Geekiness abounds.
Jul. 9th, 2004 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seasleepyMan, I am seriously slacking off on the LJ updating side of things.
But I was informed a couple of days ago by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asghar that it's time for a geeky entry. So here goes.
Cool discovery of the week is clevercactus, which I randomly ran into during an unsuccessful search for a WASTE client for Linux. Both of these are fairly unique filesharing programs in that you make a network with people you know. So that makes them less than ideal for finding everything, but it's great if you know that someone will have that particular thing you want.
I had poked around with Waste before and it seemed interesting, but hadn't ever really gotten anyone else on there and there's a bit of a learning curve for people to get what with the key generation and then swapping that has to happen. It sort of fell by the wayside once I got to Linux since there isn't a gui client and I'm not determined enough to mess with a cli for that sort of thing. ;)
I haven't gotten much time to play with clevercactus, but in my first looks at it the other night, it seemed pretty impressive, particularly for something just initially released less than a month ago. It also seemed fairly user-friendly, with a nice web interface for managing contacts.
My only gripe is that the connections to the network seem to be pretty finicky. Oscar and I ended up playing hide and seek for a bit due to disconnections, and in general, if you leave the client running without doing anything with it for like half an hour, it tends to get disconnected. (I had been hoping to use it so I could listen to the music on my computer at the apartment while I'm at work. I may have to break down and try setting up one of the various server programs for streaming, which would probably work better anyway, but...yeah. I don't really want to mess with it. This is easier.)
I suppose I should add that if you're wanting to try it out, I'm on there as seasleepy@gmail.com.
It's getting pretty obvious to me that Mozilla and Firefox are on the verge of exploding. Good thing the Fox is near 1.0....
Just a couple of releases ago, unless you knew where to look, the most you'd hear about any of it was maybe a PC World blurb or something along those lines paraphrasing the press release a day or two after it came out. Now there's rather a lot on the subject available, including some pretty massive wins thanks to Microsoft (of course, there are still the ones that offer mostly backhanded compliments).
It seems like half my friends list have at least picked the browser up in the last couple of weeks (where have you all been? ;)), which is very awesome as well.
Even my dad, who was suspicious of this weird thing I'd installed on their computer last summer (my mom needed spam filtering badly, and she liked and was used to Netscape, so I installed the full suite for them) was asking me about it. (After Mozilla got made not the default browser anymore, the bastardized branded IE-based browser that came with our SBC Yahoo DSL took over the position apparently, and in the end it was driving him insane. ;))
For those of you just picking it up, or thinking about it, here's a really nice, very simple basic introduction to Firefox.
There's also a patch that you'll all want to install on Windows to fix a little security vulnerability. (Really little. If you notice, the patch is 1 KB.)
And since I'm feeling super longwinded tonight, an extension roundup:
My two must-install-before-doing-anything-else extensions are Adblock and Mouse gestures. Now, not everyone's into mouse gestures, but I don't know anyone who likes annoying banner ads.
Cool extensions:
-- Deepest Sender - An LJ client. Everyone seems super impressed by the normal interface, which does the HTML and LJ tags for you. (It also has a source view, if you're like me and would end up with random <a href=....>s everywhere if it did the tags automatically for you. ;)) It's become one of the nicer LJ clients, which is pretty impressive considering it just started last September.
-- Context Search - Puts your search engines from the search box into the right-click menu, which is super handy and saves you a copy/paste if you search on sites other than Google very often. I'd been wanting something like this for quite a while before this extension came out.
-- Mycroft - Not an extension, but it fits in after the last one nicely. If you haven't clicked the "Add engines..." link at the bottom of that drop-down menu in the search bar yet, here's what you're missing.
-- BugMeNot - Gives you bogus user accounts for things like the NY Times, Washington Post, tons of TV stations, and so on. The plugin's not the most exciting thing ever (it just adds something to the right-click menu), but it's still handy and a lot faster than trying to come up with random information to throw in the fields.
-- Sage - An in-browser RSS reader. I haven't used this one super much, but I'm probably going to install it at work since I feel like I'm missing out when I'm not keeping up with my (non-browser-integrated and Linux-only) RSS reader here at the apartment.
-- Firesomething - Change the name of the browser. That's all it does. And it's amazingly amusing. ;)
-- Moji - Gives you a sidebar with kanji helper stuff and a Japanese dictionary. It's one of the best examples, in my opinion, of why extensions are great. A lot of people could really care less about what this does, but it's the best thing ever for others. When I found it, I geeked the heck out (and I don't even really know Japanese or browse sites where it comes up super often).
Yeah, I think that was long enough. ;)
But I was informed a couple of days ago by
asghar that it's time for a geeky entry. So here goes.Cool discovery of the week is clevercactus, which I randomly ran into during an unsuccessful search for a WASTE client for Linux. Both of these are fairly unique filesharing programs in that you make a network with people you know. So that makes them less than ideal for finding everything, but it's great if you know that someone will have that particular thing you want.
I had poked around with Waste before and it seemed interesting, but hadn't ever really gotten anyone else on there and there's a bit of a learning curve for people to get what with the key generation and then swapping that has to happen. It sort of fell by the wayside once I got to Linux since there isn't a gui client and I'm not determined enough to mess with a cli for that sort of thing. ;)
I haven't gotten much time to play with clevercactus, but in my first looks at it the other night, it seemed pretty impressive, particularly for something just initially released less than a month ago. It also seemed fairly user-friendly, with a nice web interface for managing contacts.
My only gripe is that the connections to the network seem to be pretty finicky. Oscar and I ended up playing hide and seek for a bit due to disconnections, and in general, if you leave the client running without doing anything with it for like half an hour, it tends to get disconnected. (I had been hoping to use it so I could listen to the music on my computer at the apartment while I'm at work. I may have to break down and try setting up one of the various server programs for streaming, which would probably work better anyway, but...yeah. I don't really want to mess with it. This is easier.)
I suppose I should add that if you're wanting to try it out, I'm on there as seasleepy@gmail.com.
It's getting pretty obvious to me that Mozilla and Firefox are on the verge of exploding. Good thing the Fox is near 1.0....
Just a couple of releases ago, unless you knew where to look, the most you'd hear about any of it was maybe a PC World blurb or something along those lines paraphrasing the press release a day or two after it came out. Now there's rather a lot on the subject available, including some pretty massive wins thanks to Microsoft (of course, there are still the ones that offer mostly backhanded compliments).
It seems like half my friends list have at least picked the browser up in the last couple of weeks (where have you all been? ;)), which is very awesome as well.
Even my dad, who was suspicious of this weird thing I'd installed on their computer last summer (my mom needed spam filtering badly, and she liked and was used to Netscape, so I installed the full suite for them) was asking me about it. (After Mozilla got made not the default browser anymore, the bastardized branded IE-based browser that came with our SBC Yahoo DSL took over the position apparently, and in the end it was driving him insane. ;))
For those of you just picking it up, or thinking about it, here's a really nice, very simple basic introduction to Firefox.
There's also a patch that you'll all want to install on Windows to fix a little security vulnerability. (Really little. If you notice, the patch is 1 KB.)
And since I'm feeling super longwinded tonight, an extension roundup:
My two must-install-before-doing-anything-else extensions are Adblock and Mouse gestures. Now, not everyone's into mouse gestures, but I don't know anyone who likes annoying banner ads.
Cool extensions:
-- Deepest Sender - An LJ client. Everyone seems super impressed by the normal interface, which does the HTML and LJ tags for you. (It also has a source view, if you're like me and would end up with random <a href=....>s everywhere if it did the tags automatically for you. ;)) It's become one of the nicer LJ clients, which is pretty impressive considering it just started last September.
-- Context Search - Puts your search engines from the search box into the right-click menu, which is super handy and saves you a copy/paste if you search on sites other than Google very often. I'd been wanting something like this for quite a while before this extension came out.
-- Mycroft - Not an extension, but it fits in after the last one nicely. If you haven't clicked the "Add engines..." link at the bottom of that drop-down menu in the search bar yet, here's what you're missing.
-- BugMeNot - Gives you bogus user accounts for things like the NY Times, Washington Post, tons of TV stations, and so on. The plugin's not the most exciting thing ever (it just adds something to the right-click menu), but it's still handy and a lot faster than trying to come up with random information to throw in the fields.
-- Sage - An in-browser RSS reader. I haven't used this one super much, but I'm probably going to install it at work since I feel like I'm missing out when I'm not keeping up with my (non-browser-integrated and Linux-only) RSS reader here at the apartment.
-- Firesomething - Change the name of the browser. That's all it does. And it's amazingly amusing. ;)
-- Moji - Gives you a sidebar with kanji helper stuff and a Japanese dictionary. It's one of the best examples, in my opinion, of why extensions are great. A lot of people could really care less about what this does, but it's the best thing ever for others. When I found it, I geeked the heck out (and I don't even really know Japanese or browse sites where it comes up super often).
Yeah, I think that was long enough. ;)
