Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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Scriptacular restlessness
If you haven’t been here for a while, you might be surprised by two things: one, that the site looks different again, and two, that I didn’t bother preserving all the comments that my posts had accumulated over the past few years.
This is not because I don’t love you, but rather because my insistence on using odd random scripts like Chyrp meant that I had to transfer my blog posts into this (WordPress-powered) system manually. That was sufficiently little fun in and of itself that moving comments did not seem worthwhile. My apologies.
Now that this site is running WordPress, though, I can do nice things like using Windows Live Writer to update, and take advantage of the vast ecosystem that surrounds the most popular blog engine. And ultimately the goal of that is to enable me to blog more often—something I’ve committed to for 2010.
Till then, please let me know if anything doesn’t look right.
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Bing, Opera Style
If you haven’t heard of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, you should try it out. It actually works surprisingly well. Unfortunately, the Opera browser does not currently include Bing in its search box, so you have to add it manually. Here’s how:
- Go to the Bing home page at bing.com. Look at the pretty picture and read the fun captions.
Then right click on the search box and select “Create search.” - In the Create Search box, you can leave the “Keyword” field blank, or assign it a letter or two to quickly perform a Bing search from the address bar.
- Click on “Details.” Tick the two check boxes that appear: “Use as default search engine” and “Use as speed dial search engine.”
- Click “OK”
And you’re set!
- Go to the Bing home page at bing.com. Look at the pretty picture and read the fun captions.
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Opera bookmarklet for tr.im
I signed up for the pretty cool URL-shortening service tr.im today, mostly because of the statistics it enables users to view about each link. (Yes, there are issues with using URL shorteners, but if you have to use them, you may as well use a good one.) To make using it more convenient, I wanted to add a button to my browser to automatically shorten a URL.
They had a convenient bookmarklet that worked in Opera, my web browser of choice, but when I added it, I realized all custom buttons get the same default icon in Opera, the “new bookmark” icon. I was already using that for my delicious bookmarklet, and I didn’t want two stars I’d get confused between in my menu bar. So I whipped up a custom button using Opera’s “Fit to width” image. The screenshot shows how it looks. If you’re using Opera and want to add it, just drag this link to a menu bar:
In Brief
My name is Arcadiy, and arcadiy.org is my website. Funny how that works.
I write about life, technology, my random side projects and whatever else strikes my fancy. I make no promises about the utility or entertainment of anything here. However, I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I mention.
In my day job I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft.
You can read (or look at) more by me in my momentstream.
- @shrutishah there is no way to make a nicer URL to your SkyDrive today. We're aware this is a common request, though! #
- Either my English competence dropped while I was in Moldova or the latest version of Office 2010 has become way more of a grammar nazi. #
- @KayteeesFL Basically everything I said in my first tweet. It's still the best option, though... just getting worse instead of better. #