Monthly Archives: July 2011

Firefox like keyword search in Chrome

Posted by on July 5, 2011 No comments

Recently I changed to Googles Chrome browser (to be exact, it’s the open source variant Chromium). Chrom/(e/ium) simply uses less resources, you will notice this when you have a lot of tabs open as I usually do 🙂

Right away I missed my configured keywords for Firefox keyword search. Chrome has that feature too. Here’s how you can add your custom search keywords in Chrome:

  1. Browse to the website you want to search with a keyword (for example http://en.wikipedia.org/)
  2. By clicking with the right mouse button in the URL bar you get a context menu
  3. Click on Edit Search Engines
  4. You get a three column table. Chrome detects the search parameter itself (alternatively you can add the usual “%s”)
  5. In the second column you can set your keyword (e.g. “we” for [w]ikipedia [e]nglish)
Now you can type “we Test” and you will land on the Wikipedia page about “Test”.

Building my own LightScythe

Posted by on July 3, 2011 No comments
Pacman made with LightScythe

Pacman made with LightScythe

Last week I got a link from a friend of mine linking to the LightScythe project of Gavin Smith. I was immediately sold of it. I experimented already with long time exposure photography and additional, man-made, light, but I connected with some electronic hardware makes it even more fun. 🙂

By using a full programmable 2 meter LED stripe one can write something into the air while the camera is take the photography (the sensor is exposed). The LED stripe changes its pixel according to a predefined scheme while walking. The sensor get this very bright LED light which ends in showing it bright on the photography. This way you can write something frozen in air which looks very unreal, but not faked in any way! Read more »