Wednesday, October 13, 2010
24oz Sunkist Impala
Monday, October 11, 2010
Blog Action Day 2010!
Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. The topic for this year 2010 will be Water. The idea is to spread the awareness about making clean water available for all. Check out some of the interesting posts on this topic here.
In 2009, the topic of discussion was ‘Climate change’ and in 2008, it was ‘Poverty’
-- Varun
Thursday, October 7, 2010
TEDxChennai, 2010
Series of short talks by achievers from various fields to inspire you with Ideas worth Spreading. After the tremendous success of the first edition in 2009, TEDxChennai 2010 is going to be a bigger and better one. An event to celebrate The Passion To ‘Do!’ Check out the list of speakers here. Also, a workshop about organizing TEDx events has been arranged on 09-10-10.
| TEDx Event
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What are you waiting for? Register yourself and get a chance to network with some wonderful people. For registrations, please visit this page. For more details, visit the official website of TEDxChennai. I will be live blogging from the event. Follow my blog or follow me (@varunkumar) on Twitter. You can also follow the official hash tag #TEDxChennai
-- Varun
Sunday, October 3, 2010
[How to] Filter out updates on Facebook News feed
Facebook is a social networking site as opposed to Twitter which to me is a broadcasting medium. But, Facebook has been widely used for broadcasting messages as well. Similar to the Twitter timeline, your Facebook news feed often gets flooded with updates carrying similar message. Facebook handles these cases to a greater extent than Twitter. Facebook tries to group messages based on the sender, application and other parameters (like events). If a person is spamming your news feed, you can hide the updates from that person. You can also hide the updates from a particular application. The only missing feature here is the ability to hide updates on a particular topic. That is where my script will be useful. It is an extension to the script written for Twitter.
- Filter out topics. Filter out updates containing a set of words from your news feed (works on profile pages also). You can enter multiple words separated by a comma. This will prevent your news feed getting flooded with the similar updates.
- Filtered count Indicator. The filtered updates are not gone for ever. You can clear the filters to view them. The number of updates filtered out will be shown intuitively on the ‘Filters’ menu itself.
- Remember your settings. The script has the ability to remember your filter settings on the browser and will reload the same when you sign in again. Also, the script applies the filters on new incoming updates as well (with a max time lag of 15 secs).
- Hide the ‘Likes’ from friends. (v 1.2) If you don’t care about what your friends are liking on Facebook or on other sites, you can use this feature to hide the ‘Likes’ on your news feed.
- Hide the friend connection updates. (v 1.2) Whenever a friend of yours is connected to another person, Facebook will notify you about the new connection on your news feed. If you are not interested in knowing who has be-friended whom, you can disable the friend connection notification using this feature.
- Hide the attachments. (v 1.2) Enabling this option will hide all the attachments on your news feed. This includes shared videos, photos, links, etc.
- Hide Facebook Places. (v 1.3) Enabling this option will hide the check-ins from your friends.
- Hide Facebook Questions. (v 1.3)
- Hide Facebook Ticker Section. (v 1.4). Facebook added a new section called “Ticker” which shows all the activities of your friends. It pushes the information that are already available on your friends’ profile. This section adds too much of noise to your news feed. Use this option to fix the section.
- Show only the filtered posts. (v 1.4) Enabling this option will show the posts which match the search text specified. This will be handy if you want to know what friends say on a particular topic. Thanks to Raghu for the idea.
- Hide Unread Count. (v 1.5). Facebook added a new feature called “Smart Lists” and showed the lists on the news feeds page. The unread count of the lists / groups clutters the UI. Use this option to hide the unread count.
How to install?
Compatible Browsers: Firefox 3+, Chrome 4+
Firefox 3+
- Install the GreaseMonkey add-on for Firefox from here and restart the browser.
- Get the script by pointing your browser to this.
- GreaseMonkey Installation dialog box will appear. Please click on the “Install” button.
- You are all set to use the script. Refresh the Facebook homepage. ‘Filters’ menu will appear next to ‘Account’ menu.
Chrome 4+
- Chrome has native support for GreaseMonkey scripts. No additional extensions are needed to use the script.
- Get the script by pointing your browser to this.
- You will be prompted with a security alert. Please click on the ‘Continue’ button.
- The script will be installed as an extension. Refresh the Facebook homepage to see the ‘Filters’ menu.
The script might contain few minor UI glitches. Please let me know if you find any. If you feel some other feature is missing in Facebook, please reach out to me. I shall try to extend this script. If you are looking for a similar solution for Twitter, try this script.
Update: A new version (v 1.2) is available with three new features – Hide the ‘Likes’ from friends, Hide the friend connection updates, Hide the attachments. You can download the script from here.
Update-1: A new version (v 1.3) is available with two new features – Hide updates from Facebook Places, Hide Facebook Questions. You can download the script from here.
Update-2: Version 1.4 is just released to Userscripts.org. Features included: Hide Facebook Ticker, Show only the filtered posts. You can download the script from here.
Update-3: Version 1.5 is just released to Userscripts.org. Features included: Fix for new Facebook UI, Hide unread count of Groups / Lists updates. You can download the script from here.
Userscripts.org seems to go down frequently these days. Here is an alternate link to the script. Source code is available here.
-- Varun
[How to] Filter out tweets on New Twitter interface
Twitter has been rolling out the preview version of its new interface and I got the chance to try it out just few days back. One of the basic functionalities which is missing even in the new interface is the ability to filter out tweets. Twitter is a nice medium for catching up on the latest happenings. But, at times, you might get bombarded with tweets (all of which carrying the same message) about the same topic from different people and might have to miss some important ones. Filtering is a must-to-have feature in an application like Twitter but Twitter is yet to realize the need for it. However, this feature is already available on some of the popular Twitter clients like Tweetdeck. I have written a simple GreaseMonkey script to add this functionality to New Twitter.
- Filter out a person. If a person on your timeline is on a spamming spree, you can temporarily unfollow him / her using this feature. Typical example for this could be a person attending a conference / tech talk and live tweeting from there. His / her tweets might not be applicable outside the conference room. You can use this feature to temporarily unfollow the person.
- Filter out keywords. Filter out tweets containing a set of words. You can enter multiple words separated by a comma. This will prevent your timeline getting flooded with the trending topics.
- Remove hyperlinks. In the past few weeks alone, there were two different cases of XSS attack on Twitter. This feature will safeguard you from these sort of attacks to some extent by removing all the external links from your timeline.
- Filtered count Indicator. The filtered tweets are not gone for ever. You can clear the filters to view them. The number of tweets filtered out will be shown intuitively on the ‘Filters’ menu itself.
- Remember your settings. The script has the ability to remember your filter settings on the browser and will reload the same when you sign in again. Also, the script applies the filters on new incoming tweets as well (with a max time lag of 15 secs).
How to install?
Compatible Browsers: Firefox 3+, Chrome 4+
Firefox 3+
- Install the GreaseMonkey add-on for Firefox from here and restart the browser.
- Get the script by pointing your browser to this.
- GreaseMonkey Installation dialog box will appear. Please click on the “Install” button.
- You are all set to use the script. Refresh the twitter homepage. ‘Filters’ menu will appear next to ‘Messages’ menu.
Chrome 4+
- Chrome has native support for GreaseMonkey scripts. No additional extensions are needed to use the script.
- Get the script by pointing your browser to this.
- You will be prompted with a security alert. Please click on the ‘Continue’ button.
- The script will be installed as an extension. Refresh the twitter homepage to see the ‘Filters’ menu.
The script might contain few minor UI glitches. Please let me know if you find any. If you feel some other feature is missing in Twitter, please reach out to me. I shall try to extend this script. If you are still on old Twitter and looking forward to one such script, try this script. If you are looking for a similar script for Facebook updates, try this script.
Userscripts.org seems to go down frequently these days. Here is an alternate link to the script. Source code is available here
-- Varun