mrblack.co.uk weblog

The Opera browser became ad-free for free for today only, grab it while you can. So as I had it installed anyway, and actually quite like the speed of things I’m going try and use for the whole week and see if I stick to it rather than my trusty Firefox install.

So far I love the Sessions feature and it is noticeably quicker at rendering pages compared to Firefox and, I assume, IE (who uses that anymore?). It’s also very smooth at scrolling especially over pages with loads of images, something that tended to stutter in Firefox. Anyhow Ill report on it in a week’s time.

I have finally set up a section of my site which shows how many times I play each artist. I wasn’t happy with other solutions so I built my own based on the NowPlaying iTunes plug-in and a whole load of scripty goodness. It can be found here and is linked to below the currently playing album art to the right of this post. (for those reading the RSS/Atom feed).

This photo was emailed to me from somebody in Ireland using an 02 phone. I have no idea who sent it, I don’t know anybody in Ireland. Its nice to have though, looks like some football game.

The geek world is a buzz with rumours that Apple iTunes will soon sell music videos. To be honest I don’t think I would pay for them, but hey, perhaps soon we will be able to download legal films via it. However a cool feature of iTunes is being able to subscribe to not only audio podcasts, but also video podcasts. There are not too many at the moment but offer a cool way to keep up to date on your latest downloadble tv programs. Pictured is the Diggnation video cast, which is a nice little weekly round up of tech news and beer review.

My first year at university was an amazing time. I met some really wonderful people who will always mean the world to me. Recently for my birthday (which went by smoothly) Rachel gave me the Repair book from our block in the first year.

This book was a way for students to communicate with the people who repair everyday building faults, such as lights, fridges, doors etc. We did just that, there is lots about hot water and number 23s Door, however, from time to time we went a bit mad and added problems such as that of Tim who used to play Maria Carey, or that of time warps appearing above the TV. It made me smile when I reread it. So as promised here is the book in its entirety, via a flickr photoset.

This is great news, you can send a email containing a photo directly to flickr from an O2 phone. This means that my previous work should become redundant. However flickr still doesn’t support the attached text message that you may slap with your photo. In my script I have implemented this, and here is how.

Essentially this is what needs to be done.

1) Use wget as before to grab
http://139.2.165.14/mms2legacy/showMessage2.do?encMmsId= ID NUMBER
2) Run through the downloaded page and look for the line containing the string ‘div style=”color: #000000;” ‘
3) When you get to that line, the next line will be blank, skip through to next line.
4) you are now on the line with the text message on, copy that to a variable.
5) remove the tabs and spaces from before the message text

Now you have the message attached to the photo. I would just add this to the email text, flickr would add this to the photo description. Here is a link to the code I used to extract the message written in php. Sorry for the shitness in code, but it works. I hope this is of use to somebody.