useful things!

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:48:41 GMT

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.

comments

Firefox 4!

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:18:12 GMT

1. ... whoah firefox 4 is fast. Like. Whoah.

I use chrome for some things, not because I like the interface and options all that much, but because sometimes it's much easier to have two browsers open. And the only thing I regretted about mostly using firefox was that it took so much longer to open and to load pages. But now it is WARP SPEED in comparison to firefox 3.x

I had to excitedly demonstrate this to t'wings, but I was briefly thwarted by the fact that I ask firefox to ask me whether to restore my previous session. I was like "look! I just click the button and ... okay, have to click through that dialogue choice ... but now it is there!"

2. Aaaaah there is no status bar you guys how can I tell if the site is asking for cookies or whether that's where I look to learn things what is stylish doing up there next to the search bar it belongs down in the lower right corner ahh.

3. CookieSafe, you do not work in Firefox 4, stop pretending that you do. Your buttons do not button, your menu does not menu, there is no there there.

I swapped to Cookie Monster temporarily, because I need a cookie manager, but I'd prefer something that has a toolbar button.

4. I love how easy it is to run two firefoxes at the same time. Firefox 4 is in beta, and I didn't want to screw up my old default profile. But otoh I didn't want to do the hard finding-the-bookmarks and session-manager preferences stuff. A little profile manager, a little copy paste, and I have firefox 3.6 and 4 using basically the same preferences but two different profiles.

5. Look the default position of the toolbars in Firefox 4 is just wrong, I'm sorry, what is that with the tabs above the location bar, I cannot deal with change you guys. Fortunately there is a ticky to fix it.

6. Seriously, I don't know why I put this off for so long. I heard such bad things about firefox 3.6.1.6 that the idea of upgrading just felt like irritating work, I think, but wow this is so much better.

comments

eruthros

useful things!

Firefox 4!