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Weather Underground Reorganizer Updated

The Weather Underground Reorganizer has been updated to deal with the new front page layout at Weather Underground. The update also includes reorganizing the tropical weather pages.

Updated 2005-10-11: Updated to reflect new radar page layout and now includes the satellite pages.

Updated 2005-12-18: Updated to work with Greasemonkey 0.6.4, still works with older versions of Greasemonkey too.

Updated 2005-12-24: Updated to work with new layout on regional radar page.

Sunday December 25, 2005   ·   Permalink

Greasemonkey: Snopes Header Shrink

Another Greasemonkey script, this one will shrink the header on Snopes.com so that more content is visible on the page. Actually, removes the header is more like it, along with making sure all the rest of the content moves up to the top of the page.

Enjoy.

Monday October 10, 2005   ·   Permalink

Greasemonkey Weather Underground Reorganizer

Greasemonkey rocks!

My first public Greasemonkey user script is a Weather Underground Reorganizer.

It was based upon Matthew Gray’s user script that moved the forecast contents above the header and sidebar.

My version includes Matthew’s re-org and adds a similar re-org on the local and regional radar pages. It also adds direct links to the animated local and regional radar pages where appropriate on the forecast and local radar pages.

I’ve not added any ad blocking to the script, adblock probably would do a fine job on the ads. Weather Underground asks just $5 per year to be ad-free and they give you access to daytime animated radar data as part of the deal, so I’ve been a subscriber for years now.

I hope this script will work for others, and welcome feedback on it. My email address is over in the right side bar.

Saturday April 30, 2005   ·   Permalink

Google Sightseeing: NASCAR Tracks

After seeing the fun posts on the Google Sightseeing pages, I decided to check and see just how many of the race tracks that NASCAR uses I could find. Here’s my list:

If I’ve gotten anything wrong, or you know the Autodromo location, drop me an email.

Updated 12 Jan 2006: Courtesy of Ryan Van Booven, who was locating the tracks in Google Earth, we now have a location for Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. Thanks Ryan!

Thursday April 14, 2005   ·   Permalink

url2firefox

After my recent desktop upgrade, I decided to finally get everything working together so that URLs in GNOME Terminal and XEmacs would open up new tabs in Firefox.

I found inspiration from a hack called Making Firefox Behave Like Galeon. After cleaning the example up a bit, it became url2firefox:

  #!/bin/bash

  FF_LIB=/opt/firefox1.0

  # get URL to load
  url=$1; [ -z $url ] && url=about:blank
  what=$2;

  if [ -z $what ]; then
        $FF_LIB/mozilla-xremote-client -a firefox \
                openURL\($url\,new-tab\) && exit 0
  else
        $FF_LIB/mozilla-xremote-client -a firefox \
                openURL\($url\,$what\) && exit 0
  fi

  # if xremote failed, then launch the browser
  exec $FF_LIB/firefox $url &

I then set url2firefox as the Custom Web Browser Command in the Preferences -> Preferred Applications dialog and as vm-url-browser in my XEmacs .vm file. Now I can right click on URLs in Terminal and select Open Link or middle click on URLs in VM in XEmacs and it will open a new tab with that URL.

One other thing I did was to add a set nomarkers to my .muttrc so long urls would not be wrapped with + when they hit the edge of the terminal.

Friday April 1, 2005   ·   Permalink

Metacity Annoyances

The standard Linux desktop at work is now Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, so I upgraded from my heavily customized Fedora Core 2 setup last week.

Since sawfish isn’t part of the “official” setup, I’ve been trying to get used to Metacity, the underlying GNOME desktop window manager.

One of the first annoyances I encountered was that I couldn’t easily align windows since edge gravity isn’t the default. Reading throught the doc files in the metacity RPM revealed that pressing the shift key while moving a window will turn on edge gravity.

I’d really like to have edge gravity be the default and have the shift key turn off edge gravity, but I guess it will have to do.

Another annoyance is that I can’t seem to find any way to change the mouse bindings on the window manager. I’d like to emulate the maximize, maximize-vertical, and maximize-horizontal behavior of the titlebar maximize button in sawfish, but I can only find out how to do key bindings for those functions, not mouse buttons.

If anyone knows how to work around these annoyances, drop me an email, the address is over on the right.

Wednesday March 30, 2005   ·   Permalink

Petteri's Pontifications: Sensor Cleaning

Engadget pointed to a well researched and well written article about how to clean the sensor glass in your digital SLR. Instead of using the expensive Sensor Brush or Pec Pads on a spatula, Petteri researched brushes to try and determine a more cost effective solution. Included in the article are pictures showing the before and after view of the sensor dust on a new Canon, and before and after view of a dusty slide.

Sunday March 27, 2005   ·   Permalink

Group IQ Axiom

In a group of pre-teen boys, the group IQ is the lowest IQ of the group divided by the number of members of the group.

Corrollary: Every hour that the group is up after their normal bedtimes adds an extra member to the calculation.

Saturday February 26, 2005   ·   Permalink

Pinewood Derby Cars

Pinewood Derby cars The pack Pinewood Derby was early last month and all of us had a blast building our cars. On the left is my entry into the open/stock class, next is #1’s Runaway House and on the right is #2’s Yellow Fireball. Each of us finished first in our class and since #2 was the fastest Tiger in the pack, he’ll be going to the district races.

Both boys spent a quite bit of time polishing the axles for their cars along with selecting matched sets of wheels. They both saw the benefits of concentrating on the friction points. I also built a short test track without a center guide so we could make sure the cars tracked straight before we even went to test-and-tune night. The test track worked well and we didn’t have to make any alignment changes at all.

Thursday February 10, 2005   ·   Permalink

Using kstat for ce interfaces

Since I don’t seem to remember the kstat options for checking the link status of a ce interface, I’m putting it here.

  # kstat -p ce:::link_up

will produce

  ce:0:ce0:link_up        0
  ce:1:ce1:link_up        1
  ce:2:ce2:link_up        1
  ce:3:ce3:link_up        0
  ce:4:ce4:link_up        0
  ce:5:ce5:link_up        0

It can even do regular expressions, so you can do something like this to see your speed, duplex and link status:

  # kstat -p 'ce:0::/link_(speed|up|duplex)/'
  ce:0:ce0:link_duplex    2
  ce:0:ce0:link_speed     100
  ce:0:ce0:link_up        0

Tuesday January 4, 2005   ·   Permalink

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