This long-pending update to my Google Calendar Dashboard Widget is now finally ready!

Changes in Version 2.0

1. There were some problems handling time-zones in version 1.0 for some users. These issues have been (hopefully!) fixed in version 2.0.
2. A highly-requested feature was to be able to look-ahead several days into the future, not just today and tomorrow’s events. Version 2.0 lets you preview up to one week ahead of today.
3. The top part of the widget now features a button that takes you to Google Calendar in a browser. Trivial, yet highly useful, feature.

Download this free update if you’re using version 1.0. And keep the comments flowing in!

Related posts: Announcing the Google Calendar Dashboard Widget.

In the tradition of writing gadgets for Google Desktop and other Google properties, here’s one more from me: the Google Calendar Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard.

Since my switch to the Mac, I’ve been missing Google Desktop and using Dashboard more and more. And a calendar’s a nice thing to keep an eye on from time to time. So, without much further ado, here’s the gadget, oops, widget!

I clearly have too much time on my hands. Or so it would seem by looking at what I’ve been doing the last hour. I just got a new phone yesterday. And I was curious as to what it might spell. So I wrote up a script to show all the names your phone number could spell and picked a choice few for myself. I would post my most interesting findings here, but I already get way too many phone calls to post my new number on the Wild, Wild Web.

A new version of Google Desktop released today. (For those who came in late, I worked on Google Desktop last year, and have been writing plugins for it for some time now.) When Google Calendar released, I wrote a plugin for it too.

Since my plugin was licensed under an open-source license, Google added features to it and included it in the official download. What’s more, I even get credited in the source code. Go, Google! — kudos to the nice people in the Desktop/Calendar teams.

Well, what’s to stop someone from picking up your PowerBook or MacBook Pro and running away? Macs aren’t really secure now, are they? ;-)

Given that I’ll soon be moving cross-country to work at Google, I felt a little insecure about my laptop: the many ways in which it could be stolen. I’m not the kind who would use one of those chain-locks at all times, so I devised a software solution.

I wrote up a combination of two scripts, a shell script to run on your laptop, and a script to put on a web server somewhere else. The idea is that the laptop will keep informing the server about itself, and a stolen laptop may thus be recovered. It reports back the obvious stuff such as network names, what ISP it’s connecting to, and a traceroute to Google (so you can look it up backwards to see where it went.) It also sends back screenshots of the current user — so you can see what the thief has been upto! Perhaps you could catch a glimpse of an email account, an IM window, a website — something that can help you track down the thief.

Go check it out, it’s in my list of projects as Laptop Theft Protector. As usual, free as in beer, free as in freedom. In this case, it’s also free as in puppy (meaning you will have to spend some time with it.) And, as I’ve come to believe, the best things in life run only on a Mac. Don’t try this on Windows. Or Linux.