NewsHour With Jim Lehrer · 126 days ago
James finished dinner early so I put him downstairs to watch a tape of Curious George and Thomas while Rees and I finished dinner. After Rees finished he went downstairs too but immediately came back up and asked me to put George on. I was busy washing the dishes and forgot about it. After I finished Rees and I read a book upstairs. About 30 minutes had passed between the time James went downstairs and me going down to get him. The tape had run out and the TV was showing NewsHour With Jim Lehrer that was just ending with James staring at the screen. Maybe this will be the theme for James’ 2nd birthday party.
— bryon
Favorite Firefox Addons · 128 days ago
In the rotation:
Scrapbook
I hate when I find a site, bookmark it, and come back to it later only to find that it is gone. I also like to download the site content like if there is an index page that links to several other pages. I can just download the whole site and organize the content how I wish.
Flashblock
Bloody fabulous. Replaces flash content with an icon that must be clicked in order to display the content. One of the first that I install.
FireFTP
FTP/SCP/SFTP client open in another tab. Great for uploading content to the server and then viewing is as easy as switching to another tab.
Linkification
Converts text that looks like a link into a link. No more copy and paste.
Download Statusbar
Better when used in mini mode. Docks the download dialog into the status bar.
Free Download Manager plugin
I never saw the point in using a download manager before I started using this one. Before I used this I could not download anything at work. Our internet connection is not great. This allows you to restart, pause, etc any download. From what I can tell, it also downloads content faster by starting simultaneous downloads but different parts of the file. It is also supposed to be able to download flash content and videos from certain sites. I have not tried that.
Greasemonkey
I use Greasemonkey only so that I can save the changes I make using Platypus. Not generally used beyond that but there are a lot of user scripts out there for modifying web content.
Platypus
This is the dumb persons method of modifying websites. Generally I use it to remove parts of a page that I don’t want to show up when I print it. Very useful.
All-in-One Sidebar
Aggregates all the dialog boxes into the sidebar. Makes it easier to manage web history, add-ons, etc since it does not open a new window that needs to be managed.
Less useful but installed:
DownloadHelper
Can’t even remember why I installed this.
FoxyTunes
Adds controls for the media player to the status bar. I don’t listen to much music to make it useful.
Resizeable Form Fields
Allows form fields to be resized. I have maybe used it once or twice.
Tabgroups
Tabs of tabs. Don’t remember where I downloaded it from.
Trying out:
Thumbstrips
Thumbnails of your web history. I think it will be quite useful as the URL or page title sometimes is not enough to know which link is which in my history.
Tree Style Tab
Puts the tab bar as a side bar and displays tabs as children from which tab they were opened. Looks promising but does take up a bit of screen real estate.
Interclue
Hard to explain but I am pumped about it. In fact this is what prompted me to write this post. Does many things but the most useful so far is it allows me to preview the link before I open it. Been done before but this is really slick.
PicLens
Not sure yet. Does a 3D type view of pictures from popular photo sharing sites.
Clipmarks
Allows you to clip parts of a page to share or save. Looks interesting enough.
Sidebar on Right
It seems more intuitive to have the sidebar on the right. Visually having the sidebar on the left interferes with reading web content.
— bryon
Still as a Statue · 129 days ago
“Daddy, I’m a statue.”
“Cool.”
“With a picture of Rees on it.”
— bryon
The Challenge (Update) · 130 days ago
Of the four boys who took my challenge of not watching movies, TV and playing video games for the entire month of January, three made it through to the end. It was not a clean win as two of the three messed up and played video games for a couple of hours or watched something on TV. They were forgiven and the rest of the month passed without incident. The other boy was a purist and admitted he screwed up and would not accept any offer of forgiveness. So as a reward, I am leaning towards taking them all paintballing or to an Arena League Football game. Have to see.
Jess and I passed the month and didn’t miss TV at all.
— bryon
The <insert noun or verb> · 130 days ago
James is a character. It’s funny how different Rees and James are. One of those little things that I love about James is how he talks. He likes to put “da” (the) in front of his words to make it a question.
“da five?”
“da bones?”
“da milk?”
— bryon