I have recently discovered the Mac OS X application GeekTool where one can use a html file as your wallpaper. However that isnt the most interesting thing, what I find interesting about it is that it keeps the html file alive even allowing http requests. I wanted to create that using Node.js and some other web technology that allows to run a browser on the desktop with full access to nodejs' APIs.
So I wondered if there is any way to create an alive browser in the background (as a wallpaper), which is interactive (e.g. I can press buttons and type in inputs). If so, where can read about that?
I prefer either one of the packages mentioned above, but others are accepted as well. What I need it to do is just being under the desktop-icons but as well over the default wallpaper, so it can be interactive.
Thanks 😀
Related
If I link a phone number with HTML like this:
123456789
The Browser gives me a response if I want to start an application, in my case Skype.
Now my question, is it possible to create a selfmade window and tell something like download and install Skype if none suitable application like Skype to use that functionality is installed.
That's not possible. Which program is used to open a resource is solely at the discretion of the user's browser/computer. There is (and should be) no way to interfere with that. It would cause terrible security problems if a webpage had the ability to direct a browser towards a certain program or register if a specific program is installed.
Some websites claim to 'not support Linux', but appear to work fine when I browse them from a Linux box. One such site refuses to allow me to log in when my User Agent String advertises that I'm running Linux, but works perfectly fine when I use the User Agent Switcher add-on in Firefox.
What features of a website could be OS specific?
If a website is designed to work on a particular browser, should it work on that browser regardless of the underlying OS?
This SO question suggests that rendering may be platform dependent. Is it likely that rendering differences would be significant enough to make a website unusable under a certain OS?
Are there more fundamental ways in which it could be OS dependent?
The website should look fine under same browser version in various OSs. There are things like location services that can be disabled on your OS completely, or java and flash applets but mostly they are cross-platform.
Howerver, a shining example is Silverlight that is not supported on Linux so pages relying on it (e.g. Netflix) will not work on Linux.
Mostly its just laziness of staff to test website on linux and thus they simply state that its not supported to avoid complaints from users.
Disclaimer: This may be a better question on SuperUser, but my use
case matches SO.
I'm trying to develop an Angular app on my local computer; I'm not yet ready to set up a webserver or anything like that. I'm loading some JSON configuration files from the same directory, and I'm running into Origin Policy issues (which was expected).
I know that programs like gChat can run multiple instances with the /mutex flag (I think that's it, it's been a while since I tried that). Is there any such provision for Google Chrome? Basically, I'd like to run Chrome as my main browser for everything I do, and then open a separate instance with lowered web security for testing purposes.
Thanks!
You can bring up a development web server, serving data from the current working directory, using:
python -mSimpleHTTPServer
This doesn't directly answer your question, I know. But hopefully it's even better than a direct answer. :)
I found a solution to this - although Chrome won't let you run multiple instances, you can run Chrome and Chrome Canary side-by-side simultaneously. So now, Chrome is my main browser, and Chrome Canary (with the --disable-web-security) flag is my testing environment. So far, I haven't had any issues with discrepancies between the browsers.
The question may sound a little odd but I'm currently in a project where this could help solving many problems.
Is it somehow possible to embed an .exe into any web browser? I don't want to run the program directly in the browser (would be major security risk I guess), I just want the window of the .exe being embeded into a browser page. So the .exe is running locally on the system but instead of a "windows window" I have it displayed in the web browser. Think of it like VNC, I only need my "video" and the possiblity of user interaction (the program is an interactive 3D visualization).
I don't have much hope for this being possible so I'm also glad about any suggestion that would allow me to display web pages while my program is running in the same (fullscreen) window. Doesn't necessarily has to be a "real" browser but should allow basic stuff like HTML, CSS etc.
This kinda sound more like a SuperUser question rather than a StackOverflow one.
Anyway, I have a number of possible solutions for you:
You could use a second monitor.
Maybe all you really need is setting the "exe" window to "always be on top".
I could swear that used to be an option in the Windows' default Task Manager in the earlier versions of Windows but I use a 3rd-party piece of software for around 10 years now for that and many other purposes, however there are many such options to be found online.
Can't risk endorsing the one I use here, since it tends to spook people into thinking I'm trying to infect them with HAX.
In case you have the sources for the "exe" you are running, have you considered going the other way around and building a web renderer into your desktop program? Something like WebKit, Servo and suchlike.
Or you could make the program listen on a port to network packets you can be sending from the page you'd have to make — like a remote control.
Then there's also the cgi-bin option if you run the server.
And, to see what you're controlling, you might wanna stream it to some streaming platform (if you get it to stream an obscured window), embed their player widget in an iframe on your custom local webpage and keep the website you are reaching in another frame.
Maybe even code the program to read XInput and stream it through Mixer using its MixPlay feature to control it.
Hope any of this helps.
First off if you're unaware, samba or smb == Windows file sharing, \\computer\share etc.
I have a bunch of different files on a bunch of different computers. It's mostly media and there is quite a bit of it. I'm looking into various ways of consolidating this into something more manageable.
Currently there are a few options I'm looking at, the most insane of which is some kind of samba share indexer that would generate a list of things shared on the various samba servers I tell it about and upload them to a website which could then be searched and browsed.
It's a cheap solution, OK?
Ignoring the fact that the idea is obviously a couple of methods short of a class, do you chaps know of any way to link to samba file shares in html in a cross-browser way? In windows one does \\computer\share, in linux one does smb://computer/share, neither of which work afaik from browsers that aren't also used as file managers (e.g. any browser that isn't Internet Explorer).
Some Clarifications
The computers used to access this website are a mixture of WIndows (XP) and Linux (Ubuntu) with a mixture of browsers (Opera and Firefox).
In linux entering smb://computer/share only seems to work in Nautilus (and presumably Konqueror / Dolphin for you KDE3.5/4 people). It doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (Firefox does nothing, Opera complains the URL is invalid).
I don't have a Windows box handy atm so I'm unsure if \\computer\share works in anything apart from IE (e.g. Firefox / Opera).
If you have a better idea for consolidating a bunch of random samba shares (it certainly can't get much worse than mine ;-)) it's worth knowing that there is no guarantee that any of the servers I would be wanting to index / consolidate would be up at any particular moment. Moreover, I wouldn't want the knowledge of what they have shared lost or hidden just because they weren't available. I would want to know that they share 'foo' but they are currently down.
Hmm, protocol handlers look interesting.
As Mark said, in Windows protocol handlers can be dealt with at the OS level
Protocol handlers can also be done at the browser level (which is preferred, as it is cross platform and doesn't involve installing anything).
Summary of how it works in Firefox
Summary of how it works in Opera
I'd probably just setup Apache on the SAMBA servers and let it serve the files via HTTP. That'd give you a nice autoindex default page too, and you could just wget and concatenate each index for your master list.
A couple of other thoughts:
file://server/share/file is the defacto Windows way of doing it
You can register protocol handlers in Windows, so you could register smb and redirect it to file://. I'd suspect GNOME/KDE/etc. would offer the same.
To make the links work cross platform you could look at the User Agent either in a CGI script or in JavaScript and update your URLs appropriately.
Alternatively, if you want to consolidate SMB shares you could try using Microsoft DFS (which also works with Samba).
You set up a DFS root and tell it about all the other SMB/Samba shares you have in your environment. Clients then connect to the root and see all the shares as if they were hosted on that single root machine; the root silently redirects clients to the correct system when they open a share.
Think of it as like symbolic links or a virtual file system for SMB.
It would solve your browsing problem. I'm not sure if it would solve your searching one.