Turn off ads on nytimes.com

Update: I clearly wasn’t looking carefully. There are plenty of ad-blocking stylesheets out there.

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Inspired by Steven Frank’s terrific shutup.css, I created a stylesheet you can install as a custom user stylesheet to turn off ads on nytimes.com. (I’m sure this has already been done, but to my surprise I couldn’t find any examples after some quick googling.) This is a first stab; stopselling.css isn’t exhaustive, but seems to cover most of the ads. (Warning: this may turn off content with matching classes and IDs on other sites as well.)

Download stopselling.css

If you’ve already installed shutup.css, you can add stopselling.css by adding the following line to shutup.css:

@import url("http://tinymachine.net/downloads/stopselling.css");

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Tweet me: @mihiraj.

For posterity: when Snow Leopard's "Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track" won't work

When I tried using Snow Leopard’s nifty new action “Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track” to work, I kept getting the following error in iTunes:

An error occurred while trying to import the file “Text to Speech”. The current encoder settings for bit rate and sample rate are not valid for this file.

Of course, there’s no indication of how to correct this problem. After some experimenting, I discovered that (for my computer at least) I needed to:

1. go to iTunes Preferences > General
2. click on the Import Settings… button
3. select “AAC Encoder” for the Import Using option
4. select “Spoken Podcast” for the Setting

After clicking OK and retrying the “Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track” function, it worked beautifully.

For posterity: when Illustrator's eyedropper tool won't sample (pick up) colors from placed photos or raster images

I thought Adobe Illustrator CS4’s eyedropper tool was broken (or actually had less functionality than CS3) when it wouldn’t pick up colors from placed raster images (screenshots, in my case), but it turns out an odd setting just needed to be switched:

Double-click the eyedropper tool in the tool palette and un-check “Appearance” in both sets of checkboxes.

This took me way to long to figure out, and I have no idea what it means or why it works. Searching Adobe’s forums was fruitless and nothing quickly matched my Google searches, so hopefully this post will benefit a fellow confused soul at some point.

Selectively turn off Textile

While writing the previous post I discovered that Textile chokes on bookmarklet URLs. It turns out there’s a way to selectively turn off Textile processing: simply add 'notextile. ' (making sure to include the dot and the space at the end) before the content you don’t want Textile to format. Handy.

Set 'precomposed' custom Web Clip icons for your iPhone

Update: Google recently updated the iPhone version of Voice, and they’ve now included a Web Clip icon, so this workaround is now moot. / 5 Feb 2010

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Last year, Cameron Kenley Hunt (of Birdhouse fame) posted a handy little bookmarklet that lets you set a custom iPhone Web Clip icon for any website (if you don’t like a site’s icon or if the site doesn’t have one). (Cameron’s bookmarklet was based, in turn, on Drew McLellan’s.)

Cameron’s works great, but it doesn’t have an option for “precomposed” Web Clip icons that don’t need the iPhone’s standard glossy icon treatment. Google’s icons, for example, don’t use the gloss, so I didn’t want my custom Google Voice Web Clip icon to have it either. I made a really minor tweak to Cameron’s bookmarklet so that it would use the precomposed option, and all is well in the universe.

In case you’re as anal discriminating about your Web Clip icons as I am, here’s that slightly modified bookmarklet:

'Precomposed' Friendly Clip.

And in case you use Google Voice from your iPhone too, here’s the URL for the icon: http://d.tinymachine.net/wcgvoice.png

Thanks to Cameron (and Drew) for the handy bookmarklet.

It's not you, it's me.

My dad emailed me recently to ask if I could help him sign up for a frequent flyer program online. He’s pretty web-savvy, but he wasn’t able to complete the registration, blaming himself for a lack of computer knowledge.

This is madness! It’s not my dad’s fault he couldn’t fill out the form; it’s the airline’s! Yet somehow we’ve created a culture where users blame themselves for the poor usability of products and websites. This must change.

Relatively speaking, I think we’re still in a nascent stage of computing, where people are often led to think that if they have a problem with a computer, it’s their own fault/ignorance/etc. But really, it’s a little like ‘do-it-yourself’ technology right now. It’s as if, in order to drive a car, we’re expected to know how to adjust a timing belt. But we shouldn’t have to worry about adjusting the timing belt — we just want to drive!

When cars break down unexpectedly, people blame the mechanics and carmakers, and (generally) rightfully so. They should do the same when software or a website fails them. The onus is on us, the technologists, not on them.