What I wanted was a button I could click that would copy the current URL and put it in one of Twitter’s handy-dandy popup windows. Getting it in a popup window was key, as the omnibox solutions which allow you to tweet from the browser bar don’t offer a running word count, and with the parsimonious nature of tweets and myself always pushing the limit I like to know just where I’m at so I can prune accordingly. So, enter Twitter’s share bookmarklet. Or so I thought. The one problem with the bookmarklet is that it spawned an empty popup, carrying over none of the current page info with it. So I tweaked it a bit and figure it’s worth sharing if someone else is looking for a similar experience.

Here’s the javascript code. You can paste this into the URL field of any bookmark and it will generate a Twitter popup and populate it with the current URL and — if the page supports it — sometimes the page title comes along for the ride. The ‘?url=’ + window.location.href’ is what I added for those who’re wondering.
javascript:(function(){window.twttr=window.twttr||{};var D=550,A=450,C=screen.height,B=screen.width,H=Math.round((B/2)-(D/2)),G=0,F=document,E;if(C>A){G=Math.round((C/2)-(A/2))}window.twttr.shareWin=window.open('http://twitter.com/share?url=' + window.location.href,'','left='+H+', top='+G+',width='+D+',height='+A+',personalbar=0,toolbar=0,scrollbars=1,resizable=1'); E=F.createElement('script'); E.src='http://platform.twitter.com/bookmarklets/share.js?v=1'; F.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(E)}());
Hope this makes Twitter a bit more useful for you, as it has me…

He created a “uterus” from a football bladder by punching a couple of holes in it, and filling it with goat’s blood.

via BBC News – The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary.

Auto insurers, which collect more than $200 billion in premiums each year in the United States, would initially see profits rise as accidents declined and payments to customers dropped but would eventually see something like 90 percent of premiums disappear. Health insurers would also have to give up revenue as car-related injuries plummeted. Governments would lose fines, because cars would obey all traffic laws, but police forces would need fewer officers on the road, and prisons would need less capacity as drunk drivers kept their freedom. Utilities would lose revenue because traffic lights would no longer be needed, and highways and streets wouldn’t need to be lit—after all, the cars can see in the dark. Parking lots, which cover a third of the ground in some cities, would pretty much disappear, while freeing land and reducing property values. And so on.

This should be on a t-shirt somewhere if it isn’t already:

abstract
boolean break byte
case catch char class const continue
debugger default delete do double
else enum export extends
false final finally float for function
goto
if implements import in instanceof int interface
long
native new null
package private protected public
return
short static super switch synchronized
this throw throws transient true try typeof
var volatile void
while with

Yet, here, behold the beauty of the API, and WeatherMole, the best little weather app I’ve found to bookmark and save on my phone. IP geolocation, temperature graphs. The works.

Transitoriness being the nature of API’s, and upgrades being a reality in this world, who knows what’ll happen to the Google Maps integration after May 19th of this year, or perhaps even the whole experiment itself if the function that gets the location is tied to the maps as well; that part at least is leveraging the Version 2 API, which is being sunsetted after nearly three years of deprecation. I know about this because I’m working on switching over an account of ours to the same Version 3, a radical rewrite, to say the least, and naturally done at the last minute.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But until May 19th. There’s WeatherMole!

WeatherMole

Indeed, sometimes, it’s all just a fiction…

Shit’s getting weird with study topics today.

Finally! Itunes.
There’s no better feeling than a good update in the works…

while self.living? do
mistake = Mistake.new
self.learn_from!mistake unless mistake.fatal?
end

Ha!

[source]

The EFF has recently filed suit against the TSA to demand it disclose more details about who, when, why, where and how it rents its drones to US Law Enforcement agencies.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – a division of DHS – uses the unmanned drones inside the U.S. to patrol the borders with surveillance equipment like video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. But recent news articles as well as a report from DHS itself show CBP is expanding its surveillance work, flying Predator drone missions on behalf of a diverse group of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies – including a county sheriff’s department in North Dakota, the Texas Rangers, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Defense.

EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for more information about these drone flights, but DHS has yet to respond to the request. EFF’s lawsuit asks for an immediate response, including records and logs of CBP drone flights conducted in conjunction with other agencies.

EFF Demands Answers About Predator Drone Flights in the U.S. | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The future is coming swiftly, and at least someone is here to fight the long slog battle that is watching the watchmen…

As long as it crashes less often, I’m in.

TBD…

Well, almost everything.

There are at least two breaking CSS changes that I have discovered in the latest stable version of Chrome (Version 22.0.1229.79). All other browsers along with Chrome 21 and earlier render these examples as expected.

And they are:

1. Floats don’t push block content down
2. Z-index breaking when element is a child of a fixed parent

Chrome 22 Breaks Everything « Chris Valleskey.

You have been warned…

Seriously. Don’t gimme no gimmick.

Gimme back mah, Google!

Here’s a cartographer’s take on the whole thing. And, unlike my armchair quarterbacking, this guy actually plays the game–cartographically speaking, that is…

“Perhaps the most egregious error is that Apple’s team relied on quality control by algorithm and not a process partially vetted by informed human analysis. You cannot read about the errors in Apple Maps without realizing that these maps were being visually examined and used for the first time by Apple’s customers and not by Apple’s QC teams. If Apple thought that the results were going to be any different than they are, I would be surprised. Of course, hubris is a powerful emotion.”

Exploring Local || Google Maps announces a 400 year advantage over Apple Maps.

via Reddit