mrclay.rg

Reload CSS Every… Bookmarklet

One annoying aspect of writing a stylesheet is having to reload the page in your browser to see your incremental changes. There are ways to workaround this, but I find them less than ideal so I created ReloadCSSEvery. It refreshes only the CSS of a loaded page every 2 seconds so you can use your

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1-minute RAM buyer’s guide

There was a time when it seemed you could just order the cheapest RAM you could find on Pricewatch and be done with it, but it just doesn’t work like that, especially when you’re trying to upgrade a PC more than a year old. You can easily spend hours reading about RAM density, ECC, buffering,

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Human cycles not wasted

Luis von Ahn creates simple games that have people solve problems that computers can’t (Google video). Every time you play a game of Taboo, the hinter generates associations between words and the guesser, by guessing the correct word, is verifying the quality of those associations. By isolating players via the web and collecting their responses,

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widget--

17 Dec 2006: Latest Del.icio.us Posts now works again in the latest release 9.02. Huzzah. My first Opera widget created back in July is now broken in Opera 9.02. The debugging and rebuilding process is so tedious that I probably won’t fix it very soon. A nice gesture on Opera’s part is the creation of

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Audacity failing the audition

As much I want to root for Audacity for being an open source and multi-platform multitrack recording solution, it’s just not there yet. I set it up for my coworker to record lectures and, even in this light-duty (mono 44.1 recording, nothing fancy), after about 10 min of material the program starts to sputter and

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Rhythm guitar geniuses

Ivy frequently has stunning rhythm guitar parts–a little bit of extra texture, a little melody. Two examples: “Blame In On Yourself” from Long Distance, and Apartment Life’s ”Quick, Painless, and Easy” The latter I’ve been casually wondering how to play for some time so I finally sat down and figure it out. Ivy “Quick, Painless, and

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Why I hate upgrading computers

Last month I spent many, many hours researching the seemingly simple tasks of upgrading the RAM on two of our PCs and upgrading the CPU on one. “Compy” is our old Sony Vaio, which, after swimming through the documentation, I found requires extra-expensive and rare-ish RAMBUS RAM available from basically 0 reputable sources, so eventually

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Mark Wirtz

This compilation of Mark Wirtz-produced songs rocks. Especially if you like 60′s girl groups with wall-of-everything+kitchen-sink productions, dramatic breaks that are just waiting to be sampled, bubblegum pop songs with psychadelic edges. There are duds and some dumb lyrics here and there, but it’s a great variety of sounds and clever pop songwriting. Some highlights:

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Could Expression break the tedium of CSS design?

I’ve been dealing with CSS layout quirks and bugs for seven years and, frankly, by now the thrill of designing an elegant style sheet by hand has worn off. The process of choosing the right lengths and font-sizes, and setting all these properties by hand (even with autocomplete) is just unacceptably tedious and just bogs

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The Late Greats

The best song will never get sung The best life never leaves your lungs So good, you won’t ever know I never hear it on the radio

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Workin’ for America!

Kathleen heard this on a boombox in UF’s payroll office. America works! America works! America works! Cause we’re working for America! Right up there with the Glaucoma Hymn.

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Why CSS layout is hard

The complaints are many and oft-repeated: “CSS has no grid system”, “the cascade is dumb”, “it’s broken”, etc. So why is CSS layout so hard? The obvious answer is that doing anything really well isn’t always easy. Most anyone can make a page in a modern WYSIWG editor (DW8/GoLiveCS2) in five minutes and have an

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Opera folks: Make it easy to test in your browser

Opera wants to know what features web developers would most like to see. I posted this in response (but it never seemed to show up on the page): “Testing” version: offer devs a download pre-configured for more easily testing site compatibility with Opera. Marketshare will only rise if more sites are tested in Opera, so

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widgets++

My first Opera widget is available. I designed it to take up as little desktop space as possible (a 22x22px icon) until you click it, which opens the interface and queries del.icio.us to show your latest bookmarks. By default, when you click a bookmark, the page opens in Opera and the widget “minimizes” back to

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Missing a show twice

Saturday night. Josh called from Common Grounds to remind me to come to the Holopaw show. It’s a bit after 11, so I still have time to see them. When I get down there it’s some sort of free event and Neko Case is a surprise opener! She starts playing Buddy Holly’s “Baby Won’t You

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Opera 9 thoughts

Opera 8′s UI really had most everything it needed to be a great browser (I haven’t upgraded at work and can barely tell the difference). 9′s big delivery is in the area of web standards (opacity, SVG, DOM Style) and hot proprietary ones like rich text editing, Flash-Javascript communication and the Canvas element. There are

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Yelp! I need somebody.

I’ve started Yelping and I’m hooked. Thanks, Heather!

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How to advertise Firefox to IE users

Place an ad on the most popular portal on the net, the Google home page. Google semi-officially takes a side.

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MyPage Bookmarklet

MyPage puts you in control of the current page: Remove, isolate, edit page items with keyboard control. On-screen print-preview emulation lets you see how the page will print while editing. (if you dug click2zap, try this out.)

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PHP for Easy Bookmarklet Testing and Distribution

Bookmarklet authors have it tough. On top of the usual challenges of cross-browser Javascript testing, we’ve traditionally also had to workaround IE’s character limit and jump through hoops to embed code inside of javascript: links. Bookmarklet Server (source) eases testing and deployment by allowing you to keep code where it should be—in .js files. A

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