Firefox summed up in one screenshot.
@demi’s reply: you forgot to mention the restarting in order to apply a theme ;}

However, to be fair, these seem like themes. And themes are wonky voodoo magic, and aside from requiring a lot of effort, nobody gives a damn about your work. I’d say themes and other aesthetic extensions get abandoned far more often than extensions that add functionality.

Also Classic Compact is the best theme forever.

Aside from that, it’s pretty easy to force Firefox to accept add-ons that you know are working. Slight problem: if you update and an extension really doesn’t work, you’ll be sad. Anyway, I think this extension is the current solution. Alternatively, Is It Compatible? will let you know when to wait to upgrade Firefox.

PS: I can’t help being a Mozilla apologist, okay! In principle, though, I like that you can dig around in the guts of Firefox beyond anything that Chrome’s API supports. On the other hand, I can’t help but be envious of a lot of Chrome extensions that have no Firefox equivalent because they’re so much easier to make. All of which is to say that I realize I am a flawed human with illogical software preferences!

PPS: If you have to restart Firefox to use an extension/apply a theme, it’s because it uses an older API for Firefox. Which, I believe, uses an ugly mix of C++ and JavaScript. “Restartless” extensions use a newer JavaScript API, which is still a work in progress by my understanding. It’s more in line with what Chrome offers, but I don’t know if you sacrifice anything by leaving behind the double-edged sword that is C++.

3net slum

It’s Sunday, and I have Some Things for you! First, some good news: PSN is back up in the US and Canada, coming with a firmware update that does nothing but inform you that you should change your password.

Next up is FromWhereToWhere, a firefox extension that “threads” your history, showing you how you got to a specific page. As in, if you were on your dashboard and click on the link for the extension, then go to wikipedia, then go through a bunch of articles, it would show each of the steps along the way. I used to use TreeStyleTabs in a similar way, but this is far more useful. I highly recommend it. If you’re worried about security, they say it just uses firefox’s existing history tracking. Theoretically, you should be able to use it on older history as soon as you install it.

On a much more niche note is AVALANCHE, a fan-made brawler based on Final Fantasy VII and starring Tifa for no real reason. This game actually introduced me to OCRemix, as it uses music from the stellar FF VII remix album, Voices of the Lifestream. It’s a decent game, and if you actually want to try it out, there’s a recent beta available on the creator’s website. You may also want to download the font changing mod here.

Back to general interests, I’d like you to watch the Extra Credits video from last week, Gamifying Education. If there are any teachers you particularly like, you should share it with them. If there are any teachers you dislike, you should definitely share it with them! I doubt one video on the internet is enough to reform the education system. However, it’s more than enough to help individual teachers, and that’s better than no progress at all.

Also on The Escapist is an older Extra Considerations article about console gaming. Extra Considerations has Yahtzee, the writer(?) behind Extra Credits, and another smart guy called Movie Bob discussing various topics in gaming. Guest writers come in sometimes, too. Anyway, this particular article is all about how little innovation there is in the industry, and how the Wii came and went without many games actually using its controller for anything interesting. Also, how video games shouldn’t be limited by what the player can physically do in real life. Could you play Final Fantasy VII with Kinect? Of course not, because you can’t jump fifty feet in the air or use a sword as tall as your body.

———————————————————————

Wrapping things up, I’ve got an anime recommendation: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, aka Madoka Magica. I don’t want to say a lot about it, because it’s best left as a surprise, but check it out and don’t be fooled by the cute and cuddly exterior. It’s not on crunchyroll, sadly, so you’ll have to find it yourself. This tiny paragraph doesn’t do it justice, but I liked it a lot and I think it’s worth your time.

ZoomInfo

I finally installed Firefox 4 today, removed old/outdated/unnecessary extensions and tweaks, and found some new ones to make it even sexier than before. You can’t really tell from this screenshot, but tabs will get smaller and smaller as I open new ones to prevent overflow. Just tested it - I can have 17 tabs open before they get lost. I’m ok with that number.

I won’t list everything I have installed, but ask if you like what you see! Also, I don’t have a comparison shot of FF 3 because I didn’t think about it. If I use system restore to go back and get a screenshot, can I use it to come back to the future?

Rainmeter skins at the top are edited Gnometer skins (remove icons, unnecessary text, etc.) except for the CPU/RAM. Skin in the right corner is LinePlanner, in the left is InputNotes. In the middle is an album art skin called ClearShadow that I can no longer trace. It’s the best I’ve found, though.

As for the theme, I’m using Appows Work Minimal. Or Classic. Not sure which honestly. Either way it’s dark and sexy. Tabs in Windows Explorer are from QTTabBar, and taskbar icons are edited using 7Conifier.

edit: also I guess you can’t see anything because tumblr doesn’t let you view pictures larger? that kind of defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it

Productivity Tip: Leechblock4

I’ve been working with it for a few weeks now - almost a month, I think - so I’ve come to a definite conclusion: Leechblock, a firefox extension for FF 3-4, is awesome. If you prefer chrome, there’s a similar extension called Chrome Nanny or something like that. Here’s what they do:

You set up a list of sites that keep you from doing your work. Be honest: add all the sites you use to procrastinate, all the sites that distract you. You can use * for a wildcard: *.tumblr.com will block your dashboard and any individual person’s tumblr. Then, set out a list of times where you want to buckle down and work. I set mine up to block whenever I’m in class, and almost all day on friday, saturday and sunday (the days I have no classes). During that period of time, the sites listed will be blocked, and by default replaced by a screen saying “You can come back when the site is no longer blocked.” You can set it up to redirect to, say, google or something. Or a file on your computer that says “GET BACK TO WORK”.

As far as other features go, it has plenty: you can set up multiple “groups” for blocking, so you can set up different sites to block or different times to block on different days. You can manually enter a “lockdown” mode, which keeps you out of the sites in the group for whatever period of time you specify. You can also set up a timer and have Leechblock kick you off after that time is up: right now, I have Leechblock set up to give me 45 minutes every three hours to screw around on facebook and reading RSS feeds and stuff.

You can set up different options for “how to block” a specific group of sites: it can actively block pages from your sites (when the site is going to be blocked, it will refresh the page and block it), you can prevent access to options for that group when it’s being blocked (sites can be added to groups under the right-click context menu), and in firefox 4 you can prevent access to your addons page so that you can’t get into the leechblock options. You can also set up a timer in the status bar to tell you how long before a site is blocked, and display a popup message x seconds before a site is going to be blocked.

Honestly, after one weekend of having my favourite sites blocked all day, I stopped wanting to play Echo Bazaar. After a couple of weeks, I’ve forgotten what my daily routine used to be - I have to go into the bookmarks menu to remind myself to play BvS and check on tumblr. It’s actually really nice to get up in the morning and spend two hours working, instead of getting up and spending two hours reading RSS feeds. Ideally, I’ll uninstall Leechblock and have that same resolve to get to work. Then, since I’m actually doing work when I have the time, I’ll have more time to relax and talk to people and maybe live a little.

My vacation’s going pretty well. I’m catching up on my Read It Later list, I checked out a number of to-do list managers (spoiler: I realized I didn’t need any of them), and today I’m going to keep reading and start organizing music in my library. As far as what I’m reading, yesterday I read The Little Prince, a few Lifehacker articles, and a number of Click Nothing articles. Reading more of the latter today.

Highlights of the day, which I definitely recommend: LastPass - a cross-browser password manager - a program that tints your monitor based on time of day. LastPass is pretty nice, it integrates nicely into your browser and can autofill forms for you and hang onto personal info and stuff. Most interesting is their Security Challenge, which checks all your passwords and kicks you in the butt about having bad ones. It can also generate randomized passwords for you - such as 8DIy@!Y2%EtO - but the downside to this is that you will never remember these on your own, making you rely on LastPass forever. The reality is that you need to know the password (what if you want to check your e-mail on another PC?) but you’re more likely to lose the password to a database compromise (oh snap Gawker) than to a brute force attack. Anyway, have a strong master password and then modify it as needed.

Second recommendation is Flux - a program that tints your computer monitor to simulate a natural light cycle. In the morning, it’s the usual bright blue-white that’s guaranteed to wake your brain up and stop the melatonin flow. Later in the day, it’s a warm red that is a lot nicer on the eyes. It seems really drastic when you use the preview of the entire cycle at once, but if you change it to the slow setting (takes an hour to transition) it’s very subtle. When you first come to your computer and it’s a strange kind of red, it might throw you off, but it’s… oddly comforting. Trust me, it’s good for your eyes and your brain, so try it out.

Third thing that may not be any use to you is custom address bar search engines in Firefox and Chrome. If you’ve used chrome, you’ll know that typing something other than a website will automatically do a google search. Great, but it gets better, because you can add search bars from sites and access them with a keyword (at least in Firefox). Go to a site, right click any search bar, and click “add a keyword for this search”. I did this for a french translation site - so I type “enfr bus” and it gives me the translation for the word. You could do this for your favourite torrent tracker, for a blog, whatever site you visit that has a search bar.

You can also add keywords for your bookmarks by right-clicking and going to their properties - type f for facebook, t for tumblr, w for wikipedia, whatever. It’s pretty good. You should do it.

————————————————————

Went to a family supper last night, but it wasn’t actually an awkward sit-around-and-chat kind of affair. We ate our food and rushed out to a coffee house at my cousin’s high school to see him play. Some of the music was bad, some of it wasn’t, eh. Honestly I don’t have much to say about the whole event! We didn’t spend hours together and it wasn’t horrifically awkward, so… Yeah, I guess that’s it. In a few days I may have a good story to tell.

BarTab 4

I wasn’t going to post about this add-on at first, because if I posted about every firefox add-on I find, we’d be here for a very long time. However, I found out how useful it is last night when I spent a few hours browsing the web and relaxing, so I think it deserves to be posted.

Side note: FF 4 has a built in feature similar to this, though BarTab has more options for customization, so it might be worth using if there’s an update.

The basic idea of BarTab is that you don’t really need to keep a tab in memory when you aren’t actively looking at it. So the main draw is the feature to “unload” a tab after a user-specified period of time - if you don’t look at it for a minute, or ten minutes, or 30 seconds, then it will be unloaded from your RAM or however firefox keeps track of your tabs. When you go back to the tab, it refreshes the page.

You’ll notice a huge performance boost when you’ve got dozens of tabs open with BarTab and without it - while the tabs are still there and available for you as soon as you want them, you’ll be running just as fast as if you had only one or two tabs open. Because that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s actually really, really nice in action, even if you don’t typically open a lot of tabs. The one time you do, it’s pretty great.

That being said, you’ve got more options than just unloading tabs. You can tell firefox not to load a new tab until you focus on it - I found it slightly annoying because it literally doesn’t load the tab at all, so all you see is “lifehacker.com” or something and don’t know what the tab is supposed to be. I prefer to just set the unload time fairly low - I had it at five, but I’m thinking I might go lower and add exceptions.

Adding a domain (www.tumblr.com, www.facebook.com, etc.) to your exceptions list keeps tabs from that site from being unloaded. You can manually type them in the add-on options, or right click a tab and pick “keep pages from www.tumblr.com loaded”. So my thought is to lower the unload time to a minute or two and then add exceptions for sites I don’t want to lose. While I’m reading a feature or review on Destructoid, the others I opened will unload until I’m ready to read them. On the other hand, I won’t lose the posts I’m working on or the conversations I may be having on facebook.

Check it out, it’s quite neat. Even if you don’t think you’ll notice much of a difference, it really isn’t intrusive and it works quite well if you ever spend more than a few minutes in a single tab.

Site-specific browsers4

I haven’t fooled around with this too much, and I also have the issue of having a billion things I want to do on the internet on a regular basis, but this is pretty neat anyway. Maybe you’ll find a use for it. Maybe I’ll find a use for it!

Here’s what it does: Adds a button under the tools menu for Firefox (the desktop version probably works differently) for you to make a little icon on your desktop, taskbar, etc. that will go directly to the site you’re currently viewing. By default, you get the site - that’s it. No address bar, no navigation buttons, no distractions. So you take your Gmail inbox, you take your calendar or to-do list manager of choice, and you get little icons to open them up. Facebook, maybe tumblr, whatever.

You get out of bed, check your stuff (inbox, new posts, things to do today, whatever), interact a little (reply to an e-mail, make a quick tumblr post, add an event), go to work, the end.

Chrome has this feature by default, and Prism is a firefox extension for it. I guess it just depends how you want them to be rendered? Bubbles, for Windows, renders it in IE. If you actually want that. Aside from that, I’m not entirely sure what differences there may be in performance. If you’re using Chrome, the “create application shortcut” option under tools will do that for you. Firefox says “convert website to application.” As far as Bubbles goes, I’m not sure.

Looking at Bubbles, it has extensions that allow notifications for specific sites. That may put it above Prism and Chrome, because you really only want to check your e-mail when you know there’s something there. At any rate, check ‘em out, do some research if it sounds useful. You expect me to do everything for you?!

———————————————————————-

edit: looking at Bubbles some more, it’s pretty ancient, no posts on the site or anything for months - probably best to skip that one, but that leaves the notification issue unresolved

edit2: guess Prism makes its things in a dumb way, so use Chrome’s thing - I don’t think you need to use Chrome at all or anything after you’ve created the application

edit3: Looking at Snarl and Growl to fix the notification issue. Yip allows access to these through Firefox. Research continues.

edit4: Yip seems more or less dead - the download link isn’t working, anyway, and cursory glance at google results didn’t turn up an alternative download. I question the need for these notifications in your browser when you already have Snarl/Growl providing desktop notifications.

Snarl is, from what I can tell, developed for windows - Growl is a port from Mac, and this means it has great iPhone support. If that’s your jam. Both seem to have a number of useful add-ons to support whatever you want them to support, so yeah.

Though this brings us full circle and makes the site-specific browser entirely useless. I mean, it would probably load faster than opening a shortcut in your browser. But when would you use it? *shrug*

FoxTab4

This thing is pretty sexy and amazing, but I’m probably not going to install it because I think it might get in the way when I need mobility rather than sexy. For my desktop, though, it would be awesome.

I’ve seen people using it in class and it does look awesome. The SpeedDial thing (also known as bookmarks for those of us living in the past) makes it 10x better. You’ve got your open tabs, you’ve got your bookmarks (tabs you would want to open at some point), all in one place. Now, because I haven’t tried it, it’s entirely possible that this thing is horrible to use. Maybe you’ll love it, maybe you won’t. But I just thought it was nice.

Also I hate every single change they make to the look of FireFox. All of them. From 2.0 to 3.0, every random change from there that broke themes I was using, the incompatibility of Personas with themes (Personas became so popular that stupid people came at risk of screwing themselves up), and now FF 4.0 is like completely meh to me. Moving tabs up to the top of the window? Blah.