SPIM -> MARS

MARS is an IDE for MAL development, and is immeasurably better than SPIM. It's missing a few of SPIM's macros though; to implement them you can add these macros to your macro file (MARS calls them "pseudo-ops").

Just extract the MARS jar (jars are just renamed .zip files) and edit the file called "PseudoOps.txt". Note that the whitespaces between commands in the macro file are tabs, not spaces.

Note that MARS doesn't allow overloaded macros, so I had to split putc into putc and putci depending on whether you are using a register or an immediate value.

Parsing Facebook's RSS

90% of my facebook updates are either things I don't care about (asteriskville, asterisk wars) or from people I don't care about. With Yahoo's pipes framework it's pretty easy to parse out certain pieces of your feed (but not all - I think most of the API still requires an API key).

Facebook still tries to force you to visit their site though, but you can use a relatively simple regex to parse out the url. See an example pipe here. If you subscribe to this feed, it will just have those links, and clicking on them will take you directly to the location pointed at by the url - you don't have to visit facebook first.