A 3 minute phone call, a €300 saving!
A brief departure from the usual tech-orientated posts around here... Recently my car insurance came up for renewal. As my insurance last year was with Quinn Direct, I received a renewal quote from them automatically in the post.
In 2010 I paid a little over €600 for a year's cover. The renewal quote came through - the same policy for 2011 would cost me €950. Bit of a difference! The jump in the price was enough for me to look a little bit closer at what other quotes were available - in the end a 3 minute phone call ended up saving me over €300!
Geeks on the run
A slight change of pace from the usual tech-based posts around here, but it's for a pretty worthy cause.
Ciaran, Diego and I work in the tech side of Distilled Media, helping make sites like daft.ie, boards.ie and adverts.ie tick.
Recently the three of us had a collective fit of madness - we decided to get out from behind our computer screens, leave our sedentary lives behind and enroll to run the Dublin Half Marathon.
We've decided that in running the half marathon that we'd like to try and raise money for the Mark Pollock Trust, which is where you hopefully come in...
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich
In the film Being John Malkovich, John Cusack plays a puppeteer who finds a portal to inside John Malkovich's head. Eventually John Malkovich himself goes through this portal, and the ensuing paradox means that every word he hears is "Malkovich", and every face he sees is his own.
Re-watching this film lately gave me an idea for the latest trivial entry in my ongoing bookmarklets collection, where every image on a website is changed to show the same one. So read below the jump to find out how to Malkovich a website - or customise the effect to use an image of your choosing!
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Saved by mystery anti-virus! Wait, what..
Browsing the web recently the above screen popped up.
Programmatically Detecting AdBlock Plus
One issue that comes up time and again when working on classified sites such as Daft.ie and Adverts.ie is the inadvertent blocking of site functionality by the AdBlock Plus extension. As so many parts of classified sites will logically have phrases like "ad" in the url, legitimate site content and features can be blocked inadvertently under the mistaken assumption that they're banner ads or the like.
So is there a way to detect whether a user has AdBlock Plus installed and change the output accordingly?
Extending Twitter – adding Imgur previews
Enabling Imgur preview in Twitter
Update 08/12/2010 - There's now a Firefox Extension in the Add-Ons sandbox available for adding this media preview to Twitter, as well as previews for Daft.ie and Adverts.ie ads.
With their recent site redesign, Twitter added a number of interesting new features. One of the more useful of these is the media preview. From the Twitter blog:
Media. Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, deviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.
This is definitely one of the more useful features of the new Twitter web interface, and covers most of the more mainstream media sources that I'd notice showing up in my timeline. That said, there are some notable omissions..
But how will the markets react?
Over the last few weeks, as Ireland has continued a head-long dive in to a financial abyss, it seems that every policy proposal, every political criticism and even every newspaper editorial has met the default response of "how will the markets react?"
Analytics eccentricities
Back around the start of March, I noticed that pretty much every time I logged in to Google Analytics I was running in to problems with the summary views.
The dashboard would typically load up my list of sites, then freeze without actually fetching any data. Refreshing the page would usually sort this out, before the same thing happened again when I click in to a site's individual profile.
Still loading..
A Grab Bag of Bookmarklets
A (semi-) frequently updated list of simple bookmarklets I've found somewhat useful. Some of the more complex ones for use on twitter.com (Custom filtering of the timeline and Hovercard removal) are discussed in more detail elsewhere on the site. The below are a collection of short and sweet bookmarklets that do a simple but effective job.
Bookmarklets – a quick explanation!
I've been tinkering quite a bit lately with improving the twitter web interface with the use of bookmarklets. I've put together a series of bookmarklets which allow you to do everything from apply custom filters to your twitter timeline, to removing the "Hovercards" which Twitter have recently added.
Most of the feedback I've received both in the comments here and on twitter has been very positive, but I've also heard from a few folk who have had difficulty actually saving the bookmarklets and getting them to work.
Admittedly, the posts on the bookmarklets did assume a certain level of technical know-how, so this post is intended as a quick intro for those who want to use the bookmarklets, but aren't quite sure where to start.