development corrupts

Temporarily staying in my brother's room / the guest bedroom, sharing with my aunt who's visiting from the US for a month. All this means that I get to use my brother's monitor in a dual-screen set up (...I should see if I can clear out space so I can do the same when I move back to my room)

It's so much better than flipping back and forth between spaces (Spaces?), which is what I was doing before, but I'm finding it tricky to adjust to how my mouse may not be in the screen that I'm looking at right now. It's very easy to lose track of my mouse or active window. The mouse issue is sort of helped by Mouse Locator, which shows a large version of my cursor when I hit some hotkeys.

The absolute best solution, taking the idea from synecdochic, would be to have eyetracking software that would move he mouse to the screen you're looking at (>_>). Since that doesn't exist, I'm playing with the idea of trying to make hotkeye that would reset the mouse to the center of the primary screen or the secondary screen, and at the same time highlight the currently active window.

Maybe something with applescript, though from experience that's going to be slow... hm

I had a very weird dream last night. Here is what I took away from it:

a set of tutorials/howtos in physical wooden block form, arranged in chronological order from which order makes sense to go through them, and then color-coded by difficulty.

I'm not sure why the tutorials were in wooden block form, except that I was making a big set of wooden drawers made of folded paper (that turned into wood)

One thing that has frustrated me about interacting with LiveJournal programmatically, is that ?format=light does not work on all pages. It's not really something that affects most users would notice, but certain (Greasemonkey) scripts would be much much easier to write if the entry/journal pages could be guaranteed to follow the same format.

Mostly I've kludged around it by working off of the archive pages, which respond to ?format=light, so I could get data consistently. I have a script which scrapes the lj-cut text, so it can be seen in the inbox which does this. murklins has done me one better, with a script which lj-cuts your inbox, like the entry text. I do not know how I ever lived without this. Lifesaver. Adore, love. Seriously.

But for other pages, it's been a process of trial and error, trying to figure out whether ?format=light is supported (tag page supports it, showing a page based on s1shortcomings). Uh. Archive pages, as mentioned above. Reply pages and entry pages, obviously, using core, I think.

Not affected by ?format=light are friends and recent entries. LJ site scheme pages, meanwhile depend on the user's site scheme, unless you append ?usescheme=blah, which I always forget to /o\

It's all possible, but it can get messy depending on what you're trying to do. Which is why I love that LJ offers a mobile view. Love <3

The gist of it is that LiveJournal offers a minimalistic view for mobile phones/browsers (I suspect screenreaders could benefit). No header graphics, less junk overall, more consistent look/feel, and most importantly if you're hijacking it for scripting, it works consistently! To trigger, you need to supply the appropriate user agent:

GM_xmlhttpRequest({
   method: "GET",
   headers: {"User-Agent":"w"},
   url: $url_here,
   onload: function(details) {
       // do something with details.responseText
   });

The important part is the useragent line. The rest is just the normal stuff you need to fetch and process a page.

I haven't used it in an actual script. And since I don't play around with LJ much anymore, I'm not sure when I will. But it is a potential solution to what has up to now been a tedious problem.

Abby, I'm making this for you (though anyone else can join in if they want). Post new script suggestions, ideas for improving current scripts, and bug reports here. Take a look at my current Greasemonkey scripts my current Greasemonkey scripts, and see if you think of anything!

(Poor man's tracker, ahaha)

I'm beginning a campaign. This shall be a sticky post until the idea is implemented, or I get tired of campaigning for it, whichever comes first.

Title
Posting via telepathy

Short, concise description of the idea
Instant journal updates just by thinking of them!

Full description of the idea
Use telepathy to post to your journal; no need to type up posts. You'll never again have to worry about losing another entry just because you couldn't make it to a computer in time.

An ordered list of benefits

• no more discrimination against slow typers


• will help those with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome


• more accessible to those with assorted disabilities


• sometimes, you think of something brilliant to post but can't remember what it was when you sit down to type it. If you could only post it the moment you think the thought, you would stop losing these brilliant ideas

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• possible discrimination against slow thinkers


• possible discrimination against visual thinkers (versus verbal thinkers). Solve it by adding a telepathic module for LJ's Scrapbook


• sometimes, certain ideas that were brilliant when you thought them up turn out not to be so when you post them. This isn't because you forgot the original phrasing or whatnot; it's because the idea wasn't actually brilliant in the first place. Certain LJ users may be forced to realize this and bruise their egos


• LJ would first have to prove the existence of telepathy


• LJ would have to develop in people the ability to post telepathically


• LJ would have to develop or buy the hardware required to catch telepathic posts. Such hardware would have to work at the speed of thought


• billions of people would realize that this is a brilliant idea, sign up for LJ, and try to post at once. Might kill the servers


• LJ would be blamed for an upsurge in stream-of-consciousness writing


• possibility of posts containing certain thoughts that users would, ah, rather not admit to


• dude, thoughtcrime

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation

• I don't know, but the idea is absolutely fab, and I'm sure that everyone will love LJ forever if you would just give us this (oh, and more userpics)

(Originally posted as a comment here. Reposting it as an entry because I need to put it somewhere where I can edit the grammar. Also, grabbed the title and short description from chasethestars).