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With everyone complaining about laptop searches crossing the border, and an upcoming trip stateside for me, I thought I might take a look at protecting some of my own data.  It’s not that i’ve got anything to hide (unless uncle sam is interested in client management software), but I like to keep my data as mine.  While protecting all of your data is much more difficult than i’ll cover here,  protecting at least your web surfing habits is easy as pie.  Safari has a great feature called “Private Browsing” that doesn’t hold onto any cache/passwords/history from session to session in your browser.  The only problem with private browsing is that you’ve got to enable it every time you open your browser.

I did some searching but couldn’t find any info on tricking safari into defaulting to private browsing.  That’s why I took 5 minutes out, and wrote a quick applescript app to launch Safari, and instantly turn on private browsing.  It’s simple, but it works.  Give it a try!

Download Private Safari

Cheers!

I’m a bit of a sucker for any kind of puzzle I can get my hands on.  Number puzzles, rubicks cubes, sudoku, logic problems.  You name it, I like playing with it.  I hadn’t solved any sudoku for a while prior to picking up a copy of Brain Age for my Nintendo DS.  After realizing there was a host of puzzles included with the game,  I quickly made my way through them. Repeatedly.  So I decided to figure out how to generate my own.

At first, I was just generating sets of puzzles as images, and solving them whenever there was a lull in my day.  A few friends wanted to try them out, and I quickly realized that sending sets of images was less than efficient.  PDF’s looked like the answer to my problem.  So, I generated this booklet of puzzles for an inspection.  I’ve actually set up a database to collect generated puzzles, and have filled it up with over 3 Million solvable puzzles, to date.  I guess I won’t run out any time soon.

In any case, if you want to, download the booklet and give them a try.  If you print them off, they’re very large type (1 puzzle per A4 page.)  All solutions are included at the back of the booklet.  If anyone likes them, leave a comment, and I can put up a few new booklets, as they only take 3 or 4 seconds to create.

Note: I’ve realized that the puzzles might seem easy.  If you scroll through the booklet,  the puzzles get harder as you go.  After page 200, you’ll find the hardest puzzles in the book.

That’s it, download the Free Sudoku Booklet and give it a try!

Cheers!

A few days ago, I changed the theme on this site. I noticed that when I did, my stats package started reporting 0 visits a day (while I still got comments, so I knew it was inaccurate.)

For the time being, i’ve switched back to iTheme, until I can figure out the difference (might only take 5 minutes of troubleshooting, when I get a chance to do it.)

The only thing that this has any impact on is the embeded videos.  They will appear to be partially hidden until things are solved.

I started writing a twitter client yesterday to handle inline media and shortened url’s. While it’s not ready for general consumption yet, I went in and made a demo video, explaining what I was going for. Leave a comment if you’d like to give the interface a try, and you can always friend me up on twitter.

I realized today that there was no Shake function for jQuery, a function I miss from scriptaculous. I did some googling to find a plugin but didn’t find much.  I did end up finding a site that referenced a plugin named shakeit() .   My current google searches turn up nothing, but here’s a slightly modified version of the code:

jQuery.fn.Shake = function(){
     this.each(function(init){
          var jqNode = $(this);
          jqNode.css({position: 'relative'});
          for (var x = 1; x < = 3; x++){
               jqNode.animate({ left: -25 },10)
               .animate({ left: 0 },50)
               .animate({ left: 25 },10)
               .animate({ left: 0 },50);
          }
     });
return this;
}

If anyone knows who’s plugin this is, please leave a comment, so I can give them the credit they deserve.