tinfoil, whiskey, and computers

Recently my work laptop, running XP (blah), started acting up. It was pretty much always a pig. For some reason I got a really old hand me down when everyone else in my group got awesome, powerful mobile workstations. The thing is a piece of crap, locks up whenever I hibernate or sleep, runs like general shit even with 2GB of RAM, and has horrible battery life.

I am pretty sure the hard drive has physical issues that aren’t helping the problems any. It refused to boot one day so IT took a look at it and, of course, IT immediately blamed all the software I had installed on it. I told them I would remove it all but my productivity would literally be cut in half. I can’t be crippled by the meager choice of shitty software they install. Hell, their software choices are most of the performance/stability issues. IE regularly craps out, as does Office. Forget trying to use SalesLogix or any of our bug tracking tools. They take at least 10 minutes simply to start up!

I am not exaggerating when I say that after initial boot, with no additional programs opened, over 500MB of RAM is already in use! WTF?

To get them off my back I decided I’d come up with a clever way around their limitations. First, I uninstalled all the stuff I had installed. Ultimately IT is going to re-image my laptop, which is fine by me. I don’t store anything on there that can’t be lost. Then, I implemented my master plan.

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I am a huge fan of Firefox.  I am a Windows user at work and an OS X user at home.  Having a cross-platform option is one of the many reasons I switched in the first place a few years ago.  I also love the add-ons (were they called plugins at one point?).  I love being able to customize my browser to do what I want it to do.  Here are the add-ons I use on a daily basis and have on every computer in no particular order:

• Fission - I just like the progress in the address bar.  I could live without it, but it’s nice to have.
• Forecastfox - weather in the statusbar.  Simple, effective, convenient.
• Foxmarks - As I use multiple machines (2 at home, 1 at work) I need a way to sync my bookmarks.  This is my preferred method after trying a few others.
• Gmail Notifier - I actually only use this on Windows machines as I use the Google Notifier for OS X on my Macs.  But it’s nice all the same.
• Deepest Sender - That’s what I’m typing this blog post on.  I used to use it for Livejournal originally but I’ve mostly abandoned that and just use my personal blog now.  Works great though for both.
• FireFTP - A free cross-platform FTP client.  It’s simple but it gets the job done.  As I’m not satisfied with any of the other free OS X FTP clients this is what I use exclusively on OS X.  On Windows I use Filezilla for some things, but for basic FTP I still choose FireFTP.
• Adblock Plus - Why the hell wouldn’t you block ads?  Seems to work pretty well.  Better than the Greasemonkey script options.
• Greasemonkey - Though I don’t use it to block ads I use it for all kinds of other neat stuff.  I use it on Netflix, myspace, IMDb, and a handful of other sites.
• Cache View - adds a context menu right-click to see cached pages via a variety of cache servers like Archive.org and Google cache among others.
• Customize Google - Just what it sounds like, it adds some custom options to Google searches.  Mainly I use it to link to other search engines to compare results.
• Gmarks - I am still undecided on this but the latest update is pretty nice.  I wish Google Bookmarks was better in general so I could sync my Firefox bookmarks to it.  Right now it’s a manual process to sync my Firefox to Google bookmarks.  Gmarks is pretty cool by itself but I’m not a hardcore user of it yet.
• IE Tab - This only works on Windows.  At work we have a lot of internal sites that rely on IE to function.  We can’t use IE7 and there’s no other tab solution for IE that I like.  I actually hate IE7 tabs too.  Enter IE Tab.  Now I can use Firefox, tabs and all, to view pages though it uses the IE engine embedded within Firefox.  It’s pretty cool.  I dig it.
• PlainOldFavorites - There are some bookmarks (Favorites in MS-speak) that I only bookmark on my work machine.  I don’t want or need to sync those like I do my normal Firefox bookmarks.  PlainOldFavorites allows me to neatly display my IE Favorites right in Firefox.  Very simplistic and gets the job done well.
• Tab Mix Plus - I have a need to tweak and Firefox just doesn’t give me the control over tabs that I want.  This allows me to tweak the behavior to my particular wants and needs.
• TinyUrl Creator - Allows you to easily make a tiny URL using, uh, tinyurl.com.

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I love technology, especially when it’s useful.  Wiki on a stick is one such piece of technology.  It’s a self-contained html page that works like a basic wiki.  I have found this immensely useful for keeping track of all the little projects I do for work.

It really has a lot of features for such a “simple” piece of cool.  The neatest companion I have found for it is the data: URI Kitchen.  This allows me to embed images or even files right into the html.  It works awesome for small stuff.

It’s still early in development and I only expect it to get better.  The best part is even someone like me who knows very little about the guts of the thing can make simple modifcations since it’s just HTML.  I’ve added some javascripts and changed the look of the thing.  Very simple, very cool, very useful.  Check it out.

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Greasemonkey, go Greasemonkey. You are supreme, the chicks will cream for Greasemonkey.

For the uninitiated:
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.

Basically yhat means you can add cool shit to any website via some relatively simple scripts. There are a ton of scripts out there for your surfing pleasure.

I have delved into creating a couple scripts that serve my movie info needs. And by “delved into” I really mean “completely ripped off someone else’s script. I took a couple scripts that sent links from IMDb to Netflix (and vice versa) and made the appropriate changes to have them link to BoxOfficeMojo instead.

I present to you two ugly but effective Greasemonkey scripts.

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