Stew’s Spot

I’ve been looking for a YOURLS url shortener plugin that is compatible with Twitter Tools for a while now. There was one “yourls plugin for twitter tools 2.0” but it’s been unmaintained since August 27th, 2009.

I finally bit the bullet and wrote my own. The plugin is based on Twitter Tools – Bit.ly URLs code and has been tested with WordPress Version 3.0.1.  It’s still pretty Beta, for example I don’t check if the Service URL and Signature token is correct or even entered.  But it works for me.

Installation

Copy the contents of the archive into the wp-content/plugins/ folder then activate the plugin on the “Plugins page”.

Configure

Once the plugin has been Activated, you can configure it via the Twitter Tools settings page. You’ll need to enter the full API url (including the yourls-api.php). You can find your Signature token on the tools page of your YOURLS installation.

Download

Here is a packaged version of the plugin yourls-tools.tar (27 August 2010)

I bought a Lego Mindstorms kit last month to mess with, I’ve got some ideas for robot localisation that I want to try out. Anyway, the kit comes with a sonar range finder but I wanted a little more accuracy and smaller detection area. I’ve got a bunch of Sharp rangefinders from another project and they would work perfectly for what I wanted. A couple of companies sell after market sensors for the NXT, Mindsensors and HiTechnic but it’s much more fun to design and build your own.

For a little background on how the Sharp sensors work, Acroname Robotics has a good article on them.

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I’ve been using Globat as my hosting provider for a couple of years now.  The problem that forced me to change was that you don’t get ssh or root access to your webserver. This means that you are stuck with what ever languages and features you hosting provider installs.  I wanted to run a git repository and ruby stuff, so I was out of luck.

I’ve moved all my hosting to Rackspace Cloud servers.  This gives me a virtual Linux box that I can do what I like with.  At the moment I’m running on the smallest VM (256MB RAM and 10GB HDD).

So if you notice anything funny, ie missing images or links that don’t point to the right page.  Just drop a comment so I can fix it.

I’ve been looking for some video editing software for Linux, it was not a big need so I never really spent much time looking and testing.

On Sunday I wanted to edit a shot clip and kdenlive was recommended to me by a friend. So I gave it a try.  All I can say is WOW what a pleasure to use.  It’s fast,  easy to use and seems extremely powerful.

So if you need to edit video on Linux (or Mac), I can highly recommend kdenlive