Hi,

After reading Josh Quittner's "Warming to the Kindle" (Time Europe, 2008-08-18 issue) I found out that I really wanted a Kindle. I consume a whole lot of books, so it seamed perfect for me.

Unfortunately Amazon does not offer the digital reader nor the service outside the US. This is a problem for me as I live in the Kindleless Kingdom of Norway. I just wanted to let you're managers know that there is strong interest for the device also outside the US.

Please do not disappoint us, and start spreading some Kindle love.

Looking back at this blog’s archive, you see the same. The desire to publish and grab more eyeballs have been much greater than the will to publish something valuable.

I have, however, moved away from this model lately. I am not republishing other websites—except for my own article who were recently published at SitePoint—nor have I rewritten too many press releases. (There have been a few PR-releases, I must admit.) What has this change meant for the number of readers?

Well, they have actually plummeted. I thought they would do so as I am unable to produce the amount of garbage I used to do.

A conclusion? … I will probably stop blogging for good. At least on this subject. I will probably keep the domain; and use the website as a scratch book were I can share ideas, codes, and such. But this will happen in a self-produced publishing tool. (See! I will have codes to share.) When The Way-Back Machine has finished crawling trough all the blog posts, I will kill the blog.

I do, as always, love your feedback.

Today’s web publishing technology has come a long way from its US ASCII origins—these days, the typographic punctuation enjoyed for over four centuries by its venerable print publishing cousin is fully supported for use in our web documents.

Beautiful typography does require some additional configuration on the server side and a bit more attention by the document author—but in this article, I hope to convince you that it’s time well spent. Rich punctuation is a tool that, when used properly, will make your web site’s text come alive!

…and it continues for two whole pages. Hehe. (Digg it!)

–
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Anyone using Opera M2 will recognise this default footer. Studying these emails' headers revels that the User-Agent: [is indeed] Opera Mail/9.50. The address formatting is, however, revealing that the messages are probably not sent using Opera.

Update

Opera's press release has a whole lot more details.

• c:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper
• C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\Sample

It is not much, but since many never uses the default desktop backgrounds; it is nonsense keeping them on the machine.

I am quite angry with WordPress right now.

I have a little project going on–more on that later–and that is forcing me to use the terminal. Only the terminal. So without my usual graphical user interface I was forced to improvise and learned how to use Lynx. As it turns out, text-only based web browsing is actually super!

I have even been writing messages on social web sites, replying to emails in Runbox's web email interface, and reading the news from NRK Nyheter.

Lynx is great. It goes so much faster without having to load JavaScripts, CSS, images, and other extra media. It is just the plain-text HTML or XML-parsed XHTML that is loaded. The result is a very fast and easy to navigate interface.

In my experience it has actually been easier to navigate most web sites using the Lynx-variant interface instead of the web sites own designs. As long as the page is done properly, it works like a charm.

I would recommend anyone to try text-only web browsing for a few hours. It is a whole new experience. Especially web arcitects and -designers should hive it a go. Get some new impulses, ideas, and grasp how good the web actually can be!

The only thing that has bee very disapointing is gay porn in ANSCII.

aMSN lets Linux users communicate with associates on Microsoft instant messaging networks. In this article, we’ll show you how to Reach out to your friends in the empire.

From WINDOW TALK by Mirko Albrecht for Linux Magazine.

It would at least be more fun than the Debian repository’s current package description:

A very nice MSN compatible messenger application, aMSN Messenger is a multiplatform MSN messenger clone. Works pretty much like its Windows based counterpart. Perfect for keeping in touch with those friends who have not yet seen the light.

Reaching out to friends in “the empire” is exactly what you are doing with aMSN. But would it be copyright infringement to use Mirko’s phrase? I am sure he would not mind, but what about his publisher?

This is a tip that will let you turn on a feature of Opera—the web browser—that will warn you every time you send data from a web form unencrypted. It will help rise awareness of just how much data you make available every day.

Turn on the warn insecure form feature. (Link works from within Opera only.) It will enable a dialogbox with a warning every time a form is attempted to be submitted over a non-encrypted connection. It will also let you cancel the transmission if you may change your mind about saying it across a non-encrypted connection.

I use this feature every day. It is just a small annoyance that reminds me that “the web is not private”. I live in Norway, so it is a good probability that at least some of my data gets routed trough over neighbours the Swedes.

# dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/ {print $2}' | xargs dpkg --purge

I cannot remember where I got this command. I am sorry about not giving any credit.

This has been something I have been wondering about for a while. When a system ages there will nessesarily be left quite a few configuration files when old packages are removed. This simple command cleans out old packages for good.

The “debhelper” package is required.

Anyone a little smarter than me should never run that command. You better make sure it will never run by removing it from your system: # rm /usr/bin/cleanlinks.

Thanks for nothing $ apropos clean!

Add the below lines to /etc/apt/sources.list. You may replace “stable” with any other Debian release.

# The Opera web browser (non-free), provided by Opera Software ASA
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free

Then update your repository as usual with # aptitude update (or # apt-get update), and install the Opera web browser with # aptitude install opera. Enjoy an always up-to-date web browser!

The biggest news for me was the availability of a stable 64 bit version for GNU/Linux. (Also available in the repository.)