Prompted by an article by Andreas Gohr [splitbrain.com] giving a PHP function to get StumbleUpon rankings for a given URL I decided to revisit the SocialList Wordpress plugin I wrote in 2007 (I see someone else has taken the name for a different plugin now, guess that’s what I get for leaving it 2 years!)
Unfortunately Andreas mentioned that his method doesn’t work anymore as StumbleUpon have changed something. Well, I didn’t have anything better to do this evening, so I’ve reworked Andreas’ code and come up with a solution that works with the StumbleUpon changes.
This function should be pretty much a direct replacement for the one in the splitbrain.com article and the same instructions apply especially that to make it work you will need to set the two variables at top of the function.
IsMyLcdOK is a small program to easily check for dead/paralysed/stuck pixels on LCD monitors. There’s not much to it: Just run and then walk through the battery of onscreen tests designed to isolate any problem pixels. The only trouble is it’s Windows only.
There are some alternatives for other platforms, but I decided to make a cross platform solution, and what could be more cross platform than HTML (admittedly with some javascript). Feel free to try it out here: Check my LCD - Just click anywhere on the screen that loads to rotate through the tests, you’ll also get better results using your browser’s full-screen mode.
Reading through Maximum PC’s list of 50 skills every real geek should have I noticed ‘Downloading flash video’ from sites like YouTube was on the list. So, cunningly avoiding the many easy ways to do it, I decided to put together a quick shell script, after all it can’t be that hard, you just need to look at the HTTP headers…
Well it turns out YouTube don’t make it that easy, but after a bit of prodding I ended up with something that will at least save a YouTube video to an flv file:
This will probably only work till the YouTube site changes, so if it’s broken blame them and not my shoddy coding 
Simple one-purpose site Ding It’s Up sends you an email (or text/twitter message) when a site you specify comes back online.
Pretty useful stuff, but not content to let something remain simple I decided to make a bookmarklet so that when I’m on a site that’s down, I can just hit the link in my bookmarks bar and get an email when it comes back.
To use this, either drag the link below, or right click and select “Bookmark this link”. You’ll then need to change the bookmark properties to replace ‘YOUREMAILADDRESS’ with your email address.
Let me know when it’s back
If you find this useful, you may also like the ‘Get archived version’ bookmark which checks for archived copies of the current page from archive.org:
Get archived version
Both of these have been tested to some extent in Firefox. Please leave a comment if you have any problems.
I’ve been hunting around for a shell script to download the XKCD archives, but pretty much everything I’ve found has either done loads of redundant downloads, required too much interaction, broken on the missing comic #404 or some other issue.
In the end I decided it would be quicker to write something myself. I normally post my shell stuff on http://www.shell-fu.org/, but this is a bit long to go there really, so incase it’s useful to anyone else, I’m posting it here:
To use the script, just change the directory at the top and run. You can re-run the script later on and it will fetch any new comics you’ve not already got (for example it can be run as a weekly cron job).
Any bugs, please let me know in the comments.
