Sephy’s Platzish

As seen on lifehacker

A profanity filter for the internets? I can understand someone using it at work, or for younger children to protect them from language they’ll end up hearing anyway, but why would anyone else want to use that? Maybe they’re sensitive to being called a fucking nerd (and, apparently, nerd is one of the words that is censored by default..)

Ah well, it’s not my place to say that you can’t use this, but you really shouldn’t.

I was browsing through LifeHacker today and I found this item asking how many extensions you have in your Firefox.

I personally have 10, but one is disabled. The extensions that I do use are -

FoxClocks
Adblock
IE Tab
VideoDownloader
Stylish
Fasterfox (only a couple of tweaks, and I love the page load timer)
Tabbrowser Preferences
All-in-One Gestures
Digger (which lets you go up the directory structure of a website quickly with a right-click on the Go button)

The disabled extension is Popup ALT Attribute. I don’t mind that there are a lot of graphics that don’t show a tooltip - as it is most sites are now using the title attribute to tell you about images and other things.

So anyway, the point of the Lifehacker piece was that this person had installed 200 extensions at one time. I personally don’t have any need for more than the ten that I already have.

Incidentially, there’s even an extension to tell you what extensions you have. I guess that this would be for the person who just says install at every opportunity to install something. There’s also a thread about this at the CyberNotes site. It seems most of the people posting in that thread are firm believers in more is better. Ah well - nothing I can do

I’ve always been one for customising how things look, for example, my firefox address/navigation/bookmark toolbars are all in two lines, in order to maximise space. I also like to make things look different from how they are in their original format. For me, it’s mostly because I think something will look “cooler” to me if this font is changed, or if this color is changed.

For others, it’s because they have a hard time seeing sites that have difficult surroundings, for example a site that uses yellow text on a white background. However, I have found a little extension for Firefox that allows you to change things up. Stylish allows you to do just that.

If you’re knowledgable in CSS scripting, then you can go ahead and make your own styles, but if you need some assistance or just don’t have the tools to make your own, you can go ahead and visit Userstyles where you can find styles for your favorite sites.

My favorite one is the Google Tahoma style (which I’ve since adjusted to use the Lucida Sans font which I think looks very sleek especially after seeing it on a couple of the typepad/typekey blogs out there.

If you’re using opera, most of the scripts can be loaded as scripts, and the same goes for users of the greasemonkey extension.

Well, another day went by without a post. For me, blogging doesn’t come as easily as it does for others, but I am making an effort to write more often than I have been writing. I know that I had mentioned the plethora of photos that I have on my computer, and I really should take some time to go through them again and get some choice shots to post.

However, I am a very lazy person - or so it would seem. I always get started on one thing, but end up doing about a hundred other things and never finishing the original task that I had set out to do in the first place. This post is a great example of that. I had started to write it before I went to bed, but I got really tired and decided to go to sleep.

So, anyway, I had some random thoughts; first off, while at the local home store, there was a woman who was walking through the Christmas display (the first aisle with the outdoor figurines; they also have some aisles with indoor displays and a full range of artifical, pre-decorated trees) and said out loud to her (I would assume) husband “This is all their Christmas CRAP.” — and that was the way she said it, even going so far as popping the P in crap. I would have liked to go up to her and say, “Yeah, it’s their christmas section; it’s a big money-maker for them. If you’re looking for something else, why not ask one of their employees?” Another sign of the times is that the Danish Butter Cookies are out for sale again; sure you can get them any time of the year provided you know where to look, but it’s only at Christmastime when they’re omnipresent.

Next; while watching TV last night, there was an ad for a racing collectible auction site, and the person who was pictured as participating in their auctions appeared to be wearing a replica shirt from the Toll/HSV Dealer Team (it was a black shirt and I swear that there was a Holden logo on the right side of the shirt). I went to said website and didn’t (shockingly) find any Holden memorabilia for sale there.

Lastly, in the time since I mentioned Firefox’s new search behavior, there have been some new threads about the problem on the Mozillazine forums.

Web Search
<CTRL>-K works different in 2.0

There was some mention that today would be the day that Firefox 2.0 would come out. However, I’ve been testing it out for the last few weeks on my laptop system and there is only one thing that is keeping me from upgrading.

In version 1.5 (and maybe in earlier versions, but I’m not too sure about that), a neat little feature was introduced to those who like to save some real estate on their screen - a dialog window that would pop up when you hit Control+K (or, as I didn’t realize until recently, Control+E) that duplicated the function of the search bar in the navigation toolbar.

In version 2.0, they changed the behaviour to one where if you hide the search in the navigation toolbar, you’re forced to use the Firefox Start page (which, for some versions is considered the default start page, but I have opted since I started using firefox to use the Firefox Central page, which was updated to the 2.0 look a couple of days ago).

As had been mentioned in this thread which I had posted in to echo the sentiments of the original poster, it’s a step backwards to force people who don’t want to use up that screen space into using a single option for their searches.

I challenge the contributors to the Firefox project (or even those who can make extensions) to find a way to fix this problem, so that those of us who prefer the search box to be able to use it once again.