There’s a new free tool available for Windows users called “Texter.” Made by the great folks at Lifehacker, Texter replaces your own customized abbreviations with longer passages of text. So, for example, you could have it replace “addr” with you home address, or “eml” with your email address, saving you typing time.
The thing that really makes it cool is that you can have it put any text on the clipboard into the expanded text. You can also have it move the cursor to any point in the expanded text. When you put these things together, you can make it really easy to automate some common HTML tasks, like making a link. So now, when I want to link to something in my blog, I copy the link into my clipboard, then type “hre” and hit tab. It replaces the “hre” with <a href=”link URL”></a> and places the cursor in between the two tags so that I can type the link text.
There are some videos on the site that explain how to set it all up. It’s easy to use, and it looks like a real time saver.
It seems like a lot of my favorite shows are going on hiatus lately. Heroes, my current favorite TV show, is going to be gone for almost two months. House is going away for another couple of weeks. (Thanks a lot American Idol.) The Office is repeats for the next couple of weeks.
It’s just weird; why the lull in mid-March?
Oh well. It gives me time to catch up on Battlestar Galactica. Or, you know, do something productive.
Free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
-Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
“The Great Firewall of China” refers to China’s internet censorship program. Vast swaths of the internet are restricted from the average Chinese internet user, sort of like at Bob Jones University or your average Fortune 500 company. Only in addition to filtering things like pornography, violent content, and Homestar Runner, the Great Firewall of China blocks things like the BBC and references to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Of course, there are ways around any kind of censorship on the internet, such as the Tor Anonymity Network or a secure VPN connection.
Today I discovered a site that tests if any site is behind the Firewall. It’s running really slowly right now, because it’s been discovered by a number of popular websites today, but it works. It turns out that you can access this site from China, for now.
So, to my friends who may be enduring the oppression of internet censorship: In case you cannot access Tor’s homepage at http://tor.eff.org, I have saved a list of sites that you can download Tor software from at http://www.jdharper.com/tor/. Install it, and see what your authorities have been hiding from you.
Let freedom reign.
I just wanted to make sure everyone knows about this: In my sidebar, there’s a feed of interesting stories that I’ve found around the internet. I get these from Google Reader; underneath each story in Google Reader there’s a “share” button that adds the story to the feed.
There’s also an RSS feed for this list of shared stories that you can subscribe to in Bloglines, Google Reader, or your favorite RSS client. It’s located here.
I update this way more often than I do the big blog, so if you’re looking for interesting content, that’s the place you’ll want to go.
My Dad and I spent most of the day today setting up our living room for our new TV. Our old TV was something like twenty years old, and it was starting to show its age. So when my dad was able to find a great deal on a new TV at Office Depot (!), I was delighted.
Unfortunately, the TV cabinet we were using was designed for a smaller CRT TV, rather than a larger flat-panel LCD. Despite searching the local electronics and furniture retailers, we were unable to find a reasonably priced TV cabinet in town. Dad eventually went with a cabinet he found online, which arrived yesterday.
This morning was spent assembling furniture and rearranging everything. Eventually, we had everything hooked up. We went to Radio Shack and picked up an HD antenna, which bears a striking resemblance to the saucer section of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. With this antenna, we can clearly see NBC, CBS, Fox, ETV, and MYCW in beautiful detail. This covers every show we regularly watch except for Lost. (Apparently ABC can’t be bothered to put a HD station here closer than Asheville.)
I am absolutely stunned by how good it looks. I can’t wait to see Heroes in HD!
Lifehacker linked to a neat program today called Explorer Breadcrumbs. After you install this program, a new Breadcrumb Bar sits at the top of the explorer window and gives you an easy way to navigate quickly throughout your file system. The bar lists all of the folders above the one you’re looking at in the file system, so you can jump back to any point you were at before.
This is actually a feature of Windows Vista, but this program allows Windows XP users to enjoy it as well.
I’ve recorded a quick video to demonstrate how it works.
(Higher-res WMV version of the above video)
Find Explorer Breadcrumbs at minimalist.com.
This is really neat. I found a webpage widget that simulates the newspaper sequence you see in older movies. The neat thing is that you can feed it any RSS feed. The original site uses the BBC news feed, but I decided to make it the headlines from my website.
Here’s the code if you want one for your site. Replace the words in red with the address of the feed you want to use.
<style>
iframe#flowpop { margin: 0; left-margin: auto; right-margin: auto; width:300px; height: 250px; border:1px solid black;; padding:0; background-color: #000000; }
</style>
<div style=”text-align:center;”>
<iframe id=”flowpop” src=”http://www.coverpop.com/flowpop/getTicker.php?url=http://www.jdharper.com/wordpress/feed/&ticker=spinningPaper&w=300&h=250&bgc=000000″ scrolling=”no”>
</iframe>
</div>
