Del.icio.us private bookmarks feed
This ugly little duckling will output a feed of your del.icio.us bookmarks, including those that aren’t shared. As far as I can gather, there’s not a way of get such a feed from del.icio.us itself without logging in first.
13. February 2008More stuff in: code
Ligerator
I’ve put the Ligerator online. It’s a simple web-based tool which lets you easily generate a Microsoft Word macro to do a bunch of text replacements.
My main reason for developing it was to maintain scripts for typographic ligature replacement, for example to transform:
into:
Once you’ve set it up, you can bookmark a magic URL which allows you to return to the preset, make some changes and re-generate a new macro, or share it with someone else.
The code generated should be portable across Word versions and platforms, however I’ve only tested on Word 2007 running on Windows.
p.s., if you don’t see the difference in the two samples above, Ligerator is clearly not for you.
28. December 2007DateCalc
It’s a simple little program that will tell you the time period between two dates.
Download bare executable (147KB)
No installation required, just save and run or open directly.
Doesn’t run? DateCalc requires .NET Framework 2.0
(or x64).
Usage
Just select the two dates, or paste in dates into below the calendars. Select a unit from the drop-down menu.
More stuff in: code
CWM 2.2
This minor update to Clint’s Wallpaper Master has one new feature, ‘crop to fit’ aka pan’n’scan. This came about because my SLR camera produces photographs with a slightly different aspect ratio to my monitor. When I was viewing images fitted to screen, there’d always be a band of empty space above and below the image – kind of like when you view a widescreen film on a non-widescreen screen. The bug which caused the image info window to not display near the notification icon (say, if you had your task bar at the top of the screen) has been fixed too.
Crop to fit
When enabled, CWM will crop images slightly if doing so will mean the monitor can be completely filled. You can also set a threshold so images that are wildly different from your monitor (like an ultra-wide panorama) aren’t cropped at all – otherwise a large part of the image will be cropped in an effort to make it fill your screen.
Note that CWM will only do this for images that are being displayed with the ‘fitted’ orientation. For best results with displaying digital photos as backgrounds, put CWM on automatic orientation, and turn cropped on.
For an overview of the difference it makes, here’s an image shown using CWM’s fitted mode. This means the image aspect ratio is maintained and it is scaled to fit the screen. Because of the ratio difference with the monitor, bands appear at the top and bottom.
Now, if cropping is turned on, the image will completely fill the desktop, at the expense of losing some of the picture on the left and right. In most cases you’ll never miss it, but it makes your wallpaper look oh-so better:
Another way of filling the screen completely is to use ‘natural size’ mode with images larger than the size of the screen. But this will tend to look bad because you’ll only see the top left hand corner of an image:
So there you have it. Turn on cropping to get images filling the screen, yet still looking great.
17. February 2007