Sillybean

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension. Today I wrote my first command for it: mooch, which will search BookMooch for selected text on a page (or whatever you type in). If you’re using Ubiquity, you can now add the command to your installation. Enjoy! And please tell me [...]

Adjusting settings in Firefox and OS X to restore the full keyboard navigation (including form field drop-downs!) needed for accessibility testing.

It’s 1am. I’ve spent the last seven hours migrating my sites from the old-and-busted server to the new-hotness server. A few things broke, and my email was bouncing for a while there, but everything seems to have stabilized now. Except me. Me, I go fall over.

Via Library Thing’s blog, I discovered that LT had created a handy little bookmark that would let you search the contents of your books — provided they’d been scanned by Google.

I’d been more or less ignoring Google’s new My Library feature, because a quick skim of the announcement told me more or less what Tim [...]

Well. The honeymoon is over; the words no longer come easily, and we are definitely in the “don’ wanna” stage. And one of the other books is bouncing on its toes for my attention.

New words: 908
Reason for stopping: snooze time
Sustenance: Raspberry tea, sweet green grapes
Exercise: wrestling grocery carts
Teaching the spell-check to spell: munchies
Mean things: tantrums
Time [...]

I think I finally have titles I like for all four of these books. Of course, whether I write all four of them is anybody’s guess.

New words: 863, plus 575 elsewhere
Reason for stopping: quota, tired
Sustenance: leftover soda from the road trip (mmm, sweetened acid in a styrofoam cup. Yummy.)
Exercise: nothing that really counts
Mean things: Earworm.
Time [...]

I love Digg. Having discovered their collective power earlier this week with the whole AACS thing, today they invented an impeachment poll where one didn’t exist — namely, in Nancy Pelosi’s office. While I feel really sorry for the poor people answering this phone line, I’m tickled that Digg users have figured out how to [...]

Went to Refresh B/CS tonight. ‘Twas good. Among other things, Erica handed me a slightly different way of thinking about the political/class aspects of the novel, which will come in handy during revisions — and maybe marketing, if I decide to allow the damn thing out of the house without supervision.

It’s the kind of thing [...]

The old PowerBook having been pronounced not worth fixing by a genuine Apple Genius Bar employee over the weekend — remind me to tell you sometime about the “authorized reseller” that does repairs locally — and no new laptops having been announced at the Expo this morning, we took deep breaths and put two MacBook [...]

I’ve just come across a series of regular expressions that will remove smart tags, o tags, and other Microsoft XML cruft from HTML documents. Jonathan Snook is my hero du jour.

With one minor modification, it’ll catch the closing smart tags too: </?st1:.*?>.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted Why a Mac tablet from Apple doesn’t make sense earlier today. I commented briefly there, but this seems as good a time as any to spout my theory of the Apple tablet.

(I bored several of you with this in person a few months ago. If you’re one of those [...]

This whole Zune thing is just a train wreck. Granted, the only reason I know anything about the Zune is that I read a fair number of Apple-related publications, many of which have been taking potshots at the Zune for months now. But now that the thing is in stores, I’m seeing enough reviews from [...]

I discovered last night that isbn.nu has RSS feeds for books. I can track prices for the books I’m looking for! O how I love you, isbn.nu.

I’m also (finally) making myself switch from Camino to Firefox. Sorry, Camino, I just can’t live without the extensions anymore. Also, you crash a lot, and every time you [...]

So, the other Steph and I were kvetching earlier about the lousy Word HTML we have to clean up all day… and I remembered something. A long time ago, I’d tried to use AppleScript to make the Word Unmunger’s batch mode easier to use. At the time, AppleScript defeated me… but now it’s Automator, and [...]

I’ve talked to several people lately who are having trouble keeping up with stuff — email, mainly, and they wonder how on earth I have time to read all these fabulous websites that let me stay on top of developments in web design.

In talking to one perpetually-behind person in particular, I discovered that what seems [...]