Wawrick Blogs Media Suppressor

Sometimes people make entries containing a large number of images or embedded video.

The greasemonkey script I call  Wawrick Blogs Media Suppressor hides any images or objects (e.g. embedded video) above a certain number and replaces them with a placeholder than can then be clicked to display the supressed images/objects.

E.g. the default limit for images is 5. If an entry contains 15 images then only the first 5 are displayed and where the 6th image should be the words 'Click to shows 10 suppressed images' appear.

Mike Willis : 08 May 2008 21:45 |  Tags: Greasemonkey |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

dugg for Warwick Uni

Writing about web page http://digg.com/health/Warwick_University_robo_nurses_straight_from_Star_Wars

I was glancing through the RSS feed for digg.com and found a story about Warwick Uni. What higher honour in the realm of...whatever name you care to give the realm you perceive such sites to exist in since I'm too tired to think of anything... could the Uni hope for?

Well apart from the front page of Slashdot, obviously.

Mike Willis : 27 Apr 2008 20:44 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Got Back Up?

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/7328513.stm

This is not the first time there's been a story in the news about a musician who's just lost their only copy of their latest album because their laptop/harddisk got lost/stolen. Such stories are examples of how most people don't think about backing up files on their computer, even if their livelihood depends on them. The majority of people don't bother with backups and the majority of them will get away with it. Some of them will get a demonstration that storage technology is not 100% reliable when their computer's harddisk dies, or they will have their computer stolen or lost. When this happens they'll realise just how important those files are to them.

Of course IT Services backs up files stored in the home directory of your University computing account for you, but if you've got files on a personal computer that you care about and you don't have a back up of them, go buy an external harddisk or a USB flash drive, make a backup copy and keep making backup copies as often as you feel necessary. It's not hard and if you don't you may find that one day you regret not doing so. A lot.

Oh and keep your backup somewhere other than sat next to your computer where it can be easily stolen/burnt up/lost along with the original.

Mike Willis : 04 Apr 2008 12:48 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Recipe for ruination

Take one book by Terry Pratchett. Condense to one thin plot line that can be can be acted out by a group of people in approx 60 minutes. Find a group of people off the street to read the lines of the various characters aloud whilst dressed up. Ability to act is not important, just as long as they have a physical presence. Add a couple of big name actors, doesn’t matter if one of them around twice as old as the character is portrayed in the book or exhibits none of the described physical characteristics, just adjust dialogue to compensate. Have group act out remaining plot over a period of approx 90 minutes. You may need to have them talk slowly in a stilted manner and frequently cut to tedious stupid facial expressions to fill the time. Make sure none of the cast try and inject any sense of excitement or interest in to the proceedings. Cover with music. Don’t worry if you’ve only got two main pieces, just use them repeatedly. Take care to ensure that the music sometimes renders the dialogue almost inaudible. Add mediocre CGI and some obviously blue/green screen sequences. Ensure product is generally dull all the way through and impossible to favourably compare to the source material. Hype for several months, then serve on Sky One in a primetime slot broken in to five roughly equal chunks interspersed with random advertisements sufficient to pad out to 120 minutes and garnish with persistent reminder that multistart is available by pressing the red button.

Mike Willis : 23 Mar 2008 23:37 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Anti–favourites

The Warwick Blogs Anti-Favourites Greasemonkey script allows you to hide entries from specified blogs on the recent entries pages. Essentially it does the opposite of the Favourites feature. (Though there is no facility to specify tags…yet) I wrote it so I don’t have to see entries from blogs that are always written in a language I can’t read or where the content relates to a particular course module. Click here to install it or read more about it.

If you’ve been paying very close attention to my blog you may recall I posted about this once before. In a moment of complete inattentiveness I managed to delete the post less than 24 hours later and it turns out deleted posts cannot be recovered Thanks go to Steve who picked the script up before I deleted the post and drew my attention to several circumstances under which the script didn’t work (but now does).

Mike Willis : 29 Feb 2008 13:10 |  Tags: Greasemonkey |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

More on the £99 laptop

Writing about web page http://www.elonexone.co.uk/

It’s predictably low spec but at the price point those digital picture frame which are all over the place now start to get a worthwhile spec screen you do get something with a keyboard, ‘mouse emulator’, decent res screen (for the size) more USB ports than a MacBook Air and wireless. I think they missed a trick in not including an SD card slot though. Shoving a card in to it would be a lot more convenient way of expanding the storage than a USB drive.
Apparently it runs Linux Linos 2.6.21. Whatever that is. 2.6.21 looks suspiciously like a Linux kernel version number and the only references I find for Linos via Google are videos of people booting a ‘Linos stick’ which reveals no more than that some people are capable of videoing themselves plugging a USB drive in to a computer and turning it on.

Mike Willis : 28 Feb 2008 19:40 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New BBC homepage

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/

The BBC have a new homepage and it's all customisable and stuff. You can even click-drag-drop the different sections around the page.

People of a web dev inclination may like to check out the page source which contains a great example of how much grief Internet Explorer 6 causes anyone who develops web sites and cares about things like making their pages using valid (X)HTML.

Mike Willis : 27 Feb 2008 22:35 |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The £99 laptop

Writing about web page http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/personal_tech/article3374812.ece

My first thought when reading that British company Elonex are to launch a £99 laptop was ‘didn’t they go bankrupt a few years ago?’ A few seconds on Google shows they pretty much did but it would seem the brand at least has survived. The linked article and the Elonex press release are light on technical details. It has Wi-Fi, a 7” screen, unsurprisingly lacks an optical drive and and also unsurprisingly runs Linux. But that’s all they’re saying. At that price point I’m guess it’s going to be more like the One Laptop Per Child’s XO-1 than Asus’ EeePC. Presumably more details will be forthcoming after the launch date of the 28th. I would have launched it on the 29th myself just for the novelty value.

I have a feeling there used to be an Elonex retail store in Coventry about a dozen or so years ago. Down by that open area (Bull Yard?) off the corner in the road that all the Estate agents are on. I could be wrong though. (Bull Yard, just off New Union St – thank you Google Maps.)
Edit, much later. It wasn’t an Elonex store. It was Escom.

Mike Willis : 17 Feb 2008 22:32 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Afterlife of Cellphones

Writing about web page http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Cellphone-t.html?pagewanted=all

Using data from the United States Geological Survey and mining companies’ own reports, Earthworks estimates that mining the gold needed for the circuit board of a single mobile phone generates 220 pounds of waste. The environmental nonprofit calls this “an extremely conservative” estimate. 

That 220 really sounds like it should be a typo doesn't it. A phone weighs around 100 grams, or about 1/1000 of that 220 pounds. The gold in that phone must weight what, 1 gram at most?

I read somewhere that I can't be bothered to find recently that several hundred thousand mobiles are replaced in the US every single day. I guess it's probably in the tens of thousands in this country.

Mike Willis : 17 Jan 2008 20:41 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Did you mean: mplayer…

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

...asked the Warwick Blogs search results page just now. No, worthy of mention as mplayer is, no I didn't. I typed in iPlayer and iPlayer I meant.

I've been following the coverage in the more tech orientated media of the new BBC iPlayer. Recently that's been coverage along the lines of how the BBC has apparently managed to spend around 4 years and over £100m to produce a solution to viewing their TV shows via a computer that works only on Windows XP,  doesn't allow you to stream only download then watch, wraps everything in DRM, (so as to inconvenience users whilst completely failing to prevent piracy),  expires the content after X days and generally doesn't sound as attractive as typing the name of the programme you want to watch followed by the word 'torrent' in to Google. Except being legal of course.

In all this coverage I've never seen anything about a cross platform friendly streaming catch up service. Something which as a Linux user I find far more exciting than the much criticised iPlayer application. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention since this morning I learned that there is in fact such thing. It's web browser based, uses Flash for the video and good old HTML/CSS/Javascript for the rest of it. (As opposed to turning the entire web page in to a big Flash blob as some people, usually quite wrongly, seem to think is a good idea.) Flash may be considered closed source evil by some and not a suitable format for delivering raster video by a sub set of aforementioned some and others, but at least it's easily viewable on Windows Mac and [32 bit] Linux using free software which most people have installed already anyway.

It all looks very Web 2.0 with it's glossy buttons, bright contrasting colours, gradient background and the Google-esque 'beta' tacked on to the title. Beta is right, there are some rough edges such as it offering you shows only to them tell you that they're not available when you try and play them, and not distinguishing between different episodes of the same show unless you mouse-over each icon in turn. But on the whole it looks very promising.

Mike Willis : 13 Dec 2007 20:19 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem