A great thing about the Windows key is that no application other than Windows creates shortcuts involving this key. So you can bind most combination like Win+B (and Win+T for Thunderbird) to custom actions, provided you have a Free Software tool doing that for you like AutoHotkey. Making it open Firefox the way I want (with focus in the location bar) is tricker than it should be though. This part in my config seems to work well:

#b::
{
    SetTitleMatchMode, 2
    IfWinExist, Firefox, ,Thunderbird,
    {
        WinActivate
        Send {Ctrl down}{l}{Ctrl up}
    }
    else
    {
        Run Firefox
        Loop, 20
        {
            IfWinExist, Firefox, ,Thunderbird,
            {
                WinActivate
                Send {Ctrl down}{l}{Ctrl up}
                return
            }
            Sleep, 100
        }
    }
    return
}

The Thunderbird in there is to workaround an occasional confusion with the Thunderbird window. No idea why it's happening.

I wanted to hide a few controls from the Songbird GUI and found out it's possible already, through an extension called Pane Buttons. This is how my Songbird now looks like:

These are the plugins influencing what you see above:

• ChangeFilters (from Genre-Artist-Album to Artist-Album-Title)
• iTunes (the skin/"feathers")
• Last.fm (red icon down right)
• Pane Buttons (hiding service pane and player controls)

The recent release of Songbird 1.0.0 adds a great player to the set of cross-platform Free Software audio players. It's not my personal 1.0 yet but for now it pushes Rhythmbox back to the substitutes bench.

Official screenshot from the Songbird front page I like about Songbird:

• Free Software
• Cross-platform
• Library-oriented browsing
• File system-based browsing (through a plugin)
• Last.fm tracking (through a plugin)
• Not ugly

I still miss:

• CDDA playback
• XSPF support
• Visualization plugins
• DSP effect plugins
• Official-tree Gentoo ebuilds

Original post by Thom Holwerda.

Today I learned that some people think the LaTeX environment eqnarray should be avoided. Check out Avoid eqnarray (PDF) by Lars Madsen for details.

• Full and incremental backups
• Secure upload to another machine
• Strong encryption
• Compression
• Packages for Gentoo and Debian
• Packages for Windows or Cygwin
• Simple automation

Does anybody know a tool that has all that? Please post here or write to sebastian@pipping.org .

I stumbled upon three recent 2008 albums that are 9.89€ each on Amazon.de:

• Dido: Safe Trip Home
• Nickelback: Dark Horse
• Pink: Funhouse

Is there a trend for CDs getting cheaper? Are these albums expected to sell badly and were therefore made cheaper than usual?

EDIT 2008-11-26 All three went up to 14.95€ now. What the fork? None of these were marked as special offers.

Let's see how Defensio is performing. The amount of "obvious" spam slipping through Akismet just reached the no-longer-bearable mark.

Actually quite easy. Found it on Texblog.

This release offers a wild mix of things. Mainly it makes uriparser build on Cygwin (packager wanted!), fixes a small bug with parsing reported by Sezai Tekin, and adds Qt Compressed Help (.qch) output for viewing the API documentation in Qt Assistant. This release is both source- and binary- compatible.

• Download
• Changelog