I turned to Google and found this Greasemonkey hack. It looks good and does what I want, however I don't use Greasemonkey and I'm not about to start using it anytime soon. So I ended up creating a quick bookmarklet to do the job instead — I don't know why I didn't do this in the first place, it only took seconds?!

Flickr CC Search

You can install the bookmarklet by dragging it your Firefox "Bookmarks" toolbar.

Tags: bookmarklets, hacks, javascript, tools

For anyone unfamiliar with dict.org, it's basically a free service without any adverts that provides a fast dictionary and thesaurus lookup [it does more too!]

The bookmarklets

This morning I decided to play about with creating a Bookmarklet to help perform dict.org queries. I ended up creating three. One to perform a standard query, another to perform dictionary only queries, and the final one to perform thesaurus only queries. The bookmarklets are below:

dict.org lookup — for performing default queries [dictionary + thesaurus + more]
dictionary lookup — for erm… …dictionary only queries
thesaurus lookup — for… …work it out :)

All three bookmarklets work the same way. You can either highlight a word on the web page you are viewing before clicking the bookmarklet to perform the query; or click the bookmarklet and type a word at the prompt.

Howto install the bookmarkets

Simply left-click and drag any of the bookmarklets to your Bookmarks Toolbar within Firefox.

Before installing the bookmarklets it should be noted that I've only tested them with Firefox — as an Ubuntu user it's pretty much the only browser I use. Please let me know [post a comment or something] if you test them with any other browsers.

Credits

These bookmarklets are a direct hack of the free browser buttons available for Dictionary.com. These were inspired by the work of Steve Kangas at Bookmarklets.com.

Tags: bookmarklets, hacks, javascript, tools, ubuntu

For more info about Greasemonkey see: http://www.greasespot.net/

Tags: hacks, tools

I submitted my system output as requested [well it is Friday!] However, I did feel a little disappointed by the vrms program. Sure, it's good at what it does [actually this is debatable as it only counts packages installed with apt!?] but the output was a little boring.

Surely it would be better if RMS were to present the results himself? Enter my little hack.

Instructions for Ubuntu

1. Make sure you have both vrms and cowsay installed. You can install them using apt with the following terminal command:

sudo apt-get install vrms cowsay

2. Download my rms.cow file with the command:

wget http://crunchbang.org/misc/rms.cow

3. Move the cow file to Cowsay's cows directory with the command:

sudo mv rms.cow /usr/share/cowsay/cows/rms.cow

4. Now run the following command to have cowsay output your vrms results:

cowsay -f rms -W 60 `vrms`

5. Now marvel at the screen! It should look something like my example below:

Note: Obviously this is hours of fun, but if you get bored [surely not] you can always have RMS say something else, try the following for example:

cowsay -f rms LugRadio, bunch of freedom haters!

You digg?

Tags: fun, hack, lugradio, ubuntu

I'm not sure if anyone will find this little hack useful but I thought I'd post about it anyhow. Basically, I have always kept my to-do list in a simple text file on my desktop. Each new to-do item gets put on its own line in the file and I mark the beginning of each line with an indicator to show whether the item is waiting to be done [-], been done [#]or been canceled [;].

An example of this might look like:

/*
 * stuff to do and stuff that's already been done
 */
- complete report for Mr Smith
- take dog for walk
# blog about todo hack
; fly to the moon
# buy milk
# etc etc

Keeping my to-do list in this fashion has worked great for years and my current to-do list is a couple of thousand lines long. The only problem with my to-do list is it can be hard to read and scan. Enter my gedit hack.

gedit is GNOME's default text editor and I use it to edit my to-do list. One of gedit's great features [it has many more] is its ability to do syntax highlighting. My hack basically involves creating a new language file so that gedit will be able to highlight my to-do items differently depending on their status. Simply follow the instructions below to recreate the hack:

Enter the following command in your terminal:

sudo gedit /usr/share/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs/todo.lang

Now copy & paste the following lines into the file before saving and closing gedit:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE language SYSTEM "language.dtd">
<language _name="TODO" version="1.0" _section="Others" mimetypes="text/plain">

    <block-comment _name = "Header" style = "Header">
        <start-regex>/*</start-regex>
            <end-regex>*/</end-regex>
    </block-comment>

    <line-comment _name = "Uncomplete" style= "To do">
        <start-regex>-</start-regex>
    </line-comment>

    <line-comment _name = "Complete" style= "Complete">
        <start-regex>#</start-regex>
    </line-comment>

    <line-comment _name = "Cancelled" style= "Cancelled">
        <start-regex>;</start-regex>
    </line-comment>

</language>

Now restart gedit and create a new to-do list file using the syntax shown in my example above. Then from gedit's menu go:

View -> Highlight Mode -> Others -> TODO

And finally, edit how you would like the highlighting to look. Again, from gedit's menu go:

Edit -> Preferences -> Syntax Highlighting

Once you have completed these steps you should have a nice syntax highlighted to-do file. See my example below:

Tags: gedit, hacks, linux, ubuntu