Are you startin' or wha'?

If you're new in town and you want to have a little look around Skangerland then this is the place to start. A few old favourites:

Da Bertie Code	Garda Reserve	The Irish Sopranos
Behave	Mary Harney Decides	Liffey Driving

Now check out a few more pages and we hope you see something you like. You'll find a mixture of the serious and the frivolous, but that's life and we make no apologies for it. Jaysus knows we could all do with a laugh the odd time.

Shakespeare Takedown

Hide "Who to follow" in new-new twitter using Adblock

Block the "Who to follow" panel in the new new twitter

This works in Firefox, but the principle should be the same for other versions of Adblock.

With twitter open in your browser, click the red Adblock ABP badge and select "Preferences…" (or click "Tools" in the Firefox menubar then select "Add-Ons" and then hit "Preferences" for the Adblock add-on).

With the Adblock Preferences pane open, click "Add filter…" and enter this:

||api.twitter.com/1/users/recommendations.json?*

to create a new entry, which should appear under "My Ad Blocking Rules" once you hit ok and close the preference pane. Reload the twitter page and the "Who to follow" section should be gone.

If you don't use Adblock then do a web search for userChrome.css and use a personalized stylesheet to block the relevant page element.

Remove icons from the Firefox bookmarks toolbar

This should work more generally, but (because it's the set-up I have) I refer particularly here to Firefox 7.0.1 running on Mac OS X 10.7.2.  [UPDATE: I'm now on Firefox 8.0.1 and this fix is still working fine for me. UPDATE X 2: Firefox 10.0 on 10.7.3 and still okay.] If someone has equivalent instructions for other platforms then please add them in comments.

I wanted to get rid of the icons in the bookmarks toolbar. I find some of them ugly and they take up too much space. I tried the Bookmarks Deiconizer add-on, but found that I had to reset it by disabling and re-enabling it every time I relaunched Firefox. Here's what I did instead.

(1) Find the file called localstore.rdf in

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[your unique user ID string]/

Your Library folder should be inside your Home folder. To see the Home folder in Finder click Go at the top of the screen and then select Home from the dropdown list. Lion hides the Library folder by default so if you can't see it in the Home folder then you need to go directly to it. To do that, click Go again but this time select Go to folder… from the dropdown list. This asks you to enter the folder you want. Enter

~/Library/

then click the Go button. That should bring you to your Library folder and let you follow the path above to find your localstore.rdf file.

(2) Make a copy of the localstore.rdf file as a backup.

(3) Make sure Firefox is not running.

(4) Open localstore.rdf in a text editor such as TextEdit or TextWrangler.

(5) Find the section that begins:

RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#PersonalToolbar"

at the end of this section an entry reads:

mode="icons"

change this to

mode="text"

(6) Save the edited version of localstore.rdf to the folder in your Library.

(7) Restart Firefox. Your bookmarks toolbar should be icon-free. If you have any problems then quit Firefox and dump the edited localstore.rdf and replace it with the original version that you backed up.

How to get iCal with iCloud working in Snow Leopard 10.6 [Ux2]

I have synced iCal on Snow Leopard with my iCloud iCal. So far, I have got all the calendars and events to show up on the 10.6 Mac, but I haven't yet tested syncing from the 10.6 machine to iCloud and on to my 10.7 Mac [I have tried this now and it works ok.]. I don't have an iOS device so I can't test that.

---

THE SHORT VERSION:

1.  Get your AppleID email address and password, and your iCloud CalDav server address (instructions for finding it are below)
2. In iCal on Snow Leopard 10.6 click:
• iCal
• Preferences…
• Accounts
• +
3. Select CalDav as Account type
4. Enter the following:
• User name = your AppleID email address
• Password = your AppleID password
• Server address = your CalDav server name
5. Click create

What is my CalDav server name?

Mine is p06-caldav.icloud.com, but I have seen others using p04-caldav.icloud.com or p02-caldav.icloud.com, so experiment with different numbers.


If you have iCloud running on a Lion 10.7 Mac then you can get your server name by following the instructions at the foot of this entry (in UPDATE: How to find your CalDav server name on a Lion 10.7 Mac).

---

DETAILS:

On the 10.7 Mac I still have iSync. I kept it so that I can sync with an old mobile phone. With iCloud set up for iCal 5.0.1 on the 10.7 Mac, I opened iSync and looked at the calendars listed under the device (my old mobile phone). The list allows you to select which calendars you want to sync to the device, listing each one. In my case, each calendar entry on that list now takes the form:

{Calendar Name}[{AppleID email address}@{iCloud CalDav server name}]

My {iCloud CalDav server name} is {p06-caldav.icloud.com} but your mileage may vary for that one. I have seen reports of users having a different number, so the address is the same except for p02 or p04 and so on instead of p06. (Omit the curly brackets when you're actually entering these things.)

I made a note of the part in square brackets above and then switched to the 10.6 Mac, where I opened iCal 4.0.4. There I selected iCal then Preferences… and hit the Accounts tab. I clicked + to create a new account and selected CalDav as Account type. Then I entered the following:

User name: {AppleID email address}
Password: AppleID password
Server address: {iCloud CalDav server name}

Next I clicked create. The account loaded all my iCloud calendars into the sidebar in iCal 4.0.4, listed under the heading of my AppleID email address.

I'm not sure how this could be done without iSync on the 10.7 machine, but I'm sure that a copy iSync can be found somewhere by those who really want it. I'll leave that up to you.

I have tested push syncing from 10.6 to 10.7 and vice versa and both work fine.

UPDATE: How to find your CalDav server name on a Lion 10.7 Mac

If you don't have iSync then it may be possible to get the server address from one of the info.plist files in the Calendars folder inside your Library in Lion. (If you can't see that folder in Finder click Go and then select Go To Folder… Then enter

~/Library/

and hit Go.) In that Library folder look in Calendars and then check the folder that ends .caldav - on my 10.7 Mac there's an info.plist file in there that mentions the correct server for me.

Tour de France Calendar 2012 ics calendar #tdf #tdf2012

As usual, you use and take and on an as-is basis, no warranty, etc. If you want to check it's legit then open it up in any text-editor and you can inspect the code. It's as accurate as we can make it (we'll be using these calendars ourselves) but we can't guarantee that it is error-free. If you spot any mistakes then do please let us know through the comments.

This release is a very early one, and derives from the route found by VeloPeloton (also visible here). Take it with an extra pinch of salt.

We'll update when we have more detail. In the meantime, enjoy.

Download: Tour de France 2012 Calendar v1


Subscribe:

ICS

XML

HTML

Tour de France 2011 ics calendar #tdf #tdf2011 [1]

UPDATE: For the 2012 version check here.

As usual, you use and take and on an as-is basis, no warranty, etc. If you want to check it's legit then open it up in any text-editor and you can inspect the code. It's as accurate as we can make it (we'll be using these calendars ourselves) but we can't guarantee that it is error-free. If you spot any mistakes then do please let us know through the comments.


Download: Tour de France 2011 Calendar v1


Subscribe:

ICS

XML

HTML

Mary Lou TD

Just saying...

http://skangerland.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-did-christy-burke-resign-from.html

They were warned

The government were warned by the ESRI in March 2000 that they needed an orderly calming of the Irish economy, not the bonfire of over-exuberance stoked by tax incentives that they actually gave us.

Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney, Charlie McCreevy - they all line up to poo-poo the very notion of restraint.

The last gamble

Google Streetview caught the two Brians' last gamble with the Irish economy.

It didn't work out - Cowen spent the last few cent on a donut.