Ali Hassan

When I was a boy we were not allowed to set off fireworks at home. Well, we were up until I managed to get a little burn on my foot from an out of control roman candle when I was about five or so. Then it was pretty much over for us.

One year though, through hours of wheedling and complaining, we managed to convince my mother to get us some fireworks for Guy Fawke’s night. Since we had been denied for so long the anticipation was palpable. Little did we know. [ more … ]

The fried whiting with french fries at Oohs and Aahs (10th and U) is, far and away, the best fish and chips in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Bar none.

Here’s the WordPress template that I created for my MySpace layout generator, for anyone who’s interested in adding it to their site. To get the DHTML colour picker to work, you will need to install ColourMod.

Download here.

While I don’t necessarily think the negative effects are as great as some have claimed, I’ve generally been in agreement with the position that children today are exposed to far more violence in the media than I was when I was younger.

Then I stumbled upon this gallery of covers from early issues of Commando magazine, a comic book that I used to pick up in second-hand book stores. Frankly, I am astounded at the bloodthirstiness. Not to mention the xenophobia.

Here’s a widget for adding a list of books/albums/movies/whatever from AllConsuming to your WordPress sidebar. Set up should be simple, just upload the widget_allconsuming.php file to your plugins directory and activate it. The widget only has a few options:

Title

Self explanatory, I think.

Username

Your username. Obviously you need to have an account at AllConsuming for the widget to work.

Number of items

The number of items that you’d like to have in the list

Tags

You can show items with only certain tags if you wish. Enter as many tags as you like, separated by commas. If you want to show everything enter all

Suppress header

Turns on/off the the “I am consuming …” header.

Completed items

If this box is checked the widget will display items that you have finished consuming. Note that for this to work you will need to enter the date that you completed the item in All Consuming. Kudos to Chris Merriman for figuring that out and to Tristan Havelick for incorporating it into the widget.

And that’s it.

UPDATE: I’ve altered the widget so that it is now a multi-widget so that you can create multiple different lists using tags. For example, one widget could display books, the other could display music.

UPDATE 2: Tristan Havelick has updated the widget so that it can now display completed items.

Download the widget here.

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