Status-Q

Very good news this afternoon from DisplayLink!

They have released a nice, simple, Open Source library for driving their USB Display devices. It’s available under the LGPL, which means you can link against it in a variety of ways.

The hope is that this will allow a large range of USB host devices – phones, embedded systems, netbooks, routers – to drive large displays, without the need for a conventional graphics chip.

We started DisplayLink with its roots firmly in the Open Source world, and it’s great to see the company contributing back to the community.

The library and documentation can be found at displaylink.org, and the press release is here.

Congrats to all involved!

A very quick tip today…

Everyone uses cut, copy and paste – we’ve all become so used to the clipboard metaphor that it’s pretty automatic. Most clipboard systems have a big limitation, though – they only store one thing at a time.

If you’re like me, you’re often in the middle of moving chunks of text around in web pages, or copying URLs into email messages, and then get interrupted by an IM message asking for someone’s phone number. You copy & paste the number from your address book and then want to go back to where you were before… but you’ve overwritten the contents of your clipboard.

This is why you need a ‘clipboard history’ utility. If you use one, this will all be obvious to you, but if not, go and get one now. Tools like Quicksilver and Launchbar (my favourite) have them built-in, or you can use a simpler standalone utility like JumpCut or Clyppan – they can all basically do the same thing in this regard: they give you one more keystroke to learn as an alternative to ‘paste’, which, rather than simply pasting the last thing you copied, gives you a menu of the last few things and lets you select one. Some will paste it directly for you, others will put it in the clipboard so you can paste it yourself.

You may want to hunt around for a utility that feels right for you. I like speed and simplicity, and with Launchbar I can just pop up the list, cursor-down a couple of times and then hit return to paste in that big chunk of text I was working on before I was so rudely interrupted. It’s very slick. Launchbar costs money (but does a great deal more for you as well).

It may take a while for the clipboard history idea to become instinctive, but once it has, you won’t want to be without it. Besides, you’ve been doing cut and paste for a long time now. Isn’t it time you graduated to the next level?

Just heard a delightful programme on BBC Radio 4: When Real Women Wore Minis and Real Men Drove Them, about the making of The Italian Job, forty years ago.

Catch it while it’s on iPlayer… even hearing the clips from the soundtrack can’t fail to make me smile…

My friend Andrew Rauh pointed me at this: a coffee machine on Twitter. It doesn’t even look at the coffee – it concentrates instead on the text displayed on the control panel’s LEDs.

Quite fun, though.

…then avian ‘flu might become swine ‘flu.

Update: And when I made that observation, I hadn’t seen a Twitter post by my friend Aaron about ‘swine flew’… which is even better.

Blackwell’s in London have installed their first Espresso Book Machine. From the Guardian article:

It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Which does make me wonder whether, before long, we won’t have coffee shops in bookstores. We’ll have bookstores in coffee shops…