Gareth Simpson

Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases. A news item so depressing that it made me rediscover both blogging and del.icio.us

It suddenly occured to me that I almost never use delicious any more. I was vaguely aware that they had a refresh some months back that involved splitting out the inbox feeds into constituent parts. Well it turns out that the stuff left in my 'inbox' to which I was subscribed was, in fact, nothing. So del.icio.us went silent. And I barely noticed. And then I stopped posting things and again I barely noticed. Now I loved del.icio.us and got a lot out of it when it was working for me before. I kind of resent the way they implemented the changes. If they wanted to split out the feeds, the logical way to do it would have been to leave 'inbox' as was and then provide the seperate feeds, seperately. So now I'm subscribed to my 'network' instead. I wonder if I can retrain myself to post things. I also wonder how many other people had the same experience and never bothered to rediscover it. Rubbish.

Russell Beattie's whinge about US phone operators sitting back and letting you rack up huge bills reminded me that 02 actually looks out for you in exactly the way he's suggesting. While in the US, I rack up huge (by my standards) bills and there's always a helpful little text halfway through the trip This is a courtesy message from O2 informing you that your spend is now £50 over your line rental for this month. There is no need to for you to take any action. How good is that?

The "html" that iWeb produces is an abomination. The worst bit being that it is possible to produce entries that are big images and not actually text. This is a total pain cause you can't adjust the font size, and you can't cut and paste. That said, I am a strong believer that you shouldn't just whinge and whine about something, but should try and fix it. So here we are: iWebTextify , a Greasemonkey script that adds a little 'Textify' button to the top of iWeb blogs with image entries. Push the button and the image vanishes to be replaced by the equivalent text. Unfortunately because of the gratuitous use of image maps to make links work in iWeb, it's not possible to preserve them when dropping the text version in (this is why the script doesn't automatically create a text version which is what I'd really like). It's better than nothing though. Go try it out on Ben Hammersley's site now!