Cut & paste

I’m not usually one for Internet memes, but I saw a pretty good one on The Bored:

1. Go to Wikipedia and click random page. First page is your band’s name.
2. Go to Wikiquote and use the last 3-6 words of the first random quote as your album name.
3. Go to Flickr and go to the last 7 days. The 5th picture is now your album art.
4. Photoshop everything together.

Numbers! Charts! Tables!

Two informative charts: 

1. How Sweet Is It?: Calories, Grams of Sugar, and Teaspoons of Sugar in 12 Ounces of Each Beverage (PDF, via Diluting America’s sweet tooth, one drink at a time)
2. Current WHO phase of pandemic alert

Bonus: Not a chart, but still key.

And on and on …

Note to self: just come here when I have that much to say.

Amazon mobile search bookmarklet

I’ve found a lot of useful bookmarklets to use with MobileSafari, but so far the Amazon search bookmarklets that I’ve seen use the full desktop version of Amazon.com. Amazon has a pretty slick iPhone-formatted site, so I modified an existing Amazon search bookmarklet (@ LifeClever, via Lifehacker) to search their mobile site: 

javascript:Qr=prompt('Search%20Amazon%20mobile%20for','')if(Qr)location.href='http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s.html?k='+escape(Qr)+'&submitSearch=Go&m=aps'

(WordPress.com doesn’t allow embedding JavaScript for security reasons, so you’ll have to copy & paste the above into a bookmark in Safari on your desktop before you’ll be able to use it in MobileSafari.)

I know there’s a native iPhone Amazon app (iTunes link), but without an always-on data connection and camera, the app isn’t as useful for iPod touch users. As a member of the latter camp who hasn’t found a real reason to download the app yet, this bookmarklet should make searching for and buying crap I don’t need even easier.

Here We Go Again

Hello, Internet: I present you with Yet One More Blog™. (The word “blog” still sort of makes me grit my teeth, but I’m learning to live with it.)

I’m not entirely sure what possesses me to start another blog — the ol’ LiveJournal is still there collecting dust (which despite it looking like a duck and quacking like a duck, I never thought of it as a blog until now), Google Reader more or less suffices for sharing and commenting on bite-sized pieces of the interwebs, and my Flickr seems to be serving well enough as a never-ending Frame352 volume 4. Maybe it’s a desire to share with the world my affinity for overly long and unweildy sentences which use far too many commas, em dashes, and parenthetical asides. Or maybe not.

While I spend some quality time mulling that one over, feel free to command-D this sucker or drop its feed into your reader.