Friday, 21 January 2005
Cyclists and red lights
Why oh why do many cyclists, especially in London, seem to think that the law doesn't apply to bicycles? You know the ones I mean, those who treat all traffic lights (whether green, amber or red) as signifying "If you're on a cycle - just go anyway. Oh, and don't forget to target a pedestrian while you're at it". To these people, pavements are just roads to barrel down at high speed.
I nearly got hit the other day (yet again) by a cyclist running a red light near my local Tube station. I've seen elderly people, and people steering kids in prams, narrowly miss being mown down, or having to leap back onto the kerb suddenly (risking sprained ankles or worse), to try to avoid cyclists like this.
Why don't the police protect pedestrians properly by clamping down on rogue cyclists, particularly in pedestrian-heavy areas? Instead of e.g. lying in wait to nab a car going through a red light two seconds after it changes in the middle of the night on an empty road?
I know not all cyclists are inconsiderate or cavalier about the law. But the too many who are give the rest a bad name, and pedestrians the urge to poke something between their spokes. Is it going to take a pedestrian being killed or badly hurt before laws are enforced against cyclists?
Thursday, 20 January 2005
Search addons for Internet Explorer, Firefox
I've been using a superb site, Searchy, which provides beautifully simple yet incredibly useful free search add-ons for IE - so that you can (for example) search for word1 on Google just by typing in the IE address bar "g word1", or search Amazon by typing "a word1", without having to go to those sites first. (Opera users will already be familiar with this functionality which is built into the Opera browser.) The add ons can be imported into Firefox too.
There's an excellent range of searches available on the site. Just download the plugin you want by clicking the Download button against it in the list on the site, and doubleclick the downloaded file (which is a .reg file amending your registry) to add your chosen search feature. The files are clearly entitled e.g. "Int-Movie-Database_search_with_imdb.reg" - and there you'd type "imdb" followed by the search word in your address bar to search the Internet Movie Database. I've downloaded several.
If you don't like the shortcut letter that's provided, for instance if you'd rather use "i" than "imdb", then click in the appropriate box in the Shortcut column and change the shortcut letter before clicking "Download".
Or, if you want to change the shortcut after you've downloaded the file, you can edit the downloaded file before you doubleclick it. Just rightclick the .reg file and choose Edit. Notepad should open up with the text file loaded.
Scroll across and find "please use the following shortcut: imdb" and replace the "imdb" with "i" (or whatever letter(s) you want - without the quotes of course.). And then scroll across further to where it says "[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\imdb]" and again replace the "imdb" with "i", so that it reads "[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\i]" (without the quotes). IMPORTANT: you need to replace both occurrences. Then save the file, and doubleclick it, and Roberta's your auntie!
What's more the site will even let you add your own favourite search engine just by doing a simple sample search using that search engine (it doesn't work for anything too complicated, but is fine for many sites). Click the Example button on that page to see how to do it, it's very straightforward. I've created a few ones specific to UK sites, myself.
The author also provides easy to use tools for people to replace the automatic MSN search in IE with a Google search, or to remove all add ons in one go if you decide you don't want them anymore.
For people like me who prefer the keyboard to the mouse, it's perfect - Ctrl o, and type in g and the search word, and that's my Google search sorted; much quicker even than using the Google toolbar. Fabulous.
Wednesday, 19 January 2005
How to search Blogger profiles
[Edit: I've now included a search form to do this - see the bottom of the sidebar of this blog (scroll down a bit); the Javascript code which you can add to your own template plus another usable search form is in this blog entry. Enjoy!]
The Blogger Help page says you can't yet search the profiles of fellow Blogger.com bloggers, but I discovered when tinkering with my own profile that you can do that, after a fashion.
At the moment you click on links in a profile, e.g. against an interest listed in your profile, to search for people with that interest mentioned in their profiles.
However, I've noticed the structure of the URL in the address bar for the search results page follows a certain pattern, and you can use that to search for certain words in the Interests, Movies, Musics or Books parts of Blogger profiles, even if those words don't appear in your own profile.
To do this, enter or paste this search string in your browser address bar, substituting as mentioned below:
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=vocal+music"=i" searches within the Interests section of a profile, so instead of "=i" use
=m to search within movies
=s for music
=b for booksand instead of "vocal+music", after "q=" just type in your own search words with "+" between them, and that's all.
The above example searches the Interests section of profiles for "vocal music".
Another example (I've made this one clickable for convenience): to search for profiles with the word "Shawshank" in the "Movies" section, put in the address bar:
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=m&q=shawshank
Works for me! Only thing is it doesn't show how many hits there are (but neither does the "search by clicking" method), so you may be for a long surf if you try certain popular words.
You'd be surprised how many people there are who are interested in... ahem well no, then again, maybe you wouldn't...
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