I had thought that this was something most other interested people would have known about already, and that I was slow on the uptake as usual, but it turns out that when I mentioned this to Adriano Castro today he wasn’t aware. So, I present to you a method for deep linking into YouTube videos.

1. Take one YouTube URL.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ust9YBlEfY
   

2. Watch it, and find a place within it that you’d like to link to.

   In this instance, I want to link 28 seconds in.

3. Add a fragment to the URL with the format #t=minutesmseconds

   In this instance, the URL would become:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ust9YBlEfY#t=0m28
   

4. That’s all there is to it. Simples.

Now, I’m slightly ashamed to admit it, but up until last week I hadn’t been upgrading regularly. It had seemed like in order to be able to use WordPress’s “Upgrade Automatically” functionality I had to either enable FTP (ewwww), or FTPS (seemed like a lot of effort, and needed the SSH extension for PHP installing). So, I’d ended up doing an upgrade every now and then manually. Not the best plan in the world.

So, last week I decided to take another look and see if there wasn’t a more sensible way to enable WordPress to run its “Upgrade Automatically” code. Turns out there is – just make sure the directory you’re running WordPress under is owned by the same user that your web server is running as. Do this, and suddenly “Upgrade Automatically” works, and you’re a happy camper.

And how to do that? Simple. First, find out which user your web server is running as:

ps aux | grep apache

Generally, the answer will be www-data. Then, once you’ve worked out who the server’s owner is, change the owner of your WordPress directory tree:

chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/wordpress/

Then, when you go back into WordPress you’ll be able to click on the “Upgrade Automatically”, and WordPress will actually upgrade itself. Hooray! (Of course, don’t forget to back up before you do this. I am not responsible for your data, follow instructions at your own risk, Santa Claus is real, etc.)

Hopefully this is of use to someone out there. It’s certainly made me happier about the whole upgrade dance.

Update

As Chris so rightly points out below, leaving things open to the web server to change willy nilly can be a little silly, so after running the update do another chown, this time changing the ownership back to your username and group.

The way I do this is to use a “hot corner”. In OSX you can set up your Mac to perform different tasks when you move your mouse up to any one of the four corners. If you open System Preferences, then Exposé and Spaces and make sure you’ve got the Spaces tab open you’ll see an Active Screen Corners section at the top of the window. I have the bottom right hand corner set to Start Screen Saver. Because I have set Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver in the Security section of System Preferences, when I throw my mouse into the bottom right hand corner of the screen it automatically locks itself for me.

It’s a simple solution that works well for me.

Another way you can lock your machine is to use the Keychain Access application (/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app). If you load this and then open Preferences you’ll see a Show Status in Menu Bar option on the General tab. If you tick this you’ll see an unlocked padlock appear in your menu bar. From now on if you want to lock your machine you can click on the padlock icon and then select Lock Screen. I personally don’t use this solution because it requires more dexterity than just throwing the mouse into a corner of the screen, but it’s another option that you might lie to use.

So, there you have it — two different ways of locking your Mac’s screen under OSX.

Obviously, this sounded like a job for the diff command.

Unfortunately, I found the man page a little more difficult than normal to decipher and had to call upon the massively oversized brain of Ben Hawkes-Lewis to see if we could work out together how to do what I wanted. After a bit of fumbling, it turned out that we wanted to use the line group format options. Here’s what we came up with that solved my problem:

diff --new-group-format="%>" --old-group-format="" \
--changed-group-format="" --unchanged-group-format="" \
original.file file-with-extra-data.file

Hopefully this will be of use to someone else at some point too.

It turns out that you can increase the number of tracks returned by the feed simply by adding a limit=somenumber parameter to the URL. So, for me to grab the last 20 songs that I’ve scrobbled, I would ask for:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/NeilCrosby/recenttracks.rss?limit=20

I use this as a way of getting a decent sampling of my recent tracks to use on NeilCrosby.com, as I found the default 10 was too limiting since my “Stream of Consciousness” stream normally covers a few days worth of information, whereas my last 10 tracks would only cover an hour or so of data.