www.maxieduncan.com

Amusing description of why it is such a mess these days, http://www.webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

There’s a new version of the No Smoking widget that features a new look as well as the ability to display how much money has been saved.

Setting up an application to run at a scheduled time in iCal is pretty easy once you know how.

Instructions:

1. In iCal create a new event. If using Leopard set this to the time that you want the application to be run rather than selecting all-day.
2. Set up the event so that it repeats however often you want the application to be run, for example Every day.
3. In the alarm section of the event choose the Open file option then select the application that you want to run and when it should be run.

Personally I have a seperate calendar set up called “Tasks” that I use for setting up these kinds of things so that I can hide it and not have them clutter up my normal calendar.

It should be as simple as that.

Leopard Screenshot:

Tiger Screenshot:

There are some nice clear instructions on how to this on Maria’s Guide as well.

I’ve change the default look of the site recently. If you prefer the old version - which isn’t so black - you can change back to it by selecting Silver on the footer or clicking here.

Photos from OnTheGo trip to Egypt are on Picasa.

After downloading and installing Spore it said there was an update on start up, downloaded it and started to install it. When almost completed it stopped updating and became unresponsive for more than half an hour. While I was tempted to kill it a number of posts on the web that said to wait it out and it would come back; they also said that killing the update would break the game. Well waiting it out definitely seems to work.

The great thing about Firefox as a browser is that it has so many plugins available for it. There are plenty of extensions out there, but the ones below are those which I use.

General

• Google has some useful extensions, I especially like the Notebook one.
• Flashblock is great if you find Flash based ads annoying. It disables all Flash content on websites but lets you enable the parts you want by either clicking on the animation that you want to see, or unblocking the entire site.
• Stylish is a useful extension if you want to change to default look and feel of a particular site.
• Download Status Bar is a nice little extension that replaces the default download dialog with a small unobtrusive bar at the bottom of the page.

Programming

• Firebug is by far the most useful web development tool that I know of. It allows you browse and edit the DOM, javascript and CSS, and is much more powerful than the default DOM inspector that is provided with Firefox.
• HTML Validator is another using debug tool to make sure that a page contains valid HTML.
• Tamper Data can be used to intercept and modify requests and responses.

While there are many RSS aggregators out there the one that I prefer is Bloglines. As it’s browser based it’s platform independent and I can view my RSS feeds the same way anywhere. While there are other browser based versions, such as Google Reader, this is the one that has worked best for me.

The only problem that I’ve had with it is that it is ugly; that has now been solved by hicksdesign who has provided a css skin to make it look more attractive.

7/Oct/2007 - National Geographic changed the way that they generate their urls again. If you want to continue using this automator you should download the new version.

I’ve just put up a simple automator application that downloads the latest Picture of the Day from National Geographic and sets it as the desktop wallpaper. You can of course just go to the previously linked page to do this but if you set up this in iCal to run daily then you’ll get a nice new desktop everyday without having to do anything.

Technical notes

Using Automator you can edit this application to do the following:

• You can remove the step that stores the image to the Pictures directory.
• By default the 1280 x 1024 image is downloaded. If you change the grep argument from “xl.jpg” to “sw.jpg” then the 800 x 600 will be downloaded instead and if you change it to “lw.jpg” the 1024 x 768 will be.

Instructions on how to set up iCal to run the application daily can be found here.

I’ve just created my own travel blog for my trip to South and Central America that uses google maps to show where I’ve been.

You can find it by clicking here or by using the link in the menu.