A few pics to show the progress of our allotment in Maastricht.

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We went to buy a Christmas tree, and instead rescued these
rabbits from a life of misery at the hands of some spoilt brat.

Now they’ve taken over our back yard, but only after first eating
all our furniture!

They are nice pets, once you attain some measure of poo-control
and tolerance.

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This is a variant on the Acetext Helper, except this uses textfiles instead of Acetext.

TagClipperV1 (click to inspect, right-click to download)

All details in the script.

*On further thought, I will be expanding this concept to allow a single key-press to capture a clip and have it automatically published to a web feed. Also planned:

• Category / Tag selection
• Auto-tagging to sreate tag clouds (essentially asigns importance according to the frequency of certain word in all collected text.
• A search interface and reporting tool utilising Regular Expressions

I see a lot of information every day, and my brain is full of holes. So it’s not always easy to find your way back to a statement or reference on the web or in a document.

I wanted a quick and unobtrusive way of quickly referencing snippets of information I ran across, from any source, so that I can compile these in Acetext for later searching. Acetext offers Regular Expressions (Regexp), a powerful way to filter information using text patterns. It is a fantatstic research tool, but is a real workflow-killer when collecting web clips - you must use the mouse a lot.

So I reduced these actions to keyboard combinations and have all the hard work of clip collection done for me. In a geekish moment, I calculated the number of key-presses required for standard actions in Acetext and Notepad. My script reduces required key presses by half in most cases. When working with a lot of text this dramatically increases effciency and organisation

Added to this, with Acetext I can literally drop selected clips into any number of XML feeds. Essentially I am creating a stream of information from what I come across throughout the day. These feeds can be accesses using a special reader, or published via a web-page script.

One such feed is hosted on this site, which auto-updates with a random subset of my daily clippings.

I’ve also added a ‘Thought - Tagger’ , a super-quick way to jot a few lines of text, telephone number, to-do, etc. without having to leave the keyboard.

AceText Helper (click to inspect, right-click to download)

Instructions included in the file. I hope somebody else finds it useful.

To get us in the mood for Vastelavond,
let’s review the shenanigans from 2007.

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Photos from our recent trip to Las Vegas and California. Enjoy!

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