Tag: Portable software

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How To Speed Up the Web (And Gain A little Privacy)

Let’s face it: Facebook “like buttons” are dragging the pageload speeds down. They are just the pits, and they are slow mostly because the Great Zuck want to know what you are up to. Screw that – install WidgetBlock for Chrome, your pages will load faster, your browser will crash less, and Zuck will know less about you.

This has been a public service announcement. Also, don’t forget to back up – hard drives only live for a few years.

[update] I seem to be singling out Facebook buttons. And I do – they are the worst offenders in terms of performance. On the other hand Widgetblock works for all kinds of widgets.

Love,
Deadprogrammer

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My Favorite Google Chrome Extension

[Update] The latest iteration of JoinTabs extension contains ad malware. Which sucks, because this used to be a useful extension.

I open a page in a new tab. Then another, then another. A bit later I pop a new window. More tabs. Then another window. By the end of the day not only do I have a bunch of tabs, but also multiple browser windows. Hunting for one of the windows is difficult – it can be just about anywhere. The solution? Join Tabs for Chrome. It’s creates a little horseshoe icon, which when pressed moves all of your open tabs into a single browser window.

Now if I could only import all the open windows into Evernote in one key press I’d be set.

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Web Archeology.

While looking for some hardware in my junk pile I unearthed a stack of Zip disks with old backups. On them was a reasonably complete copy of the long lost “Dead Programmer’s Cafe” circa 1996-1997.

I think this was the first version of the logo, back when I hosted my site at silly.com, my first Internet provider. My High School buddy helped me get an account there for which I am forever grateful. Believe it or not, but a shell account cost about 4-5 bucks a month and you could even do web browsing with Slipknot. Far out.

The logo represents an alpinist scaling a Cray machine.

This is a later version of the splash page when the site was hosted at akula.com . All the cool pages back then had black backgrounds and neon or chrome Photoshop effects.



Later an espresso cup made an appearance on the coffee page and on the splash page together with an IBM card punch.

These webpages served me well. A girl who lived in my neighborhood found my first homepage and sent me an email. We got married a few years later. Her friend learned that I knew minimal HTML and helped me get my first web job. Information Superhighway is great and the future seems to be indeed bright enough to require sunglasses. Thank you, Eugene, Julie and Senator Gore!

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No Lunch For Deadprogrammer

I haven’t lost much weight in the last few months on the Atkins diet and I am still nowhere near my target weight. And I am not cheating, really. So the three pronged approach must be tried.

A) Forcing myself to eat breakfast, late lunch and having no dinner
B) Cutting down on coffee and artificial sweeteners
C) Going to gym more often than once every two weeks.

So, instead of lunch today I’ll do a little post. I need to come up with a good name for this kind of a post. Slashdot calls it “Slashback”. I can’t come up with something witty. Little help?

In any case, here goes:

Very talented brings us The Matrix and Terminator in the Russian lubok style. He’s also the one who placed Cheburashka, the Soviet Pokemon in the world of Star Wars and The Matrix. I’ve seen the images floating around in journals for a while, but they never revealed the author. Don’t you hate that?

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Nobody expects the Mozilla developers! Mozilla is rather nice right now. Two features really make the difference – tabs and popup blocking. And favicon.ico rendering that isn’t broken. Three features. And NT challenge/response support. Four. And proper keyboard shortcuts. Five.

Tabbed browsing is absolutely perfect for journal reading. Unfortunately from time to time the browser window doesn’t refresh and becomes a jumble of screen layers forcing me to restart the browser. The same thing happens to Trillian sometimes. Does anybody know how to fix that?

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I am listening a lot to Kora music. Djelika by Toumani Diabate is oh so amazing. You really, really got to get it. This is the best coding music ever. What’s a bit funny is that Mr. Diabate quotes the theme from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” in the title piece. It’s just so awesome! Just listen to the sample at Amazon. Don’t even listen, just buy the damn CD. Did I ever recommend anything bad?

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got me interested in the Chapman Stick. At first I though it was a kind of a Theremin. I tried listening to a classical recording of Theremin, but didn’t like it.

But it turned out that the Stick is something very different. And also hella cool:

“… One piece, Backyard, that appears on the album was used in the film Dune. The director’s cut of the film shows a decorated Stick painted gold playing the role of the mythical “baliset” instrument described in Frank Herbert’s novel. Emmett’s recording is what we hear when we see Patrick Stewart play the baliset.”

I really want to get a cd of “Parallel Galaxy”, but can’t seem to find one for sale.

Lunch is over.

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I’d Like Some Shareware For Lunch

There are 3 pieces of shareware that I’ve been using for a long time and like very much. They are:

Clipmate by Thornsoft Development – a little app that lives in the system tray and keeps the history of everything that is copied and pasted. It also lets you keep organized collections of “copies” and allows you to paste them in rapid succession. It can also do encryption, spell checking and other things as well.

Trillian by Cerulean Studios – everybody’s favorite instant messaging client

Powermarks by Kaylon Technologies – a very, very, very good bookmark manager.

I am also using Snippets by SoftCircuits, but I am looking to replace it with some other hierarchical database. It has been at version 1.51 for many years, there is no development planned and it doesn’t have many of the features that I need.

All of these programs a worth the money that I paid many times over. I wish I bought them earlier.

Right now I am shopping for a hierarchical storage database / outliner (something like Mybase or Treepad, but I can’t decide because there are so many choices). I am also looking for an anti-spam tool (on big requirement is being able to look through my mail client and clean out the stuff that is already there, not only the new stuff that is arriving), a popup and ad killer (something like the now defunct Popup Killer, ) and probably a personal firewall in addition to the one in my router.

The common problems with shareware products are :
a) Priced too high (over $30) like Lyris Mailshield
b) The evaluation version is severely disabled like Axon Idea Processor
c) Given away for too small a fee or altogether for free, causing the development to stop like the Popup Killer which I mentioned already or even more so, like Semagic Livejournal client.

Which shareware programs do you like? Any recommendations?