Today I saw this link on Daring Fireball that presents a bookmarklet to add a link to the YouTube page to download a (higher quality) MP4 version of the video you’re viewing. This is great, but I dislike flash in general, so I’d rather not even watch the embedded version to begin with. I’ve crafted the following bookmarklet to replace the existing flash player with an embedded QuickTime player for the MP4 file. Go try it out on YouTube.

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag it to your Bookmarks Bar (in Firefox, Safari):

This has only been tested on a Mac. I expect it won’t work on some other OSes because it uses the <embed> tag rather than the <object> tag. I encourage someone fix up this bookmarklet to work on other platforms by using the <object> tag, and condense it a little–because it is rather long. I’d be happy to post an updated version if someone improves it. Additionally, a GreaseKit script would be great too.

Enjoy!

Update:
Seems to work in Firefox on Windows.

Update:
Comment from Kris below provides a Greasemonkey/GreaseKit Userscript.
Userscript

And my web browser of choice is Safari 3.0 for Leopard. Unfortunately this makes viewing TIFF images of the Patent Office’s website an absolutely abysmal experience.

So today in CS421 I found GreaseKit, a Safari Plugin that allows one to run Greasemonkey-like scripts on web pages in Safari. So I wrote a userscript: usptofix.user.js to change the <embed> tag to the <img> tag, resulting in success.

(original left, modified right)

I simply scale the TIFF to the page width, and everything is okay.

Unfortunately, it crashes Safari half of the time I load this page; I’ve reported a bug against GreaseKit.

It is probably better to just use Google Patents, but at least I learned something.

Go Ahead. Just try and get 99 lives on this website.

In order to make this blog post more useful, I will disclose first tips for skipping voicemail greetings. According to a couple of websites, one may simply press the appropriate key (varying by carrier) during a voicemail greeting to be instantly forwarded to the beep:

• T-Mobile - #
• Cingular - #
• Sprint - 1
• Verizon - 1

I have yet to try all these out. Additionally, “*” may work if these fail. If I would much appreciate comments if anyone has first hand experience of other numbers working with other carriers in the Chicagoland area, or corrections in order to make this the canonical reference for the midwest.

Hopefully this will save everyone lots of time in life.

But none of the preceding information has anything to do with San Francisco. I very much enjoyed my trip there for WWDC and am anxious to release some of the code I’ve been working on which utilizes Leopard technologies. It’ll have to wait until October. The trip was great for reasons beyond just the conference though, I had fun seeing Helvetica with Chad. I also bought a new Freitag wallet.

Though there were some low points to the trip. I was trying to play Taboo, but upon opening up the box I found the AA batteries had leaked, and I got some acid on my hand, leaving me with an unsightly acid burn. I also chipped my tooth.

Finally, while I was out there I had the opportunity to work on the Justin.tv widget a bit more. Look for a new version, supporting all the new channels soon.

WWDC kinda makes me wish I were writing exciting Cocoa apps 24/7. I can’t tell you why; it is a secret. But in my downtime, I’ve had the opportunity to add a new feature to the justin.tv dashboard widget. Version 1.6 adds support for all of the channels that have recently been added to the site. You can watch any stream by selecting your channel on the back of the widget, a much requested feature. Check it out.

More

Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

This new version of the widget now saves the window size after restarting the Dashboard. Previously, the window would reset to default size after logging in/out, rebooting, or otherwise restarting the Dock. This was a minor annoyance that is now fixed. I have also tested the issue that is preventing the play/pause/volume controls from working in the widget, and it will be resolved in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

I know it is quick, but version 1.5 brings a commonly requested feature as well as bugfix. The new version allows you to resize the video stream, at the cost of the pretty striped background. I’m working on adding the texture back in, but it is proving tricky. Additionally, the stream is significantly more reliable thanks to some help from Emmett and Kyle at justin.tv.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

Justin.tv is a website that started broadcasting 24/7 live video from a camera mounted to the head of founder Justin Kan, on March 19, 2007. It is an internet phenomenon attracting a huge number of young viewers from across the internet. Finding it cumbersome to keep a web page open all the time, I’ve created a Dashboard Widget to enable easy viewing on the Mac.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip