Day: January 19, 2009

BTProx – Use Your Bluetooth-Enabled Phone to Automatically Lock Your Windows PC

BTProx is an open source application for Windows that will automatically lock your Windows Desktop if your bluetooth-enabled cellphone is no longer nearby,

It locks on one of your Bluetooth devices which are paired to the the machine. When you walk away from the computer the device is disconnected and the computer is locked after timeout. It is possible to run a single application together with the lock. This application may be your favorite script dismounting network drives, erasing those dirty files from the desktop or anything else. The program sits in Windows tray showing its current status with tray icon and tooltip baloons.

That is an awesome idea. Hopefully someone will come up with something like this for OSX and Linux as well.

Update: BlueProximity for Linux accomplishes the same thing in Linux.

Apple C&D’s Wired — But People Who Talk About Radical Transparency . . .

John Brownlee over at Gadgets.BoingBoing.net (about the only BB property worth reading these days) has a basic overview of Apple sending a cease-and-desist to Wired Gadget Lab over a piece there showing how to install OS X on an MSI Wind. Yeah, newsflash — Apple sucks. They’re just Microsoft with a much smaller market share.

However, this part of Brownlee’s post had me snorting diet Coke through my nose,

Ars Technica’s Clint Ecker then asks if Chen (and other Conde Nast writers) are allowed to discuss it publicly, or cover it as news.

Chen’s Twitter response (since deleted):

Probably. We’re supposed to favor radical transparency here, right?

It certainly doesn’t look like it. The video to the guide in question has already been pulled and replaced with a random stream of CES 2009 videos. The YouTube mirror has been pulled as well.

Okay, if I were writing about Boing! Boing! the last thing I’d want to bring up is other sites’ lack of transparency given the whole Violet Blue episode and the more recent efforts by the ongoing efforts of Boing! Boing! comment moderators like Teresa Nielsen Hayden to insult and disemvowel anyone who dares show up with a different point of view.

AdServe Plugin for WordPress

WordPressAdServe is a WordPress plugin that (surprise!) acts as an ad server for your WordPress install,

You could setup your banner campaigns using different sized banners, set available impressions and count resulting clicks! Optionally AdServe links ads to blog users so that one could check the campaign results within the Dashboard!