Primate Brow Flash

Free yourself from the mouse and save time by learning just a few keyboard shortcuts. I’ve been trying to practice more Firefox shortcuts so this post will focus on those.

The keystrokes I use most are CTRL-t for a new tab, CTRL-L to put cursor in location bar. CTRL-e to put cursor in search box.

F7 toggles caret browsing on and off. - this lets you move the cursor around a web document and select text without using the mouse.
CTRL - U show source code (U for Under)
/ to start find-as-you-type
CTRL- TAB for switching between tabs
SHIFT-F10 for opening right-click context menu, which gives access to many more options.

Many Google applications use the J and K keys to move up and down a list. Google also uses the / key to place the cursor in a search box.
The Google Search with Keyboard “Experiment” brings keyboarding to a page of Google results. You can navigate up and down with the j and k keys and when you reach the end of a page of search results, it forwards you to the next page.
A Firefox extension called hit-a-hint powers the keyboard for web browsing and frees the user from the mouse.
This extension has a power key that makes a little number appear next to each link and control on the page. Press the number to navigate to that link or activate that control.

What should I do with all the time freed up by not using the mouse? I’m taking suggestions.

These links have many more shortcut keys.
Windows Shortcut keys
Wordpress Shortcut Keys
Firefox keyboard shortcuts
Shortcut keys for posting on blogger
Map shortcut keys to special characters across windows applications ( I wish I had known about this one when I was trying to make an umlaut in front of a bunch of people from the German School).
List of shortcuts with a comparison between browsers
Other web applications, such as flickr, have had 3rd party scripts to provide keyboard navigation

The drawback to keystrokes is that they have to be memorized or they don’t save time and every application has slightly different keystrokes. It is great that Google is bringing a more uniform set of keyboard shortcuts to their suite of applications. Having a cheatsheet near my computer helps until it gets covered with food and I throw it away. Mnemonics seem to be the most permanent way to remember them.

1. Contribute my favorite hints from Heloise to the Oreilly’s Hacks site.
2. buy the Complete Bad Company Lyrics so I don’t have to mumble the words to “Rock and Roll Fantasy” in the shower
3. Get a label maker so I can print a bunch of labels that say “Not for Use as sexual Aid” and put them on gerbil cages at the pet store.
4. comment “nice picture” to 1000 flickr photos
5. Buy a wall hanging
6. bring my wireless keyboard and wireless mouse to a coffee shop and pretend to work.
7. Next time someone asks me what I do, answer, “Email Direct Marketing”.
8. bring the “plonker” to market. The plonker is a very small spring-loaded meat tenderizer with tiny sharp points that you can tap your skin with and create hundreds of tiny, painless scabs that you can enjoy picking off while watching television.

This reminds me of when I got my first Atari game console and I invited the neighbor girl over to play missile command and after a few rounds, we ended up just staring into one another’s eyes while we wiggled those joysticks. It really opened up my social life.

from
pictures from the dawn of the computer era

My kids always want to know what the 70s were like, so I think we’ll buy them this Barbie knock-off for Christmas:
krista+present+2.JPG (image)

(from sophzilla)

Don’t you hate it when you copy something important into your Windows clipboard and accidentally copy something else over it? Or when you want to simply carry two or more things around in the clipboard for easy access?

A few years ago Microsoft Office provided “Office Clipboard” tool to try and help with this, After using it for a few days, I just gave up because it was too cumbersome.

Today, cramped by the limitations of the regular clipboard, I resolved to give available tools another look. “Office Clipboard” is unchanged in Office 2007. I want to access it from the context menu and from whatever application I happen to be using, please.

ClipX

ClipX installs easily and works well. It shows thumbnails of the images you have copied recently.

clipDiary

ClipDiary works equally well and is more recently updated. It also has the interesting feature of showing you a timestamp and originating application for each of your entries. Clip diary will not display the contents of your copied image.

Both utilities can be called from the shortcut keystroke of your preference ( I mapped mine to CTRL-V and I’m pleased with how it works. Now, when I paste anywhere, a menu of my past clipboard entries is presented.). Neither program has context menu access. I’ve seen both of them act flaky (i.e. not pasting text or images) with Microsoft Office apps, but I can’t reproduce this behavior. Both of them happily store masses of data. I copied about 100 pages worth of text from various documents document and then copied a large page full of pictures. I noticed no trouble. They both work fine in Vista.

I’m going to stick with clipDiary. I think its interface is a little nicer and I like the timestamp feature.

Was this a good idea?

Saint Anthony Park Branch Library HOLD NOTICE

AUTHOR: Pynchon, Thomas.
Against the day : [a novel]
CALL NO: FICTION
PICKUP AT: Saint Antho BY: 11-19-07

Thu Nov 15 2007
HOLD NOTICE
You will need the Requestor’s
Library Card to pick up materials.

BLDGBLOG: Bannermans Island
“this island fortress was once the private arsenal of the world’s largest arms dealer.” And that was Frank “Francis” Bannerman.
Bannerman, we learn, “bought up ninety per cent of all captured guns, ammunition, and other equipment auctioned off after the Spanish-American War. He also bought weapons directly from the Spanish government before it evacuated Cuba. These purchases vastly exceeded the firm’s capacity at its store in Manhattan and filled three huge Brooklyn warehouses with munitions, including thirty million cartridges.” Accordinglty, “Bannerman now needed an arsenal.”
Or, more accurately speaking: he needed a private island.

forums.mozillazine.org will open you up to a whole world of people who roll and smoke their own compilations of Firefox. I understand from what i read in “Firefox Hacks”, that the official Windows binary is compiled to support lots of different CPUs and therefore can’t take advantage of the enhancements of newer chips. If my system has a Dual Core 2 Gigahertz 64Bit chip and the official Firefox binary is compiled to operate on a 486, Firefox can’t fully take advantage of the power of my chip. If I installed a build compiled specifically for my processor I should see a performance enhancement. This should apply to other open source binaries like Gimp, Audacity and Eclipse.
But…

1. A third party “custom build” would be a great way to get some unsuspecting user to install something evil.
2. If there were serious enhancements to be had this way, there would be an effort to provide official binaries for many different chips, as the enhancements would make Firefox look better.
3. I think the chip in this computer is so fast that I wouldn’t notice the difference in a Firefox compiled locally.
4. If software wasn’t compiled and distributed or sold for specific chips, undermining the performance potential for all kinds of software, what incentive is there really to design new chips and for consumers to purchase them. Obviously there is an incentive and there must be big benefits for pure chip speed completely separate from the benefits of compiling specifically for your chip
5. compiling all the open source programs I use myself would be a hell of a lot of work every time there is an update.

As Steve pointed out regarding #2, maintaining lots of versions of any software would be a logistical nightmare. When it needed a security patch, the team would need to patch and compile and distribute 50 versions.

I want to see for myself. First problem is how to get Firefox to run two or more different versions on the same machine. If you download a third party version and launch it, it will just trigger your regular installed version to start. To get around this, create a new profile. (as explained here).

I also read that if I uninstall my official firefox version, I can run as many third party versions as I want and they won’t conflict as the third party versions aren’t “installs”. I’ll test this later.

So, that is how i got Bon Echo x64 2.0.0.8 running alongside my regular Firefox. Is it really faster? That will wait until the next post. I found a great page on how to measure browser speeds. I won’t link to it because the page says

“This article is around 2 years old now (although it has been kept up to date), and has been retired - posting it simply shows how long it took you to find it.”

OK, Mr. More Than Enough Readers.
The article provides everything I need to test the difference between official firefox binary and the potentially faster Custom super binary.

1. Test browser startup time with ordinary stopwatch
2. Test CSS rendering with CSS Benchmark Test
3. Test Script speed with Benchmarking tool - jsbench seems to no longer exist. I tried this other one.
4. Test Loading multiple images with an ordinary stopwatch
5. Test use of caching by navigating through search results and then doing it again - used ordinary stopwatch

He listed more tests than this, but those should be good enough to test the various builds.

Demon photographed.

I found Steve’s posts about migrating to a new computer useful, and I thought I’d copy him in detailing all the work. It is turning out to be a lot of work! Starting with just the browsers, I’ll list the extensions and settings I’ve come to depend on for safe and efficient browsing

• Find as you type for IE 7. In FireFox, if I type “/” or CTRL-F and begin typing, the browser finds words as I type. This saves a few keystrokes for me and often finds variations in spelling of the word I’m looking for. This extension makes that happen in IE as well.
• Google Keyboard Search for IE7 and FireFox: This is a change to the default search engine. Your Google results can then be browsed with the j and k keys and opened with the Enter key. It automatically jumps to the next page when you scroll off the end.
• GMail Notifier. I like having a reminder in my browser when I get mail
• Delicious toolbar links. I use these all the time. I usually just drag the delicious buttons to my bookmarks toolbar, but now I’m trying the delicious FireFox extension and I like it. It captures selected text as notes.
• Instant Library Lookup browser button. If I’m at Amazon and I see a book I’m interested in. I click the browser button and it instantly finds it at my local library. I’ve saved hundreds of dollars this way, even when I calculate in overdue fines.
• Set Firefox master password. This requires a password to access any private info in FireFox. (Tools –> Options –> Security –> Set Master Password)
• Google Dorks: This extension puts a lot of the special Google search syntax at your fingertips.
• Noscript: It is important to install this as it cuts down on possible attacks through Cross Site Scripting. I initially thought that it would be a pain in the ass to “allow” all the friendly sites to run javascript, but it is surprisingly easy. You can import allowed sites from previous installations of Firefox.
• IE7 guards against sites that “use a scripted window to ask for information” by default. This tells how to permanently ad a trusted site that won’t get blocked by this feature.
• Spelling: Firefox 2.0 has a built-in spellcheck. It is wonderful except that in my old browser I built up a big list of words that it didn’t know that I had to ask. Going into my old browser, I took the C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\ persdict.dat and dropped into the same place on my new computer.
• IE7 has no spellcheck built in. I’ve long been using the Google toolbar for this and it is great. To import my old wordlist from old machines, I found the file “..\Google\User Dictionary.txt” and copied the word list out of there and sent it to myself thru email. No sense in teaching my spellchecker to recognize “Pr0n” “Pwnzored” “assclown” “idiotarian” “MSM”, “Suxxor”, “roxxor” and “STFU” again.
• One thing I’m trying to find is a Internet Explorer setting or extension that mimics the Firefox behavior: I click on a page of text and I can then select text with the shift key and left and right arrow keys. Any help, lazyweb?

The BBC documentary, Century of the Self, is a big time commitment, but worth it for both education and entertainment. I think everything in it is kinda partly true, in the same way that the best documentaries are kinda partly true. This one somehow defuses the overwhelming trueness of the best documentaries by its hilarious style, unintentionally making it even more true.

Resonable talking heads are interspersed with random mobs attacking each other or simply running. It looks like someone watched the West Side Story/zombie trailer and thought to themselves, “That would be a great basis for a documentary about American Consumerism”. I laughed when they would have some intelligent person explain the thinking of a bygone era and then cut to footage of lights flickering in a psych clinic, clips of riots and the commentator grimly intoning. “HITLER CIA UNREASON BRAINWASH UNITED FRUIT”. I guess any documentary about manipulation must focus the viewer’s attention on the attempts at manipulation by the documentary itself. “Here is how they manipulate people with images, now have a look at a few minutes of a guy experiencing electro-convulsive therapy that shows that you should believe us.”

This documentary will make you paranoid. It is the history of how psychanalysts gave corporations and government insight into the human condition so they could use our anxieties to manipulate us. Yes, I have hidden anxieties. Foremost among them is the anxiety about people in power BEAMING MESSAGES JUST LIKE THESE INTO MY BRAIN. Thanks for waking up THAT GUY.

The other funny thing is that the documentary seems to be about the horror of subverting democracy through propaganda and manipulating citizens fears and desires. At the same time, it makes a pretty good case for treating the masses like the asses they are. Yes, the masses are irrational, but does that mean we should use all our smarts to make them buy a new car every year to salve their insecurities? The answer might be ” vould you rather zey choose a minority to massacre every year?”.

There are four hour-long parts:
Part One is mostly about Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.

Part Two is hard to watch because of the Guatemala story, which I conveniently put out of my mind for about a decade. It is just as kooky, with very interesting interviews with prominent psychoanalysts who knew Anna Freud and others. It details the first “focus group” ever and why Betty Crocker’s early instant cake mix wasn’t selling very well and how they fixed that.

All of this culminates in the recently spotted spam headline: “hey, cat-dick”.