Signal Eleven

I recently found myself using Safari, Apple’s web browser, quite often, because it’s WAY faster than Firefox in both rendering and starting up.

But, issues with Wordpress’ post editor aside, I came back to Firefox for one simple reason. Addons.

I use a lot of Addons for Firefox. Some in order to gain functionalities, some to tweak websites the way I want. For example, my Gmail, with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts, has a few extra buttons and menus that I ended up consider part of Gmail itself. And missed on Safari!

So I’ve decided to prune some unused extensions and keep only what I felt really important. Here’s what I kept, in no particular order:

• Adblock: controversial addon that filters ads from web pages. Not that I’m particularly happy about depriving the pages I visit of their source of income, but some flashy ads are terrible. It’s very configurable so you can “switch off” only that pesky banner that has been bugging you. I also use Adblock to avoid loading the Shinystat counter on Signal Eleven, so I don’t get counted (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! ;-) )
• Greasemonkey: allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using JavaScript scripts. There are scripts for a lot of websites. For example, a script for hiding “related videos” “director videos” and “comments” on youtube. Sure you can have them appear anytime, but not having the temptation of clicking on a “related video” is going to save you hours :-). Important: you don’t need to know JavaScript! Plenty of scripts here.
• BBCodeXtra: this adds a few context-menu options to quickly enter BBcode and Html in a web form. Handy if you happen to write on an online forum, like I do.
• Better Gmail: this extension adds over 25 additional features to gmail. Mostly Greasemonkey scripts, useful stuff like a “mark as (un)read” button, options to hide the spam count (it is a source of distraction for me. Gives me those extra seconds of procrastination), or to hide the invite box. Adds a search for date, save searches you make often etc… The italian version (you get it if you have Firefox in italian) has a couple of misleading translations. My fault, I’m going to fix it when a new version comes out.(Lifehacker)
• Better Gcal: same as better gmail, but for Google Calendar. It allows to collapse the header (where the gcal logo and the search box are) and the sidebar, wraps the text on full day events making them actually readable. You can obtain the same functionalities by installing the appropriate Greasemonkey scripts
• Foxyproxy: if you, like me, are a mobile user, and find yourself using your laptop in different areas such as university, workplace, home, cafes, etc. this is probably going to be useful. It’s basically a proxy configuration switcher, allowing you to change the desired proxy from a list, but it’s even more powerful, allowing you to define which proxy to use (or none) based on regular expressions, url patterns, and so on. Useful if you’re setting up a proxy and need testing, or need to access some pages directly.

Believe it or not, I’ve got more extensions to promote, some goodies for digital-divided users. But I’m going to save those for another post. Until then…

Stay tuned, more to come.

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Sorry, slightly off topic post. Call it technical.

Today I was at the graduation ceremony of my roommate Alessandro.

But a lot of my friends graduated today. Because of the summer vacation I’m not even sure who graduated, but I know for sure that some of them did.

So, partial list, in no particular order and forgetting about too many:

Alessandro, Alex, Ale Vita, Ivan, Luca, Gianni… 

You have my congratulation and my deepest, most vile and irrational ENVY ;)

Stay tuned, more to come.

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Globalisation Institute - Brussels’ most popular think tank website - Unbundling Microsoft Windows

Yes, I did not comment on the fine issued to Microsoft by the EU.

But this is even cooler. An it’s not only because it’s Fall.

Apparently, some one is starting to realize that the de facto monopoly of MS in the PC OSs market isn’t good for the market, for the consumer….for anybody, and they are starting to talk about ways to break this situation. It’s not a natural situation, so the antitrust committee has some solid ground to work upon.

Stay tuned, more to come

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This had me scratching my head for a few minutes today, so I thought about sharing it here, and maybe gain some search engines traffic ;)

Somehow I managed to corrupt my Google Reader Google Gears database.

Whenever I opened Google reader, allowing Gears to kick in, I had the following 2 errors in the JS console (ok this is not the default console, it’s Firebug, I’ll talk about it in another post). Since I didn’t really care about the content, I wanted to reset the google gears database.

After removing and reinstalling Google Gears, without much success, I figured that that wouldn’t reset the database itself.

I googled for the documentation. The DB, on MacOSX, resides in Users/<username>/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/{profile}.default/Google Gears for Firefox

HERE the location of the files for other operating systems.

Went there, and simply deleted the whole directory named google.com. Then I reloaded Google Reader, and it created a new DB. Simple as that.

I hope this was helpful.

Stay tuned, more to come.

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If you have never seen this movie, watch it.

If you’ve seen it a few years ago and you didn’t like it, watch it again. You’ll like it.

If you’ve seen it a few years ago and you liked it, watch it again. You’ll love it.

I suggest you to watch it in original, at least to hear Penelope Cruz and her *lovely* spanish accent.

Oh, and the soundtrack. Mind blowing. Did I mention I love this movie?

Stay tuned, more to come.

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Never Forget

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I love buzz words :)

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Ok, let’s face it, the old layout simply sucked.

It looked better in the preview, so I put it on, then I said “Urgh, oh well, let’s keep it for a few days while I find something else”. Then it just stuck.

Now the visits are increasing and it’s time to put on the Sunday outfit. Credits at the bottom of the page, minor modifications by me, picture with my ugly face edited by Lollo.

I had to edit the old one to accomodate some minor visual glitches in some browsers, so let me know in the comments or ideas@signal-eleven.com if there’s something wrong with this one as well.

Stay tuned, more to come.

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