Things that made me happy this morning:

• There is a new cafe in my street:
• Font Squirrel has a repository of free fonts to embed via @font-face
• Apptember is a one-month hackathon, no rules, no business model, no prices – just build some good stuff
• Man builds house from Lego – now this is dedication.
• Some very impressive photorealistic Star Wars Illustrations
• Blockchalk has an API now and I am impressed with the ease of approach to keep it totally open
• Both jQTouch and Pretty Mobile are frameworks to make mobile web development easier
• Baseline is a typographical CSS framework
• The Time API is a very clever semantic API that understands natural language to turn it into timestamps
• Browser for the better is a Microsoft campaign that provides food for homeless people when you upgrade to IE8. Seems a bit stretched, but hey upgrade is good!
• Charity Hack is a hackday by Paypal an Justgiving on 19-20th of September in London
• Top Trumps 3D is an interesting concept of Top Trumps with 2D barcodes that turn into augmented reality games.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The source code of the moon landing control programs has been released as open source. Now get soldering and build the hardware in Arduino. I also checked the code and could not find a fake call!
• MapQuest released their driving directions web service
• AnythingZoomer is a jQuery script that provides you with a little lens to zoom parts of the screen. Nothing new, but potentially useful.
• Open a banana like a monkey is one of those videos that makes you go “why did I do it wrong my whole life?”
• Apparently rounded corners are all the rage in remedy packages – Apple has a lot to answer for, but I like it.
• Moddims is an Apache module that uses ImageMagick to convert pictures on the fly. Great for a thumbnail API.
• Make magazine has a cool EeePC hardware notifier hack that embeds an LED into the casing which flashes in different colours depending on you getting an IM, an email or a Tweet.
• IBM has a long and detailed article on using jQuery with JSON-P
• Opera’s Hallvord shows us the most expensive line of JavaScript ever

Sometimes you come across web services that are so amazingly useful, you wonder why nobody has done it before. One of those is Is my computer on? sent to me this morning by Tomas Caspers.

While the usefulness of the service is indisputable the lack of RSS feed or API is actually annoying (let’s not discuss the HTML quality of the site, I am sure this is because of performance reasons as it is the case with other big players). Likeminded web dwellers like Dion Almaer bemoaned the same fact which is why I’ve taken matters into my own hand and used YQL to turn this service into a JSON API:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fismycomputeron.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D’%2F%2Fcenter%2Ffont%2Ftext()’&format=json&callback=isiton

This version wraps the resulting data (in my case “yes”) in a JSON object and calls the isiton() method. You can try it out for yourself.

If you want to change this simply rename isiton at the end of the url to your function name of choice. If you use alert() as the function name you could even turn this into a useful bookmarklet.

Of course you should never forget to support the library followers if you have a system like that and Mattias Hising came quickly to the rescue and built the system as a jQuery plugin.