Me and the girlfriend were talking about how air fresheners seem to be the most innovative sector of all fast moving consumer goods. As you do.

Everytime we see a new advert for air fresheners we groan, wondering what they have done now to make me want a new air freshener.

In recent years we have seen:

• motioned trigger air fresheners
• power point plugin air fresheners
• dual scent air fresheners
• air fresheners disguised as pebbles
• air fresheners disguised as candles
• air fresheners for toilets
• air fresheners for cats

Anyway, I was wondering where the air freshener industry was going to take us next. Here’s my best guess at the future of air de-odourisation solutions.

Aromatherapy Air Fresheners
These will pump our peppy citrus smells in the morning and calming lavender scents in the evening

Fan Driven Smell Dispersal
A squirt of scent only permeates so far into the home. What we need is a squirt, then a huge gust of air to waft the smell into all the nooks and crannies.

Home Selling Air Fresheners
They say that when you are showing potential homebuyers around a home you should bake a loaf of bread at the same time. It makes the house seem more homely. Why not let a air freshener make your house smell like a freshly baked loaf.

Personal Air Fresheners
This would be a pendant you wear that contains a motion sensor. Every time you stop still - it releases a puff of pleasant scent. Great if you’re visiting public toilets.

Air Fresheners Disguised as Flowers
Flowers are meant to smell nice aren’t they? These definitely will as they are filled with lab produced chemicals.

Film & TV Licensed Air Fresheners
If you are watching a film like avatar at home on your HD TV - you want it to be as immersive as possible. Why not get an Avatar air freshener that for 3 hours pumps out the smell of Pandora’s forests.

Remember Scents
Smells are often linked very closely with memories because the olfactory bulb in the brain has intimate access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning.

Why don’t companies release scents of the 80s (brut & bubblegum) or scents of the 90s (sweat and mdma)?

These would take us back to a simpler time when we didn’t have to worry so much about what our house fucking smelt like.

At work recently we were recently asked for naming suggestions for the blog. Here’s mine.

Search Box
The entry into the search World

Search Monkey General’s Amazing Tales
You’ve got to read it to believe it.

Canine Fatty Lumps
Or any other random search term (apart from dogging in Bridgeport)

No Results Found
Not something on our search – because we’ll return any old shit

iRelevance
Relevance is the key to search.

Query Deary!
Going after the pink searches

Al Go-rhythm
A blog under a witty pseudonym

Crush Google
A blog that outlines our ultimate goal

Telescope
We search the Sky

Stop and Search
Because you look suspicious

Crazy Search Science & Stats
Nice alliteration and it says what it does on the tin

SearchLight
Casting light on searches

Vanity Search
A vanity search is when you search for your own name.

3 Searches
There are 3 types of search. Navigational, Informational and Transactional (pr0n fits into all 3)

10 QPS
10 queries per second is what we do at peak times (maybe).

We wanted to use the excellent integrated labels with Magento.

We worked out that we needed to:
Copy Abstract.php from app\code\core\Mage\Sales\Model\Order\Pdf to  app\code\local\Mage\Sales\Model\Order\Pdf

Add the following to around line 233

/* Print shipping address for postage label */
$this->_setFontBold($page);
$this->y = 170;
foreach ($shippingAddress as $label){
if ($label!==”) {
$page->drawText(strip_tags(ltrim($label)), 70, $this->y, ‘UTF-8′);
$this->y -=10;
}
}

This printed the shipping address fine. However we noticed that it was printing out the customer’s phone number on the label too.

To remove this you have to go to app\code\core\Mage\Customer\etc\config.xml [make a backup first] and remove the references to a telephone number from within the <pdf translate=”title” module=”customer”> block.

Simon

Taken me age to figure out how to remove the Tax column from the magento PDF invoice.

I’ve made all my changes in a local version of the Magento core code as described here.

The two files you need to edit are:

1. To remove headers: /app/code/local/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Invoice.php
2. To rmove the tax from each individual line item /app/code/local/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Items/Invoice/Default.php

Hope that helps

Simon