Real Life Recap

Posted by | Filed under Life

I’ve not been post­ing any­thing for a while because… Well, I just have not felt like it which is not to say I haven’t had any­thing to talk about. Today, I decided to update the world at large about what I have been upto in my lit­tle slice of it.

  • We sur­vived the tor­na­dos and hail that hit our area a week ago. Our apart­ment and cars were not even get dam­aged by the storm. Below are a few links to some of the stores online about what happened.
  • Last week­end, we replaced Ariesna’s car (1992 Ford Escort, aka Ghost) with a 2002 Volk­swa­gen Golf (aka Grace, aka Gra­cie). The really odd part about get­ting the new car? Even though it’s a replace­ment for Ghost; Ariesna has been let­ting me drive it the most. Appar­ently, this is at least partly due to the amount door dings her old car suf­fered through in her office’s park­ing lot but it still seems strange to me. Then today, the deal­er­ship called me back ask­ing me to come in and sign a new finance con­tract on the car. Why? Because they found me another offer which would drop the inter­est rate by 1.25 points! Now that’s what I call ser­vice. So a big thanks goes out to Carousel Motors for the excel­lent service.
  • Last week­end, Ariesna and I looked at a house. But it was too expen­sive for the amount of work required to make it a home we’d want to live (namely a musty base­ment and some bad remod­el­ing in the fam­ily room, din­ing room and kitchen). We showed up about 15 min­utes early for the show­ing and the real­tor showed up just short of 15 min­utes late. He did even­tu­ally call to let us know he was run­ning late… 5 min­utes after he was sup­posed to be there. I was ini­tially a bit under­whelmed by the guy. But when he finally got there and let us into the house; he let us do our own look­ing around with­out try­ing to pres­sure us and lis­tened to the com­ments we had about the house to get a bet­ter idea of what we were inter­ested in.

Ubuntu and the Crystal 4237B Soundchip

Posted by | Filed under Computers, Software

For all you peo­ple searc­ing for more infor­ma­tion on get­ting the C4237B sound­chip work­ing under Ubuntu, here are the links to my pre­vi­ous posts on the subject:

Some other peo­ple out there in Inter­net land have reported the steps detailed in those posts as work­ing for them. Some have reported that they don’t work. *shrug* My best guess as to why is I think the chip can be con­fig­ured with a DOS/Windows util­ity to use dif­fer­ent IRQs and what not. Or it could be some sort of dif­fer­ence in the kernel(s) peo­ple are using. Or some­thing else entirely. I really don’t know for sure. Lastly I should note that when I last updated the ker­nel on my lap­top to tot 2.6.12–10; the sound stopped working.

Chocolate Belgian Waffles

Posted by | Filed under Food, Recipes

Choco­late Brunch Waffles

Ingre­di­ents

  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup gran­u­lated sugar
  • 1 table­spoon bak­ing powder
  • 3/4 tea­spoon salt
  • 1 cup NESTLE® TOLL HOUSE® Semi-Sweet Choco­late Morsels
  • 3/4 cup butter
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 table­spoon vanilla extract
  • Top­pings (whipped cream, choco­late shav­ings, sifted pow­dered sugar, fresh fruit, ice cream)

Direc­tions

  1. Com­bine flour, sugar, bak­ing pow­der and salt in large bowl.
  2. Microwave morsels and but­ter in medium, microwave-safe bowl on HIGH (100 per­cent) power for 1 minute; stir.
  3. Microwave at addi­tional 10– to 20-second inter­vals, stir­ring until smooth.
  4. Cool to room tem­per­a­ture. Stir in milk, eggs and vanilla extract.
  5. Add choco­late mix­ture to flour mix­ture; stir (bat­ter will be thick).
  6. Cook in Bel­gian waf­fle maker* accord­ing to manufacturer’s direc­tions. Serve warm with your choice of toppings.

[Editor’s Note:] As a child one of my favorite things to have for break­fast was waf­fles. Unfor­tu­nately, we didn’t own a waf­fle iron so I almost never got to have them. Ariesna and I have had a waf­fle iron for a while now but our attempts at mak­ing waf­fles have been… less than entirely suc­cess­ful. We had been buy­ing those box mixes at the store but the waf­fles made from them always sat like lead in our stom­achs. Yes­ter­day, we were talk­ing about try­ing to make waf­fles again. Since I’ve had such good luck with AllRecipes.com; I went to their site to search for waf­fle recipes and found bunches of them. I copied sev­eral into an email and for­warded them to Ariesna. This morn­ing she went through them and decided to make these Choco­late Brunch Waf­fles. They turned out scrump­tious. Though I do have a cou­ple of caveats about this recipe.

  • Be very care­ful not to over­cook them or they come out crunchy.
  • The recipe makes a great many of the waf­fles. Come hun­gry or have some­thing you can freeze them in.
  • While very tasty, these waf­fles are still have some­thing of a bread-like tex­ture and aren’t as light/fluffy as the ideal waf­fle should be.

Firefox Extensions Every Body Should Have

Posted by | Filed under Computers, Software

Accord­ing to the Mozilla/Firefox crew, exten­sions are…

Exten­sions are small add-ons that add new func­tion­al­ity to Fire­fox. They can add any­thing from a tool­bar but­ton to a com­pletely new fea­ture. They allow the appli­ca­tion to be cus­tomized to fit the per­sonal needs of each user if they need addi­tional fea­tures, while keep­ing Fire­fox small to download.

I’m going to dis­cuss my favorite exten­sions here with you. I’ll be start­ing with the exten­sions I feel nobody brows­ing the web today should be with­out and then move onto some exten­sions that are a bit more spe­cial­ized in their application.

Adver­tise­ments

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I get very tired of look­ing at all the var­i­ous adver­tise­ments plas­tered over the inter­net. For­tu­nately, there are exten­sions for Fire­fox which help to clean up the web. To block adver­tise­ments, I start off with Adblock Plus. This exten­sion lets you setup fil­ters to block just the ads you want to block. The “Plus” ver­sion of Adblock also allows you to setup whitelists so you can view ads on the sites you want to sup­port. The only down­side, to Adblock Plus, is the time it takes to setup all the fil­ters you want. This is where Adblock Filterset.G Updater comes in. The FiltersetG.Updater grabs a set of pre­con­structed fil­ters designed to elim­i­nate the major­ity of Inter­net adver­tise­ments for you. Using these fil­ters alone kills 85–90% of the adver­tise­ments out there. But even those two com­bined don’t catch every­thing, so I’ve also added in NoScript to the mix.

Actu­ally, I added in NoScript orig­i­nally because so many sites were using crappy javascripts to add “fea­tures” to their pages. Fea­tures I did not need or want. But since installing NoScript, I’ve noticed it helps to block a lot of adver­tise­ments that are inserted into web­pages via javascript. Bonus! :) Also in NoScript’s options, there is a check­box to have NoScript block Macro­me­dia Flash and other plu­g­ins for untrusted sites. I rec­om­mend turn­ing these options on as it will catch & block even more advertisements.

Annoy­ances

Espe­cially if you don’t use NoScript to block a site’s javascript, you should con­sider installing Allow Right-Click. A num­ber of web­sites with cool images will use some lousy javascript to pre­vent you from right-clicking on the image to save it. This is ridicu­lous as the image has already been down­loaded to your browsers cache and is on your com­puter already. Plus with some of the other exten­sions I have installed, I like to right-click on web­pages to get more info or what­ever and to have a site try to block me is a great annoy­ance. Allow Right-Click specif­i­cally blocks scripts that try to pre­vent right-clicks.

Another annoy­ing thing some web­sites do is to link to file you want to down­load but setup the link in such a way that click­ing on it will spawn a new browser win­dow. *grrr* This is some­thing that really pisses me off. For­tu­nately, there’s the Dis­able Tar­gets For Down­loads exten­sion for Fire­fox to take care of that problem.

Then there are sites that will write out a URL but not make it a click­able link. Linki­fi­ca­tion fixes that annoy­ance for you. It can also color code those links it fixes to let you know when a site is being naughty.

And let’s not for­get the annoy­ance of PDF Files. For what­ever rea­son, some sites will put up con­tent as a PDF file and then your browser will1 load the Acro­bat plu­gin to view the PDF in the browser. ARRRRGGGGHHHH! When I want to view a PDF file, I’ll use a proper PDF viewer and not this plu­gin crap. PDF Down­load changes Firefox’s behav­ior so it asks you what you want to do with a PDF fileL Down­load, View as PDF, View as HTML or Can­cel. The View as HTML fea­ture hasn’t worked for me in a long time, but it’s nice to force Fire­fox to down­load the file while still hav­ing the option to go insane and want to view it as a PDF file in my browser.

The last of my annoy­ances with the inter­net are sites requir­ing you to reg­is­ter to view their con­tent. I run across this the most when try­ing to view news arti­cles linked to by Google News. For­tu­nately, there is Bug­MeNot to take care of that for me. Bug­MeNot is both an exten­sion and a ser­vice. They main­tain lists of usercodes/passwords for var­i­ous reg­is­tra­tion only web­sites to allow peo­ple to view the con­tent with­out fill­ing out yet another reg­is­tra­tion form and giv­ing out their email yet again. It’s very con­ve­nient though I’m sure the sites requir­ing reg­is­tra­tion hate it.

Web Devel­op­ment

In my spare time2, I like to do small amounts of web­de­vel­op­ment and for that there’s one Fire­fox exten­sion which is an absolute MUST HAVE, Web Devel­oper. This exten­sion has tons of fea­tures to aid you in your web­dev work. The fea­tures I use the most are: Live CSS edit­ing (let’s you see your changes as you make them), W3C Val­i­da­tion (sub­mits your HTML/CSS to W3C to see if your code is valid) and Resize (resizes Fire­fox so you have an idea of what peo­ple see of your site at var­i­ous screen res­o­lu­tions). While those 3 func­tions don’t even begin to scratch the sur­face of what this exten­sion can do; they do give you an idea of how use­ful this exten­sion is in webdevelopment.

Next up is Col­orZilla. This exten­sion is great for help­ing me decide on color schemes. It let’s me visit a web­site or look at a photo and find the hex­code I need to use in my CSS to have that color. Cur­rent ver­sions also have some other func­tion­al­ity (e.g. full page zoom) but I’ve not really looked into those.

When you’re work­ing on a new design and times are not lin­ing up cor­rectly, it can be handy to see how wide some­thing is. Mea­sureIt helps you get that info.

If the design you are devel­op­ing is based off some ideas you got from another site, it can be handy to look at a copy of that site’s source code. But some­times their source code is very con­fus­ing and it is dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out how they accom­plished spe­cific effects. The X-Ray exten­sion shows you the HTML tags of a web­page while you’re still view­ing the page.

And of course, if you’re work­ing on a web­site, you are going to be con­cerned with how well your site is show­ing up on the var­i­ous search engines. SEOpen lets you track your site’s rank­ing (amoung other things).

For­eign Lan­gauge Tools

I only read Eng­lish and speak a small smat­ter­ing of other tongues. But I do have a vari­ety of inter­ests includ­ing some that tend to get reported online more by non-English speak­ers. So it’s handy to have the abil­ity to trans­late the other lan­gauges back to Eng­lish. Moji is an inte­grated Japan­ese dic­tio­nary (includ­ing kanji). I’m sure when I get ready to start study­ing to read kanji, this exten­sion will prove very help­ful. In the mean­time, there’s Trans­late Page for all my for­eign lan­gauge needs.

Cool Tools

These exten­sions either improve on the basic func­tion­al­ity in Fire­fox and/or add some­thing new to Fire­fox that trips my trig­ger. They’re cool, but I’m get­ting tired of com­ing up with some­thing to say about all of the exten­sions I use, so here’s just a list of the remain­ing ones:

Themes

I find the default theme for Fire­fox a bit dull. For­tu­nately, there’s a wide num­ber of dif­fer­ent themes avail­able out there. I gen­er­ally use the Mostly Crys­tal theme for Fire­fox. How­ever there are some other inter­est­ing themes out there and below is a short list of ones I like:

1 If you have Adobe Acro­bat installed.
2 Which is to say very rarely these days.

Inquire Within

Posted by | Filed under Life, Links

Dur­ing a recent busi­ness trip, I found out some co-workers and friends of mine had put together a comedic short film. The film tells the story of a young woman with some rela­tion­ship trou­bles going to a pro­fes­sional philoso­pher to find the answer. I thought it was pretty funny. And as there is a copy of it over at Google Video, which will auto­gen­er­ate the HTML code nec­es­sary to embed the video on my own site; I fig­ured I’d add it here. Click the more link below to watch the video.

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