A Consuming Experience

Tuesday, 6 April 2010

How to edit webpages to print etc

To edit a webpage in your browser, e.g. if you want to delete some stray images or text before printing the page out (to save ink and paper, ever eco-friendly of course), here's a simple trick.

Go to the webpage you want to edit. Paste the following text (all the way to ""void 0") into your browser's address bar (hold down Ctrl and tap l to get there quickly), then hit Enter:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

After that, if you click the mouse pointer in the webpage, e.g. on an image, you can delete it, or click in the body and you can change or delete text etc before you print out the page, save it, take a screenshot...

You'll notice the mouse pointer becomes a four-headed double arrow if you click or hover over certain areas of the page, so you can even drag text, photos or images around.

You can also resize certain areas by clicking and dragging. Just experiment and see.

Here's an example where I mucked around with my pal Kirk's blog:

Hat tip: Quick Online Tips. (A bookmarklet is also available, see e.g. Lifehacker, but I've found it doesn't work in all browsers. Where it works, you can just click it to make the current web page editable. For beginners: what are bookmarklets/favelets and how to use them.)

In Chrome the URL shown in the address bar actually stays unchanged!

Sunday, 4 April 2010

Thunderbird & Lightning - can't dismiss reminders, again?

Previously I fixed the inability to dismiss reminders in Thunderbird (the free Thunderbird email software, which with Lightning and Provider add-ons enables me to view and update my Google Calendars within Thunderbird). That time, making sure that Read Only was UNchecked and that the Cache was UNticked in the Lightning calendar properties worked.

Recently, the problem recurred. Funnily enough it only affected my own calendars, not the Google calendars which friends hadshared with me.

This time round, unticking Read-only and enabling and disabling Cache didn't work. I spent ages trying to sort it.

Here are my tips on what worked. Basic, perhaps, but it solved the problem for me. I don't know exactly which step fixed it, but I'm sharing what I did in case it helps someone else:

In Thunderbird's Options for Lightning (menu Tools > Options > Lightning), choose the Alarms, sub-tab, UNtick everything in the first "When an alarm goes off" section (outlined in red below) and OK.
Delete the affected Google Calendars from Thunderbird (just select the calendar in the list at the left of Calendar view and hit Delete key, or rightclick it and choose Delete, see screenshot at 7 below).
Disable Provider add-on (menu Tools > Add-ons, scroll to find it and click the Disable button).
Restart Thunderbird.
Re-enable Provider (as 3 but click the Enable button).
Restart Thunderbird.
Re-add the affected Google Calendars to Thunderbird (in calendar view rightclick on the calendars, New Calendar, On the Network, choose Google Calendar and use your Google Calendar address).
Re-enable alarms (as in 1, but tick those boxes now and OK).