Archive for the ‘Announcement’ Category
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 
Have you ever been outside walking somewhere while it began to rain? I have, and didn’t like it. That’s why I created Remember The Umbrella – a new online service that will email an alert when the forecast is predicting rain in your area.
How does it work?
The site is fairly simple – it connects to the National Weather Service (this is why it’s just United States only at the moment) to get the precipitation percentage for the next 12 hours, and emails the user at the correct time if that percentage is over the threshold that he or she set.
Where is it going from here?
There are many ways to improve the service. First and foremost is TXT messages. Then there will be more features like smart phone apps, “shut your car windows” on-demand warnings, and other things.
Please check it out and tell your friends!
http://www.remembertheumbrella.com
http://twitter.com/umbrellalerts
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Friday, March 6th, 2009 The University used to have an online searchable “phonebook” that was invaluable when students needed to contact each other. The information displayed by default listed name, email, major, address, phone number, web site address, and department (if the student worked for the University). This has all been disabled except for email address in the new PH system. I wrote about this situation on The Quad.
Anyway, a biproduct of the new web interface is that my Firefox extension NetID Lookup was broken for about 7 days. It is now fixed, and you can go to http://addons.mozilla.org to get the latest version (1.3). Thanks, and please provide feedback if you use and enjoy this simple extension.
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Saturday, September 27th, 2008 
As an Illinois student, I find myself constantly searching the Illinois Phonebook Gateway. Also known simply as the “PH” due to it’s URL (http://illinois.edu/ows/PH), the site will take a NetID (the user name that all Illinois students use for any computer/internet activity) or a name and display information (email address, phone number, postal address, major, etc.) about a student.
I have previously written a UIUC Firefox Search Engine Plugin that searches the Phonebook, but it just was not working for me because I always had to change the drop-down selection from Google to the PH and back again. There must be a better way.
So, I developed what I’m calling the NetID Lookup Extension. This is a simple Firefox extension that adds an item to your right-click toolbar. When text is selected, you can right-click on that text, click “Search NetID,” and a new Firefox tab will open with that text entered into the PH.
Right now it’s on the Mozilla Addons site, but is still classified as “experimental” – which means you have to log in (and set up a free account if you haven’t already) before installing it. If you install the extension and like what it does, please give it some feedback on the Mozilla page so that it can become a full-fledged extension. You can also find some more information on a page I created here (listed in the top tabs of this site).
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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 GavinR.com is now powered by WordPress. You can find all of the content that was on the old GavinR.com, but in a more organized manor. Please check out the tabs above, and feel free to subscribe to my updates by clicking the RSS link at the bottom of this page.
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Saturday, February 16th, 2008 Here’s the GavinR.com news feed. Check back for news on Gavin’s projects and activities.
Check out The Quad.
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