March, 2009

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30
Mar 09

Greasemonkey and Stylish as time management devices

I must reiterate my undying love for Greasemonkey and its styletastic cousin Stylish, two indispensable Firefox Addons. They have both saved me countless milliseconds over the years and it all ads up! Basically they take that haphazard version of the web you’re faced with due to poor design or lack of functionality and kick it up a notch… BAM!

One such innovation dramatically improves eBay searches. Usually, they look something like this: you have items with a picture icon but the seller hasn’t paid for “Gallery Picture” so no thumbnail for you.

The script adds eBay thumbnail images to searches by fetching the image from the item page. The result is:

Neat huh? Now I regularly find myself thinking “I wonder if there’s a Greasemonkey script for that” and usually there is.

Other scripts I use:

  • Super Linkfier (Greasemonkey) – No more browsing forum and being forced to copy and paste URIs. This makes EVERY URI a link, including email addresses.
  • YouTube Automatic fmt=18 Adder (Greasemonkey) – Hack that forces ALL videos to display in high quality.
  • Big fonts on wikipedia main content (Stylish) – This one’s self-explanatory.
  • Block Facebook Ads (Stylish) – due to constant changes and slew of choice I suggest you search for this.
  • Block Gmail adds (Stylish) – ditto.
  • Google Image Relinker (Greasemonkey) – Search results link straight to the image, not that annoying frame page.
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22
Mar 09

Flickr has feeds

I just realised Flickr has feeds for photostreams. Awesome. You can subscribe to mine here.

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19
Mar 09

How to Print PDFs optimally

I’ve been printing a lot of research papers recently. These are things you just have to read in hard copy. Now I like to print them as optimally as possible, striking the right balance between minimal paper, minimal whitespace and maximal readability. For reasons beyond me at this early stage, these papers have ridiculously huge margins so simply printing 2 pages per sheet (2-up) wastes a lot of space and the font is shitty and small. You can try zooming but Adobe Reader is crap at this and I can never get the most efficient zoom; it chops bits off, not centred, etc.

The answer? I googled and was like “why didn’t I think of that?”. The solution was to do it on a Mac. The Preview application lets you “crop all pages”. You select the area you want, hit Cmd-I to bring up the inspector, then click that magical button. Now I’m enough of a Mac fanboy as it is, but after wasting at least 20 minutes stuffing around on Windows, I wouldn’t be exaggerating by saying this is a jaw-dropping feature.

Then just “print” yourself another PDF using Preview, this time in 2-up with 120% zoom or whatever and you’re done. Add this anecdote to the List of Reasons Macs are Preferred by Publishers, if that even is true.

P.S. Have I spruiked Google Scholar yet? I haven’t had to write a single BibTeX entry so far.

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14
Mar 09

Dock folder launcher updated

I have updated my Dock Folder Launcher I made a while ago. Now, if you already have the Finder window open, it will focus that window instead of just launching another one. Also download available for Intel Macs.

See original post.

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8
Mar 09

Cyclone Hamish on NASA satellite

At about 11:00am this morning, NASA’s Terra-MODIS satellite passed over Queensland and took this scary photo of Cyclone Hamish, a storm meteorologists are claiming to be on par with Hurricane Katrina.

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6
Mar 09

Sushi train video camera

This video is so entertaining I had to repost! via BoingBoing.

Why I love it:

  • The contrast between, and wide variety of reactions: surprised, amused, completely oblivious, total deadpan, somewhat concerned, “I’m way to stressed to care about that”. Priceless!
  • That occasional pause of uncertainty where people’s brains decide how they are going to react.
  • The film (intentionally or not) has great dramatic structure. She sat at just the right location to have the dramatic climax at that sweet spot in time. Nice long build-up lures the viewer into a false sense of security, then BAM! Unexpected-Event-desu! Followed by nice quick resolution.
  • My brain is now going crazy thinking of weird and wonderful places to put my camera (NO, not THOSE kind of places, geez!)

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! I can feel a new reality TV genre emerging…