If you’ve got time to kill, check out the Clark and Michael show. Heard Kevin Smith recommending this on KROQ this morning. It’s Michael Cera from Arrested Development and Clark Duke from, apparently, the apartment next door. Amusing web show peppered with some brilliant lines:
[They] rested their balls on our chins and brushed our teeth with their dicks!
I cannot wait to use that line at work!
I was just poking around and came across this Christmas themed skin for Firefox.
Tinseltown 1.1 (Firefox Theme)
There’s some nice animated Christmas icons for when pages load and some cool translucent graphics throughout the tabs and text fields. The candy cane scroll bar is a nice touch. Well, at least I can enjoy this for the next week and then it’s back to default.
I just learned of last.fm and their Audioscrobbler plugin. Basically, if you have a compatible player, Audioscrobbler will capture everything you play and upload it to the last.fm mothership, where it will create a net radio station with stuff you should like, unless you listen to a lot of stuff you hate. It can also create you charts, hook you up with similar listeners, and offer feeds to embed in web sites or blogs like this one. Sadly, there’s no plugin for Rhapsody, but that already offers RSS feeds (see my page for an example). Rhapsody also has a radio station creator, but it’s pretty weak compared to Pandora‘s, and possibly last.fm’s.
A couple years ago I attended the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive and Film festivals, and they were a blast. Austin is a cool city, and everyone at the conference is really friendly. I don’t know if it’s because everyone is happy to be there, or they’re playing it safe in case you’re someone who can get them a job or financing.
Well, I didn’t make it this year, but they have posted videos and podcasts of the events. Notable videos feature Craig Newmark (craigslist), Henry Rollins, Sleater Kinney, The New Pornographers (I just saw these guys open for Belle and Sebastian – good band), Harry Knowles (Ain’t it Cool News), Peter Bart (ed. in chief of Variety), and many more. The podcasts cover the moderated discussions and have more of a techie/business slant. It includes people like cybepunk author Bruce Sterling (who gives really cool “State of the World” rants), and reps from companies such as Six Apart (they make Movable Type, which runs this blog), Zimbra, Adaptive Path, Yahoo!, 37Signals, frogdesign (they design cool Apple gear), and others. If you don’t recognize those companies, they’re pioneers in stuff like AJAX, which is used in really slick web apps like Google Maps and Gmail. I still wish I could have gone, but this eases the pain a bit.
My friend Or pointed me to a page with some great file search tips for Google (other search engines may work, too). It’s targeted towards MP3s, but can also be used to find PDFs and other file formats. Now play nice…
By now you’ve already read my article on why you should use Firefox, and how you can customize it. (I’ll continue like you didn’t just disagree.) In that article I was remiss in omitting a great extension that lets you download embedded videos. The obviously named Download Embedded places a small red arrow in the lower right part of the window frame, allowing you to download embedded content. It reportedly doesn’t work for Flash, but I’m usually after regular video content (and I think Flash kinda sucks for video that isn’t animation). This is really nifty since I have a bigger monitor set to a higher resolution; now I can download the videos and resize them to something reasonable. Most newer codecs, especially Divx, allow the video to be doubled in size with little artifacting/aliasing. With Divx I can often go full screen and it still looks great.
Another advantage is that you can now email the videos instead of the links to the hosting page, which often has NSFW ads. Of course, it’s probably not all that important for NSFW videos. But you’re not emailing those anyway, ’cause you’re all good and stuff.
MSN has a map mashup that displays the cheapest gas prices in your area. In my area, there was a 8-12 cent price difference, depending on the grade. With prices so high, I wonder if it matters.
I’ve been using Firefox since it was Firebird, and I’ve never looked back. I only use IE for pages that use custom IE features, and those are getting very rare as Firefox gains market share. Here is my personal setup:
Firefox – The latest version at this time is 1.5.0.1. This offers several advantages over IE, including tabbed browsing, tons of extensions, image blocking by server (kill tons of ads), and a built in search engine box that works with over 6,000 databases.
For some reason, embedded files (Quicktime, PDF, etc) annoy me. Firefox allows you to easily disable those plugins so they launch externally, and they seem to launch quicker that way. More importantly, the standalone viewers allow you more control. I usually play video at 2x original size since I run at a higher resolution, and you can’t do that when it’s embedded.
Extensions
These free addons improve the functionality of the browser. Here are ones I can’t live without.
Adblock Plus: Web sites cost money to create and run, and are supported by ads. Without ads, they would either die, or go subscription, and I usually prefer they did neither. However, I cannot stand animated ads (esp. Flash ads), and this plugin makes it easy to block servers who provide them (filter suggestion: *doubleclick.net*). For animated gifs, you can simply hit Escape and they will stop.
IE Tab: For those few times when you need to use IE, this offers a button to switch to IE to render the current page, but keeps it in the tab. Press it again, and it’s back to Firefox as a page renderer.
Redirect Remover: Some sites don’t provide direct links, in order to track your behavior. If the link is of the form http://OriginalSite.com/foo.php?site=http://ActualLinkImInterestedIn.com, it will scrub it so it goes to http://ActualLinkImInterestedIn.com. Sometimes that does screw things up, but you can turn it off, or right click and have it open an uncleaned link.
Search engines
In addition to the standard ones I use (Google, Amazon, Answers.com), I added these, so I don’t have to bother visiting the page before searching. Yes, I’m that lazy.
Wikipedia – Free encyclopedia.
IMDB – Internet Movie Database.
Pricegrabber – Compare prices on everything.
Shopping.com – Another price comparison site.
Some stuff submitted by Agents ZBalance and MasterChief:
Super Friends meets Office Space
Dungeons and Dragons taken to uncomfortable levels The term “hobbyist gamer” never sounded so good.
I recently signed up with CD service yourmusic.com, and so far it’s the best deal in music I’ve seen. If you’re familiar with Netflix, the concept is similar (no, you’re not renting CDs). You go through their catalog and add CDs to your queue. Every month, the CD at the top of your queue is sent to you and your credit card is charged, until you quit the club.
Here is the amazing part. Cost of the CD? $6. Oh, cost with tax? $6. Cost with tax and shipping, you ask? $6. Wanna buy more CDs? $6. Cost per disc for box sets and double albums? $6. Cost if your queue is empty at your “time of the month”? $6 (and they don’t ship you anything).
That’s it. Frankly, I don’t see why you couldn’t just sign up, buy all the CDs you want at $6 each, and then quit. At worst, you leave one CD in the queue if they require a 30-day notice (which they don’t state, I’m just speculating).
My price threshold for CDs at a store is $12 for a disc I really want, otherwise $10 because they?re gonna tax me. Half.com has some great deals, but their shipping charge is $3 per disc. So, for me, this is a pretty stunning deal. Heck, I just saw Coldplay?s X&Y at Sam Goody (yeah, I know) for $20! Who the heck pays that? Hmm, yourmusic.com doesn’t offer that CD, so perhaps that’s a bad example…
The catch? None, really. Shipping isn?t instantaneous. I signed up on a Sunday morning (1/15), they shipped it on Tuesday (1/17) and it arrived today (1/26). About average for free shipping. Their selection isn?t stellar, about 14,000 CDs, but I was still able to find a few good ones. Reviewers elsewhere pointed out that CDs sometimes disappear from your queue, so if you really want something, you might want to order it while you know you can still get it. The only issue for me is that Rhapsody fulfills most of my listening needs, so I?m only buying CDs that are great as a whole, and something I?d want to listen to in the car. When I get a subscription-capable MP3 player, my need may disappear altogether. Until then, my queue is loaded.