Look away now if you don’t want to know how this magic trick is done! When you press play you’ll never be able to go back to the sweet innocence and blissful ignorance of the entertained audience!
Oh dear, you pressed play didn’t you? Ruined it for you didn’t you? Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
This was one of those things that bugged me for ages but because I wasn’t sure of the terminology I could never find an answer for it. How do I edit a cell in Openoffice without doing either of the following?
The answer is quite simple, and it’s probably in some FAQ somewhere but each time I had a want to find it, I would have been up to my eyeballs in receipts working on my VAT return. Luckily, Lifehacker linked to this Excel keystrokes post which has a couple of magic key combos but look in the comments for the real meat.
How do I edit a cell in my spreadsheet? Hit F2.
F2 F2 F2 F2
Hit the F2 key to edit a cell. When I first discovered this keystroke, it was like the clouds parted and the light of God beamed down on my keyboard. Give it a shot right now if you haven’t used the F2 key before. (Hint: it will allow you to edit the data in the selected cell)
Remember Fifty Percent Grey? I briefly mentioned it a couple of years back, little knowing that it’s creator, Ruairi Robinson, would be nominated for an Oscar for his work on that short film.
Ruairi’s back, and thanks to Ruairi Roddy I found out about his new production. This time it’s a very cool short film called “The Silent City”. Ruairi (Roddy) likens it to Starship Troopers but I think it’s more evil than that, maybe not as blood thirsty, but I’d love to see what happens after the film ends. Who or what answers the call for help?
I wrote/directed/edited/storyboard this and did 95% of the visual effects myself. The film stars Don Wycherley (Batchelors Walk), Cillian Murphy (28Days/Later/Sunshine/Batman Begins/Breakfast on Pluto) and Garvan Mcgrath.
This is the film that finally got me an agent in Hollywood, where an Oscar nomination failed, and hopefully might help me secure one of those “career” things I keep hearing people talking about. I’ve had many many feature film scripts sent to me in the last couple of months from big fancy hollywood studios, which is utterly fantastic (but would be nice to be able to pay my goddamn rent in the meantime, before I get ahead of myself) so a big thanks to me in the past for finishing the film. I couldn’t have done it without past me. Future me, you better not fucking fail present me in my hour of need. Kudos to Nick Ryan too, for producing the thing for me. And the cast/rest of crew of course. I owe a lot of favours that I hope to *actually* repay some day.
Perl is complicated enough as there are a half dozen ways of doing any one operation, but what if you used Microsoft Vista’s speech recognition to type? I was only watching and wanted to stop the movie after 32 seconds, I don’t know how he kept going for 10 minutes! I dare you to watch this and not laugh! I wonder how well Vim would work? (via Richard)
PS. Richard increased the Linux userbase by 1 by converting one of his coworkers using the Ubuntu live CD. I used that CD last week and it’s really impressive. A bit strange when the live desktop appears, but the Install icon makes things obvious. Grab the latest Ubuntu live CD and give it a whirl if you’ve never used Linux. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Everybody and anybody who has an illness, a pain in the leg, a hurt somewhere, will use Google to find out what ails them. There is an inherent danger in that, but if you use a search engine that way, and believe the first result, then good luck to you, The Darwin Awards may need another category.
The rest of us go to the doctor, the dentist, or whatever health professional is appropriate. What if your company health plan depended on using Google to diagnose? That’s what Catbert, the evil director of Human Resources did today in this Dilbert cartoon. Arc Welder anyone?
If by chance you do suffer a tooth ache, then a Google Search could pay dividends, at least for short term relief. My toothache post has been insanely popular for a couple of years now and a few people have learned something about dealing with the pain. I found that swishing Vodka around in my mouth helped a lot. It says it on the Internet, it must be true!
I wonder what Britney Spears Googled that told her to shave her hair off? Poor girl.
While everyone seems to be running to the new kid on the block, Google Reader, I stuck with Bloglines because I prefer the old-style interface and the sorting options over the new fangled web 2.0ish Google upstart.
At the same time, I’ve lusted after some of the new features of Google Reader but Bloglines have been busy with a new feature I quite like called the Image Wall. The wall is basically a collection of images grabbed from the latest posts that Bloglines sees. The wall refreshes continuously bringing in new content as you’re watching. Clicking on an image leads to the Bloglines preview of that post where you can then click through to the actual post.
It’s not perfect. The images don’t always fade in correctly, sometimes stuttering or suddenly appearing or changing for some reason. That’s only a minor problem compared to the big one. When you hover an image, a popup appears with a large verson of that image, and allows you to mark offensive images. Unfortunately to get to an image in the middle of the wall you have to move your cursor over other images, thus suffering more popups. If you haven’t tried it, image what it would be like to mouse over a Snap Preview powered page full of closely formatted links. Ugh.
Besides that problem I really like the idea. I found a blog with an hour’s worth of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody remakes yesterday because they included a screen grab from that song’s video. Unfortunately my browser crashed shortly afterwards so I can’t share it with you. I can see you’re disappointed.
Just in case you’re worried about such things, you have to click through the following disclaimer each time you activate the wall.
The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content.
You do read the small print don’t you? Don’t go complaining that you weren’t warned!
Edit: Looks like Bloglines have listened to the complaints and have responded.
Effective today, Bloglines will move the Image Wall to its own, new domain at http://www.bloglinesimagewall.com. Now, any school, library, parent/guardian or third party filtering service can add this full domain to their list of restricted domains to be blocked.
Has anyone else noticed an increase of spam comments on Flickr lately? I noticed my first spam comment there only last week, complained about it, and the comment and user were both deleted shortly afterwards. I thought nothing more of it.
This morning I got an unwelcome shock when I checked my Flickr comments through Bloglines. More spam comments. There’s a screenshot below. When I clicked through to the photos in question both comments had been deleted but later on another spam comment appeared and I now suspect any comment left by users with usernames starting with “a” with a mixture of upper and lower case characters and digits. Maybe it’s time they invested in an Akismet license for Flickr.com? Thanks Lloyd for the reminder!
The latest issue of .Net magazine has an interview with WordPress developer, all round nice guy, oh, and my boss, Matt Mullenweg (the cheque’s in the post, right?)
It’s a shame they didn’t put the interview on their website but I’ll upload some thumbnail photos of the interview later.
Gomaith is an online cartoon in Irish that is yet in it’s infancy but promises to provide, “an irreverent look at the world from the high stool.”
Not all the cartoons are funny but there are a few nuggets of gold in there. Oh, and there’s an English translation too, so don’t be afraid to click the link! (via)
Michele blogged about a new simple and easy to use Adsense earnings graphing tool this morning that generates nice graphs.
Besides graphing the average earnings per day it also displays two moving averages which are useful as another indicator of growth. Finally, the gold line is a trend line for the future based on the data submitted.
Before you try it, read the blog post with a more detailed explanation and instructions, then give it a whirl for yourself.
What I would love to see are width and height parameters so I could resize the graph before it’s generated. Resizing afterwards antialiases the text and makes it difficult to read.
Yes, as you can see from the graph, December was a good month.