Ever tried to browse on a phone with a touch screen and felt the urge to use a pencil sharpener on you finger to be able to click links? Or wanted to throw your phone out the window when you realized that you yet again managed to click the wrong link despite carefully aiming with that one nail that is a millimeter longer than the others? Opera has now introduced a feature called Opera
Fingertouch that will take all your frustrations away.

In short, it grows links that you tap close to if there are multiple links nearby. You can then easily tap the link you wanted to open. It also makes form controls bigger and easier to interact with. So to sum up more user friendly browsing on touch devices.

But I might be a little biased so see for yourself :). If you have an UIQ phone you will find a beta version available for download. For the ones without a UIQ device there is a YouTube video you can take a look at.

And here I was thinking the Finns were the most evil people on earth when it comes to letting you enjoy your precious hours of sleep.

That was until I came accross an article about "HappyWakeUp®" which is a mobile phone application that monitors your sleep cycles and rings the alarm when the user is naturally ready to wake up.

Pity I don't have a S60 phone any longer because I am dying to try this!

Lets try to warm up my blogging skills with a little bit of bitching...

Have you ever heard anyone mention something called top posting vs. bottom posting? Chances are rather high that your answer is «No». That is if you live in the real world...

Did you know there is a whole little world of super geeks out there that have religious rules about what is right and wrong when it comes to how you should reply to e-mails? Did you realize that you might have made someone see red and shout at his computer screen that you are stupid because you replied to their e-mail in the "wrong" way?

I am pretty sure that when you reply to an e-mail, that you simply hit reply and type your response at the top. And that if you get a long e-mail and there is no text in black at the top that you might wonder if people accidentally hit the send button before they had written their response. You might maybe start a long, half-hearted, annoying scroll to the bottom...

The main e-mail fundamentalist commandment is: Thou shalt not post your response at the top of the e-mail but rather in between old content and at the bottom.

Just like any other "good" religious fundamentalist, the e-mail fundamentalist will try to force feed their views on you. They will first start out by making hidden condescending remarks on how stupid and ignorant you are. When that isn't understood they will tell you right out that you are pissing them off by being ignorant about e-mail manners. A normal person might at first simply lift their shoulders and respond "but it is so much simpler to just respond at the top and then I don't need to scroll". This is when the e-mail fundamentalist will give you an example that explains to you that you cannot easily read the old e-mails in order. The normal person will give them a blank look and respond "why would I want to read the old stuff again?" The e-mail fundamentalist will start explaining how much mail he gets and how many mailing lists he subscribes to and how much easier it is to read his e-mails this way. Half way through this long explanation the normal person will start rolling their eyes and thinking "what a dork, he needs to get a life!"

I know some of you e-mail fundamentalists. This might come off as being a bit harsh and rude, but I am getting a bit tired of your tyranny. Just like with any other religion I will try to be respectful and do as you wish until it becomes forced. When I see you again and again harassing other people in an impolite, arrogant manner I see no reason in respecting your wishes because you quite obviously do not respect other people's preferences. What you are demanding in the first place is a special preference that isn't particularly user friendly. Just like some other non user friendly things religion has demanded of people in the past ;)

I decided to just do it! Update my site to the latest drupal version. Been thinking about it for over a year but always postphoning because it meant work and making a new theme. I realized it would never happen unless I just did it. What it means is that the site will look like shit for a while and might not work. Hopefully, I will be a bit more energetic fixing my site then I have been with blogging lately:-).

Isn't it a bad sign that you don't use your own products that you are trying to sell to others?



Go to Arcsoft's site for their PhotoStudio Darkroom photo editing software with Opera, right click on the images and go to "Image properties". Hmmmmm... what software did they use to edit those images?

Mediumgeek is going extra geek soon. Mediumgeek is flying to Finland attending her first demoparty this week! Assembly '06 to be more specific.



For the ones of you that don't know what a demoparty is, it is gathering of people that come and produce non-interactive audio-visual presentations, which are run real-time on a computer. Sounds a little complicated doesn't it? To put it simpler, it is a party where people do cool stuff with graphics on their computers. In addition, they play games, chat and generally just have fun.


Opera is sponsoring the event and will be setting up a stand there where you can try some of our products, ask questions, and be recruited by us. Opera is also organizing the Widget competition and sponsoring the Browser Compo.



While I am slightly worried that I will feel a bit out of place (that my geek genes don't quite measure up), I am just happy to try something new, travel to Finland, and I really hope I will get the chance of having a beer with my friend Daniel! If there is anyone else there that I know please give me a shout or come and visit our stand at the party!



The group of people going has started a Assembly blog on my.opera.com and I will probably be blogging from there during the event.

This maybe exceeds my medium geekiness a little bit but good news has to be shared:-).



Opera on Series 60 is the first mobile browser to pass the Acid2 test! This is a version still in its early stages but this is definitely promising.

Now isn't this a friendly face?



For my readers that aren't heavily involved in browser technology, the Acid2 test is a test suite used to test how well browser follow web standards. In other words, a certain quality measure.

Few of you have complained that many of my older blog entries are full of obsene spam comments. I just wanted to apologize and state that I am working on getting rid of those.

From now on, comment on older blog entries will be readonly and eventually I will have managed to delete all of the spam (just takes time because I don't want to delete proper comments by accident). Then I should be able to keep up with deleting spam and not miss out on proper comments like I have been doing. If that doesn't work to keep those spam bastards in line I will try to think of something smart...

Sorry again!

I have an obsession about holding onto stuff. In short I hate throwing things away! I have gotten better with the years but occasionally I hold onto things that make no sense. Now it has finally paid off!



I guess it must have been in the year 2000 I got a CueCat while shopping for something at RadioShack. A CueCat is a cat shaped bar code scanner made by a company called DigitalConvergence Corporation, which no longer exists. Its intention was to have users scan bar codes of products and bar codes in catalogs and lead the users to a web page about the product. It also had some tracking which could give you targetet ads based on which products you had been scanning. Wikipedia has some more information about the CueCat.

The CueCat




I never actually tried the CueCat while the servers were up since I thought the idea was a bit silly. I however decided to hold onto it if it ever become worth anything (I guess I realized right away that this was going to be one of those failure projects). I doubt that it ever will be worth anything since there are numerous CueCats out in the wild but yesterday I did find a purpose for it.



I recently purchased an excellent book cataloging software called Book Collector. They have now added a scanner support but their own scanner is ridiculously expensive (approx 100 Euros). So I dug up some drivers, hooked my CueCat up, and believe it or not it was working.



The woman in me has to admit that it would be almost as fast to simply type in the ISBN numbers and search for the books that way. The mediumgeek in me, however, cannot help finding this extremely cool! The best of course is that now I have a proof that holding onto weird stuff can sometimes be worth it:-).



If you happen to have a CueCat lying around and want to catalog your books with Book Collector then download the drivers here. These work on Windows XP for me (and said to work on Windows 2000 and ME).