Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
July 29th, 2009 | 
Author: When I was playing around with Sockso I decided to see if there was any more open source music servers. I found Subsonic. Subsonic is also Java based and will work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It is not as user-friendly as Sockso. For example the standalone install availible for linux doesn’t appear to have a tray icon. I had to install in /var/subsonic or edit the subsonic.sh script to customize ports and its working directory. I also had to install lame into the /var/subsonic directory to get streaming to work the best. Overall it took me longer of poking around to figure out how to use it. However, it found all my coverart I provide with my music, which Sockso had issues with, and has extensive administration options through the web interface. To get it to run on startup I had to add it to my init scripts in Linux, and kill it via its PID which seams to be random.
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I like to have a fairly clean and uncluttered desktop. There is no exception when it comes to my web browser. I have found the following Firefox Extensions and theme to provide me a sleek customized interface which stays out of my way.
Add a menuitem “Add Bookmark Here…” to Bookmarks…
Fission combines address bar and progress bar (Safari style). This makes the progress bar more visible and allows for a nice visual effect.
Combines/merges the Stop and Reload toolbar buttons.
Direct access to your most visited websites
Replace the standard menu bar with a tiny menu popup.
These icons are designed around the simplified Stop, Reload, Back and Forward icons of Strata… expanding those basic elements across the entire interface. My goal is to create a compact alternative default theme… something that’s not just a special effect, but a fun and functional interface.
In addition to these extentions and theme I enter about:config in the address bar and change the value keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q= (allowing me to type in a search string in the address bar that presents me with the Google results, letting me remove the search bar from firefox entirely if so felt).
Tags: Google makes me nevus. Any monopoly makes me nervous. But Google especially. With absence collecting data from the majority of websites I visit, to their privacy policies, relations with China, Gmail, and Mozilla Partnership, it has become THE portal for the internet. I don’t trust them. I bailed out of any web application once acquired by Google, and thinking of moving my blogspot blog to a self hosted one. Perhaps I am a parinoid conspiricy type, but I am no the only one (read Google Watch or better, this Mother Jones article). With that said its an unavoidable evil empire.
However, you don’t have to use Google for ALL your searching needs.
First let me allow Clusty to introduce itself;
Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This “metasearch” approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.
But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.
And with a name like Clusty, it’s gotta be good!
Next, say hellow to Ask.com
Our ExpertRank algorithm provides relevant search results by identifying the most authoritative sites on the Web. With Ask search technology, it’s not just about who’s biggest: it’s about who’s best. Our ExpertRank algorithm goes beyond mere link popularity (which ranks pages based on the sheer volume of links pointing to a particular page) to determine popularity among pages considered to be experts on the topic of your search. This is known as subject-specific popularity. Identifying topics (also known as “clusters”), the experts on those topics, and the popularity of millions of pages amongst those experts — at the exact moment your search query is conducted — requires many additional calculations that other search engines do not perform. The result is world-class relevance that often offers a unique editorial flavor compared to other search engines.
Last, but not least is Dogpile.
If you had a choice between a single-person search party, or a search team of half-a-dozen, which would you choose? Yep, us too. Why not put six search engines to work on something in the same time it takes to use one? This is what we call metasearch. Dogpile puts the power all the leading search engines – Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, and Ask – together in one search box to deliver the best combined results. The process is more efficient and yields more relevant results.
Aren’t all search engines pretty much the same? Funny, we thought that too, but they aren’t. In fact, different search engines often return different search results for the same query. Based on everything from how information is arranged on a web page, to what each search engine pinpoints as most relevant, search results can vary widely across each search provider.
Our time is important to us too. So, we had an idea to bring together the Web’s best search engines in one place and deliver the most comprehensive and relevant results, and metasearch was born. The solution is an efficient, single-search-box engine that makes things easier for all of us. Especially when you learn that our special technology removes duplicates and analyzes the results to ensure the best results are always on top of the pile.
In Firefox you can replace the Google search tools with other options. I even go as far as to replace the keyword.URL function in about:config (typed into the address bar).
For Clusty: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=
For Ask.com: http://www.ask.com/web?q=
For Dogpile: http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web/
One of the great benefits of running Firefox is the multitude of third party extensions available. In any way you can imagine to alter or enhance the features of Firefox there is possibly an extension for it, and if not you can make one (given you have the expertise.) Here is a list of the extensions I use regularly on Firefox and have found to be either fun or useful.
Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.
Ever wondered why you are still tracked though you tried everything to prevent it?
BetterPrivacy is a Super Cookie Safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO’s. It blocks longterm tracking on Google, YouTube Ebay and many other domains.
The easy way to download and convert Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites.
This works also for audio and picture galleries.
View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.
The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!
FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up — It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers.
A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures.
Displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information.
Never lose anything you type into a web form again! Lazarus securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash, server timeout, or whatever, you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breath a sigh of relief.
The best security you can get in a web browser! Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks.
Read It Later allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.
Import/Export extension preferences
Screengrab! saves webpages as images… It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.
ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
Sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by 84 different advertising networks, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all members of the Network Advertising Initiative, and many other companies.
Xmarks is the #1 bookmarking add-on. Install it on all your computers to keep your bookmarks and (optionally) passwords backed up and synchronized. Xmarks also helps you uncover the best of the web based on what millions of people are bookmarking.
OpenOffice is the premier open source office suite. However Lenny ships with the older 2.x version of OpenOffice. However, you can add the backports repositories and make sure it defaults to the backports repos in synaptic. Now you can install OpenOffice 3.
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org openoffice.org-gtk
You can substitute openoffice.org-kde if needed.
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