ICQ has a feature to show your online status on a web page. You need to enable it in the "Security and Privacy" settings as indicated on ICQ's support page.
Once you include http://status.icq.com/online.gif?icq=<ICQ-ID>&img=5 in a web page you can show your online status like this: 
(Online) and 
(Offline).
Now the page that used to show all the icons available (img=<number> parameter in the URL) 404's (with a very nice 404-cow). Try at http://www.icq.com/features/web/indicator.html whether ICQ fixed their pages.
A friendly
seq 1 30 | xargs -n 1 -I _num_ wget -O Online_num_.gif "http://status.icq.com/online.gif?icq=197344872&img=_num_"
helped to get the Online (and similarly the Offline) icons in the mean time.
Looking at them I find these icons provide a nice glimpse into web design history.
ICQ was founded 1996 and has seen a lot of changes between being sold to AOL 1998 and on to mail.ru in 2010. Aah, the '90s ... animated gifs anyone?
As you probably risk eye-cancer looking at them too long, the full glory of the available ICQ icons delegated to the full article view...
Continue reading "ICQ web status icons"
I found a very nice script to create Notes on the iPhone from the command line by hossman over at Perlmonks.
For some weird reason Perlmonks does not allow me to reply with amendments even after I created an account. I can "preview" a reply at Perlmonks but after "create" I get "Permission Denied". Duh. vroom, if you want screenshots, contact me on IRC 
.
As I wrote everything up for the Perlmonks reply anyways, I'll post it here instead.
Against hossman's version 32 from 2011-02-22 I changed the following:
- removed .pl from filename and documentation
- added --list to list existing notes
- added --hosteurope for Hosteurope mail account preferences and with it a sample how to add username and password into the script for unattended use
- made the "Notes" folder the default (so -f Notes becomes obsolete)
- added some UTF-8 conversions to make Umlauts work better (this is a mess in perl, see Jeremy Zawodny's writeup and Ivan Kurmanov's blog entry for some further solutions). Please try combinations of utf8::encode and ::decode, binmode utf8 for STDIN and/or STDOUT and the other hints from these linked blog entries in your local setup to get Umlauts and other non-7bit ASCII characters working. Be patient. There's more than one way to do it .
I /msg'd hossman the URL of this blog entry.
Continue reading "Creating iPhone/iPod/iPad notes from the shell"
