The World of Stuff .com

Customization

As if you didn’t need another reason to use Firefox as your browser and Thunderbird as your e-mail client, I present to you… another reason: customization. Being able to customize your browser and e-mail client to suit your needs improves the Internet experience. These programs can be customized using extensions, which are easily downloadable and provide extra functionality. Now that everyone’s on the same page, I’d like to share the extensions I’ve downloaded recently (and there are quite a few).

Most of my Firefox customization as of late has been in the form of Greasemonkey user scripts. Greasemonkey is an extension that allows you to manage and use user scripts, which are basically mini-extensions written in JavaScript. I’ve downloaded a slew of these user scripts lately. Here are the more notable ones:

• Homestar-Fullon: Resizes the 800×600-optimized cartoons at Homestar Runner to fit the browser window.
• Linkify ting: Turns plain-text URLs on web pages into links.
• phpBB forum signature purger: Practically half of every thread on a phpBB forum consists of long-winded signatures. This gets rid of them all, making things much more legible.
• Currency Converter: Pretty nifty, but I’ll never use it much. I have it set to convert EUR to USD.
• Plus a bunch of scripts to make browsing MySpace easier.

Another extension I’ve recently downloaded is Book Burro, which compares the prices of books on several major sites. (I had originally downloaded it as a Greasemonkey user script, but it didn’t work.) No, this will probably never be useful to me, but I can still enjoy comparison window shopping. And it’s cool.

Today I decided that I would replace Awasu, the RSS reader I’ve been using for two years, with a Firefox extension. There were a few things wrong with Awasu. First, it uses Internet Explorer, which is not my primary browser, to display web pages in a frame. So, I couldn’t view the RSS feeds of my friends who have friends-only LiveJournals; I might have needed to be logged in to LJ on IE, but I’m not even sure if that would work. Second, the version of Awasu I had didn’t support Atom feeds, meaning several sites I would visit frequently were left out in the cold. I got around these problems with a clumsy solution — I would check my friends’ LiveJournals and sites without RSS feeds in the browser (IE, and later Firefox) while keeping up with the other sites in Awasu.

It sufficed for a while, but I decided it was time to integrate the whole RSS thing into my browser (and not use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, a very light RSS feature built into the browser). I decided to go for Wizz RSS News Reader 2.0.6, which does support Atom feeds as well (apparently they don’t want to change the name). It can update certain feeds automatically, all at a specific interval that you choose from a list (various intervals from 10 minutes to 24 hours). Compare this to the free version of Awasu, which allowed you to update each feed at any interval, but with a minimum of 3 hours. However, Wizz counts from when you start the browser, whereas Awasu used absolute (system) time. So I guess I’ll check my blogs whenever I feel like it. I’ve tried that, and I like it better. Now I have a feed reader that works with all my blogs, including friends-only LJs, sites with only Atom feeds, and sites whose feeds I didn’t know existed until I decided to look for them today. It’s all good.

For Thunderbird I have one extension: MinimizeToTray. It pretty much does what it says, allowing you to minimize Thunderbird to the Windows system tray. It would be even cooler if the extension could have Thunderbird start in the tray when you start the computer. Unfortunately, in order to do that, you have to specify for Thunderbird to run in “turbo” mode, and MinimizeToTray disables turbo mode because they don’t get along nicely. So what I do is load Thunderbird manually once the computer starts, and then have it continue to run in the background, giving me a little reminder whenever it finds that I have mail.

Coming to you from Luke, who’s in my AP European History class, it’s a bit of Dinosaur Comics fan art. (Click the thumbnail to enlarge.) He sums up much of the history of Europe quite nicely.

Wikiquote has a list of mnemonics big enough to make your head explode.

Mood-News is a site that takes headlines from the BBC and automatically sorts them from good to bad. It’s a pretty long list, but you can filter it by keyword or subject.