eruthros

1. I have this problem with reading things that make me angry on the internet - if they show up in firefox's url bar when I start to type something else in, I'll go "oh, I should check that" or "oh, I should see if there are new comments" and then I'll read them even though I know they'll make me hate the world. Like, I'd start typing some other url with an s, and then I'd end up at salon.com, even though I knew there would be nothing good there except maybe Glen Greenwald and that I'd read some lifestyles article and it would make me cranky, and then I'd read the comments even though I shouldn't and that would make me despair for humanity. And cranky.

But the thing is, I only do that when I see the name of the site in the dropdown; if I don't see it, it's much easier to resolve not to go there. So I use a handy firefox keyboard command to take things out of the suggestions - I highlight the suggested url that I want to avoid and shift-delete on it, and it is gone. It will reappear if I go there a lot anyway, but since mostly these are places that I don't want to go to, places I just end up out of habit or fear or something, it works for me.

Anyway it is a great tool and I <3 it.

2. Readability! If you use(d) readability, you probably know that they disabled their old bookmarklet in favor of their new browser applet in February. I hate the new applet - it doesn't play well with noscript, it tracks pageviews, it disables printing and saving to pdf, it doesn't work on locally saved html pages or on many secured sites, and it's basically no longer really about quickly getting me a version of a site that I can read - it's about content-management for other people. HATE.

However! There are places to get the old readability bookmarklet hosted elsewhere - Readabilitude (which on my system doesn't require me to temporarily allow scripts every time I want to use it) - and there are also alternatives that have other style features - e.g. Readable (which I haven't used because it does require temporarily allowing js every time).

I was just doing without it for a while, so I was glad when I found those a couple months ago.

3. Unrelated to computers! Many people I chat with have been reading or rereading Harry Potter fic in a burst of nostalgia. But it can be hard to find that exact story, you know, the one where Harry owned a owl-order bookstore, or that one where Snape rescued him from the Dursleys, or that other one where Blaise was a fashion designer, so in case y'all don't know about it I will link here to painless_j's themed lists, wherein ze links to all the fic ze can find for various tropes and plot devices. It's handy both for the purposes of finding that one story you lost and for the purposes of reading all the HP fic featuring glory holes or someone being sorted into a different house or someone taking up a career in mediwizardry.

4. And for anyone who's dealing with too-hot weather, sparkymonster made a post a while back with tips for dealing with hot weather; there are also a bunch of comments full of tips. It's pretty fucking hot here, so I appreciate those.

As I have now posted this in response to asides in several comments, I thought I'd put in here in case any of y'all were having trouble.

If you're using Internet Explorer (or Safari) and Horizon, the new default site scheme, together, there's a bug that may give you trouble highlighting text with a click-and-drag. LJ says that they're working on a bugfix, but I haven't seen anything posted to lj_releases about the time scheme. (Their first try didn't work.)

If you want to highlight text, you've got several options:
1. Click on one side of the text you want to highlight, and shift-click on the other.
2. Try looking at the page with ?format=light appended to the end of the url.
3. Switch to one of the older site schemes at the viewing options page
4. Switch to a different browser. (This was the advice burr86 gave on one of the Horizon release posts after people started reporting the bug. It is to laugh. I can't convince dedicated IE users to switch to Firefox by pointing out that it does extensions! and greasemonkey! and you can turn off flash! and it will practically get your coffee for you! I really don't think "hey, we screwed up, and now you can't highlight on lj" is going to make people switch browsers.)

I think that this means that lj admin shouldn't have made Horizon the default yet, because that strikes me as a pretty big bug -- in fact, most of the last couple-three pages on the aforementioned lj_releases post up there are people saying "hey! I can't do this highlighting thing! What gives?"

There are a bunch of new extensions available for Firefox 1.0, and I thought I'd link to a couple particularly good ones:

Session Saver. The coolest extension EVER. Well, after Tabbrowser, anyway. This works, completely and totally and in every way. The Firefox default session saver only works sometimes (in my experience) and doesn't work if your computer crashes or something. I've had the Session Saver extension for a week now, and it rocks my world, because I'm using a w98 computer 'cause my laptop's broken, and thus crashing a lot. No matter how hard I crash -- I can crash hard enough that ctrl-alt-del doesn't work -- Session Saver restores my browser exactly the way it was before I crashed. Word. Right down to where I was on a page. I love it.

MapIt. This is for those times when you're reading about a shop and you don't know where it is and you have to go to all that trouble to copy the address and open Mapquest or Yahoo maps or whatever and paste it in. No more. Now I can select an address and right-click and there's an option right there on the context menu. It's the little things that make your browsing experience so much better...

And... GCache. I love this extension so, for now when I come to a webpage that didn't load properly, all I have to do is right-click to view it in the google cache. My context menu, if you couldn't tell, is now miles long.

I had forgotten how many sites set cookies.

I'm starting to use Mozilla Firebird as my browser. I'd always wanted to use Mozilla, but it crashes my computer every single time. fiatlouis finally encouraged me to try Firebird, and I am now a very happy person, as it doesn't crash my computer and is small and fast and has many options I like and a built-in pop-up blocker. *heart Mozilla Firebird*

Anyway, I usually do permanent block/allow of cookies, and I'd been using my last browser(s) for nearly two years now. So I forgot how many sites do cookies. No, tripod can't set cookies. No, neither can anything with "ad" in the url. No. Just no. It's going to take me weeks before I can browse without getting tripped by cookie warnings every thirty seconds. *curses at internet*

On the other hand, Mozilla Firebird! Tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking and modifiable everything in a tiny little 6 MB package! Hot keys for everything! *happy sigh*