Records of my tumblings through the intarwebs
I can’t believe I’ve never stumbled across Stylish until recently. It is similar to Greasemonkey, which seems to snatch all the media attention. See this page for the differences between the two. The two features that interest me the most about Stylish:
Also, the official repository of user styles for Stylish, userstyles.org, is a bit better designed that that of Greasemonkey’s, userscripts.org. userstyles.org has “most popular” and “highest rated” pages, and shows popular styles in bold. Unfortunately, both sites leave a lot to be desired. It is a major pain having to scan through tens and hundreds of unverified submissions with wildly differing code quality, tagging, presentation, etc. More advanced searching and sorting methods accompanied with stricter submission requirements (perhaps a moderated section and a free-for-all section) and better presentation would be wonderful.
There are things I dislike about Ubuntu Linux, like the inability to customize during installation and the silly orange theme, but I had always thought that Ubuntu was the very best representative from the Linux world for mere mortals. Alas, Ubuntu has failed to live up to this expectation of “everything just works” in a big way. Ever since Adobe’s release of Flash 9.0 update 3 (9.0.115.0) codename “Moviestar” on December 4th, it has been impossible to install Flash through conventional means like the Add/Remove panel, Firefox’s plugin installer, or Synaptic.
Flash is one of the essential applications that every normal computer user must have nowadays. For a typical computer user to be unable to install Flash for a month (and counting) on a major operating system is frankly ludicrous. I’ve always scoffed at those who claim that “every Linux distribution sucks; *insert my favorite distro* just sucks less.” But this time, I can’t help but agree. (For the record, Ubuntu is not my favorite, but it is the easiest to install and use and my distro of choice at the office.)
Read more about this Flash bug here.
P.S. In my eyes, Mozilla Firefox is still the lone shining jewel in the arena of open-source software for end-users. Everything really “just works” and when problems arise, like the recent regressions, they get fixed in a hurry and pushed out with a fool-proof automatic update mechanism. All hail the Mozilla wizards.
I ran out of adjectives starting with “S” to describe what I believe is the very best password management solution currently available, PasswordMaker. PasswordMaker is an implementation of the on-the-fly site-specific web password hashing system.
How many accounts/passwords do you have? One for your Email? Bank(s)? Credit card(s)? Phone companies? School? Work? Utilities? Google? Yahoo? Facebook? MySpace? Amazon? Ebay? NYTimes? Torrent trackers? That annoying website that made you register just to use the simplest feature? (Oh wait, every website is like that nowadays.) I think you get the point. Even the average, casual Internet user can easily have dozens of accounts/passwords. In this day and age, computerized password management systems are absolutely necessary for even casual Internet users, and PasswordMaker is the king of password management.
Continue reading ‘PasswordMaker: safe, secure, simple, site-specific, smart password management’
Ever want to surf the web anonymously? Forget unreliable and sometimes illegal open proxies that are usually compromised or misconfigured servers. Forget web proxies that spam you with ad frames and pop-ups. Try Tor, an open-source anonymous peer-to-peer network. Using Tor and Firefox is extremely easy. More about Tor in this Wikipedia entry.
I tried the following steps in Arch Linux, but they should apply to any modern operating system. (By the way, Arch Linux is my favorite Linux distribution. I’ll likely write about it at some point.)
Windows users can get the installer.
To verify if your browser connections are anonymized by Tor, visit TorCheck. You can also visit any of the many sites which show you your IP address. If Tor is working, the IP address shown should be different from yours.
Windows users who need an even simpler method of using Tor should check out the XeroBank (xB) Browser. Read more about it at Wikipedia.
Be warned, don’t use Tor to do anything illegal. Tor has known weaknesses and does not guarantee your anonymity if someone wants to catch you badly enough.
If you’re interested in helping the Tor network grow, consider running a Tor relay.
My day-to-day web browser is not the officially branded and built Mozilla Firefox, but a third-party build by Tete that contains general optimizations and specific optimizations for my CPU. Tete’s build boasts improved page rendering speed and faster browser startup. YMMV, of course. These optimizations might be experimental, or situational, or have benefits and drawbacks that are not worth the official development team’s trouble to sort out.
Of all the third-party Firefox builds available out there, one would be hard pressed to find any build that’s updated as quickly as Tete’s, keeping up with Mozilla’s latest security updates. Third-party builds don’t enjoy the convenience of Mozilla’s auto-update feature, obviously. Often-times you have to wait weeks for a third-party builder to update his build, if he hasn’t abandoned his efforts. With Tete, a new build is up whenever I learn of a new Firefox release and visit his site. Furthermore, Tete’s been maintaining his build for over two years, since the days of Firefox 1.x. Many many other third-party builders have come and gone.
I highly recommend Tete’s third-party optimized build of Firefox for those of you who want to squeeze a little extra performance out of their beloved browser. Not recommended for people who are uncomfortable messing with their computers and need their software to just work.
Instructions:
