Signal Eleven

I’ve already been on the subject before, and I had promised a post about RSS.

Well today is RSS awareness day, and RSS advocates should promote and raise the global awareness of RSS as a tool.

Not this time. Remember ODE? Well, it’s time to try again and this what is going to occupy my labour day afternoon.

Instead, I’m gonna link you to a very informative post on “Avventure Planetarie”, hoping Paolo will forgive me for the recent content piggybacking (Voyager, now RSS…)

It’s in Italian, (and I know a few readers will be pleased), but for you non-italian speakers, check out RSSday, the website promoting the event presenting RSS using a nice video. (with an awful audio, though)

Oh, and I expect to see a definite increase in RSS subscriptions in tomorrow stats,  mmkay? :-)

Stay tuned, more to come.

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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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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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Have you ever used “apt”, or “rpm” under some flavor of Linux? O a portage system?

In case you didn’t, I’ll explain briefly what’s the purpose of a Package Management System.

A package management system is a solution that allows the automatic search, location, download (or retrieval from other media) and installation (or upgrade) of software.

Often, a PMS goes in pair with a Dependency Resolution solution, that allows to detect packages that are necessary to run the desired program and download and install them accordingly.

Believe me, once you get used to the idea, it’s hard to go back to regular “installations”, if not for special purposes.

Now, it’d be great if such a tool existed for Windows, as we all have to deal with that pain in the ass operating system every now and then.

win-get (http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/index.php) gets at least *part* of the job done

say you want the latest version of firefox: you just fire up your “run” dialog, or command prompt and command:

win-get install firefox

No, it won’t check for upgrades, see if you need other dependencies, or aid in the removal of the application, but it does download the installer of the latest version and fire it up for you to install, saving you the hassle of opening the browser, look for the program page, and dowload the installer.

It has in catalog most of the free (at least as in “free beer”, but also many free programs, free as in “free speech”) programs you might need, firefox, tunderbird, alchool…you name it, it’s probably there.

Go get your free win-get copy (and the wget utility it uses to download the programs) at the link above and slam them in your c:\windows for easy running from the run dialog.

I’m not encouraging anyone to keep using windows if frustrated by it lacks of feature, but as many of us must stick with it, let’s try to minimize the hassle!

Got any other trick to survive Windows mediocrity? Let me know in the comments!

Stay tuned, more to come.

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