Excellatronic Communications

Due to a code change on facebook, my facebook purity greasemonkey script stopped working, ive updated the script to get it working again, simply reinstall it to be quiz and application spam free once more.

Reinstall the script from here: http://bit.ly/fbpure

During the Christmas period Flickr enable an ‘Easter Egg’ on the site, allowing people to add Father Christmas hats and beards to photos by way of leaving a note on a photo with the text “Ho ho ho hat” for a hat, or “Ho ho ho beard” for a beard. The notes are resizable which lets you resize the image to fit the person in the picture. After the christmas period is over they switch this feature off.

I wrote a greasemonkey for firefox script that lets you re-enable the hats and beards adding/viewing functionality. Of course, the only people who will see the hats and beards will be the people with this script installed, except at Christmas, when and if Flickr re-enable the functionality across the site.

Installation Instructions

1) you need to be running firefox http://mozilla.org/firefox

2) you need to have the greasemonkey addon installed

3) install the script: flickr.ho.ho.ho.hats+beards.user.js

Usage

Once you’ve installed the script, you can check if the script is working by viewing one of the following images :

or

This script and all my other greasemonkey scripts for flickr are available here: http://steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/

Theres a new way to tag your photos to indicate flickr users are appearing in them.

Quite a few users have already started doing it. The way it works is to use the following “machine tag” notation, for each flickr user in the photo

“flickr:userid=[flickr-userid]”

(replacing [flickr-userid] with the userid of the person in the photo)
the userid is the thing that looks like 32463453@N00 and you can find out what a users userid is by right clicking on their buddy icon and checking the properties of the image. the userid is the bit between /buddyicons/ + .jpg in the image location.

e.g if i right click my buddy icon and check my buddy icon’s properties, the image location is farm1.static.flickr.com/7/buddyicons/36521957871@N01.jpg?1111947633#36521957871@N01

so my userid is the bit in bold i.e 36521957871@N01 now if i wanted to tag a photo of myself i would add the following tag flickr:userid=36521957871@N01 to the photo that i appear in. Or any even easier way to get a flickr user’s id is simply visit http://idgettr.com/

You can add as many user tags as there are people in the photo. of course, it sounds a bit complicated doing that for each user in the photo. luckily theres a much easier way!

Flickr User Tagging The Easy Way:
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1) Get firefox if you havent already from here: mozilla.org/firefox/
2) Install the greasemonkey extension for firefox addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/748
3) Install the following greasemonkey script: flickr.users.in.photos (Script updated 13th April 2009)

The script was originally created by jacobd, though i’ve enhanced the code a great deal, adding extra functionality. The script detects these user tags, when you are viewing photos on flickr, and adds user icons, usernames and links for each tagged user in the photo, next to the photo. It also makes adding users to photos a lot easier, by providing you with a “add user to photo” link next to each photo, where you have permission to add tags. Clicking the link brings up a select box, that lets you choose flickr users from your contacts list to add to the photo.

 Tip: If you click the select box once after it has loaded then start typing the first few letters of the user you want to add’s username, the select box will immediately jump to the user you wish to add, speeding up the user adding process.

When you click the add user to photo button after selecting a user, as well as a user tag being added, a note will also be added to the photo, so you can identify which user is which in the picture. The note contains their username, a link to their photostream, and also a link to more photos of them. This is kind of similar to how user tagging is done on facebook.

The script also adds a new item to each user on Flickr’s buddy menu: “View photos of this user” which when selected does a flickr search for photos of that user.

I made an RSS feed of the flickr:userid=* tags, which you can access here: feeds.feedburner.com/FlickrUsersInPhotos
It gets updated whenever anyone adds a photo with a flickr user in it.

You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for photos of individual flickr users, simply subscribe to the Flickr generated RSS feed for the flickr:userid=whateveruserid tag

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This script and all my other flickr gm scripts are available here: steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/

Flickr have started their own URL shortening service, specific to their own domain.

The service uses the http://flic.kr domain name. So far I have noticed that individual photo pages each have a short URL that look like so http://flic.kr/p/EKD8 at present you can find the short url for a photo by viewing the source code of the page it is on. it will looks something like this <link rev=”canonical” type=”text/html” href=”http://flic.kr/p/EKD8″ > its quite near the top of the page.

I wrote a quick bookmarklet, tested on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer that lets you quickly send the shortened version of the photos URL to the twitter messaging service.

Tweet This Flickr Photo (bookmarklet)

To install, simply click and drag the above link to your bookmarks bar, or else you can right click on the link and select ‘Bookmark This Link‘ or “Add to Favourites” depending on which browser you are using. After that if you see a photo on Flickr that you would like to tweet about, you can just click the bookmarklet and the shortened URL will be sent to your Twitter status box ready for you to add a comment to go with it.

You can also shorten  Flickr user’s photostream URLs too, this is more straightforward, you just put http://flic.kr/ + the URL alias (the bit that normally comes after /photos/ in the Flickr photostream URL)  so for example, the shortcut for my photostream would be http://flic.kr/steeev

If you want to use the shortened photo URL with another service, you can use this alternative bookmarklet, which copies the shortened URL into the search box at the top right hand of the flickr page, which you can then copy and paste into the messaging service of your choice.

Short Flickr URL (bookmarklet)

Im sure the Flickr devs will be adding methods to access the short URLs via the website and also the API at some point. Until then, i think this is a useful stop gap solution.

I found a bug in my Facebook Purity script that meant the script would fail if there were no pending requests on the users homepage. Ive fixed the bug now. If you have the script installed, i would recommend you reinstall it, you can get the script here

I cleaned out all the spam that was in this blogs moderation queue, and decided to do something about preventing it.  Since my host has disabled outgoing net connections, my akismet spam protection plugin has stopped working, so the spam queue filled up a lot.

I decided to try and find a new spam prevention plugin that doesnt need to make outgoing server calls. I tried 2 plugins, both are really good, and easy to install.

First i tried “Math Comment Spam Protection” , but for some reason it wasnt working for me, i thought it might be because it was compatible with my version of wordpress. anyway i uninstalled it.

Then I tried the reCaptcha plugin, it seems to be quite popular and features on lots of high profile sites, so thought it must be pretty good.

Heres what it looks like in action>

Its even easier to install than the math comment plugin, but alas it also didnt work for me, this time though it was due to the fact my server doesnt allow outgoing net connections, which is pretty annoying.  One good thing came out of installing it though, i noticed the options page for this plugin is separate from the plugin menu, which had been confusing me about the previous plugin.

So i reinstalled the math comment plugin, and found the options page for it, and now it looks like its working fine, so bye bye spam! h0oray! and many thanks to the plugins authors, who have done us all a huge favour!

I released a new version of my facebook purity greasemonkey script that blocks annoying application spam messages from your facebook homepage. This new version shows the number of messages that were blocked, and also lets you show the messages that have been blocked, if you are curious, and also hide them again when you have had enough.

Interestingly though facebook have also released some code changes today, that allow you to more easily block messages from specific applications. they now give you two options when you hover over the message, 1) hide messages from that user and 2) hide messages from that application. its a lot better than just being able to block messages from a specific user.

If you are like me and are sick to death of seeing messages about quiz results and other silly facebook applications, then you have come to the right place! I wrote a greasemonkey script for firefox, the script removes all the annoying quiz messages and other silly application spam from your facebook homepage. Leaving behind just the standard Facebook apps such as status updates, wall posts, links, notes, photos, etc.

Facebook Purity - Cleans the stains other powders leave behind!

In order to use the script, you must use the most excellent firefox web browser and you also need to install the also excellent greasemonkey addon.

Once you have those installed, you can then install the script  via this link:  Facebook Purity   :  

Script updated 24th June 2009 - to fix a bug. Due to a code change at facebook, the whole newsfeed was getting hidden. Simply re-install the script from the link above for the fixed version.

Script updated 27th April 2009 - script is now compatible with Google Chrome and Opera

If this script has helps you out, why not show a little love back to the author, by making a donation, big or small, anything is welcome

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Math(s) Rock(s) - The Innumerably Innumerable - [ Staircase @ The Courtauld Gallery ]

Originally uploaded by steeev
Math(s) Rock(s) - The Innumerably Innumerable - [ Staircase @ The Courtauld Gallery ]

Looks like an eye doesnt it? Its the view from below of the spiral staircase in the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House, London

The Indian mathematical text Surya Prajnapti (c. 400 BC) classifies all numbers into three sets: enumerable, innumerable, and infinite. Each of these was further subdivided into three orders:

* Enumerable: lowest, intermediate and highest
* Innumerable: nearly innumerable, truly innumerable and innumerably innumerable
* Infinite: nearly infinite, truly infinite, infinitely infinite
Quoted from the wikipedia article on infinity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity

For no other reason than i like the sound of “innumerably innumerable”

Uploaded by steeev on 20 Feb 09, 1.19AM GMT.

Well Google Chrome came out of beta today,  this is great news. Though as most win 2000 users will know by now, google chrome doesnt work on your operating system. But a clever Japanese guy known as BlackWingCat has created an installer program that lets you install it to your system relatively easily. Unfortunately the instructions on his website how to install it are all in japanese, luckily a guy named Tom managed to figure out how to install it and has provided the following instructions (found here):

0/ Download crm2k017b.zip (latest file will always be available from here) and extract all files to a directory.1/ Run Chrome2K.exe2/ Leave settings at XP and IE63/ Click “set compatible Reg” then “Set UserAgent” … this enables the 3rdbutton “Access Chrome Web site”4/ Click on 3rd button to go to Google download site, then click Download from site5/ After Google finished downloading and installing Chrome, click “Patch to …”,then click “Install User32 …”6/ Reboot without clicking the last button “Clean up”7/ When computer is up, click Start/Programs/Google Chrome/Google ChromeAnd bingo! Great work BlackWingCat + Tom! Cheers! * Update 4th April 2009 * this method of getting  Chrome to work in windows 2000 is fine, but if you then try and change to the beta version, it wont work, as black wing cat, says its not supported.  I have tried it agree that its not worth the hassle. It took ages for me to get chrome working again after that…