Archive for the 'Link' Category

Tech Things (I Know) I Don’t Understand

Published on 2007/7/5 in General, Life and Link. 0 Comments

  • Lisp and Functional Programming – Reddit collectively says it’s so great
  • Semantic Web – I just finished my entire senior project at University on processing websites and I have had the sneaking suspicion that Semantic Web might be The Proper Way to accomplish my goals. That said, no tools from that camp presented themselves in research. More on that project later perhaps.
  • “Web Services” – Mashups are one thing, but where do you draw the line? I love dapper which makes RSS/XML from bloody ugly old fashioned sites!
  • Unix (not Linux) – It always feels wrong. Props to Stallman and GNU, there is something to those tools.
  • YouTube

I do get:

  • Twitter (I like the Group Instant Messaging idea)
  • Google Reader (Podcasts, News, Blogs)
  • IMAP – Store email on the server so it is always in the cloud, Gmail works too, less personal with the benefit of free backups.
  • Google Desktop- Google for my mind. Now on Linux, Mac AND Windows. I hope that they have porting tools to move the data files between platforms!?
  • Greasemonkey – I should do one of those cliched posts where I list all the scripts I use.

Further explore and accept:

  • RAW camera formats - Here I come Nikon D80.
  • FreeBSD – Installed but it’s still not me. Gentoo makes more sense.
  • Grandcentral.com – Route all your calls through one number? Google just bought them.

Facebook might be like AOL but College students have free audiences there, more than can be said for most blogs.

How to Optimize Gestures in Firefox

Published on 2005/7/29 in General, Link, Linux, etc. and Tabletries. 0 Comments

Why Bother?

It is nice to be able to flick your wrist to do all the common tasks in a browser without touching menus, reaching for toolbars, or the keyboard. Personally, I’ve got a tablet so the pen is often the most convenient interface. Back, Forward, Next (in series), Previous (in series), new tab, close tab, minimize and maximize all in two mouse moves or less.

I used to use “All-In-One Gestures”:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/index.html which is a fork of the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures” extension. It was forked before reliable diagonal gestures were implemented though and it has stayed san diagonals for years. Optimoz was broken in Firefox for a time with no maintainers so I had to move to All-in-One, I got used to a few of the bit features and didn’t check back on Optimoz.

I sorely missed diagonal gestures, instead of 4 gestures with one move (Up, Down, Left, Right) I could do eight!, but I tolerated AIO. Two gestures which were especially handy as one move-gestures but don’t fit into the UDLR orientations were Grow Image and Shrink Image. Did I mention the loss was a tad annoying?

A new extension has come about though which adds two more amazingly useful one move gestures into the mixin’s though–”NextPlease”:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=390 . This extension adds interfaces for Next and Previous page, filling out and in my opinion, fully justifying the diagonals as legit gestures, if there was any question. All-In-One supports these gestures but only for the non-diagonal gestures–Up (Link-in-new-tab), Down (Link-in-new-window or Scroll Down) , Left (back), Right (forward) are already taken with important moves. No flick to next page for you there.

So, how can you flick to the next page?

  2. Install the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension”:http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/installation.html
  3. After you restart firefox, click the links below to add the NextPlease gestures to Optimoz:

The other two classic diagonals are all enabled by default–Grow Image is Down and Right, Shrink Image is Up and Left.