Morton Fox's journal

No new geocaches in my neighborhood yet this week, so I revisited The Rhodo Ranger and The Swirly Girly Cache on my way to the Park Ridge post office. Already found them, so I can't sign in again, but I swapped geocoins and travel bugs. Having geocaches too conveniently nearby may not be a good thing. :)

I discovered today that I'm in the top users for the last 60 days at Postcrossing. Apparently, sending just 30 postcards in the last two months is enough to be on the leaderboard! Last year, I was thinking about quitting Postcrossing because of the postal rate hike but 15 postcards per month isn't so bad.

Wrote my first Pidgin plugin last night. The backstory is I was using Pidgin to update Twitter with status messages showing what I was doing. There were certain things such as "catching up with livejournal" that I would do daily, sometimes multiple times daily, so I would copy the status IM to the clipboard and repeat it later using the clipboard manager Ditto. I was lazy so I started wondering if I could write software to automate the copying of sent status IMs to the clipboard. Which, if you think about it, is a silly way to be lazy. Wouldn't most people who wanted to be lazy just accomplish that by forgetting about the whole thing? :)

To be specific, I was wondering if I could write a plugin to extend Pidgin's functionality to copy IMs to the clipboard. Now, I didn't know anything about Pidgin's plugin interface (nor did I know much about GTK, for that matter), but a few web searches later, I had enough documentation and code samples to hack a simple piece of code and this is it. The whole thing is essentially a wrapper for 3 lines of code that do the actual work of copying the message to the clipboard.