Send2Press Newswire is a press release promotion service. They provide RSS feeds of all their news, and currently there are about 90 different feeds available. This plugin allows easy access to those feeds on your WordPress blog. Either as simple headline links or complete with a 5-10 line summary. CSS can be used to tailor the look and feel.

Please note that even though the GPL says you can do more or less whatever you want with this plugin, including jumping up and down on it or feeding it to your hamster, there are restrictions on how you can use Send2Press Newswire content and trademarks. So please read the terms of service carefully, either on the web at Send2Press TOC or the included text file termsofuse.txt, before using this plugin.

For more information, see the plugin documentation.

Questions in the comments please. Note that this is technical support for the plugin. If you need Send2Press support, then hit their feeds support website on Send2Press Feeds. If you’re unsure where to go, just leave a comment here and I’ll try to answer or pass it on to Send2Press.

KNOWN BUG(S)!

Line 719 in the send2press.php has this bit of code: <h3>$title</h4>. That should of course be a h3 ending tag, not a h4.

NEW Edit/Delete of feeds do not work under WordPress 2.7. I’ll release a fix as soon as I can. If you’re adept at editing PHP code, you can try out a temporary fix. Edit send2press.php and replace all references to edit.php with tools.php and see if things go back to normal. Let me know!

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Fast forward to today, and Slimdevices/Logitech just announced their updated version of the concept. Not too imaginatively called the Squeezebox Boom. It’s basically the old style Squeezebox with an amplifier, a pair of speakers and a few buttons that makes it more like a normal radio. This means it streams audio (mp3, wav, you-name-it) from a PC running the excellent Squeezecenter music software or straight from the internet, using wifi or ethernet. The Boom also has Line In, for attaching other music sources like a CD player or an MP3 player of your choice, and a headphone plug that also can be used to attach a sub. It also has a seven-day alarm clock built in, so you can wake to your favourite playlist, internet radio station or just Metallica on repeat. You can even pick something different for each day of the week.

And it plays nice with your existing Squeezebox system if any, including the fancy Squeezebox Duet remote. Although it also comes with its own plain, 10-button, LCD-lacking remote as well.

Apparently, Logitech has gone to great lengths to make sure the sound is as good as it gets from a set of loudspeakers this size. Which is on par with something Bose would want you to put in your kitchen. Cheesy promotional picture included to show you the actual size. Sorry about that, but it was the only image I could find that showed it in relation to anything at all.

Downsides? Well, the minor one is that it needs a power cord to work. Which is perfectly okay if you want to use it in the bedroom, kitchen, workroom or any other place indoors you need a beat but don’t want a full stereo. Any respectable home will have a mains plug nearby. But forget taking it into the yard without an extension cord. Presumably, Slimdevices figured it was very few places you could bring your Boom that had wifi/ethernet but no electricity. And I tend to agree, although it would have been nice to have the option. Not that I have a yard, yet.

Here is a quick graphic showing how Slimdevices would want you to use their new Boom.

So, would I buy one? Well, I already have the Logitech Duet for the living room stereo, an existing stereo mini-system for the kitchen and the radio alarm clocks in the bedroom. And that’s about covers the audio needs we have in the apartment. However, when we move to a house this is definitely one piece of equipment going into one or more of the additional rooms we then get. As I’ve already mentioned in the Logitech Duet review, this instant access to your ripped audio selection is a great way of connecting with your music again. Get the Logitech 930-000054 Squeezebox Boom All-In-One Network Music Player with Integrated Speakers (phew) at Amazon.

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Anyway. In a couple of months I’m off on vacation to Australia for five weeks, and would really like to bring a laptop to be able to check the weather for the next few days, book interesting excursions a few days in advance, check email, upload travel photos to home server etc. My trusty old ThinkPad T41p (best laptop ever) has performed that job for several years, but its days as a holiday computer are numbered. I need a sub-notebook. Any will do, as long as it’s cheap, small, lightweight and has a battery capacity of 4-5 hours at least. Screen, keyboard and looks are secondary objectives.

The new Asus Eee PC 901 seems to fit the bill. $600, size around a couple of DVD cases, 1.1kg and the battery claims to manage 4-8 hours. The screen should have been 1280 wide for todays web pages, but at 1024 it’s not that bad. I can deal with a certain amount of sideways scrolling to read my local newspaper on a beach in OZ.

There are quite a few contenders at this point of course. The MSI Wind (also sold under the Microtel Wind name) had a small 3-cell battery (aka useless) in the first batch, with the 6-cell battery slated for september. Now it appears that the battery shortage never materialized and that MSI is getting the 6-cell to the people a little early. 10 inch screen, spinning hard drive, Eee resolution, 1.3kg with the 6-cell battery and notably bigger though… We’re aaaalmost entering small notebook territory again. Note the Amazon-links are all for the 6-cell versions running XP. Don’t get the 3-cells.

The Acer Aspire One, somewhere between the 901 and the Wind. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC has the resolution advantage, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use those vertical mouse buttons. About the size of the 901 and lots of optional features available for a price.

The big boys are also loading their guns. The Dell 910 (wonder how they came up with that imaginative numbering scheme) looks promising, but the main thing there will be the price point. The Dell volume could take the entry in under $299. We should hopefully see in a couple of days. And Lenovo just rolled out the Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10, another $399 machine with comparable specs. Available in 2-3 weeks according to the Lenovo web site right now, several months earlier than previously thought. With the excellent Lenovo build quality and support, they may have a winner as well.

So, for the ones actually available for purchase right now it’s still the ASUS Eee PC 901 at the moment, but it’s still two months until I really need it so anything can happen.

Note all links are to the Windows versions of the various laptops. I will be getting the Linux version myself, but I expect most of you will opt for the Windows-version. If only to have a valid license to fall back on should you wish to reinstall Windows after having tried a Linux-distro. If you’re serious about getting one of the laptops mentioned by all means use the Amazon-links provided. Would keep me in coffee for a week or two!

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Google aggregates news from over 4500 news sources, updated continously. The results can be retrieved as a number of RSS feeds, where you can create your own specific feed by specifying one of more than 40 regions/languages, and an optional topic ranging from Domestic to Most Popular to Entertainment. Currently there are nine topics, including, of course, All. In addition to this, any feed can be filtered through a search query so that only news items matching your query will be shown. Note that not all combinations of region/language and topic has been enabled by Google but it should degrade gracefully.

This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as both simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.5.

If you’ve configured feeds that use character sets like cyrillic, arabic and you’re getting errors from WP when trying to view the feeds then your WP MySQL database tables may be created with the wrong character set. Let me know and I’ll give you some pointers.

Download Google News plugin

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

Known bugs:

• There is a bug in the WordPress RSS engine, that sometimes show up when people use this widget. If you get something resembling “unknown function debug() in line 504 of wp-includes/rss.php” then that’s one of them. WP is aware of the problem, and apparently a fixed rss.php might be showing up in the next release. As a quick-fix edit wp-includes/rss.php and change line 503 from if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG ) { to if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG > 1 ) {
• When the widget fails with a php error like the one above, the template goes out of whack. I’ve made sure none of those are my fault in the next minor upgrade due out soon. I’m looking at better workarounds for the bug above first, so release might be a short while yet. Don’t want to spam you all with multiple releases like some widget writers…

Example of inline content replacement.

Default feed <–google-news–>, alternating randomly between two feeds:

A different feed <–google-news#non-default–>:

Shortcode test non-default [ google-news name="non-default" ]:

Shortcode test default [ google-news ]:

Shortcodes are only available in WordPress 2.5 and up.

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If that problem sounds familiar, then just buy a Logitech Squeezebox Duet Network Music System. It Just Works and problem solved. If you’re not convinced, see the Logitech Squeezebox Duet-link in the Pages-menu on the right for more information.

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This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as all three simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly. Clicking on a news item will of course take you straight to the relevant article at CNN, as per CNN Terms of Use.

I know there are generic RSS feed widgets out there, but I figured with so many CNN feeds they warranted their own widget with easier configuration than your average generic RSS widget.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.2.

Download CNN News plugin

Known bugs: See the Google News plugin post. These two widgets are virtually identical, so bugs also tend to be the same in both.

Let me know if you find bugs, or if you want additional features or changes. Admin-selectable news item look, extra class/id for CSS etc.

NEW Edit/Delete of feeds do not work under WordPress 2.7. I’ll release a fix as soon as I can. If you’re adept at editing PHP code, you can try out a temporary fix. Edit cnn_news.php and replace all references to edit.php with tools.php and see if things go back to normal. Let me know!

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Installation instructions:
Unzip in wp-content/plugins directory, enable plugin and then use as any other WordPress widget.

Download NASA Image Of The Day plugin

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

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Since I was fiddling with the site anyway, I decided to go for a new theme as well. It required some code changes to work properly, for example a simple thing as showing comments on pages was missing. Easily added. I also fiddled with the look&feel, so it’s not really a clean Prosumer theme anymore. Not enough changes to warrant a rebadge and release though. Not entirely happy about the colour scheme either, so here today gone tomorrow. Leave a comment if you can recommend a great theme that not too many others use.

Found some cool new plugins while updating. Like the Democracy Polls widget on the left, just below the ahem one click is enough Income widget.

Another thing I found out about WordPress in the upgrade process was that there are quite a number of hard coded references to your web site url in the database. Not just the single config entry you’d expect. So if you want to fire up a copy of the site under another name to see how 2.5 worked without destroying your primary site, you need to dump the database, do a search & replace on the dump and then restore to the new location.

The logo image is an umodified photo taken at low shutter speed in a tunnel, just cropped to show the interesting part.

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Mar 18 23:52:25 home kernel: [ 8661.700076] scsi_add_timer: scmd: ffff81004da8a700, time: 7500, (ffffffff88123ed0)
Mar 18 23:52:25 home kernel: [ 8661.700117] scsi_delete_timer: scmd: ffff81004da8a000, rtn: 1

If you too are suffering from this then do the following:

1. First, stop it right now by starting a shell and typing:

sudo sysctl -w dev.scsi.logging_level=0

2. To make sure it doesn’t start up again after a reboot then edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add this line anywhere in the file:

dev.scsi.logging_level = 0

And you should be all set.

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(WW) NVIDIA(0): No valid modes for "1920x1200"; removing.
(WW) NVIDIA(0): No valid modes for "1600x1200"; removing.

To get the X server to tell you exactly why it’s removing those two modes, try starting X with -logverbose 6 as arguments, and it will log something like this instead:

    (II) NVIDIA(0): Validating Mode "1600x1200":
    (II) NVIDIA(0): 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
    (II) NVIDIA(0): For use as DFP backend.
    (II) NVIDIA(0): Mode Source: EDID
    (II) NVIDIA(0): Pixel Clock : 162.00 MHz
    (II) NVIDIA(0): HRes, HSyncStart : 1600, 1664
    (II) NVIDIA(0): HSyncEnd, HTotal : 1856, 2160
    (II) NVIDIA(0): VRes, VSyncStart : 1200, 1201
    (II) NVIDIA(0): VSyncEnd, VTotal : 1204, 1250
    (II) NVIDIA(0): H/V Polarity : +/+
    (WW) NVIDIA(0): Mode is rejected: PixelClock (162.0 MHz) too high for
    (WW) NVIDIA(0): Display Device (Max: 150.0 MHz).

If this used to work for you, and all you did was upgrade Ubuntu (or some other distro), then edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and add the line

Option         "ModeValidation" "NoMaxPClkCheck"

inside either the Screen or the Device group. Restart X and it should start up in a higher mode again. For more interesting options to set, try looking at the NVidia X driver documentation.

Leave a comment if you’re lost and I’ll try to guide you through the tricky parts.

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