That's Really Smart, McDonald's

Posted February 21, 2008 By Ross and has no comments yet.

<Rant>

I came home a couple days ago to find my daughter playing with her new happy meal toy:  a small figurine from The Spiderwick Chronicles that has a little button on the back that makes a small light in the birdhouse? the character is holding light up.  I tried shining it on the wall to see if it made a dot, but it didn't seem to do much.  Then I found the instructions:

McDonalds' Spiderwick Toy
McDonalds’ Spiderwick Toy

So basically, you look through a little viewfinder which is backlit by the figurine's light, and you see an image, either a crow or a goblin.  I'm sure this is in line with the premise of the movie somehow. I've got a little problem, though, with this toy (and McDonald's, by association) advocating that my child shine (bright) lights into her eyes from 12" away. 

Sure, I can (and do) tell/teach her not to do this, but she's young enough still that she doesn't understand the consequences of staring at a bright light or at the sun, etc, even if I were to explain them to her.  So I would appreciate if McDonald's wouldn't compound the issue by making it seem like it is OK to do this by way of a toy.

</Rant>

And now for something completely different – I finally got around to scanning the picture of Violet w/ Santa from this past December….

Violet poses with Santa
Violet poses with Santa

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Categories: Vox_export
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Ross’ Hacks

By Ross and has no comments yet.

Most of my hacks are software-based, because I spend the majority of my time in front of a computer. These are things I’ve developed or discovered to make myself more productive or efficient in some way.

Check out my archive of hacks here, for a list of posts in this category, or look at individual items in my “Best Of” sections, below.

Ross’ “Best Of” Hacks (Developed by Ross)

  1. Avoid starting up memory-hogging applications accidentally

Ross’ “Best Of” Hacks (Discovered by Ross)

  1. Pocket-sized Thumb Calendar (for Moleskins or other use) by Adam Sporka
  2. A quick-and-easy way to back up blog posts
Categories: hacks
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Vox Recent Activity Collapser – Greasemonkey Script

By Ross and has 1 comment.

Summary
Screenshots
Download
Feedback

Summary

Vox Recent Activity Collapser is a Greasemonkey script designed to streamline the Vox Recent Activity page. Instead of seeing the full set of recent comments/activity for a given post, the script provides an inline link for each post that will expand/collapse the data related to the post. By only showing the post titles, a user can quickly and easily scan the set of posts on the page to determine the ones they want to read, and then expand only those posts to review the additional information.

Screenshots

Recent Activity Page - Normal
Example of Normal Vox Recent Activity page, prior to introduction of script.

Recent Activity Page - After Script
Example of Vox Recent Activity page, with script.

Example of Expanded Thread
Example of expanded post thread, using script.

Download

The Greasemonkey script can be found for download here. Make sure Greasemonkey is installed prior to trying to install this user script.

Feedback

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on how to improve this script, please leave a comment here or send me an email at ross…@gmail.com .

Categories: greasemonkey
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Ross’ Projects

By Ross

Here’s where you can find a listing of all my projects.

Greasemonkey Scripts

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. Although I’m new to the language, I’m finding it fun to write scripts for websites I use regularly, to enhance the functionality of their pages.

  • Vox Recent Activity Collapser – A script for blogging site Vox.com that allows users to streamline the “Recent Activity” summary page.
  • Vox Homepage Reorder Script – A script for blogging site Vox.com that reorders the modules on the homepage to provide the most popular modules “above the fold”.

Perl Scripts

Perl is a kind of programming language, known for its strengths in text processing. I learned it back when I thought I would be creating a dynamic website with .cgi scripts. I never ended up using a lot of .cgi, but I got some good use out of perl for other things.

  • Textify – A script based on the “Textify” program by XXX. Allows the user to reformat text files found in the directory where the script is being run. The script turns text files with line breaks at the end of each line or (1 or 2) line breaks at the end of each paragraph into a simple .html file with 2 line breaks after each paragraph. This .html file is well-suited for loading onto a portable device book-reader, such as the Rocket eBook reader or a PDA.
  • Photo Gallery Creator [No longer supported] – A set of scripts that takes a directory of image files and their thumbnails and creates a photo gallery page out of them. Allows the user to enter a page title, date, additional page comments, and then individual captions for each picture. Generates an index.html page for the thumbnails, as well as individual .html pages for each photo with links to the full-size images.
  • Random Picture Generator (Perl side) – Generates the proper PHP code for the selection of a random picture from an array of pictures created from the image files in a directory. Code is executed on every page load, displaying a new randomly, selected picture on each page load.

PHP Scripts

  • Random Picture Generator (PHP side) – In combination with the perl side of the code, this is the resulting output to display a new, randomly selected picture on each page load.

Hardware Projects

No current hardware projects

Categories: Projects