With or Without UIDs

Here are the slides from my talk at XTech 2008 in Dublin this morning.

Hopefully they'll make a bit of sense without the accompanying explanation.

Download as PDF

I'm Feeling Unlucky

A stupid Greasemonkey script that introduces random spelling errors into Google searches (only works on the search form at google.com): install.

Meta Latest

Quickly view the latest tweets, photos, blog posts and bookmarks for any keyword/tag: Meta Latest.

Uses Tweetscan API, Google AJAX Search API and Yahoo! Pipes.

Dealing with corrupt preference files on OS X

Due to running out of disk space, plus a forced shutdown, I ended up with a corrupted keychain and quite a few corrupted plist preference files in OS X; the applications would mostly delete them and create new ones, but it was causing problems. Luckily I had recent backups, while a couple of useful applications came to the rescue for making sure everything was fixed:

• Applejack, which automatically runs all the disk checking, permission repairing and cache cleaning operations from Single User Mode so you don't have to boot from a DVD.
  
• Preferential Treatment, because Applejack can't detect corrupted preference files inside a FileVault image, so you need to use this to detect them while logged in.
  

RecipeBook

RecipeBook is an experiment in social bookmarking that I put together recently. It's designed for bookmarking one specific type of object: recipes.

It's not finished yet, but here's what you can do so far:

1. Create an account and sign in.
   
2. Drag the bookmarklet found at the bottom of the front page to your browser's toolbar.
   
3. Find a recipe that you like somewhere else on the web and run the bookmarklet to bookmark it. Add tags and any notes for yourself.
   
4. Once you've saved the recipe, switch to the edit tab and scroll down to the imported HTML section. Click on elements that you want to keep, alt-click to remove elements. When you've selected all the important elements of the recipe, press Save and those elements will be picked out and displayed alongside your bookmark.
   
5. While you're cooking the recipe, take some photos and/or videos and upload them to Flickr, adding them to a new set. Back in RecipeBook, attach the address of that set to the recipe.
   

Here's an example (the photos are unrelated, couldn't find a pancakes set yet).