'Bunch of me

I came across this amazing Greasemonkey script for Firefox today that blocks off all those pesky quizzes and 3-rd Party application updates that your friends are littering your frontpage with. No more would you have to tolerate mindless questionnaires like "Which herbivorous rodent were you in your past life?" or front-page updates that involves a contact of yours finding which movie villainess she resembles.

What this script does is it filters your front-page news items, strips them off the 3-rd Party quiz/apps nuiscense and leaves you with news items of/related to original Facebook apps (like status updates,photo uploads,event updates etc ).



Here's what you should do:

* Install Greasemonkey.
* Install "Facebook Purity". Don't worry it's a harmless javascript file. Tested and cerfied.
* Browse Facebook minus the annoyance.


Power Tip: The author of the script suggest you keep an eye on the script homepage for regular updates. I know I sure will.

* Update: It turns out, "Facebook Purity", the above mentioned blessing of a Greasemonkey script even goes as far as showing how many 'app msgs' has been blocked ! Neat, right? The blocking notification is available on the top-right corner of your FB frontpage. Here' s a screencap under my A/C:

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First of all, first thing first , from now on I'm going to discontinue my previous 'formal' attitude towards blogging . I've had it with long, arduous and boring blog posts that stresses over and over again the more 'subtle' aspects of the subject in question and experiments with English lit. The NEW ME would post short, possibly humorous posts. These so called 'short stints' would be far more casual and 'regular' ( I must stress ) than before.

Ok, onto the actual jig. The other day I was looking for a way to download "Spell of , an awesome book on the Sundarbans. After a number of nudges here and there, I was left with a few options. The first 'obvious' choice was the Google Book Downloader. Then I found out that I had to install the latest version of the .NET framework which I was somewhat allergic to. So scratch that.

Then I did what I always do when left with no other option with which to exploit/manipulate web-service like "Google Books", turn to Greasemonkey. It turns out that there's a very potent GS script out there (also ironically called Google Book Downloader ) that might help freeloaders like myself to do our bidding. Here's how you can use Greasemonkey and a compatible script to download your favourite book from Google Books :

1) Install Greasemonkey if you haven't already.

2) Install the Google Book Downloader script. Don't worry, this piece of JS-code is fang-less.

3) Browse to the book of your choice in Google Books. A "Download this Book" dialogue (shown below) will become visible. Click that fat, pale button.



4) The dowload will progress (shown below). Once done, you can now download individual pages as .png files or use the FlashGot extension to download all pages at once.




Productivity Tip: If you want to make a nice PDF file out of the image files downloaded, I recommend using doPDF which happens to be an excellent 'anything to pdf converter' and its totally free!

Phew, who knew writing 'small' can be tiresome as well :(

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Experiencing violent upsurge in the CPU usage characteristics of your PC ? Browsers, word processors and other everyday applications/softwares taking days to start up or respond ? Chances are, you haven’t unleashed a special, ‘superpower’ tucked hidden in the architecture of your hard disk drive. Its called the UDMA (* U stands for ‘ultra’, how trite, right?) mode. It should’ve been the default only option automatically selected by Windows XP during a fresh installation due to its vast superiority in direct memory access & bus speed support of over 16 Mbit/sec, but unfortunately they had to include an exception. Whenever you install a Windows OS and it decides (with great margin of error) that your ATAPI drive is not suitable for UDMA (when in actuality every HDD built after 2002 is), the OS would revert back to the ancient PIO ( Programmed Input / Output ) mode . Now, there’s nothing wrong with PIO except the fact that its slow as a slumdog trillionaire (not to be mistaken with an analogous movie title) and as mr duck puts it “Nothing built this century should be using PIO.”

Anyway, if you are experiencing mysterious cpu-hogups download and run Process Explorer, a free diagnostic tool from Microsoft SysInternals, which happens to be a much more potent tool than the windows task manager (what are the odds of that, right?…plenty). After running process-exp, look for a process called ‘hardware interrupts’ on the left hand bar of the screen. If the process is present on the 1st column and eating up a lot of memory (see the 3rd column titled ‘cpu’), then ‘presto’- thats your problem .

There are some registry hacks available on other sites that requires you to delete a few key registry entries, but my personal recommendation is that its better not to mess with the registry unless absolutely necessary . The registry is a fragile thing and can break down easily. So here’s a totally safe way to do the good deed:-

1) Go to device manager (right click on the My computer icon> Properties > Hardware.

2) Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller section ( press the + )

3) Right click on the Primary IDE channel (if you want to enable UDMA in your secondary drive too, you can repeat this process) and go to Properties > Advanced Setting

4) Now here’s the trick, regardless of what it says in the “Transfer Mode” section (even if “DMA if available” option is displayed ), you’ll have to manually reset and force XP to use UDMA. To do that, first select PIO only in the box for transfer mode for both Device 0 and Device 1. Then confirm by pressing the ok button

5) Then go back to the device manager screen again, right click on Primary IDE channel as before and go to advanced setting once again. Only this time, select “DMA if available” in both transfer mode boxes. Confirm your selection by pressing ok. You’ll see “Ultra DMA Mode 2” appearing in the current transfer mode box.

6) Restart and bask in the glory of your faster, more responsive system :)

This hack was extracted from an official Microsoft bulletin addressing the PIO/DMA issue (or as it is known in popular folklores, the “XP DMA BUG”)

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Thanks to Posterous, I can now update my blog-posts/status messages/twits/flickr-posts/tumbles and anything else with a simple email. Even raw markup used in the mail would get converted to actual HTML, posterous would also host any and I mean "ANY" media file attached with it :) Images, mp3s,videos,pdfs,documents you name it. They'll host all your files without (and I quote) "..you moving even a finger".  They also have a sweet email syntax recognition system. For example, any email sent to #{text}@posterous.com would get posted on the services with url that contains that specific text. Like #mybd@posterous.com would get posted to my Flickr account ( http://flickr.com/photos/mybd ) but not to my Facebook profile. RAD! This means I can finally compose blog posts from my mobile with custom HTML. Not that it was impossible before, just not as effortless :) 
 
 
Also in the review queue was Woopra, a new gen website analytic service. I got an exclusive beta invite couple of weeks ago and decided to check it out today. Their 'free' package is still down and undergoing updates, however what I was able to find out was that they do mean business. This is what they had to say in their FAQ section , I liked the fact that they weren't being vague about the whole 'beta-testing' fad. 
 

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Imagine a situation when your internet connection is recovering from a chronic phase, the bandwidth is still dwindling, but your boss/engineering-course demands an article on Puritanical Analysis of the Mughal Empire. Now in normal times, we would not hesitate frolicking here and there (i.e., Wikipedia) for writing materials. But remember, your internet is down, or at the very least in ‘rehab’. Now you are truly in a fix right?

What about the time you’ve come across a colloquial figure of speech and want to know if the Irish drunkard beside you called you ‘mighty’ or just cursed your entire family tree (READ: Urbandictionary), but hey you only have a mobile phone and that special page on Urbandict isn’t loading quite well. Is that frustrating or what?

Well, just Snap Ask your questions then. Snap Ask is a web service that delivers freshly baked answers to your dire questions in a jiffy. All you got to do is send them a mail at Ask@SnapAsk.com with a proper subject line. In a prompt reply-mail you’ll receive your desired answer. They’ve introduced a technique that involves putting special ‘commands’ or ‘’key word(s)’ in your mail’s subject. These commands are ‘service specific’, meaning to use a different service like Wikipedia or Urbandictionary or perhaps Google Define, you’ll have to use different command lines. The format of your subject line would be something like < command > + subject/question/query

Where the command section (without < > signs) is to be replaced by ‘wiki’ (for wikipedia) or ‘news’ (for news articles). The whole list of commands is available on the homepage.

Neat eh? Who says ‘Email’ is a dead technology? Evidently, Snap Ask can prove to quite the friend when you are down at home with heaps of homework and a sick sick internet connection.

>> Visit Snap Ask.

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