Somewhat bored at work at the moment, and not really inspired to be writing code, like I should be, so instead I’ve decided to make a quick post about Mozilla Firebird, a stripped down version of Mozilla, without the newsreader, mail client, IRC client, or composer stuff, which I never used anyway, and some of the extensions that I use for it. Actually, I’ll probably just detail the extensions, it’s more interesting that way.
- Adblock is a pretty slick extension that filters images and iframes out of pages with the intent of blocking ads. If you see an ad, you can just right-click on it, select “Adblock” and it gets blocked. It works on pattern matching, so it’s pretty easy to set it up to block all the ads on a site with just one rule.
- RadialContext replaces the traditional right-click menu with a circle of icons that do pretty much the same things. Because of the way the circle moves with the mouse, it’s possible to use it as a mouse gesture system, similar to those found in Opera. Also, people looking over your shoulder tend to get confused by it.
- User Agent Switcher is a very simple extension that just adds a menu to the Tools menu that lets you switch what your browser is reporting itself as. There are still some stupid sites out there that will only let you in if you’re using IE or Netscape, and this lets you easily circumvent that detection. I don’t use it a lot, but it comes in handy when I need it.
- Googlebar is perhaps the greatest extension ever made. It works like the Google bar for IE, mostly. Puts all the power of Google into a nice, easy to use bar. I particularly like the highlighting feature, to easily see search terms in a window, something that you normally have to use the Google Cache to get.
Well, I think I’ve wasted enough time now. I should get some work done.
Not too much going on at the moment. I spend some time over the weekend working on the HTPC, and it’s now mostly functional. It’s displaying to the TV, it’s running MythTV, seems to do music and video playback pretty well. I’ve also got it loaded up with a bunch of NES and SNES ROMs, but that’s not quite working as I’d like it too. Ideally, playing an NES or SNES game from the HTPC should be as much like playing it from the original console as possible. At the moment however, it displays as a square in the middle of the TV screen, rather than filling the whole image. This is partially because I don’t have a video card with overscan support in Linux and partly because the emulator doesn’t want to stretch the image across the whole screen. I just ordered an ASUS V9180 Magic video card to try and correct the overscan problem. It’s a GeForce4 MX, so it should have overscan support directly by the nVidia drivers. I’m also going to try using ZSNES instead of Snes9X for SNES emulation, hopefully it will be able to stretch the image properly.
I also spent some time rearranging furniture in my apartment on Saturday. I’m going to move my computer desk from the living room to the bedroom, making more space for people to sit and play games and whatnot in the living room. Should work out nicely, I hope. I still need to figure out how I want to run the ethernet cables through the wall. I think I’ll get a couple of RJ-45 wall plates and replace one of the cable plates. This should also give me a better work area for fiddling with computers and whatnot. Hmm…. whatnot.
Andrea and I went to see Underworld on Saturday, I thought it was pretty good. Not the best movie ever, but better than a lot of what I’ve seen in theaters recently. I can’t really put a finger on anything wrong with it, but from some reason it just didn’t jump out at me as a movie that I’m going to rush off and buy on DVD. We also rented The Core on Sunday, which I liked. There are a couple of technical things that kindof bugged me about it though, mostly things like how do they communicate with the surface when they’re in the Earth’s core? And if the weapons control stuff is vital to their mission, why did they put it at the end of the train, instead of up near the front, seeing as they have to jettison anything that gets broken. Ah well.
Also, picked up a little IOGEAR 2-port KVM switch for when I get my Linux box built up and running, so I can just switch my monitor and stuff between the Linux box and my main PC. Havn’t had a chance to test it out yet, but it looks pretty basic. I’m slightly confused by the weird little cute creature thing that appears several times in the product documentation, and on the website.
Not too much going on this week. We’ve been working on a new version of our Remote Sentry box at work, this one is built into a steel box that came with out 12VDC power supply/battery system, using a VIA EPIA 5000 motherboard. I should have some pics of it up tomorrow. We’re switching from NetBSD to Gentoo Linux on this one, most for some hardware compatibility reasons. We eventually want to trim it down to be able to run from a compact flash card instead of a hard drive. Should be fun.
Speaking of Gentoo, I was erroneously attributed with starting a thread on sub-$100 USB UPS’s on the gentoo-users mailing list in this week’s newsletter. I didn’t realize it until Dan pointed it out to me earlier this evening. Kindof neat to see my name on a project’s website, even if it is in error.
Also, picked up a DVD-ROM drive for my planned Linux box. I plan on putting that together this weekend and getting it all installed and whatnot. Shouldn’t take too long, I’m mostly worried about finding all the right screws for it. I think I’m going to pick up some cheesy little two-port KVM switch to go between the Linux box and Vincent, my main PC.
So, another weekend come and gone. Friday I helped over at JLC installing a new mail server. It’s JLC’s first dual-CPU server, with it’s dual Athlon MP’s. I tried to make it as redundant as possible, dual CPU’s, dual hard drives running in a mirrored RAID. Didn’t spring for the dual hot swap power supplies though, I don’t think John would have paid for it. Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly, though it took several hours longer than I had hoped for, but everything was pretty much problem free.
For the rest of the weekend I didn’t really do anything terribly productive. Saturday I just wandered around for most of the day and played a lot of Soul Calibur 2, I’ve gotten a lot of stuff unlocked, but I’m still missing two characters and a bunch of weapons. Shouldn’t be too much longer till I have everything though. Sunday I went over to my mom’s house to help her with the pool. They’re moving out this week, but don’t have the deal with the cabins in Maine done yet, so they’re staying at a hotel until things get sorted out. However, they can’t take the cat with them, so he’s coming to stay with me for a bit. Hopefully not too long though. He’s an outdoor cat, and I don’t think he’ll like my apartment too much.
I believe I have discovered a cure to my recent addiction to Final Fantasy Tactics, and it’s name is Soul Calibur 2. I was hanging out with Dan, Tim, and Amanda last night, and we wandered over to the new Target in Nashua, so I decided to pick up SC2. Played it for a bit last night, it’s very nice. The original Soul Calibur was a great game, and I’m glad to see they didn’t mess it up. It seems like there are tons of things to unlock, and they brought back the multiple weapons per character that Soul Edge had. This should keep me busy for quite some time.
