I always put exclamation points at the end of my subject lines. Weird, that.

Anyways, I have pictures! I realized that I had dragged my knitting to work, and I have my camera, so picture time it is.

First, I made a new pair of orange baby socks for a friend, who is giving them to another friend. I need to weave in ends, but these are so fun and quick to make – I use a pattern from the Interweave site.

I love how the orange and green work in that picture. I was also managed to get caught taking that picture right as about a zillion people came out of a meeting. It’s a little hard to explain why you are taking pictures of orange socks, at work, in a plant.

Now, its veil time! Honestly, I”m not sure if this picture shows you anything other than the fact that I have made signficant progress. The center needs to be 19 diamonds high, and I’m on 15. But, I’m only on my second of 9 balls of yarn, so I have a long way to go in this shawl. Loooong way.

At knitting last night, folks commented that my lace seems a lot more firm than what folks often have – its not a big loopy mess. My lace never is – I think I tend to use smaller needles than some folks, but even my charlotte web was pretty firm before blocking.

Everything ends up opening up beautifully, so I don’t worry much about it.

There may not be a podcast this weekend – Kevin is back from D.C., and he might need lots of care and attention. Or, rather, I probably need the care and attention, because I’ve missed him!

Oh, and in other podcast news, I bought a new microphone. It’s a Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone. The USB connection is supposed to be much better than going straight to the sound card, especially if you have a crappy sound card. It also gives you less case nose, in theory.

I so do not know what I am doing in this area, but its fun learning. I’m such a geek, deep down inside. I’ve researched the max headroom noises, and its probably a combination of a badly defragmented drive and my virus checker, but it could also be conflicts with the sound card or maybe the phases of the moon…

Well, sort of.

For the first time in a long time, I looked at the web logs for my houseofcritters.org domain. I happen to put all my image/media files that I manually upload on that domain. It’s really just a matter of semantics – knittergail and houseofcritters are hosted on the same server. In any case, I realized that the myspace folks had been hotlinking to various images. Like my 3rd grade picture. I have no idea what is up with that. I don’t really care about the bandwidth (I have more than any reasonable person ever will need, even with my podcast, because Dreamhost rocks.)
In any case, using the handy tools that Dreamhost provides (my hosting provider), I set it up so that only select domains could hotlink. I don’t think this will effect anyone reading this blog – most of the images these days go through my gallery, and I’ve allowed livejournal and bloglines to hotlink. If you read my blog via an RSS feed, and notice that images no longer load for you, please leave me a comment along with where you are reading the RSS feed, and I’ll add it to the allowed list.

If you didn’t understand any of the above, don’t worry about it.

In honor new image fun, I shall now post completely non-knitting related pictures. Aimee the Sis recently sent me pictures of her new Lawyer Office. Her office rocks. I happened to send her a great picture of a Prarie Dog the day before she got her first Real Live Lawyer Job, and she put it up!

She also sent me a picture of her desk and the view, which on a non-blizzard day, would include mountains! She works in Denver.

In contrast, I took a new picture of the awesomeness that is my… cube.

First, please notice the 3 computers.  I win the “Total Number of Computers in a Cube” award.   Second, notice that I have a terrorist protection squad – Aimee does not. Third, notice my totally awesome Elizabeth Austen (mispelled in the picture, doh!) bag, which I bought at Tuesday Morning for 50% off.  Its even in my favorite fabric pattern.

Hee.  Anyways, I’m totally jealous of Aimee’s office.

I saw that Cheryl over at Diva Knitting had upgraded to WordPress 2.0. She assured me via email that it was very easy, so I decided to just do it. And, it was reasonably easy, and everything seems to be working fine. Well, we’ll see what happens after we make this post. I’m trying to use this new fangled way of putting pictures up. I can do a thumbnail:

Or maybe full sized?

I’m a little concerned here. Oh, that picture was taken last night at Barnes and Noble. Laurel was being a total copycat by buying the same drink, so we decided to try and take an artistic picture. We decided that if you take the picture at an angle, its automatically all artistic and crap.

Well, that certainly didn’t work! Let’s try this – Full Size, GO! Hrm, that’s not doing it either. Never mind, we’ll figure it out one of thes days. Wait, I did! You have to click and drag! Crazy new non-HTML editor. I’ll have to switch back. We can’t handle the change. Although maybe one day we’ll learn to put images next to each other:

Oooh!

Okay, that last post about the css file and all that? Ignore that. With a ton of help from some non-knitter friends, I created a userscript that is amazingly awesome. Mainly, after you install it, you’ll get an option on every knitty pattern page to either print with images, or print text only. In fact, I took a screenshot, so you can see what it’ll look like:

See those two links up top? They’ll show up on every knitty pattern.

So, how do you get the awesomeness?

• You must have Firefox 1.5.
• You must install the greasemonkey extension. greasemonkey lets you write all sorts of userscripts that change how webpages are displayed. It’s amazingly cool. However, you do need to know javascript. Or, you need to have long suffering friends who will write a zillion examples for you until you figure it out. Or, you can just download scripts folks have already written.
• Once you have Firefox and greasemonkey, just click this link:
  http://www.houseofcritters.org/widget/knittycleaner16.user.js
  You’ll get an option to install the script – just click install.
• Then, go to your favorite knitty pattern page.

The main issue is that if you print the page with images, some images may span two pages. There isn’t much I can do about it – it happens in the non-print versions of knitty as well. It’s a browser thing, and I haven’t figured out a way to deal with it. Also, I’ve found that print preview can make it look like the text will overlap the images – when I’ve printed though, that hasn’t been the case.

So, enjoy!

Note: I actually created a better way to do this via a greasemonkey script – I talk about it in this entry. I’d recommend using that method, but the CSS method also works well, if you don’t care about printing with images.

Okay, this is total geekery, and you probably will need to be fairly comfortable with web technology to get this to work.

But, I created a style sheet that will allow you to print out knitty.com patterns without causing extreme pain to yourself and loved ones. Or without killing multiple trees. Mainly, it removes all images and only leaves the text and enough formating to print out reasonably correctly.

In order for my Fabulous Knitty Printing System to work, you must:

• Be a Firefox 1.5 user. It may work with earlier versions of Firefox, but I only tested this with 1.5. As far as I know, this will not work with Internet Explorer. I only tested this on Windows XP.
• Install Chris Pederick’s Web Developer’s Toolbar, which is an extension for Firefox.
• Download the Knitty Print Without Killing Loved Ones stylesheet. Just right click on the link and choose to save the stylesheet to your hard drive.

Once you have Firefox and the Web Developer’s Toolbar installed, navigate to the knitty pattern you wish to print. On your Firefox toolbar, you should see a list of new button, one of which includes CSS with a drop down. Click on it, and select Add User Style Sheet. Browse to where you saved the stylesheet you downloaded, and select it. You’ll see the page change to a basic one. Then print normally. You may end up with an extra page at the end, but its better than 18 pages of unreadable crap, isn’t it?

Please note that you may get unexpected results if you use Print Preview, and then Print. Why? I have no idea. Also, I am not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination. I have no idea what I’m doing – this was just me stabbing in the dark until I found something that worked. I mainly picked everything up from this article.

Someone who knew what they were doing could do much better, and knitty.com itself could actually create their own style sheet that did the same thing, but was built into the site. The disadvantage of my system is that if knitty changes how they code their pattern pages, my stylesheet can break. Also, you won’t get any images using my stylesheet, which can be a bad thing if you need a schematic. But, you can always print those out separately by right clicking on an image and choosing view image. Then, print out the image from its own window.

Let me know if you have any problems, but I don’t promise excessive handholding, unless I’m in the mood to be helpful. I handhold all day at work, and sometimes my palms get chapped.