Technically, every day a pretty straight-forward Ruby script will automatically run on our server to update the information from all sources and then sends it (together with a security token to make sure the data isn’t messed with) to a PHP script at pluxemburg.com. The PHP script then processes (cleans and validates) the data and stores it in a file as serialized PHP, which is used by the index page to present the information.

www.pluxemburg.com

The character you click will automatically get copied into your clipboard, thanks to the flash technique mentioned here. However, I wrote my own JavaScript class to handle the clipboard and the buffer of clicked characters since you can hold down ‹alt› to copy multiple characters at once.

Here’s the source for the copy buffer class in case anyone’s interested.

There are a couple of input fields on the options page; one for each “length” of the spectrum (for it to start over again). I.e., if you want a div element with the id “header” to get its background colorized from Colhour and its Colhour cycle starting over every day (after 24 hours), you just enter the CSS rules in the “day” input field. The actual color-value should be replaced with `%colhour%´ so the plugin can insert the current color in its place. 

I suggest not having any other CSS rules in the Colhour admin than the ones dealing with the colors you want replaced. I.e., strip out the fonts, border sizes etc and keep all that in your .css file where they belong (and can be cached).

Bad:

#myDiv {
    font: 1.1em Courier; 
    padding: 2em;
    background: #DDD url(my-background.png) no-repeat top left;
    border: 2px dotted %colhour%;
}

Good: 

#myDiv {border-color: %colhour%;}

Download here, put it in your wp-themes/plugins/colhour.php (note the .php extension) folder and activate it as usual in WordPress admin » Plugins. The options can be found under Options » Colhour.

Finally this site looks like something other than the default WordPress theme. Peter and I wanted to connect our work sites to each other and decided to use his simple but easy-to-use WordPress theme as a base.

The problem was that his theme never was cross browser compatible and worked more or less only in Safari. My first task was to re-code the theme from scratch to make it work in all modern browsers using valid XHTML and CSS with as clean and simple code as possible.

I also set all font sizes using em:s (instead of px or pt) to make the text resizable. It wasn’t too hard making it work (even in Microsoft Internet Explorer) thanks to some great resources. Sooner or later I’ll convert the positions, margins etc to em:s as well, but font sizes should be enough for now.

I also added AJAX comments and used effects from script.aculo.us. I’m using Prototype to add CSS classes to some elements and to wrap i.e. all <h3>‘s content in a <span> to achieve the look I wanted without any unnecessary markup. Since <input type="search" /> only is supported by Safari and I wanted to use it, I used a script (thanks Wolfgang Bartelme) that replaces the regular text input field with a search field for Safari only. This way the document will stay valid XHTML 1.1.

Next task was to make the theme more personal for my site. I’ve tried some different looks but couldn’t really decide how I wanted it and choose (for now at least) a slightly darker version of Peter’s theme. I think it looks good and is easy to use without making too much noise.

When I implanted the tagging I first looked at Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 but it seemed too advanced for my needs, so I decided to use the native category system in WordPress 2.0, that lets one add tags (categories) by just entering them in separated by comma in a text field (WP 1.x didn’t have this feature). The tag cloud is a modified and simplified version of Tag Cloud Plugin.

Download