Posts tagged with “how to”
How to securely connect to BT OpenZone using VPN without installing the Cisco VPN software, on a Mac
Well, I figured it out, so I thought I’d post it. More after the fold.
How to remove "+1" icons from Google search results
Having apparently abandoned former principles of simplicity and unintrusiveness, Google now punishes account holders by sticking coloured icons next to every Google search result and, worse, animating them on a mouse-over of the result. Obnoxious! There currently seems to be no setting to remove these that I could find, but I figured a way to use AdBlock to hide them away.
Registering to vote as an overseas US citizen
I’ve recently been pursuing the possibility of voting in the upcoming US presidential election, since I am a US citizen. The trickiness is that I have never lived in the US but am a citizen by virtue of my parent who was born there.
The UOCAVA protects absentee voting rights of some citizens overseas, including those who have never lived there.
Here’s where I’ve been looking; perhaps it will help you if you’re also considering voting absentee.
Mail link to current Safari page in Mac OS 10.8 with a keyboard shortcut
In Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple removed the Email link to this page option in Safari, replacing it with Share > Email this page, which places the entire contents of the page into the email, images and all.
Sometimes this isn’t what you want, though. Sometimes just a link is best.
I’ve written a short AppleScript to perform the old “just a link” function, and will explain how to make it run from within Safari using a customisable key command.
A quick javascript hack to fake adjusting HTML5 audio elements' timeupdate event frequency
I was trying to make a bunch of elements change position as an audio file played, using a snippet something like:
$(audiohtml).bind("timeupdate", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("play", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("pause", onAudioUpdate);
function onAudioUpdate() {
// Move the elements here
}
But the trouble was that the audio element’s timeupdate event only fires once every 200ms or so on my browser (this is set by the HTML5 audio specification and isn’t modifiable as far as I know).
A javascript hack to have Spry CollapsiblePanels remember their state
Adobe Dreamweaver uses the Spry CollapsiblePanel plugin to create boxes that expand and collapse when a heading is clicked.
The following code allows the open/close state of the panels on a page to be remembered when the page is reloaded, or when history is accessed. It can also be used to share the open/close state between many pages containing the same panels.
Embedding a Bibtex publication list in a website with PHP
Now that I have a more professional website, I wanted to include on it a list of publications. It took me a while to figure out a “good” way to do this, and many things I tried didn’t work, so here’s the solution I eventually settled on.
Maybe it can help you too!
Hazel rule to delete ResearchGate pdf cover pages
I download a load of academic papers in as PDFs from ResearchGate, since that’s often the only place a free version of a paper is available. Unfortunately, ResearchGate prepend downloaded PDFs with a branded cover page, which I obviously don’t want.
On MacOS, it’s easy enough to manually delete pages from a PDF using Preview. But with a bit of help from Hazel, it’s possible to automate it.
How to link to a specific scene in a Hype document
If you’ve made a multi-scene Hype document which is hosted online as a web page, you can link directly to a named scene in that document using this handy script:
How to fix the "1.5l issue" on a Morphy Richards 131004 hot water dispenser
In this very long post, I describe my process of repairing a kitchen appliance.
I explain in excessive narrative detail (a) to provide an amateur how-to guide for someone else who might have the exact same issue with this exact same model and (b) to generally encourage people: try and fix your broken stuff! It can sometimes actually be done, and you really don’t need to be an expert or even particularly skilled! To be real for a second: if in a few decades we want to be living in a world where we can have things like kitchen hot water dispensers ordered from the internet, we’re going to have to get comfortable fixing them now because as I’ve said previously, extractive growth capitalism in 2022’s current form is simply incompatible with that future. But we can probably still have nice things if we make them to last, make them repairable (ideally user-repairable), and make them sustainably.
I’m not an expert, so probably did this repair in an unnecessarily difficult and painful way. But the important thing is, that doesn’t matter! My intended audience for this is someone who maybe has never attempted to repair anything electrical before, beyond perhaps changing a fuse.