I love greasemonkey. It’s sort of a uber extension for firefox that lets you have hacky control over how pages display and what they do. The scripts for it are amazing.

So I wrote one.
This American Life is a radio show about everything and it is really smart and awesome – if you haven’t listened to it you totally should.

Number 61 called “Fiasco” is my favorite.

They have a links to buy cd’s from audible.com and they have links to realaudio streams that are free.
Unforunately, I like to listen to them on my pocket pc.
Here’s a greasemonkey script that changes all the stream links to download links.
Install greasemonkey.
I don’t have separate hosting, so just copy and paste this into a file and open it in firefox.
Then go to tools, and install user script.
Open thislife.org – all ram links should point to the actual .rm files now for downloading.

Please feel free to improve on this. It might be nice if it offered you a separate link for downloading as opposed to streaming.

Why doesn’t it work?!
Thanks for your input! Please let me know how it isn’t working.

I am in the main page, none of the sub pages have the links converted.
You’ve got an old version! The new version works better better, sometimes. Thanks much to Rhett Sutphin for this!
Basically, it’s having trouble with the frames – on the page rightclick-this frame->open in new tab. This new tab will have all the links convereted

Why is thislife.org CRAWLING right now?
I had no idea so many people would use the script and the first version hit their servers directly.
I’m putting up a new version that hits the coral cache of it. Thanks Jaime Alesso!

If you know how to fix this, let me know, I’m looking at it.
Please email me if you can host the script, thanks.
update: fixed to work with firefox 1.5/greasemonkey 0.64

from here

// This Mobile life
// version 0.4 BETA!
// 2005-05-19
// Copyright (c) 2005, Matt Katz
// Released under the GPL license
// http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
//
// --------------------------------------------------------------------
//
// This is a Greasemonkey user script.
//
// To install, you need Greasemonkey: http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
// Then restart Firefox and revisit this script.
// Under Tools, there will be a new menu item to "Install User Script".
// Accept the default configuration and install.
//
// To uninstall, go to Tools/Manage User Scripts,
// select "This Mobile Life", and click Uninstall.
//
// --------------------------------------------------------------------
//
// ==UserScript==
// @name          This Mobile Life
// @namespace     http://snarkhunt.blogspot.com
// @description   Changes all This American Life ra stream links to link to the .rm file to download
// @include   http://thislife.org/*
// @include       http://*.thislife.org/*
// ==/UserScript==




var allLinks = unsafeWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("a");

for (i = 0; i < allLinks.length; i++)
{ 
 
  var href = allLinks[i].href;
  if (href.match(/ra\/([0-9]+).ram$/i) )
  {
   
//   alert('Hello world!');
   var episode = href.match(/([0-9]+)/i);
   
   //get the number to get the episode number
  if(episode){
    allLinks[i].setAttribute("href", "http://wbez.org.nyud.net:8090/ta/" + episode[1] + ".rm");
   }
   
   
  }
}

I’ve been using slickrun to automate getting to some programs and folders. It’s handy and it has autocomplete.
Adam at work showed me a cheap way to get similar functionality.

1. Create a folder for shortcuts – I used c:\cuts
2. Right click on My Computer and choose properties.
3. Click the advanced tab.
4. Click on Environment Variables.
5. Under system variables, scroll down to one labeled “Path”.
6. Edit it and add a semicolon after the last variable and add in your shortcut folder path.
7. Create a shortcut for any program you want to be able to get to quickly and put it in there. Try giving it a short 2 or 3 letter name.

Now you can run any shortcut you drag there by just typing windows-r and typing in the name. After the first time you run it, the run box will autocomplete.

Perhaps you could make put your desktop in your path… Then as programs install, they will add a shortcut automatically for you. Perhaps you could put your quicklaunch folder in.

Copynight is a calendar of copyright related events. I went to the inaugural event at the horrible Bar 9 and had a good discussion with Peter Tolmach of WellGoodLLC. He’s working on a very interesting charity website that hopefully I can help betatest.

Also met Esthr who is definitely the most Flickr enthused person I’ve ever met.

The best game ever apparently has a version for pocketpc – I’m so psyched. More carnage and things to do than GTA ever dreamed of.

I spent a lot of time in mom’s office stuck there because I was suspended or somesuch, and, since her workplace was for work, there were no games there. When she was out of the office I would sit at her Mac and use the graphing calculator to create new and interesting shapes, playing with the equations to get it to do more and more interesting things.

Turns out the story behind the development of the program is even more interesting!

via wired

I was reading Cool Tools(rss), when I discovered this website called Modest Needs. It’s a great idea. Small-scale philanthropy for people who aren’t wealthy. If you’ve partnered with paypal you can easily make an automated donation. They give out very small grants to people who need to get through a tough time. $200 bucks at the right time can mean a whole hell of a lot.

They operate on a tiny budget, spending $0 on advertising, $0 on fundraising and disbursing grants within 72 hours of approval.

I like this.