<Angered Brackets />

Riding my bicycle for over an hour a day as I make my way to work and back and around the city, I've often felt the need for a GPS. At other times, I would want a speedometer, so I'd have some idea at what speed I'm taking that slope.
In this post, I'll show you how to safely attach your cell phone to your handlebar for less than $5.
continue reading »

XKCD, for those of you who don’t know, is a webcomic about (as it testifies of itself) romance, sarcasm, math, and language. In my opinion, it’s the best webcomic out there. I wanted to download the complete comics archive, for the sake of a local backup, and as an idea for a printed, coffee-table style book. However, I didn’t want just the comic’s image file – the best part of XKCD is often the alt-text that shows up as a tooltip when you mouse-over the comic. And of course there’s the comic’s title, as well.

There are several scripts out there that others have written before me that download the comic, and some even do a pretty good job of getting some of the extra data. However, I wanted more. I wanted a downloader that would get ALL the data available about the comics, and store it in an easily-retrievable, transformative manner. continue reading »

This post will only be relevant to readers of right-to-left languages, and to developers who develop for such languages. As such, my next post will be a translation of this one into Hebrew.
A bit over a year ago, a friend of mine wrote about embedded unicode right-to-left and left-to-right characters in a flow of text. In a nutshell, when writing text that contains both LTR characters (like English) and RTL characters (like Hebrew), the flow of the text can wind up messed up. Here’s an example:

The (proper) solution to this conundrum is this: wrap your text, which you want flowing in the opposite direction from it’s encapsulating element, in the unicode characters for left-to-right embedding (or right-to-left embedding), and the Pop Directional Formatting character. For further reading, go here.

Back when Liron wrote that post of his, I thought it would be a nice little project to tackle – write a Firefox plugin or Greasemonkey user-script that allows you to encapsulate your text in these characters, for the sake of all those who will follow and read it. I have since then become familiar – and very fond of – bookmarklets. I think a bookmarklet is the best way to distribute the solution to this problem, because it’s lightweight, easy to install and modify, and (at least in theory) cross browser. continue reading »