Insert special characters in a click

Special characters, like “¶”, or “Ω” or “≈”, are already a pain to insert in Word documents (or the like) and a super-mega pain in the a** to insert correctly into web pages, where if you’re going to be disciplined about things, you need to put in the html entity, so that the symbol will display correctly everywhere.

At least, these things were a pain until now!

I was just taking a look at Lifehacker.com, one of my favorite daily reads. They put up an article today on a new website called copypastecharacter.com. This website is, in reality, a single flash-based webpage, but little websites can sometime have big benefits for users.

Indeed the website is just a display of special characters, but the beauty is in the use. All you have to do is click on the special character that you want and Bing! (no free advertising for search engines intended) the character is on your clipboard, ready to be pasted wherever you need it.

You have the choice of copying the normal text character, but also the html entity; I think that the real beauty of the website is with this latter. In other words, website developers will find this more useful than your average Joe typing in Word.

†, ¼, ⇧, ®, § …

Easy as pie.

(EDIT: All the above symbols display correctly in Opera, Safari and Firefox, but the third from the left, an up-arrow, may not display correctly if you’re using Internet Explorer [hmmm, wonder whose fault that is...].)

www.copypastecharacter.com

What women really want

(maximize your browser window if you can’t see it all)

That made me laugh literally out loud. It also reminded me of the webpage “How not to fail at life” that made the rounds recently on Digg and Co.
Warning: foul language but mostly SFW: How not to fail at life (you might need to cancel automatic image resizing).

Well, this pretty much made my day

Or check it out directly at You tube.
Thanks Boing Boing.

When violins and Hip-Hop meet…

I Stumbled upon this just a few minutes ago, originally via Metacafé, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get their embed to work. Here’s the same video via You Tube.

Paul Dateh is the violinist and inka one is at the turntables. New music discovery for me. Maybe it will be for you too…

Turn up the volume and enjoy!

You can learn more about the artist at his website, pauldateh.com

Fun with Google Zeitgeist 2008

So, if you haven’t noticed yet, Google has published its “Google Zeitgeist” for 2008.

It’s a collection of the most popular search terms in Google for 2008 grouped under a variety of categories, thus providing an interesting look into our collective, global psyche. Often banal, sometimes funny, sometimes sad and sometimes strange, the Google Zeitgeist is definitely worth a look.

Take a look at the “Politics” section for an excellent illustration of how we use Google to get information rapidly: one day the “Sarah Palin” line is non-existent and the next, boom! it’s there (McCain names her as running mate) and sky-rockets above the other election personalities.

Then, under the “Around the World” section, I couldn’t help but notice two things. First, the amazing popularity of Facebook the world-over. And second, more interestingly, notice how often the word “Google” itself appears in many of the countries’ “Fastest rising” and “Most popular” lists (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, India, etc.)…

This means that a huge number of people in these countries are searching for “Google”, in Google.

Why?

Feel free to leave a comment for the elements of the 2008 Google Zeitgeist that you find interesting, and, well, keep on Googling!

Ciao!
2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

How to improve your blog in one easy step

Hello fellow WordPress users and thanks for stopping by!

It’s always important to keep in mind that if you’re writing a blog, it’s because you want others to read it. That means that you have to do everything you can to make your blog a pleasure for your visitors.

Here’s a fast and easy way to do just that:

Inactivate “Snap Shots” on your blog.

Snap shots are those aggravating pop-ups that appear when your visitors hover over links in your posts.

Do you see that kind of thing on the New York Times? Do you see it at Yahoo!, or at the web-site of the American Medical Association? How about on the website of the NFL? No? Well, that’s because these serious websites understand that anything that pops up, makes noise or otherwise “gets in the face” of the visitor is to be avoided like the plague.

I hope that I’m not going to get myself kicked out of the community for suggesting this, as I’m sure that the Snap Shots are a major cash cow for WordPress.com. Nevertheless, this simple modification will greatly improve the User experience for your blog, and that’s always a good thing for everybody.

Here’s how:

1. Open your Dashboard
2. Click on “Design”
3. Click on “Extras”
4. Uncheck “Enable Snap Shots on this blog”
5. Click on “Update extras”

Et voilà ! Now your blog is behaving like the big guys!

Why you still need to learn how to spell

Hey it’s Friday! How ’bout something fun and light for a change…

I’m sure most of you out there have run into some version of this and had a good chuckle. Here’s the one that I had found years ago:

A Poem Called ‘Spell Checker’

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea
Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong or write
It shows me strait a weigh
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can putt the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong
Eye have run this poem threw
I am shore your pleas two no
Its let her perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew

Here’s the story behind this little jewel at About.com:

The Spell Checker Poem

Beer shortage on the horizon

I got wind of this through an article in the local newspaper here, le Progrès.

Apparently an over-supply of hops over the past decade led many hops producers to change crops due to the resulting falling prices. In turn, the pendulum has now swung over to the other side and there is now a shortage of hops. In addition, the beer industry is suffering from other negative influences such as increasing barley prices, draught—sorry, drought—rising fuel prices and bad weather in Europe, just to name a few.

This is a serious emergency: microbreweries in Oregon, Washington and the world-over are suffering and  beer prices are increasing!

Luckily, according to le Progrès, Europe will be protected at least partially from the rising prices because of the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro. I hope that’s true, because if not…

I’m sure this is Bush’s fault as well…

Further reading:

Hops Shortage Likely to Boost Price of Beer at NPR
For drinkers of craft beer, prices may soon be hopping at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

In French
Les brasseurs s’inquiètent de la pénurie mondiale de houblon at Le Progrès

Indispensable web apps (well, maybe not “indispensable”…)

I’m often getting on the back of Downloadsquad.com for suffering from Firefox blindness, but from time to time they point you to neat things. So thanks to them for pointing us to these absolutely indispensable web-based tools:

instantrimshot.com
and
sadtrombone.com

Just push the buttons.

Web-based e-mail, photo retouching, pffff… what I’ve been needing is audio-humor support!

Can the direction of the “cascade windows” function in Microsoft be reversed?

(I originally posted this article on my other blog on October 25 2007)

I’ve already posted this to the (Opera) forums but I thought I’d go ahead and launch this bottle in the sea here as well to see if anyone out there can tell me how to do this…