I have a bunch of blogs I want to read all the way through- but when it’s been going for 2 years, that’s a *lot* of posts. And I’m sitting close to my computer all day at work, I don’t want more of the same at home.
So I wondered if there was a way to read and navigate a blog across the room?
The first step is to get a remote. I got the Keyspan wireless remote, which, at the time of this writing is about $20 at Amazon. In absence of a remote, a mouse with programmable buttons and a long cord would probably work. Oh, and it helps to have a large monitor.
The second step is to make a page visible across a room- there are a few plugins for Firefox that let you zoom in on a page (like the new version of Opera, I suppose) but I used the Web Developer Toolbar, which I already had. This made it easy to add a new user stylesheet:
I then increased the text size so I could see it from 7ish feet away.
Next, I had to figure out the behaviors. The remote is programmable, so I set different buttons to do things like scroll up and down, page up and down, increase and decrease text size, and add a bookmark (so I can mark things for later reference). The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how to get it to advance to the next page? Luckily, some nice programmer wrote a handy firefox extension called “Next, Please” that will automatically find the “Next” Link in a page and advance. From there is was a simple matter to program the keyboard shortcut into the remote.
Voila! Web surfing from across the room. This will be handy for reading ebooks too, I’m sure. I’m hoping it will be easier on my eyes than reading text close up.
