I Fell from the Moon

Opera Unite is Opera's way of giving you back control over the web. Instead of saving your files on websites owned by corporations, you can keep your files on your computer and share them with anyone you want. When you keep Opera Unite running on your computer, your computer becomes a website other people can browse. And this website can contain things like a music player, photo album, file explorer or a chat room. You can even create new kinds of services if you're a web developer.

Anyone can browse your Unite site if they have access to a web browser. You only need to keep Opera Unite running. Your friends on My Opera can see if you're running Opera Unite, and you can see which of your friends are running Opera Unite. You can also password protect all your Opera Unite pages, except the fridge. But since after the rush at the launch of Opera Unite, the service has been rather quiet, which brings me to my question.

I somehow haven't seen many of my friends online in Opera Unite this week. Have you gone back to Opera 9.6? Did you disable all your services? Perhaps you never enabled it. Or are you running services, but aren't getting any visitors? Please vote for your answer in the sidebar poll --> . And make a comment about your answer below. Either way, I'd really like to see more of you keeping your Unite services running when you're online.

Unite really deserves a chance, because it really is revolutionary. It gives you back the control over your content, and allows anyone to run a website. If you value freedom from the strings corporations put on the content you share, please install Opera Unite and enable some of your services. It's really easy. Just run Opera, open the Unite panel, and double click the service you want to share.

As opera released the new beta version of version 10, I was finally able to switch back to the standard skin. Let's face it. Neither of the two previous skins were especially beautiful. So I've been using c00 since it was first released.
The new skin looks a lot like c00, but a tad better. And even better, it looks more beautiful with my own custom setup.


My Opera setup. I removed a bunch of buttons I don't need, disabled a few toolbars, and wrote two new menus to replace my menu bar. A page menu and a tools menu like in Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.


The same setup with visual tabs enabled.


And how beautifully it integrates into my desktop.

I'd like to provide an easy way to install my setups, but My Opera disabled setup uploading. So here are the files instead:

compact_menu.ini
compact_toolbar.ini

You'll need to put them in their respective Opera Profile directories. Make sure you save them as *.ini files and not *.txt. You'll find your Opera profile directory by looking at the Opera directory path in opera:about. If you're missing the menu or toolbar directories from your profile, you'll need to create them.

Once you've placed the files in the correct directories enable them from Tools --> Preferences... --> Advanced --> Toolbars --> Compact menus / Compact toolbars --> OK.
Both the menu and toolbar require each other.

The wallpaper is the official Opera 10 Beta wallpaper.

Opera introduced a build with support for face gestures today. It uses your web cam to scan your face. Opera automatically does the action defined for the face gesture you're making.

Like most features in Opera, the new face gestures are easy to configure. Through Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> Face gestures, you can use the new easy to use interface to record new face gestures.

Like search engines, you can also install custom face gestures. Just right click the image and select Create Face gesture... Here are some of my custom face gestures.

Hmm. Which website did I browse yesterday? Now Opera enables the history with this custom face gesture.


Ahrg! I'm fed up with these popups. Opera senses my frustration and disables all popups for me.


Hmm. How do I use all these buttons? And where's the print button? Opera offers to help automatically.


Ahrg! My eyes! I knew I shouldn't have searched Google Images to find out what "Goatse" is. Now Opera disables images to protect my sensitive eyes.


I hate websites that play a sound automatically when you enter. So Opera disables sound for me.


When I'm wearing glasses, Opera automatically assumes I'm a geek and enables the developer tools if I look for them at the bottom of the screen.


Which website should I visit? I have no idea. Well, Opera does and Stumbles using the StumbleUpon.com tools.

After a long period of absence of trustable ways to use StumbleUpon in Opera the My Opera Stumbleupon Team have finally made an alternative that works in Opera.



Simply visit their site for instructions for how to install it.

Or maybe you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about. Social bookmarking is the action of sharing links to websites to others through a web service. Examples include Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us.

So am I a social bookmarking addict? Maybe. It might say something about me that I use more than one service. As my main service, I use spurl.net. Spurl.net is the most complete online bookmarking service I've seen. It completely replaces any locally running bookmarking system. With instant bookmark search, categories and tags. But there's a catch. Importing your bookmarks might not work. And it's currently in a limited feature set. It seems like it's abandoned by the creators. Because of that I'm using Simpy as a backup bookmarking system if Spurl ever dies.

While Spurl definitely does have some social bookmarking features for sharing, I find friend based systems to be more enjoyable when sharing links. Therefore I'm using Digg and StumbleUpon. Digg.com is a site for sharing links to technology news, and related things that geeks like me enjoy, such as videos. But since Digg.com is mostly technology related, I'm using more mainstream social bookmarking services such as StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon was originally a social bookmarking community based around a Firefox extension. But later they added a Internet Explorer add-on and several people are working on various tools for other browsers such as Opera. There are already bookmarklets available, widgets (including one from a team I've been working with). There are even some Opera add-ons that I don't trust.

Facebook is another alternative if you want to share links with your friends. Facebook is a very popular online community where you can find your friends and socialize with them. Facebook allows you to share links to videos and sites with your friends.

Well. With all these services, it might be hard to keep track of all the ways you can bookmark sites. But people have been trying to do something with the problem. One of these sites are AddThis.com. Sadly, they've done overkill by using extensions instead of more simple browser modifications. But fear not. I bring you the AddThis social bookmarking button for Opera. Just drag it to your toolbar of choice to start sharing links with your friends.

Add This!

For those of you that are using another browser, you can't add this button to any of your toolbars. But that doesn't mean you can't use AddThis. Their JavaScript based site buttons aren't only useful on sites. They work as bookmarklets too. Simply visit AddThis.com and drag The button that says Bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar.

Good luck and have fun playing with social bookmarking!