Thin & Light

Two weeks ago we went to Mount Huang (Huangshan in Chinese) and spent 3 days there (2 days on the mountains). The trip was wonderful and Mount Huang is really impressive.

During the shot trip we saw all kinds of beautiful sceneries like sea of clouds, sunrise, sunset, various strangely-shaped pines, peculiarly-shaped granite peaks, etc.

We walked on the dangerous roads hanging on the middle of the cliffs, which was very exciting. You’d better not look downwards, and pray the road is solid enough.

Below is the carved steps to Celestial Peak. It’s like a ladder stretching into the fog. It’s almost vertical but don’t be too frightened, as there’re ropes beside it for travellers to grab.

Sea of clouds appears in the morning. As you can see in the pictures, our standing ground is higher than the clouds. The picture on the right is a scenery called “monkey watching the sea”.

If you’re interested, view more photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/qingbo/sets/72157609353527815/

These photos are taken after ending ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The ending ceremony was not very good, in contrast to the opening ceremonty Except the fireworks. After the ending ceremony, Beijing was illuminated by fireworks everywhere in the sky:

Taking photos from my room is difficult because it’s not at the right position. Tripod is of no use because the camera must be projected outside the window. Besides, my camera (Canon A510) is not good enough.

Gmail is my Firefox home page and is always open as long as Firefox is there. So I wrote this Greasemonkey script to show Google Reader’s unread count in the nav-bar of Gmail. A good place, isn’t it?

The script checks for the unread count every 8 minutes. But after you click the “Reader” link, it checks the count 1 minute later and extend the interval by 1 minute after every check until the interval returns to 8 minutes again.

Install Greasemonkey，and then install this script。

Page on userscripts.org.

Half a year ago I wrote a small tool for customizing MyBlogLog widget. And, since then I didn’t notice the changes MyBlogLog has done.

As I noticed there are some problems with the widget colorer, I checked MyBlogLog and found that they’ve changed the widget theme.

Well, the new theme is polished and cool but lacks flexibility due to the gradient background.

So I must mark the project as “obsolete”. But people still can play around with it, and the “obsolete” code can still be used on websites.

Handy new feature coming soon…

I use Gmail instead of iGoogle as browser home page. But I don’t want a complete integration. Just alert me the unread count and I will check it when I have time.

OK, tinyurl is short enough. But is.gd is even shorter.

Many tools use tinyurl to shorten URLs, because it was the origin of this wonderful idea. TwitterFox is such an example.

I prefer TwitterFox to twhirl because as a Firefox add-on, the url can be inserted into the tweet with a single click (Besides, word “twhirl” is hard to remember ). But why didn’t it provide an option of URL shortener to use?

We can modify its source to achieve this, though. Open the file chrome/TwitterFox.jar!/content/twitternotifier.js and find the line where TINYURL_CREATE_API is defined. Change the constant value to “http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=”, which is the API of is.gd.

There are countless URL shorteners around the web. Just choose your favorite.