Al’s Blog

Mozilla has launched an interesting labs add-on for Firefox called Ubiquity. It’s a productivity tool for passionate users, as the Scobleizer writes “It’s not for non-passionate Internet users. They won’t get it.“.
Download it, read the tutorial, have a play, extend it, and increase your productivity :o)
UPDATE 8/Sep/2008: I’ve creaed a ubiquity command for my Pub [...]

I’ve written a script to parse the London Underground real-time tube status page and convert it into an Xml feed. It caches the output from TfL for 1 minute. If their page structure changes i’ll endeavour to update my parser.
You can get the feed as Xml or HTML. I’ve also started the ball rolling with [...]

I’ve had a few occasions to print out a website exactly as the browser is displaying it. Usually it involves a screen grab, scroll down, screen grab, scroll down etc. and then stitching the images back together. I’ve now found a much simpler solution - ScreenGrab:
Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy [...]

iSquint - Mac OS X only, converts and imports movies you have which aren’t in .MOV format into iTunes. This means you can use Front Row to watch them. Takes about 15 minutes for a 75 minute movie. Fingers crossed it also means I’ll be able to use Apple TV to watch them over the [...]

I’ve spent a short while today upgrading my Pub Finder to use the Google Maps 2.0 API. I’ve also added indexes onto the data set to improve the speed.
Finding any one of the 5,149 pubs now in the database is now even quicker so there’s no excuse to drink in a dodgy pub.

I’ve got my Google Maps / Beer In The Evening mashup working again. Seems I completely missed the Google Maps API V2 changes which broke the layout and the ‘link to this pub’ links. Unfortunately I still can’t get my CSS to expand the map to the available screen size so if anyone has any [...]

My site has been featured on Times Online -
Google spawns travel map mash-ups - Online Travel - Times Online
Bring on the referrals!

Okay, so this is going to sound like an advert, but it’s a neat idea so I thought i’d blog about it. Cahoot have a facility for their customers to automatically generate a unique set of single-use credit card details associated to you.
It’s called the Webcard and the idea is that everytime you want to [...]

Announcing my first Google maps mashup - my Pub Finder. It integrates content from the great www.BeerInTheEvening.com site with maps, and then gives variably coloured icons denoting the rating of the pub.
To use it: move the map to an area you’d like to visit. If no pubs appear, then enter the placename of where you [...]

Tired of sitting through automated menus when you call companies? Some enterprising fellows have setup the gethuman website which will tell you the ‘cheats’ to get through to a live person. UK listings here