This ugly little duckling will output a feed of your del.icio.us bookmarks, including those that aren’t shared. As far as I can gather, there’s not a way of get such a feed from del.icio.us itself without logging in first.

This minor update to Clint’s Wallpaper Master has one new feature, ‘crop to fit’ aka pan’n’scan. This came about because my SLR camera produces photographs with a slightly different aspect ratio to my monitor. When I was viewing images fitted to screen, there’d always be a band of empty space above and below the image – kind of like when you view a widescreen film on a non-widescreen screen. The bug which caused the image info window to not display near the notification icon (say, if you had your task bar at the top of the screen) has been fixed too.

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Crop to fit

When enabled, CWM will crop images slightly if doing so will mean the monitor can be completely filled. You can also set a threshold so images that are wildly different from your monitor (like an ultra-wide panorama) aren’t cropped at all – otherwise a large part of the image will be cropped in an effort to make it fill your screen.

Note that CWM will only do this for images that are being displayed with the ‘fitted’ orientation. For best results with displaying digital photos as backgrounds, put CWM on automatic orientation, and turn cropped on.

For an overview of the difference it makes, here’s an image shown using CWM’s fitted mode. This means the image aspect ratio is maintained and it is scaled to fit the screen. Because of the ratio difference with the monitor, bands appear at the top and bottom.

Now, if cropping is turned on, the image will completely fill the desktop, at the expense of losing some of the picture on the left and right. In most cases you’ll never miss it, but it makes your wallpaper look oh-so better:

Another way of filling the screen completely is to use ‘natural size’ mode with images larger than the size of the screen. But this will tend to look bad because you’ll only see the top left hand corner of an image:

So there you have it. Turn on cropping to get images filling the screen, yet still looking great.

Fixed a few little bugs, and added a new feature to CWM – now at version 2.1.

The new feature in this release is the ‘image info box’ which you can bring up by gently caressing the CWM tray icon with your mouse for a little bit. Don’t click, just rub the icon with your cursor. I’ve not seen other apps do this, it’s works well – kind of like you are coaxing the information out of it.

Oh and for tableteers (tablet PC users) there’s a special trick that makes CWM the best wallpaper changer. It’s the ‘match images to screen orientation’ option. This way, when you’re in landscape mode, your landscape aspect ratio images are shown, and when in portrait, the others will be shown. No more nasty image mashing. Perfectly square images will trigger the creation of a blackhole. The feature will of course work for non-tablets, but tableteers are the ones mostly likely to be zipping around different screen orientations.

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A quick little update to Clint’s GPS Logger, now it’s at 1.0.1.

• Can now automatically find the GPS unit so there’s no need to set the COM port initially.
• Configuration settings take effect without requiring a program restart.
• Better serial port performance and status reporting.
• Richer GPX file creation and now validates properly (to version GPX 1.1)

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The program was first and foremost to get data logged on my EMTAC Trine Bluetooth GPS unit as easily as possible, to make it a zero-effort thing. With CGL running in the background, I can now just turn the GPS on within range of my computer, and away it goes, after the balloon appears telling me the data has been downloaded, I can switch the unit off and forget about it.

Features

• Convert logged data points to a GPX format file with no user intervention required
• Store stream of coordinates to a GPX-format file
• Store single current coordinate to a GPX-format file for use by other applications
• C# source is available for modification and improving

How to use it

• Start CGL (I’ve added to the “Startup” start menu group so it runs when I log in).
• Whenever you want your current position to be logged, or for recorded points to be downloaded, turn on your GPS unit.
• By default CGL will download recorded points every 10 hours and on startup. It will log your current position every minute.
• CGL will notify you when it has downloaded points or it has fixed your current location.
• Turn off your GPS unit when ever you want, CGL will find it next time it’s on and within Bluetooth range.
• Data will be stored in the folder that CGL lives. To use a different directory, create a shortcut and set the working directory to somewhere else.

Notes

• CGL will try to find your GPS unit automatically. If this doesn’t work, set the COM port (e.g., COM6) manually in the configuration dialog.
• I have no idea if this will work with GPS units other than the EMTAC Trine unit, that’s all I have.
• Currently you have to turn on data logging using software that came with your GPS unit.

Status screen (usually hidden)

Right-clicking on the tray icon

Configuration

Download
Latest version: 1.0.1 (21.12.06)

• Clint’s GPS Logger (40KB)
• Clint’s GPS Logger and source code (190KB)

Source Code License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.