We Are Golden

Add Art is a Firefox extension that replaces ads on websites with art, built on top of AdBlockPlus. Now this I have to see.

Five Superhero Movie Scenes They’ll Never Let You See is hilarious, and oh so true. “Kiss me, Mallah!” Ahahahaha. I must reread the Doom Patrol for the fifty-ninth time. Actually, this is just an extension of the general trend of movies to fail at translating books or comics into movies that convey anything at a similar level. For example, I just watched the first half of the Stardust movie, and while I can’t remember the Neil Gaiman comic all that well, I already have the distinct impression that there is not just a lot that’s missing, but a lot that’s missing that’s important. I rather liked the Stardust story when I read it -it was funny and clever, sweet but not saccharine, gentle but not naive. And the movie is both saccharine and naive, I think, deliberately so- sacrificing all kinds of reasonably clever subtleties for inconsistent, clumsy “adaptations”, making pretty much every character simpler and stupider. And that’s just the first half of the movie -I have a horrible suspicion the second half will be worse. As a serendipitous gift from Great Mother Internet, here is a downloadable copy of the four-volume illustrated novel: Stardust by Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess. File’s about 45M, get it while stocks last, and read that instead of watching the pitiful movie. (“Graphic novel” means “comic book, but posh”. “Illustrated novel” means “regular book, with some pictures in it.”)

In other news: Get Your War On is actually hilarious. It’s about the Americans and their ridiculous war, not ours… of course. Whoever is the first to start a locally-themed webcomic on these lines will win a THOUSAND Internets. Muxfind is pretty nice, if you like Muxtapes. Grabb.it/tv has videos for the 20 most popular songs of every week from the day MTV launched in 1981 to the day Napster shut down in 2001. (That’s… interesting. Now, what about all the unpopular videos?) Ah, the day Napster died. I still remember the horror… Actually, by that point we had switched to Audiogalaxy, I think, but it was the principle of the thing. And yes, I agree that Robot Brain Monkey is awesome.

Gmail Manager and Gmail Notifier are bot …

Gmail Manager and Gmail Notifier are both not worky on Firefox 3. The former isn’t available for FF3 yet, and the latter is just broken. I have switched to -horrors- to buttons on my bookmarks toolbar. Wake up, extension developers!

Hotwire is a fancy new shell, a sort of combination of a regular shell and a file manager.

I think I want a modafinil prescription. I feel the need for chemical augmentation.

I/O Error

So my hard disk crashed and I lost all my stuff. Ho hum.

As Drac noted, I am comparatively calm about this -mostly because I didn’t lose all my stuff. Both work and personal email is in Gmail these days, so that’s fine. A gigabyte or so of work-related data is rsynced daily to a server at work, so that’s fine. Novel and associated notes are tarballed and emailed to myself on a daily basis, so that’s fine. Most everything else important is on a weekly backup, which means I’m losing precisely a week’s worth of data, given that my weekly backups go on Fridays and the crash happened Thursday evening -but nothing life-threatening. Apparently backing up really is a Good Thing.

There was a hairy moment with some freelance writing work I’m doing these days -I’d forgotten to back that up. I’d only been on it for two or three days -it just didn’t occur to me. I should have put it in one of the directories which are automatically backed up, but I set the backing-up cron jobs a long time and had mostly forgotten about it. Still, working at a tech company has its advantages. They dug out the external USB cables for me and I managed to recover those precious twenty-eight kilobytes. (OpenOffice makes very small documents… the plain-text version is only a little smaller)

The deadline for the freelance job was Friday, so I had to temporarily put my hard drive troubles on hold, borrow the flatmate’s laptop and stay up till 3am on Friday morning, accidentally pressing F1 far too often on that stupid Thinkpad keyboard. Still, no harm done.

They had a replacement hard drive by the time I got to work Friday morning, and I’d gotten around to reinstalling Ubuntu (from a Dapper CD that was lying around) by noon. Since then, I’ve been

• re-upgrading Dapper to Edgy.
• Firefox 2 and setting up my handful of extensions again -I always forget how to get Gmail Manager to show up in a toolbar of my choice as opposed to the bottom corner of the status bar. Every time.
• doing things like this, every ten minutes: Hmm, let’s watch a movie. Wha- where the hell is- oh, right. New install. Sigh. apt-get install vlc. Hmm.

That’s all the good news. The bad news is, I can’t seem to wedge the old hard drive open long enough to fish out all the shit I had in it -the stuff that’s was never backed up because A) it was always going to be moved to DVD, in a few days or weeks and B) because it was just too goddamn big to back up in the meantime. This means maybe five gigs of music (Goddammit! I just got that Thunderbirds are Now! album), maybe twelve gigs of comics (Goddammit! I was really and extremely looking forward to reading Wood’s Local over the weekend) and of course, the next two episodes of Prison Break- so there goes my stash of weekend entertainment.

Of course, a digital packrat’s hard disk is usually littered with obscure goodies. There may have been gigabytes of interesting stuff in there I’d just forgotten about (I know I save a lot of stuff off the Internets to read offline… I just never see it again once it goes into the “Crap off the Internets to read” subdirectory.) Non-critical stuff, of course. Anything you can’t remember is there probably wasn’t important in the first place. No, I’m sure they weren’t important. But they might have been interesting.

Xanadu: Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 2, And Other Stories

Tab Mix Plus is finally out for Firefox 2. It didn’t take actually take that long, but it surely felt like a very long dry spell. As Blake Ross once said,

Every time someone was “pulled out of the dream”, every time they had to stop and realize that they were using a browser called Firefox and not just the amorphous “Web,” was a personal failure.

When the “Closed Tabs” button goes away, even if I can use the new History -> Recently Closed Tabs menu, a fellow gets pulled rudely out of the dream.

(And the dream, of course, is Xanadu. The Internets, caverns measureless to man, deep hypertext, a space that isn’t a place -the ultimate supermodern non-lieu, in fact- but something like a wrapper around your brain, a giant Cerebro helmet.)

I’ve been fiddling with Zotero and Scrapbook ever since the upgrade to Firefox 2 -Zotero is only available for Firefox 2. Still unable to choose between them. They’re useful for those times when it doesn’t seem enough just to be bookmarking stuff, even on del.icio.us. When you want to save a link to something but also maybe take a local copy, and maybe also highlight bits of the text for later, and possibly categorize it all for later review. The danger lies, of course, in accumulating far too many repositories of data. Little piles of stuff marked “read this later”, accumulating in the corners and slowly turning yellow. Stuff squirreled away for an information winter that never comes.

Interesting del.icio.us factoid: on my personal tag cloud, I have no tags beginning with k, x, y or z.