Peter's Useful Crap

It’s Christmas-time. You might want to print photos for cards and such. You might forget which way to put your paper in. You don’t want to waste the free paper that came with the printer, after all (for environmental and economic reasons). You’re too lazy to look up the manual so you Google it, for the tenth time (you forgot the answer the first nine times). If you have a HP 7760 (or perhaps any of the 7700 series) put the print side down for photos:

OK, this is old to most, but new to me! Normally I loathe working with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but this time it provided me with a quick solution to my very problem.

So here’s the situation. You have some user-generated form output and you want to allow users to add some custom text for printing. This text needs to have a variable size. To do that, you can use JavaScript to give users the option to vary the size of a textarea.

See this page for a working example.

However, when a user prints the page, you want to hide “show X header rows for printing” and probably want to remove the borders around that header. To remove the borders, all you have to do is redefine the CSS styling for print (apparently this has been built in to CSS for quite some time… nobody told me!). So, if your normal CSS code was like this…

#customheader {
border: 1px solid black;
}

… just add some code to override the definition for print:

#customheader {
border: 1px solid black;
}
@media print {
#customheader {
border: 0;
}
}

Similarly, if you stuck the “show X header rows for printing” in a DIV called “hideforprint”, use the CSS code “display:none;” to, well, hide it for print, like so:

@media print {
.hideforprint {
display:none;
}
}

An alternative to using “@media” to only override certain styles is to define the media type in the style tag:

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
Put all your normal CSS stuff here
</style>

<style type="text/css" media="print">
Completely change the look of the document for print here
</style>

If you go back to my example page, you can view the entire source code that I just tried to awkwardly describe.

I used to download movies before my conscience got the better of me. But here’s a movie that anybody can download guilt-free…

The filmmakers of The Corporation (from BC!) have released an official “Download Edition” of the movie (the full movie in high quality DivX format), available as a torrent. Read about it here.

If you’re unfamiliar with torrents, download a client such as μTorrent and then click on a link to a torrent file. Torrents are a form of peer-to-peer sharing somewhat similar to what Napster was doing.

I’ve also posted the “read me” PDF that comes with the torrent.

I saw this movie in theatres a few years back and absolutely loved it. It examines how the concept of a corporation has developed into the psychotic excuse for immorality that it is today. It’s what I would call an almost-documentary (whatever that means). The movie managed to take what might seem to be a boring topic and make it thought-provoking and entertaining.

You can also donate some money to the filmmakers on their website if you appreciate the film.

I dread opening PDFs in my browser. They’re so slow to load (with Adobe Acrobat and Reader) and sometimes they even crash my browser. This is even more painful when in Firefox (which I otherwise love), with several tabs open at once.

Well, if you are in the same boat, say goodbye to this problem. It can be solved quite simply by 1) using Foxit Reader as your default PDF reader; and 2) not opening PDFs in your browser to being with.

1) Why Foxit? It’s small, resource-light, and loads quickly. That’s all you need to know, really. Anyway, download Foxit here.

2) To stop opening PDFs in Firefox, click Tools… Options. Then, select the Downloads tab. Then, click View & Edit actions… Then, find the row for PDF and click Change Action… Finally, select Foxit as the designated application:

There’s a way to do this in Internet Explorer too, but I’ll leave that up to you!

So far, programs with “fox” in their name are quite good.

I couldn’t find a plain, large map of Canada to add my own comments / locations to, so I stole this one, removed all the colour, and thickened the lines.

Click on the image below to view/download the huge 2099 x 1845 pixels (415KB!) version.

——————————-

Here’s one of the Lower Mainland, stolen from this site.

Click on the image below to view/download the bigger 1675 x 596 pixels version.