Roundtuit

Soon there will come a day when using a cable to connect slot A in device X to slot B in device Y is a thing of the past. Until then, we’ll have tangle, and seek out spools and retractors for our compuelectronic stringy things.

For my laptop power cable, I have a Targus spool:

Works great. You stick any cable in the slot, spin, and the cable is held in a nice neat spool

For my USB Ipaq sync cable, I have a Zip-Linq:

the great thing about these do-hickeys is that they have a self-retracting, ratcheted spool. You pull-to-desired-length, then when you are done, you pull-and-release for retraction. Great, but you have to buy them with the cable already hard-welded in. And, of course, that’s no good for cables that are themselves welded to a wall wart.

Why can’t you get something that does both? A retractable spool that can take whatever cord you want. You could buy them for different cable widths and lengths.

Contributed by Rob Smith

I love National Public Radio, but I live in the UK. No worries, you can listen to almost all of the NPR programming online. And you can find out what items you’d like to listen to via the copious NPR RSS feeds. Brilliant!

But I really like to listen to these items on my PDA, free and easy. Unfortunately, the items are available as streaming media.

So, I did some research, and figured out how to download the media files that backup these streams. You can find it on my main blog “Truth Like The Dark”.

But what’s really needed is a GreaseMonkey script that does this whole process. In case you haven’t heard, GreaseMonkey is an amazing scripting language that allows you to modify how Firefox displays web pages. This is really deep stuff, allowing you to effectively reconfigure the operation of pages, even drawing data sources that aren’t on that page. For instance, the AmazonLinky GreaseMonkey script adds a pretty tab to all Amazon pages, so that you can get a pull-down with other bookseller’s prices, and libraries that might have your book. GreaseMonkey will change lots of web business models.

But it could also help to make any RealMedia streaming link have an associated “download” link. It’d be relatively easy to write, but I’ll never have enough time to get roundtuit.

Contributed by Rob Smith