Ramblings

It seems I never posted this userjs publicly before. After using it for a while I can't live without it. It's excellent for dragging around big images without having to reach for the scrollbars, and also for pages.

To drag images around simply click, hold and drag. To drag around pages, either get hold of an image and drag that or use shift+click, hold and drag somewhere in the page that is not normally clickable.

I guess for you people surfing with the Wii, this behaviour is familiar.

Download it here: http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/userjs/dragscroll.js

A video of the userjs in use can be seen here: <video src="http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/userjs/dragscroll.ogg">http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/userjs/dragscroll.ogg</video>

Note: the video is a bit sketchy as the movement and click events didn't work 100% when capturing the desktop.

Right across the street of the Opera offices in Oslo, there is some construction going on. Actually new buildings have been popping up everywhere around Opera lately, which is nice. The problem with this particular project coined Waldemars Hage 2 is that they are doing sheet piling with 10-20 metres long sheets sticking them into the ground using a giant vibrating hammer, each sheet takes probably 10 minutes to put down, and the noise made is extremely loud.

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Actually wanting to add this feature for a long while, but it wasn't until today when I noticed someone wanted the feature that I decided to make a User Javascript to be able to pan any web page with the mouse. The following User Javascript allows you to click, hold and drag a web page around in the same way you are used to move a map around, just remember to hold the shift key when dragging. This so that regular text selection and drag-n-dropping of images and pages doesnt break.

Update: You can scroll in big images without modifier key, and the scrolling should time out if you havppen to release the button outside of the browser.

Update2: Script now only allows to use the left mouse button. Hold down shift to drag pages, and shift not needed when dragging an image alone. Only images without tags surrounding can be used to move page.

Download Drag Scroll User Javascript

So, just had a new dig at using user stylesheets right here on MyOpera. I noticed after selecting a different theme that the tags didn't stand out from the text really well, so I decided to paint them green.

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I use earphones a lot, although mostly indoors, I normally try to spare people around me from music or other noise. It's not uncommon that I stay up quite late so it's been ages since I first got hold of some earphones to listen to music late at night instead of keeping neighbours awake.

Anyway, I've been able to break quite a few over the years, everything from breaking handles, bars, arcs etc. to wearing off cables, or plugs.

This time I decided I didn't want to give up easily on a pair whom which the cable between the the left and right part was teared off. After some fiddling around with it, I manged to get some sound from both sides if the cable was held in a special way. (It had a small rift on it.) However it wasn't really logic which position it needed to be to have contact.

So, I put on some bright light and got an extra pair of glasses in front of me as I bluntly cut the cable and prepared to remove the insulation to twist the conductors together and put some insulation tape over it. That always work. I thought. It turns out, the cable had two apparent conductors, with two different colors, but since they were adjaceant, they had to have the actual conductor inside them.

Of course, there wasn't anything inside, just the bunch of tiny colored cables and some white featherish thread in the middle. Check the picture. Anyway, after some thought and searching the net I realised each of the small individual colored cables were conductors. A suggestion was to scrape off the colored insulation, but that was easier said than done. Someone mentioned how the heat of the solder iron weared off the insulation and I tried out a lighter. I wired the conductors together, put on some music and melted the insulation from the "knots" till I got contact. Voila, working earphones (It's 3:37 AM here, so excuse me if this is obvious to you, I'm happy at least )